Bad for Kids

Outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins, a biologist and proponent of evolutionary theory, not so long ago embarked on a new venture; a series of videos where he openly attacked religion. Called The Root of All Evil, Dawkins claims in these films that religion is inherently evil because it is not rational and, further, claims religion is responsible for many, if not most, ills of society. He calls teaching children religion a form of child abuse and obviously wants to ban it in ‘the best interests of children’. Let us look beyond the fact that Dawkins admits he knows virtually nothing of theology. Let us ignore the fact that the BBC would blanche at the mere idea of allowing a fiction story portray Catholics or Baptists as being correct and condemning those with differing beliefs as being in a ‘permanent state of infancy’, but have no problem producing and airing an atheist’s blatant attack on all religious believers, everywhere. Let us even overlook how Dawkins’, a self-proclaimed rationalist with advanced degrees in biology and zoology, can be so concerned with overpopulation in face of the evidence that it is not, and never has been, a true concern (see the rest of this blog).

Instead of looking at his hypocrisy (he mocks people whom criticize biology without understanding it, but refuses to study the theology he, in turn, criticizes), his prejudice (his assumption that believers are inherently inferior is quite obvious, and often admitted), or his use of mass media to denigrate a majority of the world. No, let us instead focus on… children. Dawkins claims that it is ‘bad’ to raise children in a religious atmosphere. Let’s do what he would like and – look at the scientific evidence.

There have been a lot of studies into religious people vs. non-religious people. Since it can be really hard to figure out who really has faith and who doesn’t, statisticians (and other researchers) usually use the shorthand of measuring how often a person or family attends church, synagogue, or temple and calling people who go at least once a week ‘religious’. Sure, this may not be perfect, but statistically it seems accurate. What do these studies show? Are religious people, as Dawkins claims, infantilized by their beliefs?

Overwhelmingly, being religious is good for you. Regular church attendance leads to lower blood pressure, less anxiety and depression, a stronger immune system, and are less likely to commit suicide, all contributing to religious people having a mortality rate about 25% lower than people who do not attend worship regularly with the end result that religious people outlive the non-religious by, on average, seven years. Not only do religious people live longer, they are healthier and happier, leading to a higher quality of life! Indeed, the correlation of church attendance and happiness is pretty strong, and diverse. People who regularly attend church are more likely to have strong, lasting marriages where both members are happy.

Scientific research seems to point toward a result that surprises religious people not at all; they are healthier, happier, and live longer than non-religious people. Heck, religious people make more money and the sex is better, too! It should be obvious, then, that a rational person, looking only at the scientific literature, should advocate for more religion in peoples’ lives. Not only is it good for them as individuals and families, it is good for society as a whole – after all, healthier, happier, wealthier people need less of the services governments provide these days.

But I was speaking pretty specifically about kids, wasn’t I? And while we hope each and every child grows up to be an adult (and also, we hope, benefit from the advantages of being religious), they are kids first. Does religion affect kids, too? Yes, it does.

Research shows that even low levels of religious life make adolescents less likely to use alcohol, drugs, tobacco, engage in criminal activity, become suspended from school, run away from home, engage in sexual activity, or require emotional counseling. Religious children (again, even at low levels of church attendance) are less likely to drive drunk or engage in casual vandalism. Church attendance improves school attendance, work activity, and homework completion. It even improves their chances of escaping childhood poverty. As religious faith and participation increases, the positive effect on children also increases. At the other end, just having a mother that attends church regularly also improves the odds of adolescents not engaging in self-destructive behavior. Religious children grow up to have more education.

To sum up; scientific research shows that religious people are healthier, happier, wealthier, and live longer. Religious children are happier, less prone to depression, more likely to get an education and escape poverty, and better at avoiding self-destructive behavior. These things are all positives for children. For Dawkins to oppose religion as ‘child abuse’ is to place his prejudices above the actual welfare of children.

Those Who Cannot Look in the Mirror

If you haven’t noticed, I tend to write about population and demographics from time to time. I am not alone, of course; there are a number of Conservative and Moderate people discussing birth rates and such out there. There is also a strain of commentary on Liberal blogs - especially Feminist blogs, mainly mocking Conservatives that want kids.

I have noted again and again that these Feminists seem to think that Conservatives are racists. I have covered many of the ways that the facts of racial violence show that these stereotypes are wrong, but this lumping of “Conservatives are racist” and “wanting large families is about racial supremacy” stuff is getting so ludicrous that I figured I’d take a look.

First, we find that our erstwhile source of all things Feminist - as long as they are radical things - Amanda at Pandagon points out that not only are people who want large families racist… they are genocidal (actually, see ascribes a genocidal motive to all those who oppose abortion, but we‘ll help her out by focusing on just proponents of large families). Reading the comments on Amanda’s post will reveal an echo-chamber of people more than willing to proclaim that all who want large families are racist, genocidal, and (by strong implication) fascist. They also refer to a commenter who posted that he was interested in ‘preserving his own culture’ as a ‘racist misogynist’ whom the moderator called on the others to ignore. Now, far be it from me to claim that Liberals/Feminists must act a certain way, but - isn’t this commenter right to value his own culture?

I visited a number of quiver full sites online. You can see many of them for yourself and a search can find you more. I searched pretty carefully and I found that these sites have quite a bit in common; they tend to advocate large families (no surprise), they love kids (no surprise), and they don’t talk about race. At all. The only reference I found at all related to race was one mention of a speech by Teddy Roosevelt when Teddy, not the author, spoke of declining fertility in White women in the early 1900’s. That’s it. I do admit, if you google ‘+quiver full +supremacy’ and look at the religious/quiver full sites that result, there is a discussion of supremacy. But it is the Supremacy of Christ, not a race.

