Category: Culture

Having served your US federal government for thirty-eight years (yes, I like to say I was press-ganged into service as a child. Back then, they grabbed unsuspecting waifs off the street and took them to DC as laborers), I later realized I knew a lot about how the government really works. Lessons of which the average citizen was unaware. Some of these might be simply informative. A few have applications in regular life. Given the inflamed state of our society today, I submit them for your consideration:

• You don’t have to make your opinion known. You can work in an incredibly politicized area like government policy and NOT opine about politics. This used to be the standard practice among the bureaucracy. It started to erode about the time “not my President” bumper stickers started showing up in federal employee parking lots after the disputed 2000 election (Bush v. Gore, and all that). It really took off with the “resistance” to President Trump. Now even allegedly nonpartisan types like intelligence community officials weigh in with their party preferences. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

I learned early on in the career that it wasn’t my job to critique who the voters sent into office. My job was to bring my expertise to bear within the limits of “supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, . . . ” and nothing else. Critique policies to the leaders espousing them? Of course. But publicly criticize them or their policies? Never, and don’t get me started on those who privately try to subvert such policies. There is a time and a place for those who resign in protest, but there is a place in hell for eternity for those who take it upon themselves to undermine American policy (looking at you, Eddie Snowden). I know some friends cheer on those who work against leaders they dislike, and see them as heroic. I would only caution those who do so: you do not want federal bureaucrats getting the notion it’s ok for them to decide what the government should do. Because when they do, they’ll decide they don’t need the voters.

• The overwhelming majority of the federal workforce is well-meaning, dedicated, hard-working, and competent. There are 2.2 million full-time federal employees, almost 3 million if you include part-timers. It’s the largest employer in the nation, forty percent larger than Walmart or Amazon (the runners up). Because of its size alone, there are good and bad employees. There are executives who strive to keep the common good in mind at all times, and careerists looking for promotions at any cost. There are agencies with a deep sense of purpose, and some which seem to be looking for something to do. There are malingerers already retired-on-active-duty and workaholics who put in eighty-hour weeks (but only get paid for forty).

Federal government employment has some unique qualities. It requires relinquishing certain rights, like the right to campaign publicly for a party or candidate. It insists on strict hiring processes to avoid nepotism, and protects workers from political favoritism. It pays lower-skilled positions at an above-market rate, and higher-skilled positions at a below-market rate. All these things have both positive and negative effects of the workforce.

One thing that unifies this grand, diverse group is a sense of patriotic purpose leavened with expertise. If you want to clean up pollution, you learn about environmental science and get a job at the Environmental Protection Agency. If you want to protect the border, you study law enforcement and seek work at Customs and Border Protection. When I was working the strategic arms negotiations, across the table at my US policy sessions was a representative from the US Arms Control & Disarmament Agency (ACDA). That rep studied international relations (like me), but was dedicated to reducing the number of weapons in the world, while I represented the Pentagon and (at least) more and better weapons for our side. We argued incessantly, but I never believed the other rep had anything but American success as a goal and solid expertise as a means.

I received (courtesy of your tax dollars, ¡Gracias!) loads of training, including two Masters Degrees, a stint at the Federal Executive Institute, executive education courses at Harvard, Columbia, and Oxford, and a failed typing course (still two-fingered, thank you very much!). I got to see all types and manners of federal employees, and they fit the generalization with which I started this section. They aren’t infallible, they get things wrong (see Covid, 2019). But they’re executing laws they didn’t write under the direction of leaders they didn’t choose for people they don’t ever see. That’s why they don’t get paid much, but don’t get fired much, either.

• If you think the media just started to portray the government inaccurately, you haven’t been paying attention. When I returned to Washington, DC in 1987, I started that job working on arms control. I had heard all about how dangerous Ronald Reagan was, I had seen firsthand the enormous anti-American rallies in West Germany, read the stories about the Machiavellian characters in the Reagan Administration. Now I was a back-bencher, sitting in meetings with these same characters. And I learned the press was full of shite, as they say in Ireland.

