What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster.

AuthorHammond, J. Daniel
PositionBook review

* What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster By Jonathan V. Last New York: Encounter Books, 2013. Pp. vii, 230. $24.

In the economics of population, national income per head founders completely as a measure of welfare. It ignores the satisfaction people derive from having children or from living longer.

--Peter T. Bauer, "Population Growth: Disaster or Blessing?" The Independent Review 3, no. 1 (Summer 1998)

Jonathan Last opens What to Expect When No One's Expecting with a story from his life in the Old Town neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia. This community is an oasis for young adults with refined tastes and ample income to indulge their tastes: high-end kitchen and food shops, gourmet restaurants, and coffee bars. A children's clothing shop named "Tutto Bambini" opened in a new cluster of shops but closed after only eighteen months. It was replaced by a doggie spa. Pets abound in Old Town, but there are few children. Residents of Old Town expect to have the next popular food or clothing fashion, but few of them expect the birth of a child.

The Old Town lifestyle serves as a motif for Last's prophetic warning that the good life as it has come to be defined in modern Western culture--a life of hard work, high income, and expensive play--is not sustainable across generations. This is because these three elements of the good life depend on freedom from the ties and responsibilities of children and family. Thus, the unsustainability Last foresees is rooted in the shrinking size of the next generations and the resulting inversion of the demographic age pyramid. If this lifestyle were confined to a few urban centers, there would be no cause for a prophetic voice. Perhaps if the lifestyle were confined to the rich West, there would not be. But because Western values have spread throughout the world, there is indeed an urgent need for the prophet's voice.

Last cites demographic evidence of the downward trend in fertility rates for Americans that has persisted virtually since the nation's beginning. In 1800, the fertility rate for white Americans was 7.04 children per woman. By 1890, it had fallen to 3.87. For blacks, fertility in the 1850s is estimated to have been 7.90 and at the century's end 6.56. But by 1940 fertility among blacks fell to 2.87 and for whites to 2.22, a little higher than the replacement rate of 2.10. The "baby boom" increase in fertility following World War II lasted roughly two decades. But this was a fertility spike, not a reversal of the downward trend. Overall fertility for American women is currently 1.93. The demographic...

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