Some of the “Progressive” sites you find, though, do speak of race. An article in The Nation(not the most Right-leaning of papers, of course) speaks of the quiver full movement and, as it does so, mentions race twice; first by claiming that “race suicide” is a subtext to the quiver full movement (with no citation, naturally); and, once again, a reference to a quote by Teddy Roosevelt about White birth rates over a century ago. From this article you get the Pandagon bit, mentioned above, and a few related posts from the Left side of the blogs, all claiming having many children for religious reasons is racist, almost all pointing to the Nation article or to Amanda’s post. Some even claim being pro-large families at all is evil. There is also a Newsweek article on the quiver full movement, but it makes no leaps as far as racial motivations.

The quiver full movement almost completely dismisses the Leftist claims that they are racist, only pausing occasionally to point out that Christianity has a lot of non-White members and that the quiver full movement calls on all Christians to have children as a blessing of God.

While we have some fairly prominent Feminist bloggers making the charge that wanting a large family is racist, even genocidal, the movement they point to this time is pretty obviously race-blind. Pandagon and the other Feminist blogs like to paint the Catholic Church as racist, but of course, the Church is very multi-ethnic and always has been. So where is this hateful accusation coming from? Well, I have a theory.

It is, in short, projection. The Left, always quick to dodge reality when it suits them, is projecting their own biases onto their ideological opponents. I’ve already gone into detail about how people in the North and West deride Southerners as racist bigots when, in fact, the North and West have much higher rates of race-motivated crime. I have also discussed how Liberals denounce Conservatives as racist and discriminatory despite the fact that studies show Conservatives to be race-blind while Liberals favor Whites over minorities. In both cases, Liberals accuse others of the actions that Liberals, themselves, exhibit. They cling to these notions of how ‘the other’ acts despite the evidence to the contrary. So why is Amanda of Pandagon and her comrades so eager to point to the Right and claim that people who refuse to use contraception are genocidal? That’s a rather simple one, really.

Its because the origins of modern contraception use, especially the founding of Planned Parenthood and the development of the birth control pill, were covertly and overtly racist and genocidal, with a strong underpinning of elitism thrown in. The founder of Planned Parenthood and primary source of funds for the research that culminated in the birth control pill was Margaret Sanger. Ms. Sanger’s support of eugenics is widely known, as are the many statements she made disparaging the mentally ill, the retarded, and the ‘unfit’, Of course, she also said the same things about Blacks and the poor, too. While some try to distance Ms. Sanger from the horrors of Nazi Germany, they have great trouble doing so since her support of Fascists was fairly evident. Her defenders are in the rather uncomfortable position of admitting that she worked closely with, supported, and was supported by racists and fascists, she made a lot of comments that might seem racist or fascist, but you can’t pin her down to a definitively racist or fascist quote. That’s pretty shaky. She hoped that incentives would work to reduce the population of ‘undesirables’, but advocated coercion and force if incentives failed. Showing that she certainly believed that she and other experts knew what was best for everyone and was willing to use force to impose it.

“OK,” you say, “Sanger was a eugenicists and, possibly, a racist and, maybe, a support of fascism. So what? That was years ago!”

Really? Who is the primary focus of Planned Parenthood today? The same groups Sanger targeted - minorities and the poor. Analysts noted in the 1980’s that Planned Parenthood focused its efforts on poor urban minority areas, resulting in 33% of abortions being performed on minority women who made up less than 20% of the total population. Contemporary advocates of contraception and abortion continue to see these two things as means of eliminating the poor, the ignorant and the unhealthy - and these same advocates are intimately involved in groups that advocate policies of government-promoted and funded contraception and abortion. A list of proponents of eugenics reveals a broad group, to be sure, but a group with a bias toward the Left with some rather prominent names as large boosters of contraception and family planning

The end result is that we see that the birth of the ‘family planning’ movement was in the midst of Liberal eugenicists. Planned Parenthood and related groups flourished under the umbrella of eugenics and ‘racial improvement’. Abortion was as much a part of the eugenicists’ arsenal as forced sterilization (and, often, more prominent). To this day groups that advocate ‘family planning’ specifically target the poor and minorities, resulting in a much higher incidence of abortions in those same groups. Call it what you will, but the end result of contemporary family planning is virtually identical to the planned results of the eugenics movements of the pre-WWII era.

Access to abortion and contraception combined with the attitude that children are a financial burden has resulted in plummeting birthrates in North America, South America, Europe, Australia, Asia, and North Africa with indicators that the rest of Africa will rapidly join in. In a number of countries abortion is being used to eliminate women before they are even born. All these facts reveal why Feminists must denigrate women who want large families. For if they were to admit the possibility of merit in large families, they must examine the consequences of their own attitudes and actions. Such an examination would reveal that, regardless of their stated motives, the end results of Feminists’ advocacy for ‘family planning’ are indistinguishable from the hopes and dreams of the ‘racial hygienists’ of the late 1800’s.

Once More Around the Floor

Blogodidact has been kind enough to keep the conversation going. Once again, I will look at his posts and respond, hoping to add more clarity to my views on Distributionism and to answer his questions. Let’s begin.

Van is concerned about government programs and was originally concerned that my comments about things like tax breaks were endorsements of taxes in the first place. This seems to be cleared up now; personally I support the need for minimal taxes only to allow the government to do what the government only can do – a patent office, the military, foreign diplomacy, etc. I even support the FDA – to a point. Originally, the FDA was just an oversight group to investigate and prosecute fraud in medicines and foods. Fraud is criminal and some medicine manufacturers and food producers were ‘getting by’ through producing in one state and shipping to another, allowing them to defraud consumers. If the FDA had limited itself to assisting local police by investigating interstate fraud, it would be a fine (if very small) group. Its current size, cost, and powers, though, are pretty far gone.

