It is called Disunited Nations. From the introduction:
What’s been different in recent decades is that geography has been suspended somewhat, enabling deep global economic interconnections. We’ve come to see those connections as a great strength; they are turning into weakness before our very eyes.
Of course, those words were written even before the media discovered the term “coronavirus.” UPDATE: Today, Zeihan posted his take on the coronavirus, and it is exactly what a reader of his book would expect.
Much later in the book, Zeihan writes,
On the farm, we marry young, we work young, and die young. In the city, we marry old, work old, and die old.
In explaining the decline in family size, he argues that industrialization/urbanization is the main cause. Adults who run family businesses, especially farms, usually value children. So a more rural society will have more children. Furthermore, cities are very crowded. Because living space is expensive, an urban society will have fewer children.
One virtue of this explanation for declining family size is that it applies to countries that did not go through the American sexual revolution but still have experienced declining family size as they urbanized. Also, it occurs to me that perhaps the Baby Boom can be attributed in part to the way that suburbs relieved the crowding of cities.
It makes me wonder more generally about the social effects of a shift from family businesses to corporations. What sort of cultural changes result from that? Have other countries succeeded in protecting family businesses, and if so, has this helped maintain birth rates? I suspect that the answer is “no.”
I’d argue that female meritocracy is the main cause. Female education lowers birth rates more than easy access to contraception.
As an anecdote related to modern urbanization, I kept noticing among friends, family, and acquaintances that automobile logistics places a hard constraint on the number of “child seat” aged children a family can have. The one modern excessively large family I know made a mockery of transportation rules, bordering on “clown car” absurdities. Following the law and having more than two children close in age requires significant forethought.
“Female education lowers birth rates more than easy access to contraception.”
Right.
Time and time again, every rigorous study that looks into the question, domestic or foreign, contemporary or historical, finds this to be the strongest coefficient in the regressions. Attainment is sometimes combined with status and economic opportunity outside the family in a kind of “fertility perfect storm” variable the feminists would probably name “the emancipation index”, (with justice) but since these tend to be correlated, one might as well focus on attainment.
Indeed, over 50 years ago when lowering population growth in developed and developing countries alike was more in fashion among elite intellectuals, this connection was well and widely understood and thought to be a good “win-win” mechanism by which the goal could be furthered.
Which raises the question of why people keep trying to rediscover the wheel, and indeed, keep proposing alternative wheels that are nowhere near as explanatory or obvious from the data. Affordability matters, but not nearly as much. In the last two centuries, rich people without economic constraints usually have fewer children than poorer people, even in expensive crowded cities, and before contraception, and over time people will mimic what they see high status people do, and conform to what it seems normal to do, what their reference social group won’t judge as weird.
The trouble is that since female emancipation and education are such highly socially desirable values that one dare not speak openly of potential negative trade offs, anyone concerned with low fertility rates, looking for socially acceptably proposals by which to raise them, is forced to go plow much more marginal lands, and pretend the more fertile (heh) fields don’t exist.
This is the opposite of the stoplight effect. Instead of looking for your keys in the wrong place, “because that’s where the light is”, you know that you lost them in the bar, but the bar is locked up, so you’re looking for a screwdriver elsewhere. You might be able to jimmy your way in the car and turn the ignition with a screwdriver, but it’s nowhere near as good a solution as the keys. But the keys are off limits.
And, to continue the metaphor, the keys are off limits because you’re a raging alcoholic and inevitably end up drinking and hurting people if you go into the bar late at night.
Yes, modern society has tied its hands in several ways by leveling hierarchies. It’s time to move on from dwelling on solutions that involve mass forced unpaid labor.
Go ahead, I’m all ears. So far the proposals seem to be variations on taxing the men to pay the women, establishing just the sort of “collectivization of the family” envisioned by communist theoreticians. Small wonder that the effects are typical for communistic schemes: disincentivizing men from hard work – they get nothing for their taxes besides more and more obloquy and contumely from the likes of you and from the educated young women who work for a pittance in the glamor industries – and degrading everybody’s conscientousness and self-reliance with handouts. A further effect is the reduced incentives women have for choosing for reproduction men likely to uphold civilization going forward, because these men are less exciting and have less to offer.
