Penna Dexter

The fertility rate in the United States just hit 1.6 children per woman, an all time low. The replacement rate — the level that will keep the population stable —  is 2.1 children per woman in the U.S. and 2.25 globally. Drop below 2 and depopulation begins.

Two economists at the University of Texas, Austin outline the factors leading toward depopulation and warn against allowing it to happen. The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip reviewed their book, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People. He says the Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, “rest their case not on the familiar need for workers to propel economic growth or shore up Social Security but on a more fundamental proposition: More people is a good thing in and of itself.” The authors write in detail of the ways in which, as our numbers have increased, humans have figured out ways to reduce pollution and increase available resources.

Greg Ip points to these demographic specialists’ “most provocative argument.” They write, “It’s better if there is more good in the world.”  They emphasize, “It’s better if there are more good lives.”

Author and culture commentator Rod Dreher observes that people’s decisions whether to have children rely very little on material factors. Instead, he says, “It’s culture.”

In Hungary, where he currently lives, the government has enacted policies aimed at making it easier for people to form families. The results have been disappointing, he writes, “given the immense expenditure.”

Mr. Dreher, a Gen Xer, says, “my sense is that my generation in America is the last one in which it was just taken for granted that having kids is what one does as part of maturing in life.”

To rekindle the desire for marriage and the natural family, Rod Dreher says we need “a return to religion, and not just any religion, but religion that celebrates childbearing as a positive good.” I agree.