Back to the topic at hand, the desire of Distributionists to eliminate all but absolutely necessary organizations and regulations at every level of government in pursuit of the ideal of subsidiarity seems to be clear, finally. I apologize for any confusion!

My discussion of wage slavery seems to have gotten Van, well, lathered up. My intent was not to upset him (or anyone else). But I am going to take a side trip to both explain what I meant and comment on Van’s response. Walk with me for a minute.

As I have mentioned before, my childhood is memorable for a long phase of deep poverty. I don’t mean ‘one year I got socks for Christmas instead of air jordans and it ruined my childhood’ poor, I mean ‘one year I got a bowl of hot stew for Christmas, and it was the first food I had eaten in 4 days’ poor. In the years since I have fought my way up out of poverty to a upper-middle-class life. This was through hard work, luck, and sheer endurance. I have had some serious setbacks over the years and have done everything from work 40 hours a week while taking an 18 credit course load at college to working two jobs. I’ve scraped grease in a sub-basement and I’ve made $5 million sales presentations on Wall Street. I’ve been paid salary, hourly, and commission-only. I’ve had friends and family help out when I needed it, and I’ve had no one at all to turn to when I needed it. I sympathize and empathize with all that Van wrote of his own struggles.

In my travels through life, I have, naturally, met a lot of people. There are two sorts in particular that apply to the discussion at hand about poverty, job skills, and such. [Warning – broad generalizations follow] The first is one I have met most commonly in two places – academia and the white collar world. They feel that poverty is largely an inescapable trap. They point to studies that show the life-long effects of poverty. They talk about the statistics of childhood poverty and how it is ameliorated by ‘transfer spending’ in places like Sweden. They are passionate about the effects of poverty on families and society. They insist that Something Must Be Done and want to create as many safety nets and programs as possible to eliminate poverty. In my experience, the majority of these people have never been in poverty. Oh, sure, they had ramen 3 times a week in grad school, and their entry-level jobs were only about $25,000 a year when they started their career. But they had mom, dad, and student loans to get them by in college and credit cards until they got that raise and a mortgage. They think paying taxes to make sure a kid doesn’t go to bed hungry is a pretty good deal. They, you know, worry about money – but they have never been unable to sleep for three days wondering how they will feed the kids for another meal with no idea where next week’s rent is coming from.

The other sort I usually find in ‘blue-collar’ jobs and middle management. They’ve struggled, they’ve been poor. They worked hard, they got through, they made it. They want to know why everyone else can’t. After all, they didn’t have mom and dad paying for school, they did it themselves. They are ticked off and know that things would have been a lot easier without the taxes being sucked out of their checks for programs that they either never qualified for, weren’t there to help them, or simply didn’t apply – let alone those programs that are a sheer waste of tax monies. They have largely been successful at all they have tried with no true setbacks – no crippling car accidents, no bolts out of the blue, just the grind of making Horatio Alger a prophet. They are damn decent people who think the best way to eliminate the poor is to get Uncle Sam’s hand out of our pockets and get the Hell out of their way as they Make It.

Want to hear the tough part? Distributionists think they are both almost completely right. The keys to escaping poverty are simple and self-evident – hard work and thrift. From the 19^th Century Papal encyclical Rerum Novarum to Chesterbelloc to Schumacher the keys to self-sufficiency have been stated clearly: hard work and thrift. Distributionism is based on hard work and thrift and will always be so. Subsidiarity is about getting as many hands out of your pocket, as many rules out of your life, and as many people you report to out of your life as possible. But we can’t forget reality, and the reality is that things happen. We are human, not super-human. People make bad decisions; conditions change; accidents happen; people you have never met will always impact on your life. There are many things that can cast a person into poverty, and many of them are beyond our control. From cancer to a drunk driver, fraud to disabled children, life is hard and it always will be.

Blogodidact insists, again, that Capitalism is not about happiness, but is only about commerce, production, etc. At best, he concedes, it is a forecasting tool for predicting bad policy. To a Distributivist this is like claiming that the law is only about punishing criminals or that politics is only about power. To clarify terms, as Van tries, let me clarify two terms. To a Distributionist ‘Capitalism’ means “an economic system with ownership and control of capital in private hands” tied up with the concepts of private property, the rule of law, etc. while ‘laissez-faire Capitalism’ refers to ‘the error of trying to isolate economic activity from other facets of life with the expectation that the pursuit of profit divorced from ethics will somehow lead to ethical situations’. Capitalism is a group of ideas and processes within the economic areas of our lives. It must be conceded that Capitalism is intimately dependent upon our legal ideas of private property and our ethical ideas of the goal of jurisprudence and the nature of human rights. How is it possible to concede that Capitalism is dependent upon legal and ethical concepts, and then claim that it must be pursued independently of ethics?

Chesterton and Belloc both pointed out that the “failure” of Capitalism in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries was the attempt to divorce economic activity from ethical considerations – this is what I and many current Distributivists mean when they cite ‘laissez-faire Capitalism’. Chesterton and Belloc called it a failure because people instinctively realize that moral and ethical considerations must be a part of every aspect of human life, including economics. The divorcement of these ideas in laissez-faire Capitalism led to mass discontent and a yearning for more ethics in economics. Into this hole stepped Marx and the later Communists and Socialists. Their focus on ‘justice’ and ‘equality’ is a naked appeal to the ethical impulse in Man, and it obviously worked! No matter how horrific all Communists nations have been/are, no matter how badly the economies of Socialist nations wallow, people are still drawn to them because of the overwhelming desire for ethics within economics. Despite this, Objectivists, many Libertarians, and others of the same school continue to insist that ethical considerations are at best secondary within economics. These same folks also continue to wonder what the appeal of Socialism might be.

