DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Read it.

In a recent interview on NPR, a reporter asked a 20-year-old woman with sickle cell disease how she would feel about a new treatment on the market, noting that the side effects include hair loss and sterility. The woman remained almost giddy—not merely because she already owned a closet full of wigs, but because, she noted, “I don’t want kids anyway, so that is a free form of birth control.”

Without diminishing from the seriousness of her illness—maybe she was just trying to look on the bright side?—it is still striking how often and how easily young women are proclaiming their desire to remain childless. How we arrived at the declining birthrates all over the world—but particularly in the United States and Europe—is a complex story. But Tim Carney—my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be—offers a readable and nuanced explanation for the phenomenon.

Family Unfriendly begins with the problems faced by people who actually have children and then works backward in time to the decisions young people are making about dating, marriage, and childbearing. Carney, who has six children of his own and lives in a community with other large families—think 10 or 12 children—describes the problems that families like his face. Oddly, finances are at the bottom of the list, despite the fact that Carney is not an investment banker and his wife stays at home with their children.

Think of it as evolution in action. People who don’t want kids will have no descendants, and so eventually everyone will be descended from people who do want kids–a self-correcting problem.

Like gravity and markets, natural selection works even when you don’t want it to.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 17th, 2024 at 14:18 and is filed under Dystopia Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.