Will We See the End of Children?

The fertility collapse, young marriage, the flatlining of the decline of American Christianity, and more in this week's digest.

What I’ve been reading: Saving the Protestant Ethic: Creative Class Evangelicalism and the Crisis of Work by Andrew Lynn.

For those of you in the Indianapolis area, I want to highlight a great upcoming event. Farah Stockman, author of the great book American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears, will be in town speaking about her book on March 19th at 6pm at the Carmel Clay Public Library. (Registration required).

Stockman’s book is about the lives of workers in a bearing plant in Indianapolis that closed and moved to Mexico. I hosted her for a discussion about it on my podcast last year.

The End of Children

The New Yorker has a long and fantastic piece on falling fertility rates in its new issue. There’s a particular focus on South Korea.

Today, declining fertility is a near-universal phenomenon. Albania, El Salvador, and Nepal, none of them affluent, are now below replacement levels. Iran’s fertility rate is half of what it was thirty years ago. Headlines about “Europe’s demographic winter” are commonplace. Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, has said that her country is “destined to disappear.” One Japanese economist runs a conceptual clock that counts down to his country’s final child: the current readout is January 5, 2720.

It will take a few years before we can be sure, but it’s possible that 2023 saw the world as a whole slump beneath the replacement threshold for the first time. There are a couple of places where fertility remains higher—Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa—but even there the rates are generally diminishing. Paranoia has ensued.

….

Anyone who offers a confident explanation of the situation is probably wrong. Fertility connects perhaps the most significant decision any individual might make with unanswerable questions about our collective fate, so a theory of fertility is necessarily a theory of everything—gender, money, politics, culture, evolution. Eberstadt told me, “The person who explains it deserves to get a Nobel, not in economics but in literature.”

…

South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.7. This is the lowest rate of any nation in the world. It may be the lowest in recorded history. If that trajectory holds, each successive generation will be a third the size of its predecessor. Every hundred contemporary Koreans of childbearing age will produce, in total, about twelve grandchildren….Portents of desolation are everywhere. Middle-aged Koreans remember a time when children were plentiful. In 1970, a million Korean babies were born. An average baby-boomer classroom had seventy or eighty pupils, and schools were forced to divide their students into morning and afternoon shifts. It is as though these people were residents of a different country. In 2023, the number of births was just two hundred and thirty thousand. A baby-formula brand has retooled itself to manufacture muscle-retention smoothies for the elderly. About two hundred day-care facilities have been turned into nursing homes, sometimes with the same directors, the same rubberized play floors, and the same crayons. A rural school has been repurposed as a cat sanctuary….Outside of Seoul, children are largely phantom presences. There are a hundred and fifty-seven elementary schools that had no new enrollees scheduled for 2023. That year, the seaside village of Iwon-myeon recorded a single newborn.

…

The after-school program was about to start. It featured two options: 3-D printing and something Lee called “a new sport.” She could give me no details on the new sport, which was played on Tuesdays. In the past, they had offered volleyball, badminton, and soccer, but such extravagances required a critical mass. She let me wander the school, which felt like a museum of childhood artifacts: an unlit but well-stocked gymnasium, a darkened cafeteria outfitted with a little proscenium stage, enormous forsaken playgrounds, ballfields gone wild. The only apparent concession to the demographic reality was a robotic apparatus for playing Ping-Pong by yourself.

…

Korea’s demographic collapse is mostly taken as a fait accompli. As John Lee, the political analyst, put it, “They say South Korea will be extinct in a hundred years. Who cares? We’ll all be dead by then.” The causes routinely cited include the cost of housing and of child care—among the highest in the world. Very little in Korean society seems to give young people the impression that child rearing might be rewarding or delightful. I met a stylish twentysomething news reporter at an airy, silent café in Seoul’s lively Itaewon district. “People hate kids here,” she told me. “They see kids and say, ‘Ugh.’ ” This ambient resentment finds an outlet in disdain for mothers. She said, “People call moms ‘bugs’ or ‘parasites.’ If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you.” She had recently vacationed in Rome, where adults drank at bars while their kids ran amok. She said, “Here, people would say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ ”…The reporter said, “When I write about this, I think, Well, what would change my mind? The answer is nothing. It’s the norm not to want kids.” Like many Koreans, she dotes on her dog. Finding gifts in Seoul for my two little soccer fanatics at home required deliberate planning—I schlepped all over town looking for national-team jerseys in child’s sizes and had to settle for black-market knockoffs—but there is a pet depot on practically every block. Last year, strollers for dogs outsold those for babies. She said, “I’m not saying people value dogs more than they value children.” She paused to gesture to the other patrons: “But all you have to do is look around.”

