Mark Steyn has spent much of his time in recent years discussing the negative consequences of abnormally low birthrates.
In the latest Fortune, Ben Stein picks up the theme, examining why more Americans are following the lead of Europeans in pursuing the demographic ?death spiral?:
[B]y pure luck, my wife and I do have a dutiful, helpful son and daughter-in-law. How this happened I am not quite sure.
But my son is an aberration, as far as I can tell. Look around you. The costs and benefits of having children in affluent America are wildly off kilter. Too much cost, too little reward. Often the cost-benefit analysis of children prints out “Get a German shorthaired pointer instead.”
Many people are doing that, and the birth rate is collapsing. But if we stop having enough children, because their value is so low relative to their cost, the society grinds down. It’s happening right now. The native-born upper middle class barely replace themselves in America, if they do at all. In a way we are committing suicide as a class, possibly in part because of the burdens of child rearing in modern life.