Distributionism points out that Socialism/Communism misses the mark by a much wider margin than laissez-faire Capitalism. The attempt to impose perfect justice and perfect equality by mandate leads not to justice, or freedom, or even economic improvement – it only leads to greater and greater centralized governmental and economic power. Eventually all centralized governmental and economic power is abused. Thus, Socialism and Communism lead, inevitably, to the effective servitude of workers to the state/an oligopoly.

Instead, Distributionism advances an ethical solution to the ‘problem’ of laissez-faire Capitalism that is, at its heart… Capitalist. Instead of mandated giving (taxes, fees, etc) and government programs, Distributism proposes private organizations and cooperatives and voluntary organizations. If the Guild of Carpenters is more efficient (i.e., they actually take care of their members, have a solid reputation with customers, provide the training they promise, etc) than the International Carpenters’ Guild – the International Carpenters’ Guild will go away and the Guild of Carpenters will thrive – until an even better professional organization comes along. If the Delaware County Seed Coop has negotiated better prices with a distributor for the last five years and is reducing operating costs for its members better than the Farmer’s Coop of Delaware, guess which will have more members? This goes for consumer coops, industrial coops, etc. All along the line, the goal of Distributionism is twofold – get the government (etc.) out of economics and ethics as much as possible and use the market itself to include ethics in the economy in a vibrant, competitive, voluntary manner.

Let me give you a small, personal example. My family belongs to a small consumer coop that purchases raw milk for its members directly from a dairy. We include distribution costs in our prices and we do not negotiate for reductions based on volume (not enough volume yet!). Our price for organic raw whole milk is lower than the same product at the local store; we know the producer (and the cows, and the dog that guards the cows) and can check quality personally any time. The producer is making about 30% more by eliminating the distributors and other middlemen. We are saving about 10% by doing the same. If another dairy with similar quality, quality controls, access, etc. came along with 15% savings over local stores, we would (naturally) switch suppliers (or coops!). As a matter of fact, we should be able to do so right now… except for a state law that makes it illegal for dairies in this state to sell raw milk for human consumption. Indeed, we could eliminate a great deal of our internal distribution costs if it weren’t for a law that gives the advantage to large corporate farms or corporate-processed supplies over small farmers.

So the coop works now (the supplier makes more profit, we pay lower costs) and would work even better if it weren’t for intrusive laws that favor large firms over small ones. If there were a different, more efficient/cheaper supplier available, the coop would adapt or wither away. That, baby, is Distributionism at its Capitalist best.

Within the industrial realm the preferred ‘tool’ is also a coop. The largest, most famous example is Mondragon in Sapin. Mondragon is the seventh largest corporation in Spain and has operations in over a dozen countries. With sales of almost 12 billion Euros and a workforce of almost 80,000 people (full and part-time) it is a good-sized company. With business offerings ranging from engineering consultants to brake drum manufacturing to fresh beef, they are well diversified. But how are they different from a well-diversified corporation that isn’t a cooperative? After the probationary period (six months to one year, typically), similar to an apprenticeship, workers become full members of the coop; in effect, they become part owners. Members receive shares in the cooperative (like shares in any company), but shares are only open to employees - no outside ownership exists. Every year a portion of the profits is distributed to shareholders. Typically employees receive a salary and one or more shares when they become full members. Raises and promotions may come in the form of wage increases, more shares, or a combination of both. In Mondragon the shareholders in local ventures (auto plants, dairy farms, etc.) elect spokesmen to an cooperative assembly, who then elect a board. This board then manages the corporation.

In short, it looks and acts like a corporation – but all the owners are workers and only the workers are owners. Unions are allowed but superfluous; after all, the guys on the assembly line, their supervisors, and the managers are all also the owners. If they want a pay raise, they don’t need to strike – they just tell their representative who passes it up the chain. They have all the financial data and know if their operation can afford to give them a pay raise and will elect different representatives if they are lied to. More importantly, if their wages aren’t raised any increase in profits is reflected in the payments of their share profits, too. In Mondragon’s case some profits are diverted from share payments (by the decision of the owners/workers) to run a multi-campus university. Members of the coop can attend at no cost or a reduced cost, and non-members can attend at costs lower than average. It is accredited and graduates are encouraged to attempt to join Mondragon, but it is not required. Since the goal is to create real-world skills and the oversight is by people working in business, not life-long academics, the schools have a good reputation amongst businesses.

Mondragon also provides internal health insurance where needed, pensions, etc. They adjust salaries to reflect local taxes and state-provided benefits to provide comparable compensation while keeping profits high. They also invest in research and development and maintain a strategic reserve of capital.

When it comes to support of Capitalism the Mondragon Faq has this entry:

“Do you consider co-operativism to be an alternative to the capitalist production system?
We have no pretensions in this area. We simply believe that we have developed a way of making companies more human and participatory. It is an approach that, furthermore, fits in well with the latest and most advanced management models, which tend to place more value on workers themselves as the principal asset and source of competitive advantage of modern companies”

I think this is a great example of how a company based on Distributivist ideals can flourish in the ‘real world’. Mondragon’s diversification and expansion to nations like Turkey and China combined with its 13% growth in sales in 2005 seems to bear this out.

Does this eliminate risk? Hell, no. If there are no profits, shares received no dividends and some workers end up less-well-payed than employees of ‘standard’ corporations. Cooperatives can fail completely, just like other corporations. The difference is that the worker/owners decide for themselves what social safety nets they want, fund them themselves, and do so not like an exclusive union (which wants all it can wring from “Management”) but as part-owners, resulting in sensible plans that give you pensions, health care, and profits all together. If health care gets pricey, the owners look for a more affordable plan – or buy some clinics! Instead of eliminating risks, the goal is to spread out and share the risks voluntarily, keeping compulsion and government regulation out of the picture. The effect of tying ethics to the market is not only providing solutions to the potential ‘disappointment and ruin’ but allowing market forces to make those solutions more efficient and more targeted by keeping the government out of providing them.

