[With this essay, I’m returning to a series that I began late last spring on the five most important problems facing the American people today. Readers who want to go back and look at the first essays in this series can look here, here, and here. The first problem treated in the series was the problem of jobs – how do we create enough well paying jobs in a post-manufacturing economy to support a middle class society? The second was the problem of demography. An earlier essay looked at the problem that the Baby Bust created for public and private pension, medical and retirement systems. Today’s post goes beyond pensions to look at what demography tells us about where contemporary society needs a change of direction.]

Most people don’t think about the baby bust in the advanced industrial world (including the United States) very much, and when they do they usually assume that it is just one of those things and that there’s not much that can be done about it.

This is a dangerous mistake. On both sides of the Atlantic, and in advanced Pacific Rim economies like Singapore and Japan, the swift decline of childbirth drives some of the world’s most serious social problems. Virtually all Americans understand at this point that the crises in our public and private pension systems and in old age programs like Medicare are largely a result of the baby bust. Our entitlement programs were based on the assumption that each generation would be larger than the last. As that assumption has been proven untrue, many of our most important social programs are becoming unaffordable.

It is also true that the baby bust exacerbates problems and conflicts over immigration. Countries with low birth rates need to import more workers to do necessary jobs. Within certain vague but very real limits this can work reasonably well in a country like the United States, but 200 years of European history were shaped by violent conflicts over ethnicity and the demand of Europe’s peoples for nation states to defend and uphold a specific ethnic culture and consciousness. Europe may not be fated to sink into the darkness of ethnic and social conflict once again, but few European policy makers or social observers consider the vast immigration of recent decades risk- or cost-free.

The baby bust is not a blip on the screen; in China, Japan, and on both sides of the Atlantic, the drop in birth rates is shaping the future and causing major problems. Low birth rates are ruinously expensive because of what they do to social programs and they drive wrenching social change. They are important in another way: although the details of the demographic shift are different in different countries, low birth rates provide eloquent, irrefutable evidence that some human societies are headed in the wrong direction. They are failing at a primary task facing any human group or culture: the task of reproducing themselves into the future.

This is easy to see in the case of a country like Russia. A massive social meltdown and a colossal failure of political organization since 1989 has undermined the institutions and the family and social structures that give young people the confidence and resources to bring children into the world. The dramatic decline in Jewish birthrates throughout Europe in the 1930s as their horizons darkened (examined by Bernard Wasserstein in his important examination of European Jews before World War Two: On the Eve) is another harrowing example of a social crisis leading to a baby bust.

In the chart above it is worth noting that the figures are for all of the ethnic groups in the Russian Federation. Muslim populations in the Federation have much higher birth rates than ethnic Russians; a graph focusing only on Russian speaking Slavs would likely show much lower levels and might well not show much of an uptick since 2000. But many countries today are achieving near-Russian levels of childlessness without the obvious signs of economic and social crisis in which Russia is so rich. They are approaching the levels of fertility reached by European Jews as the uncertainties and threats of the inter-war years mounted around them.

Many people don’t think there’s a problem here—or rather think that the transition to a low-birth society is a good thing, even if certain transitional problems might appear. Malthusians see every additional human being born as another locust intent on wrecking the planet. Some feminists see low birth rates as a natural and entirely desirable response of women around the world to better educational and professional opportunities—not to mention the availability of cheap and reliable birth control.

But if we look at America’s case, we don’t just see hipster ZPG worries and feminist career building at work; we see a general crisis of the entire system by which our society reproduces its biological substance and cultural values from one generation to the next. If a mix of ecological consciousness and conscious choice by empowered women were driving our birth rate, one would expect to see that even as the quantity of new babies fell, the quality of their life circumstances would rise. Women might delay birth until their careers were on track and so might have fewer babies overall, but the babies they did have would be born into more affluent and stable homes. Those who chose to limit the number of children they had because of ecological worries would again be expected to have fewer children, but would have more resources to devote to their care.

While there certainly are families who fit these descriptions, the state of American children casts doubt on the likelihood that these are the factors driving our fertility shift. More and more American children are born to single mothers, many (though of course not all) of whom are economically or socially disadvantaged in some way. Reflecting that reality, the percentage of American children living in poverty is rising. Other social indicators—like food insecurity, education inequality, and children born out of wedlock—point to declining well being among American children, with the youngest often suffering most.

In other words, Americans are having so few babies that the demographic transition is wrecking the federal budget and our social safety net, and we aren’t taking particularly good care of the ones that we have.

This can only be seen as a spectacular, and spectacularly dangerous social failure. It is a catastrophe of historic proportions, but we are reacting to it with a mix of learned helplessness and willed ignorance.

When people do address this problem it is often in political cliches. The left responds to evidence that children are badly off with calls for massive increases in government programs and social spending. Much of the right responds to the fertility decline by blaming the crisis on cultural decay.

From where I sit, restoring some health and balance to America’s reproductive system looks a thornier and more urgent problem than many on either the right or the left have yet grasped. Both liberals and conservatives are going to have to leave their comfort zones if we are going to do a better job of reproducing American society from one generation to the next.

The demographic crisis is about more than pension solvency, and dealing with it effectively will be one of the biggest efforts American society will have to engage in during the next few decades. How we address these problems will help define the next stage in American life; whether and how far we succeed will have much to do with how happy and prosperous we become.