Say goodbye to traditional marriage

In the Guardian today, Jill Filipovic was celebrating the demise of traditional marriage in western societies.

It's finally time to ring the death knell for traditional marriage. ..... Conservatives are right: traditional marriage is under attack. But the assault isn't just from gay men and lesbians who want the right to enter into marriages of their own. Heterosexual Janes and Johns are also reshaping holy matrimony: they're marrying later, they're marrying less, and for reasons other than having children. And it's making them (and their kids) happier and healthier.

Jill makes a long list of largely unsubstantiated claims about the state of personal relationship. The thrust of her argument is clear; we are all better off without marriage. However, she does make one very telling point.

More women are also forgoing childbearing – nearly twice as many women have never given birth today than in 1976. And when we do have children, we're doing it later: the average age of childbirth is now 25, compared with 21 in 1970.

Traditional marriage, which presumably means monogamous heterosexual life-time relationships were very good at achieving one thing - producing children. Jill seems to have neglected the profound significance of that fact.

Virtually all advanced economies have fertility rates below 2.1 children per woman. In some countries, such as Germany, Italy and Japan, the fertility rate is closer to 1.4.

The consequences of these kinds of fertility rates are mathematical. The population will, within a generation, begin to age, and then the population will decline. The only solution to ageing and population collapse is either boost the fertility rate or import large numbers of migrants.

Europe has opted for the latter strategy. The problem for Jill and her liberal experiment in personal relationships is that many of these new arrivals do not share her vision for marriage. Migrant fertility rates are higher largely because tradition marriage is stronger in these communities.

Ultimately, the future belongs to breeders. This is not a value judgement, it a fact of life. A society that does not produce babies has no future.

Rehabilitating eugenics

By Michael Cook, editor of MercatorNet

Ten years ago, in February 2001, to great fanfare, the draft human genome sequence was published. US President Bill Clinton had celebrated the completion of the project the year before as if man had just landed on Mars: “Genome science will have a real impact on all our lives — and even more, on the lives of our children. It will revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases.”

That was the hype. The reality is impressive, but hardly revolutionary. As Nature commented in its editorial for the occasion, “the complexity of post-genome biology has dashed early hopes that this trickle of therapies would rapidly become a flood.”

Scientists are acutely aware of the gap between promise and performance. The battle against common diseases still has not advanced much, because so many genes are involved. But somehow their battle-weary scepticism has failed to filter down to the science-dazzled public.

Biopolitical Times, an excellent blog based in California, has taken to running a brief feature called “gene of the week”. These are based on press releases from scientists (normally social scientists) proposing correlations between genes and personality types.

There is the “slut gene” which disposes people to one-night stands, a gene for being in a gang, an early-loss-of-virginity gene. There’s a "ruthless dictator gene”; there are two genes which predispose you to vote; there are genes which dispose you to vote Democrat. There are genes for victimhood, shyness and being a picky eater.

However absurd these sound, they send a serious message. They demonstrate that there is a hunger to believe that we are genetically determined. And wherever there is a hunger to believe, there are people ready to feed that belief.

It comes as no surprise that a Singapore company is marketing a genetic test to anxious parents which promises to test for 68 genes ranging from “Propensity for Teenage Romance Gene” to an “Explosive Power Gene”? (US$$8,871 worth of tests for a one-time-only price of $1,397!)

It’s impossible to know how many people were gullible enough to take the bait for this product. But I suspect that some people have a gene for belief in genetic determinism whose effects are magnified by higher education.

Take this incredible case from New York. A Federal District Court judge in Albany sentenced a man based on an as-yet-undiscovered gene. He spurned reports that a man convicted of possessing child pornography was “at a low to moderate risk to reoffend”. The man clearly had a child-porn-viewing gene which no scientist had ever heard of.

The judge told the defendant, “It is a gene you were born with. And it’s not a gene you can get rid of”. Nor did Judge Sharpe need evidence -- because he was sure that it would be discovered within 50 years. “You are what you’re born with. And that’s the only explanation for what I see here,” the judge said. (The sentence was successfully appealed.)