Van and I do seem to have friction about corporations. Van seems to at once glamorize them (“[corporations are] an organization that has yet to be improved upon for most practical purposes.”) and point out that they can be (and usually are) terribly inefficient. I particularly like his point that the collaboration of many small firms and individuals seems to be very efficient at making a particular project. Such ‘project management’ ventures are becoming much more common and effective. Yet for all of Van’s admiration for the Really Large Corporation, how much of it is misplaced? After all, a great deal of the success of a particular corporation can rest largely on… where it was incorporated. Need a corporation to dodge taxes? File in Delaware, and then never do business there! Want your shareholders to be anonymous? File in Nevada, which has no disclosure laws! In the end, corporations are legal fictions, an abstract concept in constant flux that is evolving as we speak. LLCs, large sole proprietorships, cooperatives – these and many other structures can do many of the same things, often better. More critically, what we have seen time and again through recent history is that large corporations use their economic might in coercive ways. Van wrote this:

“As long as the Corp gains NO legislative/regulatory political power, and uses no PHYSICAL force; and threatening to no longer do business with a company, or convince other members of their supply chain to not do business with their company DOES NOT qualify as Physical Force – it is negotiation, though hardball, true, it is still a legitimate part of the process of making agreements.”

Really, Van? So when Standard Oil told oil suppliers that they would take the payment Standard Oil offered (below market rate) or no one would ship their oil to a competitor, there was no coercion? When Standard Oil told the railroads that all Standard Oil shipments would get a below-market shipping rate and that Standard Oil’s competitors would pay 20% above the market or the railroads would pay triple for oil and railroad track – if there was any available - there was no coercion? Van asked:

“What is the principled difference between such hardball tactics on the part of Corporations, and your trying to wheel and deal at the local service station by saying “Look I’ll let you put a set of your top tires on both my and my wife’s car, but if I do, I want you to throw in a alignment check and road hazard on all the tires of both cars, for free, other I’m taking my business across the street to Big Bob’s place and you and your mechanics will not see any more of our regular business”?”

Here’s the difference; a large corporation can do this;

“Here’s the deal – you are going to sell my tires with a road hazard kit and an alignment check. You are going to sell my competitor’s tires with an additional 10% markup. If you do, you pay rate on electricity, lubricants, and windshield wipers. If you don’t, you pay triple for lubricants and windshield wipers and quintuple for electricity – unless there is a blackout.”

That is a big difference. What happens with a powerful enough corporation is that you are no longer capable of voting with your feet. In these cases the corporations can eliminate existing competitors and then raise the market entry costs to prevent new competitors, and then cascade into other markets. The coercion comes not from physical violence (or its threat) or governmental regulation, but it is real nonetheless.

I do not think that such behavior is inevitable. Indeed, it has been more rare than you might expect – but we have no way of knowing if that would be the case in the absence of anti-trust laws. So let us assume a simple thing – I am wrong. Large corporations never become coercive, and preventing competition is not bad. Let’s just talk about another – diseconomies of scale.

Now, everyone learns about economies of scale in Econ 101. And Econ 105. And, heck, most of Econ. You don’t hear about diseconomies of scale quite so much. In effect, economies of scale means that as you make more of something, the cheaper it is per unit to make it – so, the larger the firm, the more efficient it is. Diseconomies of scale is the opposite; beyond a certain point the per-unit costs of producing something go up – so, beyond a certain size, the larger the firm, the less efficient it is. The threshold seems to be primarily related to two factors; initial required capital; and ongoing capital requirements. Like Van, I have worked at firms small and large, and Very Large, and I prefer the small ones.

For the record, my opposition to large firms is one of ethics and efficiency. I don’t want more laws to control anybody. The preference for smaller firms, although shared by all Distributists, obviously isn’t an impediment to the creation of something like Mondragon. Indeed, if cooperative-based corporations working as a conglomerate or consortium became the world’s largest corporation, I’d have no problem with that.

If it was still ethical and efficient, that is.

In the end, all is as Van said – same words, different meaning. Most disagreements between Distributists and other Capitalists are like that, it seems. But my thanks to Blogodidact for forcing me to be more clear and more detailed. Good luck with work (I, too, am in IT). And as for the Kant, Hegel, Hume, etc. I suggest 2 beers, hot shower, two beers, read James J. Hill and the Opening of the Northwest.

A World of Artisans: Distributionism as an Economic Third Way

This is the fourth in a series of articles about Distributionism. You can read the earlier pieces here, here and here.

I will attempt to draw the various ideas together to show not just how to encourage Distributionism, but what I think a Distributivist society would look like and some of the effects I think it would have on other societies. To make this as clear as possible I will attempt to do this in a single post, so I apologize in advance for its length.

In the views of Distributivist thinkers (and in my own opinion) Fascism, Communism, Socialism, and laissez-faire Capitalism all result from the same mistake. And that mistake is to misapprehend the goal of economic activity. For laissez-faire Capitalists, the error is thinking that the goal is to maximize profits with the goal of accumulating the greatest possible capital; for Communists the goal is transformation of Mankind into a new sort of person with a different nature; for Fascists the goal is social order and stability; for Socialists the goal is perfect equality of outcome (which they mistake for justice). Belloc and Chesterton point out where these errors can lead, and history has shown them to be pretty accurate. In every case the essential needs of Man are in at least some ways neglected, leading to unhappiness, abuse, and, eventually, tyranny.