RE: The “Gift” of Coronavirus [via the UPDATE link]
This article demonstrates why geopolitical specialists like Samuel P. Huntington and Robert D. Kaplan come across as such A-Holes to my classical liberal ears. Zeihan clearly suffers from the same Zero-Sum myopia that plagues Protectionists worldwide.
COVID-19 is a disaster to anyone that appreciates the Positive-Sum characteristics of Emergent systems. It takes a special kind of person that combines A-Holeness with Zero-Sum Myopia to reason about how this tragedy is actually a “gift”.
Reading these passages sound a lot like ‘Make America Great Again’ like 1900 or 1880.
1) The reality is fertility rates in the US and Europe started dropping in late 19th century and declined sharply early 20th until late Depression years. The 1950s baby boom for the US is the historical outlier not the long term trend.
2) Lyman Stone: One simple reality of fertility rates decline match the decline infant morality rates. The highpoint of net births (births – infant morality) was the 1950s so they valued babies more because many of them did not live.
3) In general I suspect farm life does increase FTR although it is probably closer to .5 baby per female. Population density does lower birth rates. But family farms and business have declining since ~1870s.
4) Italy relatively speaking has/had low birth rates despite a higher percentage of family farms and businesses.
5) I find discussions of past fertility rates completely miss that the culture of the past and quality of birth control was significantly different and hindered its use a lot. So I do find the whole they value babies more in 1880 misses the reality that value sex a lot too.
6) The birth rate continue to drop for modern nations come from my reading the Bell Curve and everyday parenting three kids. That the modern economy:
1) Requires better choices from its citizens and having too many babies is a bad choice.
2) The cultures that Murray values most outside US is the Asian Tigers who have the lowest birth rates.
3) When the Great Recession hit, the drops in fertility rates are driven by minority women.
I’m assuming we are talking about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rateTFR (Total Fertility Rate). I was going to first respond that we should spell out our TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) when they don’t show up on the first page of a Google search but I knew something was wrong when the TLA didn’t make it to Wikipedia’s FTR “disambiguation page” either. Perhaps widespread adoption of asdf’s muscle memory or autocorrect errors reflect the extent of his influence here.
sigh TFR (Total Fertility Rate)
I am an embarrassment to my profession.
You’re good.
I live in fear that my typing mistakes will make it into print.
We have fields more full of flowers
and a starrier sky above,
we have woods more full of life
and a life more full of love.
-Antonio Goncalves Dias
Why is this one spread across four lines instead of two?
Is there an unspoken rule that poems are limited to 40 character columns?
It is taken from a famous Brazilian poem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canção_do_ex%C3%ADlio
I am unaware of any rules as to phrasing. My guess is that in the original Portuguese it produced a pleasant rhythmic effect.
I think my 40 character column guess is accurate and reflects the natural length of a handwritten line. It is like tracking the history of rail gauge. The natural point size of a handwritten character is approximately twice that of printed characters. Now I’m curious if standard paper width is a carry-over from natural parchment and/or papyrus width.
“On the farm….”
One more cranky rant here on blurred rural/urban divisions. Consider this farm family, a fairly typical Midwestern family: farms about 300 acres, half owned-half rented, mostly pasture and cattle, 4 kids grown and all in college or graduated, mother full time job in a high skill technical medical occupationin a hospital 40 miles away and father full time factory foreman in same distant city, own 4 rental properties as investment in large urban area 120 miles away.
Or some guys I play cards with who farm even more acreage. One guy has about 3,500 acres that he gradually accredited in corn and beans, but built his own storage elevators and handles about 1 million bushels a year and has a couple 18 wheelers to haul to better
markets when prices improve, college educated in agriculture and does better than 300 bushels an acre some years. Vacations in Europe. Wife teaches. Has African-American grandchildren. Another started working for an auto mechanic right out of high school, saved, opened his own shop, saved and gradually acquired pasture and now has over 500 acres with cattle. Another is a master carpenter who does specialty work in rich city homes but manages to also manage a hog operation. (Interestingly although these guys are culturally sympathetic to Republicans, the high cost of their health insurance means they are not sure Trump votes).