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Koreans cite the pressures and costs of excessive education as a large part of their reluctance to have children. (American parents in liberal enclaves might share a version of these misgivings.) An auspicious Korean childhood culminates in acceptance to one of Seoul’s three most prestigious universities. Admission is primarily based on a student’s performance on the national collegiate entrance exam, or Suneung, which is administered every year on a Thursday in November. The opening of the stock market is delayed that day, and many construction sites are closed. Bus and metro services are increased to ease traffic congestion. Students running late may avail themselves of a police-motorcycle escort. During the English-comprehension section, which requires absolute silence, air-traffic control suspends all takeoffs and landings.

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In the southern city of Gangjin, I stopped at a coffee shop and encountered a sign on the entrance that read “This is a no-kids zone. The child is not at fault. The problem is the parents who do not take care of the child.” The doors of Korean establishments are frequently emblazoned with such prohibitions. The only children I saw on Seoul’s public transit were foreigners. Kim Kyu-jin, who is by all accounts part of Korea’s first openly lesbian couple with a child, told me, “Five years ago, we didn’t think too deeply about ‘no-kids zones.’ Now we think it’s discriminatory. We always call places beforehand to ask if we can bring our daughter.” Children remain welcome and visible at malls. The Seoul government offers a “Multi-Child Happiness Card,” which gives parents discounts at select amusement parks and theatres. When it was first introduced, you needed three kids to qualify; now you qualify with two. Daum, the artist, told me, “We joke that soon enough they’re going to give the ‘multiple-kids card’ to households with only one.”

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Hwang Sun-jae, a sociologist who studies fertility norms, traces the swift dissemination of low fertility in part to social media’s role as an accelerant of global monoculture. It has never been easier to acquaint yourself with the opportunity costs of childbearing—the glamorous destinations unvisited, the faddish foods uneaten. “People once had only local comparisons,” he said. “Now they see other people’s lives—in New York City and England and France—and they have a sense of relative deprivation: my life is not good enough.”

…

The incidence of childlessness among Democrats is significantly higher than it is among Republicans. This appears in part to be an artifact of educational polarization. Lower fertility rates seem correlated with the perception that proper child development depends upon enormous amounts of personal attention. Some economists attribute our recent fertility slide to a generational shift: people who were born in the nineties are less likely to remember a time when children were largely left alone. Working mothers today devote more time to active child care than stay-at-home mothers did in previous generations. Mothers with a college degree spend about four more hours per week with their children than mothers without one, and they are also less likely to live in proximity to extended family. In an economy biased in favor of highly skilled employees, a protracted education followed by a long career apprenticeship seems like the only way to secure a dependable income. But the longer people wait to try to form a family, the less likely they are to have one.

Click over to read the whole thing.

It’s worth noting that the birth rate in Korea rose for the first time in nine years last year.

The Atlantic also has an interesting article on the loneliness of the conservative pro-natalist.

The pronatalists combine conservative social nudges (get married, start a family) with liberal policy objectives (give parents more money, upzone the suburbs), which makes for tricky politics. At a time of increased abortion restrictions, many liberals find them creepy—busybodies at best and eugenicists at worst. And many conservatives think they’re Trojan horses for socialism, cloaking their desire to spend taxpayer money in family-values rhetoric. Like parenting itself, giving birth to a broadly popular pronatal movement will take a lot of hard work.

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The intellectual force behind the movement lies mainly in a cluster of culturally conservative writers. These include Bethany Mandel, a writer and homeschooling mother of six; Tim Carney, a father of six who wrote Family Unfriendly, a recent book about society’s hostility toward big families; Patrick T. Brown, a father of four and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a socially conservative think tank; and Daniel Hess, a writer more commonly known by his X username, MoreBirths. The informal ringleader is Lyman Stone, a 33-year-old father of three who directs the Pronatalism Initiative at the right-leaning Institute for Family Studies.