Sometimes the different factions arguing over policy would leak tainted information about their opponents or policies, and the media would lap it up (sometimes gullibly, sometimes willingly, always because it made for good copy, which was that era’s equivalent to today’s “eyeballs.”). Other times some important meeting would be held and nothing would leak, so the reporters just made stories up. Oftentimes the media attributed bad intentions to policies they didn’t like, or questioned the ethics of officials they disfavored. If called on it, they simply offered, “you can tell me the real story” which, of course, would be a leak, too.

All this was happening back when the press publicly described itself as nonpartisan and independent, a fourth estate which kept tabs on the government, and when media was comfortably atop a communications hierarchy that attracted sufficient advertising and revenue. So today when media sources are often at risk of folding, “eyeballs” are everything, and reporters at the New York Times and Washington Post insist that balance or fairness are pro-fascism, mind what you read and believe. Because it’s probably at best partly true, and that’s the worst kind of lie.

• Having a friend in the federal government doesn’t help. People sometimes think, “hey, my cousin works for the FBI, maybe she can help me with this IRS letter.” Short answer: no. It seems natural, right? If your aunt worked at the bank, you might expect the bank manager to give you at least an opportunity to talk about a loan. If your sister was with the DMV, you’d expect to not wait in line for your license renewal. But for federal employees, it is against the law to represent a third party (that is, a friend, family member, or frankly anybody) back to the federal government. The key word here is represent, which is a formal thing. Could I call up a friend at another agency and ask some questions about a process, or the best way to do something? Absolutely. But could I call that same person up and say, “My uncle wants to get a small business loan from your agency’s program; how can you help?” Only if I wanted to get fired and prosecuted.

• If you want to live forever, become a government program. Every department, bureau, agency and administration has a perfectly legitimate problem it was designed to solve. In some cases, those problems will never be solved; I’m thinking here of the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community, which we’ll need until after the Parousia. In some cases, the agency evolves to do other things. The Secret Service was started in the 19th century to combat currency counterfeiting (if you watched the old Wild, Wild West television show, you already knew that!). Then President McKinley got assassinated and they got the mission to protect the President. But others simply morph over time. I was against the establishment of intelligence elements in the Department of Homeland Security, because I reasoned that if all they needed to do was be an information conduit, that was better done by technology and rules, nor organizations. If you put analysts and collectors together, eventually they’ll go looking for threats to collect against. And you’ll have an analyst writing about the possibility of Islamic terrorists turning Desert Storm vets into domestic violent extremists, or the dangers of rad-trad Catholics.

Once a government program starts, it is well-nigh impossible to end it. Bureaucracies are full of true-believers who are almost incapable of considering, “what if our mission simply went away.” I was involved with two reductions-in-force and several re-organizations. At more than one position, I offered to eliminate functions or elements. Most of the time, the very offer was met with horror. It was the one thing no one in the workforce or leadership (generally) would consider. So you have to have an external forcing-function if you ever want to reconsider what the government is doing and how much it is spending.

• Related to the previous point, the federal government is a hardy, perennial, invasive crop. It thrives almost anywhere you plant it, and it tends to spread. If your agency works to clean the soil, eventually someone points out that the water is dirty, too, and dirty water endangers the soil, so you need to clean it too. Then the air. Then emissions, then second-hand smoke, then bovine flatulence. Each step seems incremental and logical at the time, but in the aggregate it makes one wonder where it stops. Because it never does. And of course it takes a few more federal government employees to do the new missions.

There are some things only the federal government can do. Even in those areas, the people and their representatives must take care when charging the federal bureaucracy with a mission, keeping in mind the traits I cited above. The bureaucracy has a natural tendency to want to solve problems, but that can be a problem unto itself. The federal government is neither a deep-seated conspiracy (the “Deep State”) nor a Confederacy of Dunces. It’s patriotic Americans showing up and doing a job. Some good, some less so. And everything they do has been approved by both the Congress and the White House, and sanctioned by the Supreme Court. Next time you want to scream, “who put these clowns in charge?” remember: you did, I did, we all did.

