Maybe I'm being harsh, but I'd give this book 2 stars for opinion and 2 stars out of 5 for information. I don't like that it says children are expensive, an antinatalist idea. This book has antinatalist ideas like this: "[Children are] cute and precious and wonderful. (
Even more so if they’re not yours.)" And this one: "Having kids is, literally, no fun." It also says youth bulges are associated with violence and revolution- this author isn't a natalist: "One study shows that between 1970 and 1999, 80 percent of civil conflicts occurred in countries where 60 percent or more of the population was under the age of 30." This book is terrible: "children won’t just change your life. They will utterly and completely destroy it." I don't recommend reading this book.
These are quotes from the book. I bolded what may be more important.
Today American pets outnumber American children by more than four to one.7
This is interesting but it doesn't seem to be a useful fact. You can't tell your spouse, "You like pets. Children are similar to pets. Let's reproduce" because it seems to objectify children and the two are pretty different. I don't want pets though.
America’s middle-class women are reproducing at rates far below the Golden Number. Why is this? That’s the subject of this book and I’ll give you the full tour in a minute. But if you’re looking to get ahead of the class, reasons include: the ubiquity of college, the delay of marriage, the birth-control pill, car seat laws, religious participation, the rise of the thousand-dollar stroller, and Social Security.
This is a summary of the book.
[M]ost famines are caused by corrupt political establishments, not overpopulation.
I've never spoken with an overpopulation believer so this fact seems useless. We need reasons to reproduce.
[N]early every country in every region is experiencing declines in fertility.
The One-Child Policy employs an array of coercive measures to prevent couples from having babies—violators are often taxed or fired from their jobs; there are forced sterilizations and forced abortions; sometimes their homes are razed as punishment. As a result of One-Child, the fertility rate in China is roughly 1.54.
This might be important because some people seem to say government won't have an effect on the birth rate
Between 1950 and 1970, the average Chinese woman had roughly six children
Asians should have a lot of children again though this seems to be a useless fact since I don't want to marry a Chinese woman(not that I can I just like to fantasize)
[China] is a regime that, within living memory, intentionally starved to death between 20 million and 40 million of its own people.
I guess antinatalism can be correlated with evil?
A few years ago, economist Michael Haines combined data from that first census with other data sets to determine that in 1800, the fertility rate for white Americans was 7.04.8 The earliest reliable estimate of the fertility rate for black Americans, from the 1850s, puts it at 7.90.9
This is why slavery was good. This is actually relevant to me because I'm American.
Fewer working-age people supporting more retirees means that something will have to give: Either benefits will be scaled back, non-entitlement spending cut, or taxes raised.
Early on, Caesar Augustus attempted to combat the dearth of children with a bachelor tax on single men; it had little effect.
Perhaps the tax wasn't big enough. And women should be taxed too - especially women.
Adam Smith noted in The Wealth of Nations, “the most decisive mark of prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of its inhabitants.”
the USDA figured that a child born in 1960 would cost his parents $25,229 (about $193,000 in 2011 dollars).
The idea that children are expensive actually goes against Christianity, of which a belief is that children are a gift(Psalm 127). Since when do gifts burden the receiver? It's actually the other way around - they benefit the receiver. This is pretty much the only good thing this book inspired.
In 1965—“the ’60s,” as we popularly conceive of them, didn’t actually start until 1968—middle-class families were very close in structure to the popular stereotype: Sixty percent of all children lived in a family with a working father and a stay-at-home mom.
This is interesting but I don't think I'd want a SAHM wife.
The poorest families, those with annual incomes under $20,000, have the second-highest fertility rate, 2.038.
Many poor people reproduce. This is important because you can point to them and say, "you are able to do this too." It proves children aren't expensive. For some reason this still seems like a useless fact.
Simply put, the more educated a woman is, the fewer children she will have in the course of her lifetime.
In a 2000 study, sociologists Karin Brewster and Ronald Rindfuss noted that when you examine the change in both labor participation rates of women and fertility rates in industrialized countries from 1965 to 1996, you see that many countries with high percentages of women in the workforce also have relatively high fertility rates.32
I independently assumed this too since raising children requires money.
Nearly half of female graduates were involved in a single field—education. And, as it turns out, being a teacher is very conducive to having babies.
...
A teacher can reasonably graduate from college at 22, begin working immediately, and if she so chooses, marry and have children in short order without losing ground in her career. By comparison, consider the life of a young woman who becomes a doctor...
This would be a useful fact if I had a daughter which I don't.
By 35, half of women trying to get pregnant over the course of 8 months will not succeed.