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You might expect such a progressive-sounding agenda to have attracted an enthusiastic liberal following. Not so much. In fact, left-of-center Americans are more likely to be anti-natalists. According to a recent YouGov poll, twice as many people who identify as liberal, and four times as many people who identify as very liberal, think too many children are being born than think not enough are.

To the extent that they’re even familiar with the pronatalist argument, liberals seem to find it creepy and off-putting. The main cause of the global birth-rate decline was women’s growing autonomy and access to contraception. Liberals understandably fear that trying to reverse the decline might involve undoing the progress that triggered it.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Would You Have Rather Married Young?

Lillian Fishman wrote an interesting essay about marriage for the Metropolitan Review.

This was the first time it crossed my mind that a young woman like us — a knowledge worker, a writer, a leftist — might regret her independent youth and wish she had married a loving person at a young age. I’d associated this idea with a type of womanhood we considered totally outside of our zone of interest: anti-intellectualism, a belief in the primacy of motherhood. I was blindsided by the suggestion that we might be better people if we were recused from formative independence and struggle. I looked around at my friends and acquaintances, especially the married ones, and wondered if there was any truth in the idea that the years they spent as poor captains of their own ships, unmoored and often lonely, were in fact not remotely necessary or enlightening.

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Experience, we hoped, would broaden us. The new object seems to be the inverse: the contraction and refinement of the self, within and against the overwhelming flood of external information with which we are in constant contact. We might call this new object cohesion, or clarity. And getting married young is exactly that: the cohesion of one’s identities, contraction and refinement, a safehouse from within which to view the external circus without having to risk getting dirty and lonely. I don’t know what it’s like, but from what I can see it isn’t regressive anymore. Perhaps it’s far more fulfilling than the broken pursuit of experience.

The Decline of US Christianity Has Leveled Off

Pew released a new survey showing that the decline of Christianity in America appears to have leveled off.

There’s a lot of fascinating detail in the study. For example, 58% of immigrants to the US are Christian, which is about the same as the population as a whole. Notably, it found that the religious gender gap among younger age cohorts was still slightly skewed towards women, though the gape is not statistically significant.

The New York Times provided some color commentary on this report:

“If you look to the long term, it’s a story of decline in American religion,” said Gregory Smith, a senior associate director of research at Pew. “But it’s a completely different story if you look at the short term, which is a story of stability over the last four or five years.”

The story of the steadying is complex, but one factor is the youngest cohort of adults in the survey. The survey’s first two editions have shown each age group becoming steadily less Christian than the previous. For example, 80 percent of those born in the 1940s or earlier now identify as Christian, compared with 75 percent of those born in the 1950s and 73 percent of those born in the 1960s.

People in the youngest age group in the new survey, born between 2000 and 2006, appear to defy that trend. They are still less likely than average to identify as Christian, and far less likely than the oldest Americans. But, intriguingly to researchers, they appear no less religious than survey participants in the second-youngest cohort, born in the 1990s.

Best of the Web

Chris Arnade: All Men Want to Be Heroes

Tom Owens: Patriarchy and Its Pretenders

David Griesing: Too Many Boys & Men Failing to Launch

James Wood: Sexuality After Industrialism

John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times notes that the political gender gap in Germany among young people is almost entirely a result of young women shifting left.

Ryan Burge: Is Distrust Driving the Rise in Non-Denominationalism?

The great Twitter account DataRepublican created an incredible online tool that cross-references every verse in the New Testament to the places where it is cited by the ante-Nicene fathers. You can even click through to read the exact citations in context.

New Content and Media Mentions

I was a guest this week on the Missions podcast.

New this week:

• The Wounded Prophet - When alienation reveals what conformity conceals: why our most profound truths often come from those most deeply wounded

• Beware the YIMBY

• Beyond Jocks and Nerds - Joseph Holmes on how Hollywood's fixation on innate talent creates unrealistic expectations and resentment

• My podcast this week was with Brad Littlejohn on Christian liberty vs. modern license.

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