What is the first duty of government? Security. International law cites that for a government to be recognized as legitimate, it must effectively control the territory it claims (international security). And for a government to remain legitimate, it must provide security for the citizens it claims to represent (domestic security). So crime (the amount of it, the types of it) is always a political issue.

You would not be wrong if you felt uncertain about the state of crime in America today. Almost sixty percent of Americans say crime is increasing. There are many people, most of them politicians, telling you that the data prove crime is at an all-time low, or crime is rampant, or you’re a racist for even being concerned about it. The first two are right; the last one is entirely up to you. Let’s dig in to the issue to get past the spin and see what’s really happening, because (1) it’s an important issue and (2) it’s a great example of how statistics can be used for good or ill!

There are two sources of crime data for America, both of them in the Department of Justice (under the Attorney General): the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). The BJS data is compiled by a random survey method of Americans, the FBI uses data reported by over 18,000 American law enforcement elements (everything from State Police to Sheriffs to tribal organizations). Comparing the two, we learn that only about half of all crimes are reported (the BJS data is twice the FBI data!). Both data sets tend to move in the same direction (crime overall and types of crime vary in the same way, that is for example, less murder, even if we don’t know for sure the total number of murders).

What do we know for sure? Only a little. First, while the FBI counts crimes and the BJS has a survey, the fact that almost half of all crimes go unreported means our data can only be used in a general way. The apparent specificity of the FBI data is undermined by several factors. Local authorities do not have to report to the FBI. There are inducements to do so, but no true forcing mechanism. So some do and some don’t. Also, while the FBI has rules for how to report, there is some subjectivity. “The kid who threw a rock through the window of the only black-owned business in town. Was that vandalism or a hate crime, too? Did we have to charge it? What if it qualifies as a felony (by cost) but we charged it as a misdemeanor?” You get the point. On top of this, the FBI recently switched its data system for Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR), so some agencies stopped reporting, then restarted, others joined, some left. None of this is best practices for sound data. The phrase among statisticians is “garbage in, garbage out.”

Still, there is a principle in statistics that if you are sampling data, it is unlikely you’re only getting the outliers. So the data are good enough for general trends. When Presidents say “violent crime is down 35% under my administration,” they are at best fibbing. They might be able to claim it is down (35% is pretty large to be an outlier), but in no way should the data be taken as that specific. What are the basic trends in the data?

No one can mistake the trend lines: rates of property crimes and violent crimes are both way down from thirty years ago. The line zigs and zags, meaning it could go up in a given year, like it did during the pandemic in 2020. And local conditions vary: Chicago had a murder peak for a year or two before things calmed down. Yet overall there are far fewer violent crimes than before.

Yet most Americans believe crime is getting worse. How can that be? Statistically, you are extremely unlikely to be a victim of violent crime, and very unlikely to be a witness of one. You are somewhat unlikely to be a victim of property crime, and you are just unlikely to be a witness of one. Which is to say some crimes are more common, and more of us witness them. When you get to the point of knowing someone who experiences or witnesses such crimes, the probabilities begin to switch from “unlikely” to “likely” because you keep increasing the number of people under consideration.

And then there are “crimes of disorder.” These are the actions like public intoxication/drug use, prostitution, indecency, vandalism, petty theft, shoplifting, aggressive driving, fare-jumping, etc., that are the ones most likely to go unreported. In some cases they may not even be literal crimes anymore. They are also the most frequent “crimes” and the ones you are most likely to witness. And witnessing all those events makes one feel unsafe, regardless of whatever the FBI is telling you. When a disheveled man muttering to himself gets on your subway car, you instantly flashback to stories you heard on the news. Even if nothing happens, it turns your quiet commute listening to music on your earbuds into a tension-filled ride watching for the moment he goes off. When he does, it may or may not be a crime. No crime, but no peace either. And crimes of disorder have gone through the roof (data).