This speaks volumes about the magical power of genetics to subvert common sense. The belief that all behaviour is genetically determined has obviously sunk deeply into the public consciousness. Using the word “eugenics” has become taboo; believing in eugenics is widespread.

And even amongst bioethicists.

Julian Savulescu, an Australian who is currently a professor of practical ethics at Oxford, recently declared that parents are morally obliged to genetically engineer their children so that they will have higher IQs. "There are other ethical principles which should govern reproduction, such as the public interest," he said. This policy would reduce welfare dependency, crowding in jails, school dropout rates and poverty. "Cheaper, efficient whole genome analysis makes it a real possibility in the near future."

Anyone who thinks that eugenics is dead and buried with the Nazi regime is deluding himself. Eugenics has clawed its way out of the grave and is being rehabilitated.

Politicians feel the pain and discomfort of assisted suicide

That rapidly ageing scribbler Ian McEwan is again pushing the idea of legalizing assisted suicides. This morning, he gave an interview in the Telegraph, calling for an overhaul of suicide laws "allowing terminally ill patients to receive medical help to die".

Ironically, legislators across the world are rejecting bills to make it easier to dispatch the terminally ill. The "End of Life Assistance" Bill in Scotland was comprehensively defeated. The Canadian Parliament rejected a similar draft law. Likewise, bills legalizing euthanasia in South Australia, New Hampshire and France were all defeated. Even the European Court of Human Rights offered a rare moment of legal sanity, ruling that there was no "human right" to suicide.

In this permissive age, it is curious why euthanasia has struggled to achieve legal acceptance. I suspect that parliamentarians across the world understand the long-term agenda behind this campaign to liberalize euthanasia.

Stripped of its misleading poetry, such as "dying with dignity" and " making a good end surrounded by people they love", liberalization means a Harold Shipman-like killer approaching the hospital bed of a lonely old person with the syringe.

Where euthanasia has been liberalized, hospitals have become frightening places for the old. In the Netherlands, old people now feel the need to write letter explicitly that they do not want to be murdered if they enter a Dutch hospital.

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see the where euthanasia might take us. Twenty years from now, the huge proportion of Europeans will be over 80. Even with the best case scenario, these people will not be working. In terms of health care and pensions costs, the old will pose a huge fiscal burden.

Therefore, it is perhaps understandable that these legalized suicide bills are having such a difficult time. Parliamentarians across the developed world are out that funny age called early middle age. Fast forward 20 years, and it will be their generation lying in a hospital bed terrified of their medical carers.

Europe and the culture of death

Oscar Wilde once said "you can survive anything, except death". That might be true for individuals, but nations operate under a different maxim. Nations can survive anything except a sustained decline in fertility.

In Europe, Italy is the poster child for catastrophic demographics. For every 8 births, there are now almost 11 departures. The Italian population would be rapidly shrinking were it not for migration. Two of those dearly departed Italians have been replaced by migrants. Even with migration, the Italian population has slowly begun to shrink.

I recently received a comment questioning whether declining birth rates and ageing populations were a bad thing. "More resources for the rest of us" sums up the gist of the argument.

Don't count on that. Resources tend to gravitate to the most productive economies. Countries with ageing populations are unlikely to be well positioned to compete in the increasingly globalized economy.

However, this isn't what really bothers me about the worsening population demographics in Europe. There is something much more disturbing behind that chart. These numbers reek of despair. Italians, and Europeans generally, can not be bothered to defer sufficient current income to ensure that there are enough offspring to maintain current population size.

It can not be a lack of resources preventing procreation. Apart from the odd famine and plague, Europeans had no problem producing children in previous centuries when incomes were lower. As any teenage mum will tell you, children are extraordinarily robust, and can thrive in the most adverse environments. Moreover, children aren't as bothered by poverty as adults might think.

In cultural terms, a society that can not reproduce itself is in a very dark place. This is why I have absolutely no time for Europeans whingeing about migration. Europeans have collectively decided to vacate the continent. Europe has literally lost the will to survive. If that is the decision of the majority, then we will all have to tag along for the ride.