The real answer is surprising in its simplicity; the goal of economic activity is the same as the goal of society. The goal is happiness. In ‘The Outline of Sanity ‘Chesterton wrote,
“There is no obligation on us to be richer, or busier, or more efficient, or more productive, or more progressive, or in any way worldlier or wealthier, if it does not make us happier”

We seek happiness in society through friendship, family, the development of character, and the improvement of our fellow man. We seek happiness through economics by acquiring the essentials of stability, the leisure of self-improvement and beauty, and the improvement of our fellow man. As the principle of solidarity points out, society and economics cannot be divorced from one another. This means that we must engage in economics with our neighbors and cannot forget that we are as dependent upon them as they are upon us. The principle of subsidiarity points out that, just as the most important element of society is the smallest and closest (the family), so our economics should look to smaller, closer ventures to maximize happiness.

There can be no true happiness in the absence of security. The first goal of society is security (from outside invaders, from crime, from abuses of rights) and the first goal of economics should be security (from hunger, homelessness, and exploitation). But just as a society that does not need to fear crime is not necessarily fair or open, a society where all are fed is not necessarily just or free. Security is the foundation, not the end, and this must always be kept in mind.

Many Distributionists argue that concentration of capital into the hands of too few people leads to a decline in liberty that can lead to a state resembling slavery for those who lack capital. The proposed solution is to strive to distribute capital as much as possible (hence Distributionism) so that most, if not all, families are capable of self-sufficiency. This leaves a wide range of possibilities; farmers that have enough land to provide for themselves both directly and through the sale of ‘excess’ produce; skilled tradesmen with their own tools and enough skill that they can be either self-employed or find employment both readily available and their jobs portable (such as a carpenter or computer programmer); factory workers who are part-owners of their factory with sufficient equity that they are involved in issues of capital expenditures and share the reqards and risks of production; retail employee/owners who make cooperative purchases of stock, participate in sales, and either lease or co-own their facility.

As you can see, the ideas of self-sufficiency, solidarity, subsidiarity, an aversion to wage slavery, and social justice tend to point along a particular path, one that rejects Communism, Socialism, and Fascism and is opposed to corporate consolidation and monopolies. The result, where as many people as possible are professionals that own all the tools required for their work and deal as directly as possible with each other, could be called a world of artisans.

A world of artisans would nullify the tendencies of industrial and post-industrial nations to slip into authoritarianism, regardless of their ‘flavor’. The economic displacement of both industrialization and the transformation to post-industrialism creates feelings of fear and insecurity amongst many people who are incapable of self-sufficiency do to a lack of personal capital; they need wages to live and are incapable of generating them without access to someone else’s capital. Changes in the structure are coming that means that they are unsure of continuing access to capital. A simple example is a worker at an auto-plant. He cannot make cars himself; he owns none of the tools, materials, or facilities to make cars himself; his skills are specialized to the point that no other employment but car-making affords him the potential of a living wage. As plants are closed or moved, he is (naturally) afraid of losing his home, even of losing his life to hunger.

Capitalist economies will always lead to some level of insecurity; it is their nature. The feelings of fear created by those lacking capital will be utilized by those who desire change. They may be Machiavellian, they may be benign, but someone will harness the insecurities to effect change. If the desire is to do away with the insecurities of Capitalism altogether, the goal of change will be Communism. If the goal is to use the power of the central government to take capital from one group and give it to another to ameliorate insecurity, the goal is Socialism. If the goal is to make Capitalism more efficient in the desire to accelerate economic growth and reduce insecurity through expansion, the goal is laissez-faire Capitalism in its ‘purest’ form. If the goal is to stabilize society while maintaining Capitalism (and the largest Capitalists), the goal is Fascism.

I am aware that some will argue with my definitions, above. These are my own very broadly-brushed opinions, nit an in-depth analysis of political methods other than Distributionism.
Distributionism argues that Communism and Socialism are wrong (and lead to oppression) because they make the mistake of blaming Capitalism. They further argue that Fascisms and ‘invisible handers’ are similarly wrong for blaming people. You cannot reject economics, nor reject people – you must integrate them. This is done by making as many people as possible independent economic actors – in other words, capitalists.

But how do we get there?

As I mentioned in Part II, the shift to Distributionism cannot be coerced or via ‘negative’ means. You cannot seize land from those that have ‘too much’ and give it to those who have ‘too little’; who would decide? Who would enforce such decisions? Both obviously require – a massive, powerful central government, the very antithesis of Distributivist thought. Likewise, imposing higher taxes on people earning ‘too much’ and giving this money to those earning ‘too little’ result in the same formula – injustice enacted by remote, faceless entities. In addition to leading to resentment (from all sides as to what is ‘just’), alienation (of different groups from one another), dependency (of those who gain with no effort), and lawlessness (by those wishing to either avoid being taxed or who wish to profit unjustly) the power of the central government will continue to expand at the expense of local leadership, the family, and the individual.

The path must be positive. Some steps are relatively obvious and even partially in place. Small businesses should be encouraged with tax breaks and loans. Similarly, cooperatives, credit unions, and similar solidarity groups should also receive tax breaks. Microloans to such organizations could be subsidized by government agencies for a strictly limited time to encourage transition. The removal of farm subsidies and their replacement with tax incentives would go a long way toward creating Distributionist farms. Local, regional, state, etc. funding for training, especially in trades and professions, would encourage the creation of more artisans. Laws that encourage guilds should also be created.

And here we come to another key element in early Distributionist thought; the guild. Similar to unions, similar to professional associations, and similar to consortiums, guilds are still unique. The European guilds of the medieval period are, as noted in the link, the source of most modern concepts of intellectual property, business ethics, trade, and social security. The were formed by members of the same or closely-related trades or professions, generally as independent, self-employed artisans and professionals working together for their own greater good. They set standards of education for their members (and prospective members), codes of conduct, quality standards for products, even rules for contents, size of products, etc. Virtually all of them also organized funds and systems to care for the widows and orphans of members, for members no longer able to work due to disability, and the retired/elderly members of the guild.