What have we learned about effective crime control policies? For one, they require active policing. The so-called Ferguson effect, named for the spike in violent crime after the riots in Ferguson, Missouri (caused by the police shooting of Micheal Brown, who never put his hands up and never said “don’t shoot”) is real. The effect happened again in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests/riots: tell police they’re not wanted and not trusted, and they will retreat, which empowers all kinds of criminal activity.

However, active policing doesn’t requite trampling constitutional rights. “Broken windows” policing, the idea that enforcing small rules against vandalism helps prevent a community sliding into a cycle of increasing criminal violence, works. But turning that policy into a massive “stop-and-frisk” exercise simply eliminates any trust between the community and the police. People want a friendly cop on the block, someone with whom they can talk and engage; they don’t want to be stopped and searched every time they leave their house.

Criminals may not be good at delayed gratification, but they aren’t stupid. Tell criminals they won’t be charged for shop-lifting less than $950 at a time (looking at you, California!) and they will demonstrate amazing math abilities when swarming a retailer. Abolish cash bail and criminals will go on a spree, because if the fear of jail doesn’t deter you in the first place, the fear of more jail eventually won’t either. Being in jail without bail does, ‘tho. As San Francisco learned, telling people their feeling of insecurity is all in their heads as they step over a drug-addled body on the street and into a pile of human feces while headed to the CVS where everything is under lock-n-key, is a losing proposition.

So if violent crime is going down, and police know what to do to fight it, why do we feel so insecure? In America, we have been on a libertarian/progressive bender with respect to crime and punishment. Not everywhere, nor all the time, but often enough to show up in regular people’s lives. In the war on drugs, the US has surrendered. We are gradually decriminalizing or legalizing cannabis in various forms, under the argument it’s no worse than alcohol (I will point out here that there are a nearly unlimited number of things which can fit into this category, so the argument is ridiculous, but hey, it has won). Courts previously ruled that homeless people could not be incarcerated for occupying public spaces. Over-policing like the stop-n-frisk effort undermined public confidence in the police and the broken windows theory. Various progressive groups cited arguable data to suggest that arrests and convictions were racially biased, leading to policies like cashless bail, the aforementioned green-light on shoplifting, and elimination of minimum sentencing.

What went wrong? If shoplifting isn’t punished, you will get more of it, like any other crime. If marijuana use is legal, cops aren’t going to police public use unless it’s egregious, and forget about possession with the intent to distribute (which in many cases was still illegal). If the homeless are free to live on the streets, they will (literally) do their business there, too. And if every police stop becomes a potential case of racial bias, cops will retreat from the very communities most at risk. Of course, when automated traffic cameras display the same “racism” noted in live police stops, it undercuts the argument.

My more perceptive progressive friends may point out that some of these same changes in law or enforcement were enacted successfully in Europe. And that’s true, to an extent. Decriminalization (drugs, prostitution) and an emphasis on rehabilitation or redirection to counselling have met with some success initially in Europe. One major difference there is cultural: Portugal’s famous drug decriminalization approach was based on a Portuguese culture which strongly disapproves of drug use. Another is they fund rehab. A third is they enforce what few limits they have. We didn’t. And even a place like Amsterdam which had the longest-running, most successful, libertarian approach to social “crimes” (i.e., drugs use and prostitution) is reconsidering. It is little wonder that wherever such approaches were developed in libertarian or progressive parts of America, they have failed miserably.

So it is absolutely true that violent and property crimes are greatly reduced. It’s also true that most Americans are witnessing a general lawlessness that is not conducive to feeling safe.

When I was a new Second Lieutenant in West Germany (1983), manning the NATO frontier during the Cold War, a very self-important TV movie appeared:

Seizing on the angst produced by the media in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s (Ronald Ray-guns, get it?) election, the movie sought to bring home the horrors of nuclear war to the general public, less the new President be inclined to start one (didn’t I say self-important?). It was interesting as a movie, with good special effects for its pre-digital age, but terribly preachy.