Procreation takes sacrifice. It has rewards too, but it means spending money on others. Europeans, for the most part, don't want to do it. They would rather avoid changing diapers, waking up in the middle of the night to placate a crying baby, cutting back on expenditures to ensure that the kids have piano lessons.

This might sound a little melodramatic. Nevertheless, it is important to focus on European fertility rates. Forget about what people tell you, look at what they do. Europeans don't produce children.

Look at that chart again. In Italy death is more popular than birth. This culture of death is obscured by the arrival of migrants. To which I say we should welcome them. For they appear to be less selfish and less despairing than the current residents of the continent

Europe isn't producing enough children

Every country in Europe except Turkey and Ireland has a total fertility rate below the replacement rate. That magic number is 2.1. This is the average number of children per woman that stabilises population size over the long run.

Among industrialized countries, the US, France, the UK and Australia tend to have higher than average fertility rates. These countries have a long history of welcoming migrants, who tend to have higher fertility rates than indigenous populations. In the case of the UK, almost one birth in four is now to a mother born overseas.

Eastern European fertility rates are, in part, depressed by the high outward migration rates. Young people tend to be the most eager to leave their homes and search for work abroad. Therefore, the slightly higher than average fertility rates in countries like the UK and France should be weighed against the unusually low fertility rates in countries like Poland and the Czech Republic.

Taking Europe as a whole, the fertility rate is desperately low. Without large migration flows from outside the continent, the European population will soon begin to rapidly shrink. Or to put it more bluntly, Europe isn't producing enough children.

The food price shock - lets talk timing before we blame the weather

Over the weekend, I wrote a post on the recent surge in world food prices. Happily, it turned up as a link on a number of websites, so was one of my more widely read pieces. The post argued that the recent food price shock was primarily due to the world wide decline in interest rates.

This isn't a terribly popular view. The prevailing wisdom says that world food markets have undergone a radical structural change. On the demand side, Asia is growing, both in economic terms and waist bands. The continent is munching on burgers and pastries and it now firmly on the road towards obesity; a path that Western economies have been treading for nearly half a century.

There have also been a couple of well publicised supply problems. Certain commodities, such as sugar, and to a lesser extent, wheat have suffered bad harvests. As a practical matter, most of these shocks have been quite recent are therefore likely to affect future rather than current supply. Nevertheless, these poor harvests have been described in apocalyptic terms. The end times are near, and judgement day will soon be upon us. Climate change has wrecked agriculture from the Russian steppe to snowy mountains in Australia.

To summarize, there are three parts to the conventional view; higher world demand, supply shocks, and climate change. How seriously should we take these arguments.

Lets pick the easiest off first - climate change. I am fairly agnostic about whether the world is warming up. I just don't know. I am not a meteorologist. Nevertheless, I know one thing. This process, if true, will take many decades. Climate change won't burst upon us in six months and wreck our food supply.

The Asian demand argument is also unconvincing. Why? Take a look at the chart above. It traces out the UK CPI price index for all food items, divided by average earnings. This chart tells us how much food costs in terms of the price of UK labour.

The chart tells us that between 1996 and 2007, food in the UK became a lot cheaper relative to labour. There could be some honest debate about the precise turning point. Nevertheless, the chart points out that food prices rose sharply relative to UK wage rates as soon as the financial crisis took hold. So where is the Asian growth story in this picture. I would say it isn't there. Asia was growing rapidly throughout the decade before the crisis and food was becoming cheaper; much cheaper.

Now, I know that this chart is picking up a lot of other things; like the sterling depreciation, and the recession. My point is just about timing. Just to make that point one more time, could Asian growth explain that chart.? Could the weather in Russia or the floods in Australia? Call me a weathergirl, but I don't think so.

The last argument - the supply shocks - is the most difficult. There have been shocks, and prices should rise in response. The issue is one of magnitude - should these shocks have generated double digit increases? All commodity prices are on the rise, including those that have experienced no such supply shocks.

Supply shocks are in the mix, but it is monetary policy that is baking the inflationary pie. There is lots of liquidity pouring into commodity markets. Speculators are doing their thing; responding to incentives, and trying to turn a buck. Meanwhile, the rest of us are paying more for our food.

