What to do about baby gap?

America's Coming Demographic Disaster

By Jonathan V. Last

Encounter Books.

237 pp. $23.99

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Reviewed by Paul Jablow

Nancy Willard, a poet and novelist best known as a children's author, is generally credited with the saying: "Sometimes questions are more important than answers."

Jonathan V. Last's book bears out the truth of that statement: His answers range from obvious to insightful to perhaps crackbrained. But there's no escaping his big question:

Since the United States' "total fertility rate" - a better measure than crude birthrate - is sharply declining, what can we or should we do about it?

First, a couple of numbers. The "total fertility rate" of a country is the average number of live births a woman would have if she lived through her childbearing years, roughly 16 through 45. For an industrialized country such as the United States, the figure to keep the population stable is about 2.1. The country's current rate is 1.93 and falling. Immigration is helping, but is a temporary fix at best.

For Last and many economists and sociologists, this is a "demographic disaster." Bad Things tend to happen to countries with declining populations. It's hard to ignore the potential stresses on the country's social safety net if its population in 2050 is similar to Florida's today, which could happen if trends continue. Fewer workers supporting more retirees isn't a pretty picture. It's when Last, a senior writer at the conservative Weekly Standard, moves from Question to Answers that things get really interesting.

Start with whether the planet can support its current population - let alone a growing one - without the polar ice caps melting and causing Worse Things. Following conservative orthodoxy, Last relegates this issue to a footnote, calling it a "subject . . . fraught with theological division," and later on attributes it to "radical environmental politics."

Moving on, we get to the question of what is causing the country's fertility rate to slow down. Some of what Last points out is obvious: Later marriages, the pill and other forms of birth control, and increased access to abortion. To this, add shacking up: Couples who do that are less likely to have kids than if they got married.

Other things he cites are dicier. Car-seat requirements and acceptance of homosexual lifestyles head that list. No, you can't fit the Brady Bunch in the back of the SUV if they all have to be strapped in. And, yes, some folks living openly as gays would have married and had kids if they'd stayed in the closet just like the old days. But statistically significant?

Last also theorizes that Medicare and Social Security remove an incentive to have children because people now need kids less to support them in their old age.

A more likely disincentive is the cost of raising children, in terms of cash outlay and, in the case of women, career setbacks and forgone income. Last is eloquent on this subject, noting that the $25,229 the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated in 1960 as the cost of raising a child has grown to $193,000 in 2011 dollars - not including the skyrocketing cost of college.

One might expect that this would make higher-income people more likely to raise children, but actually the reverse is the case: A 2008 report by the U.S. Census Bureau showed that families with incomes less than $50,000 had total fertility rates hovering around the 2.0 mark, while those with incomes above that level were around 1.8.

"The bearing and raising of children," he writes, "has largely become the province of the lower classes."

So where to now?

Given that religious people have more kids, he says, "it is important we preserve the role of religion in our public square, resisting those critics who see theocracy lurking behind every corner."

Easier political sells, perhaps, are a less-restrictive immigration policy, lowering the almost ridiculous cost of college, and telecommuting.

He advocates a college equivalent of the GED for people who now attend only for the credentialing diploma.

And telecommuting, he writes, "wouldn't just make it easier for people to have families; it could return intergenerational family relationships to their traditional form."