The opening scenes were unusual: people in small-town America going about their business, all the while news reports on radios or televisions playing in the background clearly reported on a gathering international storm. Folks remained oblivious, so much so that as the missiles launch from the corn fields, people are still wondering whether it’s just an exercise!

Twenty years later, climate activists cheered on a second disaster flick with much the same title and message, much better special effects, much worse plot, even more preachiness. This one took a few liberties with climate science, but did so in service of a greater good (always the case, no?). A sudden collapse of the Gulf Stream (actually the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC) leads to Arctic hurricanes and an overnight ice age for most of the northern hemisphere. Again, people are going about their business and unaware until the ocean over-spills Manhattan.

These are not those times.

In a few days, we’ll have an election in the United States, and a new (or renewed) President. Both sides have assured us that if their opponents win there will be a fascist dictatorship or total criminal anarchy, runaway inflation or a ruined dollar, the real handmaid’s tale or abortion vans patrolling our streets (at least at the Democratic National Convention, that last one was true). While all things are possible, none of these are likely.

First off, while both sides claim that “the people” are unaware of how truly awful the other side is, they are wrong. Nobody is unaware of the candidates, the parties, or the policies (to the extent they are stated). Both sides are keenly aware and on the watch for the worst, which is in itself a check on the system.

Second, the US governmental system is designed specifically for such circumstances. Power is diffused, shared, with checks and balances. While a single party may control both Houses of Congress and the Presidency, there are still the courts (ask President Trump how his control of the Supreme Court has been working!). There is the filibuster in the Senate, unless of course the party worried most about democracy decides it is inconvenient. The margins are so close that either party’s majority in the Houses is likely to be single-digit, thus empowering even the smallest factions within the party to grind things to a halt.

Third, there is the simple fact of culture and its momentum. It’s easy to wave your hand and say “let it be so,” but that doesn’t change anything in the end. Border walls proved to be very hard for President Trump to build; likewise it was easy for President Biden to overturn Trump’s executive orders on the border, but not to deal with the consequences. Pro-lifers learned that overturning Roe v. Wade simply made the nation open for a conversation about abortion (you can’t argue much about fundamental rights), but that didn’t mean most people now wanted a nation-wide abortion ban. Culture changes slowly, despite the wishes of activists. Just ask all those electric car proponents.

Finally, despite all the doom-n-gloom talk, things are looking up (more detailed blog posts coming on the reasons why). Believe it or not, inflation has been largely tamed. Yes, there’s still a significant affordability problem (housing, rent, groceries) but that’s a different problem requiring different solutions. Inflation is insidious and more threatening, and we should all be happy it is under control. The US economy is out-performing every other national economy on almost every measure, and all the trend lines are for more of the same. Violent crime is down, even if other crimes of disorder are up and the data are very general. It will take real effort to screw things up, although perhaps the next administration will be up to the task (there’s my pessimistic side butting in).

Other reasons I’m optimistic? Social media is all talk. People tend to forget that. “I’m moving from the US if X is elected” is nonsense, as are most other social media claims. There will be claims and counter claims about the election, regardless of outcome. I expect if former President Trump wins, some progressive somewhere will literally self-immolate. If Vice President Harris wins, some group will threaten to march on the Capitol. Good luck with that. As the January 6th rioters (and plotters) learned, you can’t stop the process. You can get shot in the face.

President Trump is not a fascist; I doubt he could spell it if you spotted him an “f” and an “a.” He is rude, crass, and lacking in normal inhibitions. And he talks too much, exaggerates too much, promises too much. Vice President Harris was born in Oakland, and after much thought, I have decided she is the living embodiment of Gertrude Stein’s immortal put-down of that city (Oakland): “there is no there, there.” She is a vacant vessel, an empty pants suit as it were. She is not a Communist, nor a Socialist, not even a Democratic Socialist (wherever that is). She is probably not even a Progressive, but she could play one on TV, if it suited the election vibes (see her brief 2020 campaign). Like her opponent, she cannot summon the support to fundamentally alter the system, nor does she have the conviction to do so.