Historically a number of guilds negotiated exclusive contracts with cities, preventing non-guild members from practicing their professions there. This eventually led to their concentration in such cities and, ultimately, their downfall as they became isolated and hidebound fraternal institutions. Their counterparts outside the cities often refused to join organizations they saw as urban and both were more able to change quickly and, interestingly, were easier prey for large capital concerns who wished to consolidate. Distributionist thought is to learn from history and employ the best of guilds while rejecting their tendencies to become focused on defending exclusive territories and protecting trade secrets. Under this model Guilds are to have an almost dual nature; internal and external. Internally they act like fraternal societies and professional boards/consortiums. They ensure training and performance standards, enforce ethics, provide insurance services for members, manage pensions and trusts, engage in cooperative enterprises with other guilds, etc. Externally, they are almost like a brand. Consumers that deal with members of, for example, the baker’s guild know that they can trust the contents of the baker’s goods, his level of training, the standards of cleanliness of the bakery, his business ethics, etc.

Guilds differ from unions in a very important element – all levels of the profession or trade are in the same organization. While unions tend to pit employee against employer, guilds force them to work together. Since guild members have the skills, tools, and other capital needed to make them ‘portable’ (they can work for themselves or another master of their profession with ease) there is less insecurity on the part of wage earners. Employers within the guild ‘worked their way up’ through the guild and are very clearly aligned with their workers in the joint venture of success for all members of the guild. Since many guilds historically had rules on the election of guild members to local leadership councils and guild assemblies, the voice of the employed has as much weight as the voice of employers in large decisions, as well. The preferred management of Guilds is at the level of individual self-employed worker, then small shops, then a neighborhood, etc. The involvement of workers ensures such things as a living wage, decent social benefits, and a voice in larger decisions. The non-exclusive nature of a guild means that guilds that become corrupt, exclusive, coercive, etc. will simply have their members melt away/ It is almost like the Wobblies, but with the managers and owners involved, too!

More seriously, the Guild system is a microcosm of Distributionism; the line between employer and employee is virtually eliminated since the employee has the means to become self-employed or an employer himself; the organization is founded on the principles of solidarity, subsidiarity, and justice. The goal of guilds is not to erase Capitalism (which was the goal of many early trade unionists), but to embrace it, to take the best of Capitalism and share it through the free actions of voluntary members. At the same time, guilds share the risks and dangers of Capitalism and ameliorate them through acting with and for each other. Their goal is to create a community where the members avoid the excesses of materialism through close association with their peers, a focus on the needs of their community, and a desire to contribute to the society that makes their success possible. These voluntary organizations succeeded not by rejecting Capitalism, but by sharing the Capitalism, the risks and insecurities as much as, or even more than, the rewards. This is an emulation of civilization itself; the protection of society by sharing risks and hardship is the cornerstone of the advance from barbarism. The voluntary sharing of the benefits of security is the cornerstone of a just civilization.

I can almost hear you now,
“Hold it!” you say, “Deep, you aren’t describing Distributionism as a ‘Third Way’, are you?”

No, I’m not. Mainly because I don’t think that it is a third way. Communism has always been a pipe-dream of people whose arguments begin and end with ‘once we change Man’s essential nature…”; Socialism is an argument that concludes “…and thus we will give Man more freedom by carefully controlling him.”; Fascism is an argument that “We know what is best for you!”; Laissez-faire Capitalism is an argument that “Selfish, unjust actions lead to altruistic, just results… eventually.” Distributionism rejects Communism, Socialism, and Fascism as unjust and immoral in their very conceptualization. It also rejects laissez-faire Capitalism as a wrong-headed attempt to separate ends from means. So, in the end, it is not a Third Way, it is simply the acknowledgement that Capitalism is the best known economic system, and that very minor, voluntary controls can prevent Capitalism from becoming a tool for injustice.

Since Distributivist writers and thinkers spend a lot of time explaining what is wrong with the world, and what Distributionism is against, it has been argued that Distributionism is no more than a reaction, a denial, a ‘no’. In short, it is impractical, even evil. The arguments against Distributionism range from ‘it prohibits international trade’ to ‘it cannot compete with huge multinationals’ to ‘it has no political platform for politicians to use in advocating it’. I find the concept that Distributivist are against international trade when virtually all of them point to the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation as an example not only of international trade, but successful competition with huge multinationals. Or that small firms cannot compete with large ones when small ‘mom and pop’ shops have successfully limited WalMart in China and carved out serious market share in America in recent years. I must also confess that I was surprised when Fr. Neuhaus, whom I normally find to have a very informed opinion, dismisses Distributionism as not having anything to which to attach policies or platforms in the political arena. America has; a Small Business Administration that promotes small business; farm co-ops, credit unions, consumer co-ops, and business co-ops like ACE hardware on almost every corner; a history where the Grange movement held strong, if brief, political influence over national politics; a growing concern over the impact of large enterprises like Wal-Mart and Microsoft of the well-being of the average person; and a rather large (and growing) government job training program. With all respect to Fr. Neuhaus, but I suspect his obliviousness to possible political planks supporting Distributionism may have more to do with his own ignorance of Distributionism, politics and American business than any weakness of Distributionist thought.

Indeed, it would be a rather simple matter to craft political positions that would have a broad appeal and promote Distributionism in a non-coercive manner. As I mentioned earlier, tax breaks for small businesses would be well-received by many. Pointing out that the vast majority of new jobs in America are generated by small businesses would go a long way to making it more popular. Tax incentives for co-ops would face similar approval across a broad segment of society, and it would be a simple matter to increase support for credit unions and similar activities. Reduction of levies and tariffs for small business and co-ops would also help. An increase in awareness of the value of trades would be of great benefit, too.

