David Brooks writes today of “The Odyssey Years,” which he describes as “the decade of wandering that frequently occurs between adolescence and adulthood.” He notes that in both the U.S. and Europe, young people are postponing all kinds of things: Employment. Moving out. Marriage. Childbearing. Instead:
During this decade, 20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school. They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another.
Brooks doesn’t mention an implication of this phenomenon, concerning which writer Mark Steyn has been sounding an alarm in the past couple of years. Steyn argues, sometimes a bit shrilly, that the liberal West is committing cultural suicide by not having children. If present demographic trends continue, he says, over time Europe and Russia will become increasingly Muslim, because Muslim immigrants are having far more children than the European- and Russian natives (who are reproducing at far below the rate needed to replace themselves). Similarly, Steyn says, Japan will become increasingly Korean and Filipino, and red-state voters will come to dominate the U.S. political scene.
But present trends very well might not continue, for two reasons. First, the fecundity of other cultures may well be reduced by the same forces that earlier reduced Western fertility: the availability of birth control, combined with increased education and economic power for women. It seems plausible, says blogger “dave,” that over time the same thing might happen in, say, Muslim cultures.
Second, Western fertility may be increasing. It’s been said that conservative Americans tend to have more kids than liberal ones, and that kids tend to adopt their parents’ values at least somewhat, so over time we should expect Americans to start having more babies. And even more interestingly, liberal Americans may be breeding more: NPR’s Tovia Smith noted in a Weekend Edition report last month that “in the past 10 years, the number of high-end earners [in the U.S.] who are having three or more kids has shot up nearly 30 percent. Some say the trend is driven by a generation of over-achieving career women who have quit work and transferred all of their competitive energy to baby making.” It’s even said in San Francisco, that bastion of American liberalism, that “three is the new two.”
It all should be fascinating to watch. If past trends are any indication, somehow humanity will get through it (perhaps painfully), and those who live 100 years from now wouldn’t trade places with us even if they could.
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