Americans all want the same thing: to get on with life. We’re too busy living to be holding a grudge, regardless of what we post. It’s part of our genius. We fought the British a couple of times, but ended up loving their royalty, their accents, and Downton Abbey. We regularly invoked the French as haughty and evil, and fought world wars to save them. We depicted the Germans and the Japanese as inhuman savages, burnt their countries to the ground, rebuilt them, and now we love driving Mercedes and Lexus. We fought a bloody civil war and almost immediately said “let bygones be bygones” (too soon for the slaves we emancipated). It’s our way.

I’m not saying things won’t get rough. You can’t go this far down the road of divisive rhetoric and simply do an about-face and double back to civility. There will be protests, lawsuits, recriminations, probably even some violence. But it will only go further if both sides insist that it does. And while social media (and some mainstream outlets) will convince you you’re part of a vast army ready to respond, you’re not. You don’t agree with everything the parties and candidates say, you don’t want to fight it out in the streets.

Yes, right now we’re deeply divided. And we have deep problems (immigration, affordability, national debt, education, population decline) to confront. But ask any economist, any politician, any citizen anywhere if they would trade places with America, and they would.

So take a deep breath. Be concerned if your side lost, and watch what the other side does “like a hawk.” Don’t contribute to the noise by trying to “pwn” the other side with memes on social media. If you do, don’t complain when they do the same; you’re both equally contributing to divisiveness. You can’t ask someone to listen to the better angels of their nature while telling them they’re a Nazi (or a Communist, or . . . )

And look at the bright side: the post-Trump era will start soon, either in two months, or in four years!

In a world where media often use terms like “unprecedented” and other superlatives, it is easy to become so jaded you miss when something truly world-changing is occurring right before your eyes. Especially when those same media ignore it, or trivialize it. Yet something momentous and ominous is happening all around the world, and most people seem unaware. But not you, at least not anymore!

Throughout all human history, the total population has grown (see the chart)^*. It is as close to a given as one gets in social science. Demographers liked to say “demography is destiny” because it was a limiting factor. If you had an imaginary country with a population of ten people, and you wanted it to grow, the most people you could have in nine months was nineteen (one man and nine women, each pregnant, resulting in a growth of nine in nine months). If you chose nine men and one woman, the growth rate would be far less (in fact, the nine men would kill each other rather quickly).

In the last one-hundred and fifty years, human population exploded as improvements in medicine, health, and social services decreased child mortality and increased general longevity. While there are a few countries which have bucked the overall trend (Ireland, for example, still hasn’t recovered from the potato famine!), in general, countries have experienced rapid growth. In the United States today, there are two Americans for every one alive when I was born in 1960. So it was fair to bet that in developing public policy (or anything else), you could count on more people in the long run.

As living longer and having children survive childhood became probabilities rather than possibilities, social scientists noticed that birth rates started dropping. In the chart, it’s the area at the far right where the steep curve rounds off. The original assumption was that more wealth equated to more children, as the couple could afford them. But what happened was always and everywhere fewer children: in decadent European countries, in developing nations, in democracies and dictatorships, in states which demanded more children or even paid mothers to have more children. While some policies seemed to help for a time, in the end, the bottom continued to drop out of the human population growth trend. Some welcomed this trend, convinced earth was in danger of human overpopulation, lack of resources, and eventual exhaustion. For most people it simply meant they could plan for one perfect child (rather than adapt to many unplanned ones) and focus all their attention thereupon.

This trend remains unchanged in liberal, social democratic Scandinavia where parenting is egalitarian, in male-dominated (some might say misogynistic) east Asian cultures, and everywhere else. Some countries have experienced this trend for so long it is starting to show up as a domestic policy challenge. In a place like Italy or South Korea, the population pyramids (so called because there were always more youths than old people) are becoming inverted. Now there are four grandparents, two parents, and one child/grandchild. Since all these people are alive at the same time, and many of the couples are divorced, there can be four houses (usually in small villages) being inherited by the couple (living in the big city) to pass on to a grandchild. And so on. But also six people counting on the earnings of one later-adult for their government support!