And even in Brazil (Zeihan’ s chapter is a clicheed mess), consider my aged mother-in-law who started cutting sugar cane in an interior state at 15 but several years later married a village baker and had 10 kids but the village got swallowed up in urban sprawl and she is now considered urban.
If I ever met anyone who had a life consistent with the tidy little rural/urban narratives that journalists and academics are so fond of spinning, I might have more hope for them winning back some credibility.
I don’t understand. Why are these anecdotes not fully consistent with “the tidy little rural/urban narratives”? The rural agriculture economy is tightly intertwined with the urban economy, that is how I think of the difference between “subsistence farming” and modern agriculture.
If you were a population biologists looking at our species, you might conclude that we have evolved into a unique two-ecosystem pattern, each with different but inter-dependent K (kapacity) values.
The stark Zeihan quote contrasting urban versus rural life that Dr Kling posted above, about rural people marrying young and dying young, seems to me to be a caricature. Yes, rural is closely intertwined with urban. I am just trying to point out that they are in many cases so intertwined that it is impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends. If I missed the point, and Zeihan is not making gross generalizations, then it wouldn’t be the first time I misread something. My general perspective is that the exceptions generally swallow the rule.
My bad, I didn’t notice or think about the accuracy of Zeihan’s claims about age/lifecycle differences between rural and urban people. Thanks for pointing it out.
Thank you for these descriptions! The variety of life and “small” business never ceases to amaze me.
In Slovakia and Eastern Europe, there are plenty of villages going thru a de-collectivization with a lot of stereotypical young marriages. There’s also a big drift away from the small farm villages into universities and towns.
So far, few university graduates go back to the farms.
This might have been true for the 100 or so years in the US thru to the post WW II (outlier) Baby Boomers. Hmm, 1865 post Civil War thru 1964 last Boomers. Since then, more US farm kids have been going to college AND back to farming, at least part time. (More data on this would be good; I don’t have it.) My guess is that the stereotypes were long term trends that have been highly reduced, if not broken, but no “new stereotype” has taken over about farm kids, especially as many foreign places do display the old US formula.
Also, many Boomers remember having 3 or 4 kids in the back seat of a station wagon (not just a Rambler!) – 4 kid car seats do not fit in any station wagon today. It’s illegal … to have 4 kids without having a bigger car / not taking the whole family in one car. (We got a 7 person Mitsubishi for our 4th).
Our civilization would be better with more tax cuts for married families with multiple kids, to reduce the econ dis-incentive.
Most of Zeihan seems more contrarian geo-politics than family, but that would be a different set of comments. The Covid-19 Flu will increase manufacturing in the US. Those companies that, because of Trump or other reasons, have been moving out of China, those companies will likely be first to profit.
There’s a factoid that Campbell Soup is increasing production in expectation of higher C-19 Flu fears and home soup makings. Growing food will NOT be the big problem Zeihan fears. Even with globalized supply chains temporarily disrupted.
One giant omission from this discussion on birth rates and family sizes is rapid advances in fertility treatments and the coming advances in lifespan+healthspan extension.
Kling references the enormous social impact of widely available birth control. Fertility treatments are having enormous social impact. Age mitigation treatments are on the near horizon and will have larger social impacts.
The first child born from IVF was in 1978. The tech has moved from being a never-done-before research experiment to a very common medical service. There have giant strides in IVF techniques, reliability, and success rates.
Next, lifespan+healthspan extension is on the near term horizon. The social implications of that will be enormous. Women will be able to bear children at older chronological ages and adults will have the energy and willpower to parent at older chronological ages. Of course, beyond that people will live much longer, being able to work much longer, play sports much longer, people will get to know their great grandparents and great great grandparents.
One might consider looking at the Amish for an idea of how historic birthrates might have developed. Based on my experience growing up around them, the Amish seem to like bigger families, and all the children work on the farm or in the shop from a very early age. (5-6 at least) I don’t know what their infant mortality looks like, never having thought asking was polite. Still they are a little closer to the “idyllic” rural farmer family.