Forty-four percent of UK births outside marriage

What? We are only fourth?

Forty-four percent of children are born outside marriage.

The data is 2006-7, but things probably haven't changed much.

Immigration - it goes both ways

Yesterday, the Independent reported that "Britons have 'greater fear' of immigration" than other countries. Almost one in four thought that immigration was the most important issue facing the country, while 59 percent agreed there were "too many" people living in the country who were not born here.

These are dismal answers, with a strong whiff of xenophobia. However, I wonder whether these answers are really that informative. I sense that this survey was poorly constructed and did not identify the true underlying preferences of Britons.

While it might be true that Britons have a "fear of immigration", that is not the same thing as saying that they would like to stop migration altogether. Of course, Britons might "say" that want it stopped, but if the full consequences of a sudden halt to migration were laid out, who would actually vote for it? Judging by the results from last election, the answer would appear to be very few.

Here is the key thing about migration. There are inflows and outflows, and second order effects on average fertility. First, lets talk about the flows. The inward flows are huge. The UK gains around half a million people from overseas each year. However, the outward flows are also huge. The UK loses 300,000 people each year. Some of that is migrants going back and forth. However, a large part of it is Britons seeking opportunities and homes abroad.

Over the last decade, the UK population has increased. However, around 40-45 percent of that increase is due to migration. If migration were to stop, and outflows were to continue at current rates, the UK population would immediately start to shrink.

Added to that, we need to recognise that foreign born woman have higher fertility rates than their native born counterparts. In fact, one in four live births in the UK are to foreign born mothers. In other words, migrant families are carrying a disproportionate burden of the costs of creating future generations of workers.

The simple truth about migration is that the UK depends on it to ensure current and future prosperity. Lets be honest, you can't run a successful, dynamic and innovative economy with a population of geriatrics. That is what Britain would become without a steady flow of migrants and the willingness of migrant women to have large numbers of children. Britons may be fearful of immigration, but they fear declining living standards even more.

The grim reality of European demographics

There are many grim comparisons to be made between Italy and Afghanistan. Once we get over the oppression of women, heroin cultivation, and the Taliban, demographics is up there as one of the starkest.

Afghanistan is a land of children and teenagers. Just over half the population is under 18. This is also the median age of an Afghan woman. In her average Afghan life, this median woman has around 5.5 children.

In Italy, the median age is over 45. In the absence of some really serious gynecological interventions, at least half of all Italian women can no longer have children. The average fertility rate is 1.3; way below the 2.1 needed to maintain population equilibrium.

From a demographic perspective, these are terminal numbers for Italy. Countries can not survive for long with these rates of infertility and population ageing. It is simple arithmetic. Due to the advanced age of Italian woman, it may no longer be possible for Italy to reverse its average fertility rate. Absent a massive wave of migration, the Italian population is doomed to age and then decline. This is what is exactly what is happening. The majority of Italians are now middle aged, while large numbers of migrants are now moving to Italy.

Italy is by no means unique. Virtually every country in Europe has a sub-replacement female fertility rate. In a very real sense, Europe will begin to die off within 20 or 30 years. As Italy demonstrates, population ageing and low fertility rates can reach a point of no return.

At this point, some people get really nervous. The prospects of a huge wave of migration makes many Europeans uncomfortable. The islamisation of Europe suddenly begins to look like a real possibility, especially when one considers the extraordinary population growth rate in Afghanistan.

Personally, the growth of Islam is not what worries me. For me, the real fear is that the migrants won't come. Worse still, economic growth in developing countries may start to attract some of our current migrants home. Ageing Europe, with its massive debt burdens, has poor long term growth prospects. As Europe stagnates, those migrants will look elsewhere. If they can move once, they can move again.

Imagine that scenario for a moment; a sudden drain of young people out of Europe just as the population ageing problems becomes most acute. It would be a fiscal catastrophe; an economic nightmare. Once the migrant drain begins, it will likely accelerate. The implications for European standards of living are just too appalling to contemplate.

However, we should have thought about this forty years ago, when it became apparent that European fertility rates had declined below replacement rates. Unfortunately, Europe forgot something quite elementary. The production of children serves a vital purpose. Those little brats grow up. They start to produce output, part of which can be taxed and used to finance pensions.