In Japan, they are re-purposing neighborhood schools as old-age rec centers. Villages across Europe are simply dying. China’s government is flipping from its former strict one-child policy to something just short of mandatory child-bearing (real Handmaid’s Tale stuff there). Even in the United States, our system of Social Security was based on a constantly growing population, which no longer is. Seniors cost more in terms of health care, and the longer they live, the more social security they cost (and few people realize that the FICA taxes they paid are exhausted within a few years of applying for social security; after that, you’re receiving and spending other people’s money). This is a problem which will pass with the baby-boomer generation, but that’s like waiting for a stone to pass, if you get my drift.

As I noted earlier, this trend toward a single or no child has been resistant to all those policies tried by a variety of governments, so it is indeed a sticky trend that crosses cultures. In the United States, immigration has provided continued population growth, but we are at historically high levels with the resultant stresses on the body politic, so that won’t work in the long run. Other countries won’t even attempt it. While governments flounder, everybody is asking the same question: why?

In the States, there are ample data to suggest some reasons. First off, it was only economically sane to have children prior to modernity, when they were the only form of old-age social security. You had six kids, hoping three might survive to adulthood, so they could take care of you and your spouse should you live long enough. And people did live into old age: the notion everybody used to die by forty years old is simply wrong. But once modernity happened, you no longer needed to have six kids to get three adults, and the government provides social security. Why have kids, who always, always, always decrease your resources?

One set of answers was religious/civic. In the West, Christianity provided the maxim “be fruitful and multiply.” Having children was seen not only as fulfillment of the Lord’s covenant, but also a part of the civic commitment: we believe in our country, so we want it to continue. There is at least a temporal link between the gradual end of religiosity in the West and drop in fertility. But it can’t be the sole reason, since the decrease also occurred in non-Christian and even formally atheistic lands.

Likewise, for millennia women were relegated to duties in the home (like raising the many children) or poorly-paid service jobs (maids, chefs, teachers, etc.) There were few attractive alternatives to being a stay-at-home mother, and great social pressure to do so (“aren’t you ready to start a family yet?”) Modernity brought contraception (and its omnipresent cousin, legal abortion), more education and better job or even career possibilities for women. More importantly, the cultural views of womanhood changed.

While the reigning narrative is all about women’s choices (in whether to marry, have kids, control their fertility, choose a career, etc.), in fact the narrative is decidedly lopsided: neutral at best about marriage, pro-career, anti-motherhood. Think I am overstating the case? Look at cultural icons: they are “emancipated” women with full-time careers, “girl-bosses” leaning in to the same challenges men do, women who don’t necessarily need a partner and can do it all. If they have any, they have only one child. These are the people held up for all to admire. Likewise, women staying at home and raising a family of three or more are generally derided, even by causal acquaintances in public! Visit their far-less-popular websites and there you’ll see stories of how people feel free to walk up and tell them to stop having so many kids, or ask smugly, “you do know why this happens, don’t you?” It was supposed to be a choice, but now it’s a choice in name only.

Those cultural icons are having one child, so what’s the problem? Are they any less of a mom because they work outside the home? No way to tell, is there? There are great career moms and terrible stay-at-home moms. Same for the reverse. Same for dads. But all those couples having one child gets to the root of the problem. The measure of how many children a woman has on average over her lifetime is called the total fertility rate or TFR. To keep a steady population in a modern society, it needs to be about 2.2. Right now the US is at 1.79, meaning one is all the children these women are ever going to have. You don’t need to have an advanced math background to see that two parents resulting in one child will not maintain the population.

When American couples are asked why they have no or only one child, the answers always begin with something like this wording: “it’s not that we’re selfish, but . . .” The rest is usually either it’s too expensive or there isn’t enough time with two careers. The rationalization is obvious in the opening phrase, but is also consistent throughout. See, most of these couples will have one child, and every child is a net negative when it comes to your income, your time commitments and your loyalties. It is never an economically rational choice. So why have even one or why not stop at one?