Half of [American] pregnancies are planned; half—surprise!—are not.
This would be a good fact if it weren't for the fact that abortions happen. You can't say, "If they have children even when they aren't planned, you should choose to have some.
States with very high birth rates—Utah, Mississippi, South Dakota, Kentucky—have very low abortion rates.
There’s a 64 percent chance that a first marriage will last at least 10 years. Fifty percent of cohabitations break down after just the first year.
With each passing year of marriage, a couple’s chance of divorce drops.
Perhaps with time spouses accept being together more. The solution to divorce may be to just wait for your desire to divorce go away. I dunno though tbh. I don't really think divorce is bad if your spouse doesn't want more children but you do.
Couples with college degrees get divorced at about half the rate of couples without a high school degree.
Studies on the effect of no-fault suggest that it increased the divorce rate somewhere between 5 percent and 30 percent.
This is sort of dumb. Of course policies have an effect on the world.
After all, married couples have more kids than singles.
And at that point, these countries [from where immigrants come from] will have their own labor shortages, meaning emigration from the region may significantly diminish.
In 2005 the Center for Immigration Studies released an interesting report: Immigrants to America tended to have higher fertility rates than the countrywomen they left behind.
Which led demographers to a disturbing hypothesis: What if people derived their “ideal” family size by looking around them and intuiting the societal norms?
a skewed sex ratio has often preceded intense violence and instability.
Another irrelevant fact since I live in the US.
In 1955, Nikita Khrushchev called Western worries about overpopulation a “cannibalistic theory” invented by “bourgeois ideology.”1 He went on:
Their concern is to cut down the birth rate, reduce the rate of population increase. It is quite different with us, comrades. If about 100 million people were added to our 200 million, even that would not be enough.
In 2006, President Putin doubled the government’s monthly support payments for children and created a $9,200 bonus payment to mothers who have a second baby.7 (Keep in mind that Russia’s per-capita GDP was $10,700 in 2006.8)
For instance, after World War II, American advisors bullied Japan into enacting the “Eugenic Protection Law,” which made it the first country in the world to explicitly legalize abortion.
This book doesn't explain what this is. Google says this law also involved forced sterilization.
As you can see, there is a divide separating France and the Nordic countries, which have had some success at sustaining higher fertility, from the rest of Europe (particularly the East and the Mediterranean regions), which has not. France and the Nordic countries have pursued similar policies with regard to families and natalism and these policies are worth examining.
What’s more, France’s fertility numbers are helped by immigration. Like America, France has a large, fecund immigrant population, which masks the lower fertility of the natives.
Perhaps immigration increases native birth rate too because people's ideal number of children is inspired by the number of kids the people around them want.
[Prime Minister] Goh dissolved the Family Planning and Population Board.51 “Two Is Enough” was replaced by “Have Three Or More Children If You Can,” a slogan broadcast on TV and radio, and pushed in print ads and on billboards.52
The slogan should be "Have Ten Or More Children If You Can" and should be broadcast on TV and radio.
*****
The first [new Singaporean policy] was the “Baby Bonus” program, which paid families—straight cash—for having children: $9,000 for the second child and $18,000 for the third.
[Singaporean l]eaders were reluctant to ban abortion outright, but launched a public campaign against it. Women with fewer than three children who sought either sterilization or abortion were required to attend counseling before any procedure would be performed.
Year after year, [Georgia's birth rate] ticked upward until, by 2009, it stood at 1.86—a mark that would make the French and Scandinavians proud. So what happened?
Behind the Numbers
The data offer some clues. Abortion has generally been on the wane in Georgia since 1980, when there were 99.1 abortions for every 100 live births.
After prayerfully considering Georgia’s fertility collapse, [Patriarch] Ilia II decided to take action. In late 2007 he promised that, going forward, he would personally baptize any child born to parents who already had two or more children... The year after Ilia II’s proclamation, the birth rate increased by 20 percent—four times the already substantial increase from the prior year.
Michel Debré proposed altering the very fabric of his country’s democracy. He wanted to start handing out extra votes to parents, an additional vote to each man for every son he fathered and an additional vote to each woman for every daughter she bore.31
...
(It’s now commonly known as “Demeny voting,” after demographer Paul Demeny.)
the man or woman who deliberately foregoes these blessings[children]...merits contempt as hearty as any visited upon the soldier who runs away in battle, or upon the man who refuses to work for the support of those dependent upon him, and who though able-bodied is yet content to eat in idleness the bread which others provide
Theodore Roosevelt said this.