Land Registry confirms falling prices

(click on the graphic for a larger version)

According to the Land Registry , UK property prices dropped by 0.2 percent in December - the fourth successive monthly fall in prices.

Nevertheless, the Guardian helpfully located the few remaining bubble boom towns.

It is not looking good for the big three

Germany, Japan and the United States together account for over half of the West's output and nearly 30 percent of the world's GDP. Over the next twenty years, Germany and Japan will be ejected from the top three:

• In Germany, the working-age population (those aged 15-64) is projected to decline by 15 percent between now and 2030, and the decline will be much steeper if immigration slows. Meanwhile, Germany's 65-plus population is set to grow by a third, to 27 percent from 20 percent. Its 80-plus population will grow by over half, to 8 percent from about 5 percent. Big increases in pension obligations, health-care costs and long-term care needs are thus in the offing.

• In Japan, 30 percent of the population could be above age 65 by 2030, and nearly 13 percent--more than one in eight--could be 80 or older. Japan's working-age population, which has been falling since the mid-1990s, is projected to drop by another 16 percent between 2010 and 2030.

• The U.S., meanwhile, can expect to see continuing population and manpower growth between now and 2030, thanks to relatively high birth rates and a robust inflow of immigrants (roughly half of them legal). America will remain the most youthful Western society, although its 65-plus population will be about 19 percent of the total, up from 13 percent today.

The lowest ten: at least the UK isn't there

In terms of fertility rates, Britain ranks 143rd.

Here are the countries with the ten lowest fertility rates. The bottom six are all in East Asia. Collectively, they used to be known as the Asian Tigers. Judging by this table, it seems they were producing too many cars and electronics and not enough people.

Japan's fertility rate is shocking. It is just over one birth per woman. Perhaps, Japan is a vision of the future for Europe. During the 1980s, it had an massive asset bubble, which burst around 1989. Since then, it has suffered from 20 years of near zero growth, an ageing population and a massive build up of public debt. It is hard to see a way out from this demographic trap.

Where will future growth come from?

Not from rising labour inputs in Western economies.

You have been warned......

"Overall, it is apparent that the future global economy will not be able to rely on the kind of demographic inputs that helped fuel growth in the era before the current global recession.

For today's affluent Western economies, the coming demographic challenge of stagnant and aging populations combined with mounting health and pension claims on a shrinking pool of prospective workers is already generating concern, especially in Europe and Japan.

But at the same time, demographic constraints in the rising economies that are expected to fuel future global growth are more serious and intractable than generally recognized."

Nicholas Eberstadt
What Population Growth--and Decline--Means for a Global Economy
Foreign Affairs

Russia's disappearing population

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has undergone a demographic catastrophe. Fertility rates have declined, the death rate has increased, and the population has shrunk in absolute terms.

During the last decade of the 20th century, Russians almost stopped having children. Before 1990, Russian women had on average 1.9 children. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, fertility crashed, hitting a low point of 1.2 in 1999. Since then, fertility has recovered slightly. In 2009, it was 1.54. However, it is still lower than the rate required to stabilise the population - 2.1 children per woman.

The demise of the Soviet Union was the trigger for this extraordinary decline in fertility. As living standards worsened, many women postponed child-rearing. The comprehensive childcare system - once a key pillar of the soviet labour market - disintegrated in the new market economy. Previously, it played a central role in maintaining both high levels of female labour force participation and a relatively high fertility rate.

The post-soviet collapse also provoked profound social changes. Before 1990, marriage was still the norm. Although divorce was common, a majority of women were likely to stay with their husbands through their child-rearing years. On the whole, this tended to increase the number of children born per woman. Since 1990, only a third of Russian women remain married during their child rearing years.

Parallel with this development, cohabitation has also increased. Around half of all Russian women have lived with a partner by the time they reach middle age. Such relationships tend to be more transient. Women in these relationships have fewer children, bringing average fertility rates down.

Russia has also experienced a general decline in health conditions and health care. Russians suffer from unusually high levels of cardiovascular diseases. Other diseases, such as Tuberculosis have made a comeback.