Sometimes there is a time element invoked, as in, “we would like to have children (note the plural) later when our careers and finances can afford us to do it right.” Yet the data show that doesn’t happen in general. It gets harder biologically, financially, career-wise, and personality-wise to change family size and dynamics later in life. Some social scientists and policy officials think that economics is the key, and if we only had more financial support (free child care, free maternity care, more paid time-off, better family housing and the like) the issue would resolve. But social democratic governments have tried these measures with no positive results. No amount of government support will mask the burden of child-raising.

It comes back to culture, and the clue was in the “not selfish” line. The culture has twisted the concept of parenthood into something more like an apprenticeship. When parents had many children, they expected some to live, some to die. They expected some to be more successful, some less so. They expected success to be defined in different ways (back then, often in different ways for women and men, but the concept holds). Nowadays, many parents see having children as requiring the money, the time, the house, the job, the child-care, the tutors, the camps, the sports leagues, the private music lessons, and the enrichment activities to be successful in life: rich, educated, well-off. They hover (“helicopter parents”) over their charges, supervising all aspects (“play-dates”), demanding special accommodations in school and even engaging with their (adult!) child’s prospective employers! By their own accounts, it is financially, emotionally, and temporally exhausting. But it is driven by a notion of success that is not universal, nor even practical. It results in sustained pressure in childhood, family stress, and limitations rather than opportunities. And that is where we are today.

This standard of “success” is universal, artificial, personal, and entirely tangible. Universal as while it differs in degree (what counts in India might be different than America), it is happening all over the world. Artificial in that it is relatively new and there is no apparent reason for it. Personal in that it pertains to MY children, and what happens to yours or our society is secondary. And finally tangible as it deals with money, fame, or power, but not necessarily happiness, contentment, or satisfaction. Those goals are thought to be ensured by the means of education, career, and wealth.

In America, not well.

You might have seen this issue alluded to in the media as a result of Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies.” That was poorly-worded, if accurate. One fact-checker pointed out that childless cat ladies are indeed a die-hard set of Democratic party voters. But his language was more an attempt to “Pwn the libs” than to initiate an intelligent discussion. Likewise, social media memes which attribute any such concern to a desire for some type of patriarchal imposition of the Handmaid’s Tale are just as useless. The issue is real and thoughtful people from economist Nicolas Eberstadt to progressives like the New York Times’ Ezra Klein have also highlighted it.

Women report record levels of disappointment despite solid gains in income, freedom, and career. Children have record levels of anxiety, drug treatments, suicidal tendencies, drug use (especially marijuana), and self-harm. Men are increasingly withdrawn and avoid commitments. Divorce rates are down, but only because marriage rates have collapsed. Free to have a family without a husband, women find it ridiculously stressful (who’d have thought?).

Now a stagnant or declining population does not necessarily mean disaster. The problem is our nations, our governments, and our societies were based on a growing population, and that’s not the case any more. We can make some generalizations. First, all the changes will take place over decades, but they will accelerate over time. So what seems like an inconvenience at first soon becomes a crisis. Infrastructure will need to be repurposed or reduced. Government services will have to be reduced. There will be less innovation, as there will be fewer people to spark it. Some areas (counties? towns? cities?) may simply need to be abandoned. Concepts like national defense may need to be re-thought, as finding people willing to risk death in defense of a “dying” culture is a difficult proposition.

Or we’ll need to re-evaluate what it means to have children. What it means to be a parent. What it means for them (and us) to be “successful.” Why go through the economic dislocation and the worrying? Why care about the nation, the village, the family? As our age demands, there are plenty of choices here. But as our age rejects, choices have consequences. Choose wisely!

*During periods like the Black Death, it is probable the human population stagnated or decreased slightly for a few years or a decade. No one knows for sure how many people died, or even what the population in some regions of the world was at the time. But the overall trend over time was always up.