Word: wattenberg
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...ancient scold, with a new Jeremiah sounding the doom cry. Ben J. Wattenberg, a demographic analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, warns that the U.S. and other Western nations are not producing babies fast enough. Since 1957, writes Wattenberg in his new book The Birth Dearth (Pharos Books; $16.95), the average American woman's fertility rate has dropped from 3.77 children to 1.8 -- below the 2.1 size needed to maintain the present population level. Meanwhile, he argues, Communist-bloc nations are producing at a rate of 2.3 children per mother, while the Third World rate is rising...
...result, predicts Wattenberg, may be a massive shift in world military, economic and ideological power. The West may find it "difficult to promote and defend liberty . . .Western nations ((could)) no longer shape either the political agenda, the culture or the direction of the global community." Moreover, Wattenberg writes, the tide of Third World immigrants to the U.S., combined with the lower ratio of white births to domestic black and Hispanic births, may reduce the proportion of European-descended stock in this country from the present 80% to 60% by 2080. The upshot could be social "divisiveness and turmoil...
...Wattenberg's book has stirred a storm among politicians, academics and other public policy mavens. Critics charge that he provides a rationale for Big Brotherish intrusion into the intensely personal realm of childbearing. Indeed, Wattenberg believes the Government should encourage births with cash bonuses of up to $2,000 annually for each child 16 and under, tax deductions for day-care costs and forgiveness of educational loans in the case of graduates with babies. Other analysts are concerned that Wattenberg's data could be used to justify a rollback of proabortion laws, a reduction in sex education programs and perhaps...
...boomers now entering their peak earning years will build a surplus of retirement funds that will sustain the Social Security system for a while. But by 2020 the amount coming in from the smaller cohort of workers behind the boomers will not be enough to cover costs. Says Ben Wattenberg of A.E.I.: "What you put into a Social Security system is babies, and what you get out is money. Those nice baby-boom yuppies forgot to put a baby in the system...
...gloomier prophets of the American future, the long-term drop in the birthrate means that the U.S. has joined other industrialized nations in a Spenglerian decline of the West. In his forthcoming book, The Birth Dearth (Pharos Books; $16.95), Wattenberg points out that developed nations such as the U.S., Australia and the West European countries, which accounted for 22% of the world population in 1950, are being surpassed by the rapidly growing East bloc and Third World populations. The developed nations now account for just 15% of the world total, and will sink...