In general, though, I think edgar has it very much right, perhaps not going far enough. In many rural areas on the east coast the vast majority of people are not farmers. We might have a garden, and maybe some chickens or a horse etc. but nothing commercial. Most everyone works in stores, schools, commutes to the city, whatever. The only necessary difference between rural and urban people is that rural people don’t like living in cities as much. Maybe that is because they like kids and want to have a bigger house and yard to put them in, or a better, less violent school. Maybe they just like to hunt or avoid traffic, and find that kids are cheaper too as a bonus.
In any case, I suspect that trying to find a single answer for birth demographics and rural/urban divides is a fool’s errand. There are lots of very different people in both settings, and self sorting is going to reflect a huge number of trade offs.
Perhaps Edgar’s anecdotes say more about modern farming being like polymath software engineering than unskilled factory work. Some of my former high-tech co-workers also ran commercial farms or “hobby farms” but I suspect that has something to do with proximity. I know one Australian coal-miner whose hobby farm home is near his place of work. I’m sure proximity plays a role in part-time commercial fishing as well.
If you do a Google search on “mennonite infant mortality” a number of papers and articles come up that include 18th and 19th century European mortality data and Amish numbers as well. I think the Anabaptists are a natural source of unmined data waiting for social scientists to respectfully analyze.
That’s a good point. I can’t remember the numbers, but the number of people with hobby farms that are marginally self sustaining (zero price hobby) is very large. I mainly meant to point out that rural != farmer. You see the farms driving through, but there are many many more people living in the country that are not farmers by any reasonable definition. Even the rural economy is largely service driven.
I have seen some of the studies on the Amish, and I am a little skeptical, particularly about sensitive topics. As a group, they are pretty standoffish around the “English”, and are known to not work with police or other authority figures. I totally understand that impulse, but I wonder how accurate some of those surveys and studies work out to be. Do the Amish get an official death certificate if a newborn dies? It certainly varies by area, as well as how willing the individual groups would be to divulge that information.
They are super interesting in a lot of ways. I am moving back to central PA this year, and I might pick up a side project looking at Amish schools and educational achievement. I am curious as to how well a 15 year old Amish kid, 1 year out of school, does on a PISA type test compared to a 15 year old English kid.
One of my Mennonite colleagues had a full funeral for the death of his newborn son. Church records are the main source of data, as far as I understand it. Church records were a source of information for Michael Ondaatje as outlined in his book “Running in the Family” which is filled with discordant humor such as:
The irony, as I read through the book, is that pre-WWII Sri Lanka has more of the decadent feel of Ondaatje’s multi-cultural Canada than of the post-WWII horrors of war torn Sri Lanka as described in his novel “Anil’s Ghost”.
Pre-WWII Sri Lankan Birth/Marriage/Death records are captured in Portuguese Catholic churches and Dutch Protestant churches. Post-WWII death data, as outlined in “Anil’s Ghost”, often requires forensic anthropologists.
As for your central PA side project, you should try to look up someone in Waterloo Region, Ontario (either the University of Waterloo or Wilfred Laurier University) to do the same for the Mennonite community. Without the practice of shunning, Mennonites seem to have a much broader spectrum of educational attainment ranging from the Old Order Amish equivalent communities up to the full participation in the local high-tech community.
Peter Zeihan published the high resolution color graphics from his book on a web site. I’m not a fan of Zero-Sum Geopolitics but I’m a huge fan of high quality geospatial infographics. I like the trend of publishing complementary book information on web sites.
Immigrants and pioneer-type situations boost fertility; many religions urge fertility, partly as a battle-of-the-cradle tactic.
I’m just thinking that there are important non-economic factors.
Regarding family businesses, my experience is that the gifts of the father are often not passed down to the son. And after a couple of generations of division into inheritances of grandchildren and nephews, the end result is a bunch of absentee owners pushing for profits this quarter so they can pay for their second home. Not unlike public companies
Where I have seen multi-generational businesses survive transitions and thrive, it’s often where Generation N requires Generation N+1 to actually buy the business from them. While the terms are often favorable, it helps to filter out the duffers and dimwits.