This, coupled with rampant alcoholism, has dramatically increased the death rate, especially for men. On average, Russian men live ten years less than women. It has also affected female fertility, since there are fewer men around. Ultimately, Russia’s female fertility crisis is inextricably linked to its male mortality crisis

These developments mirror the dysfunctional nature of modern Russian society. Rising income inequality, rampant corruption, and widespread criminality has pushed the country into deep despair.

On a fundamental level, any society that can not reproduce itself will perish. Perhaps, Russia will reverse recent demographic trends, but it can only achieve this if it re-establishes a higher fertility rate. Procreation is a commitment to the future. It is an act of hope. Russians must again feel confident enough to have children.

The prophet speaks

Unemployment creeps upwards

The one thing that the UK must avoid is both high unemployment and increasing inflationary pressures. From a policy perspective, there are few viable options.

The UK may be heading in that direction. The inflation numbers, released yesterday, gave a stark indication that pressures were mounting. Today, the unemployment numbers ticked upwards, bringing the overall jobless rate to almost 8 percent.

The most striking thing about UK unemployment is that it seems to have been completely unmoved by the huge fiscal deficits and quantitative easing.  The rate shot upwards during the autumn of 2008 and has remained high ever since.

Brown spent like a Prime Minister about to lose an election.  The Bank of England, like the Greek God Atlas holding the world aloft, used their printing presses to prevent the UK banking system from collapse.  Yet these herculean efforts had little practical impact on the labour market.

Defenders of the UK stimulus package and the monetary blowout will always argue that things would have been much worse without this emergency response.  This is, of course, an unprovable counter-factual.  What is clear is that the data provides little evidence that the mad policy blowout of 2008-9 had any practical benefit for the UK economy.

UK house price to earnings ratio converging to long run average

According to the Halifax, the long run price to earnings ratio is almost exactly four. Currently, the ratio is 4.33, falling from an all time high of almost six.

The Halifax ratio was calculated using ₤36,576, which is apparently the national average wage for a man in full time employment. (I will let the obvious sexist implications of using that measure pass). The average house price is estimated to be ₤159,623.

What do you think? Is the crash over, and the boom about to begin? Should we believe the Halifax numbers?

Ruthless defaulters

The debt serfs in America are starting to revolt.

From the New York Times....

Melissa Birks is being stalked. Her cellphone keeps ringing, always from a caller marked “unknown.” She says she knows it is her credit card company wondering why she stopped making payments. Ms. Birks, who owes $28,830, has nothing to say.

Those on the front lines of the debt industry say there is a small but increasingly noticeable group of strapped consumers who, like Ms. Birks, are deciding they will simply stop paying. After loading up on debt eagerly provided by the card companies during the boom times, these people now find themselves trapped in an endless cycle where they are charged interest on interest and fees upon fees while the lenders get government bailouts.

They are upset — at the unyielding banks and often at their free-spending selves — and are pre-emptively defaulting. They could continue to pay for a while longer but instead are walking away. “You reach a point where you embrace the darkness of default,” said Adam Levin, chairman of the financial products Web site Credit.com.

The lending industry term for these people is “ruthless defaulters.” In a miserable economy where paychecks, savings and expectations are all diminished, their numbers will surely grow.

State tightens its grip on the UK banking sector

Here is a further example how the clammy hand of socialism is gradually taking over the UK financial system.

Mr. Darling has taken it upon himself to tell banks how to run their businesses. "I've made it clear to the banks that we need to get lending going". Remind me again, does Mr. Darling have any experience actually running a bank? Would he know a good loan proposal from a bad one. Does he know anything of credit risk?

How long will it be before New Labour decide to introduce government determined credit growth targets for each bank? Not long, I'd say....

At last - a chart for estate agents

According to the RICS, there is an army of buyers out there, ready to jump into the property market and stabilize prices. Estate agents are inundated with enquiries. In fact, the volume of enquiries is actually higher than during the bubble years.

Hungry buyers, the lowest interest rates in 400 years, and a government committment to stabilise house prices at any cost - that sounds like a recipe for a housing bubble.