That seems pretty simple, really; the engine of job growth in America (and the world) is small business; tradesmen are critical for small business; co-ops of all sorts are efficient, competitive organizations that provide solid business benefits to their participants. I am not sure what Fr. Neuhaus and his fellow detractors are missing, but these seem easy sells as political positions. Conservatives can focus on tax relief for business owners and job creation, Liberals can focus on job creation and tax relief for students, blue collar workers, and mom & pop shops. Both can appeal to farmers and rural voters by supporting co-ops.

Seems like a win-win to me.


Next time: more on Distributionism, but on a more personal level.

Follow the Money

During my discussions of population implosion and the dangers that a shrinking workforce poses to economic stability, I sometimes get the response “Well, Europe has a better standard of living than America, so they must be doing something right!”. In similar veins, I am regaled with stories that we need a social services system like European Socialist nations (Sweden is usually mentioned, often as a ‘socialist paradise’) or that the American preference for Capitalism over Socialism is why so many Americans are poor.

As usual, my response was to dive into the numbers, look around, and see what is *really* going on.

Poverty in America exists; trust me, I grew up in a prime example of what poverty in America can look like. According to the U.S. government, 12% of Americans live below the poverty line, or about 1 in 8 people. That seems pretty serious.

France officially reports that 6.5% of its citizens live below the poverty line. It is probably no surprise that many Eastern European nations, all recovering from communism, report higher percentages of their citizens living in poverty. What may surprise you are the Western European nations that report the same thing. Britain reports that 17% of its citizens live in poverty, for example.

One important thing to remember, though, is that these numbers are all measurements of “relative poverty”, meaning each nation has its own definition of what “poverty” is. In poorer nations, the definition is lower than in rich nations. The generally accepted definition of ‘relative poverty’ in Europe is 60% of the median income, although sometimes it is 50% or even 40% of the median income.

The U.S. doesn’t do it this way. The American government calculates a national average cost to provide a minimum number of calories for an average adult and an average child and adds in a calculation of minimum cost of living expenses for housing, utilities, etc. in short, while the American definition of poverty is an attempt to determine how many people may have trouble paying for shelter or trying to eat enough, the European measure is a variable based on how much the ‘average’ person makes.

At first blush, this sounds even worse for America; after all, while European nations are trying to define who isn’t earning “enough”, America is trying to define who is actually hungry – and America’s numbers are supposedly higher. Sweden, for example, with its combination of taxes and welfare programs designed to eliminate poverty has a poverty rate of about 6.4%.

But when you start to compare things, however, they may not be so rosy. For example, while Sweden officially has no one living in relative poverty, this may be because the average Swede is simply much less affluent than the average American. The American per capita GDP is about $42,000 while the Swedish per capita GDP is about $30,000. These numbers are called Purchasing Power Parity numbers, or (in non-government terms) they have been adjusted for cost of living.

The median Swedish income is about $27,000 while the median American income is about $43,000, so Americans in general make almost 40% more (in actual purchasing power) than Swedes. As was pointed out recently by Swedish researchers, 40% of all Swedes would be counted as “low income” Americans based on what they can purchase with their income. Also, the tax ratio (or the comparison of total taxes compared to the GDP) in Sweden is an amazing 51.3%; America’s tax ratio is about 17.5%.

This means that, adjusted for cost of living, an average American earns $1.40 for every $1.00 earned by a Swede.

Now, some argue that Swede still “win” because Americans have to pay for health care, something provided for free by the Swedish government. Well, first of all the Swedish health coverage isn’t free (see those tax burden numbers back in that last paragraph?). Secondly, the average out-of-pocket health care costs of an average American totals about $3,850 a year. That leaves a purchasing power difference of 30%. Even if you add in student loan payments of about $50 a month (this is the average for all working Americans, reflecting that some have no debt and some have paid it off, and some expenses are related to public schools), this leaves a purchasing power difference of 20%. So even with the generous government benefits (which are, after all, paid for by taxes on earnings) Americans are better off by over 28%.

Some people have argues that since Swedish households are smaller than American households, the differences are moot, since more people depend in each wage-earner in America. I am being careful to use per capita numbers, not per household numbers.

Another counter argument is that Americans work many more hours than Swedes, an average of 158 more work hours a year, or about 2 more months of work. Since Swedes get much more time off, they have a “better standard of living”. Perhaps; this may be a cultural artifact. But let us adjust the incomes again to reflect either the lost Swedish income or the lost American leisure. The difference is (rounding up) 17%, leaving Americans with ‘only’ about 12% greater purchasing power than Swedes, on average.

So even after paying for health care and education and subtracting the ‘extra’ money earned by working more hours, Americans are financially better-off than Swedes to the tune of putting $1.12 in our pockets for each $1.00 earned by a Swedish worker after the differences is services and life style are removed.

So why am I focusing on Sweden? Well, Sweden is spoken of as the epitome of Socialist Europe, routinely being ranked as having the highest standard of living, best welfare programs, etc. So if the people of Sweden don’t have the purchasing power of Americans, then Europe as a whole is further behind.

The definition of poverty as “a percentage of the median income” is a lousy way to score things. For example, if a nation goes through an economic recession making everyone poorer, but a higher percentage of the top 5% of the income earners loos more ground, statistics will show there are less people living in poverty because the median income has gone down. Also, in a nation that is generally poor the official poverty line may be well below the minimum needed to actually survive. Be that as it may, the official poverty level of Europe is 17% and their unemployment of about 9% is almost double that of America.

The obvious truth, that America is much richer and getting even richer faster, has European leaders worried. You see, European nations have lower economic growth than America. There is some argument that this is an inevitable result of the aggressive taxation and wealth redistribution of the welfare state systems prevalent there. Regardless of the cause, the fact is that the American economy, already larger than the entire EU economy, is growing about three times faster than the EU economy. Add in the fact that the EU has a total population almost 60% larger than the U.S., and that means that the per capita GDP of Europe will continue to slide compared to America. Indeed, the OECD predicts that in 2025 the average American will have twice the purchasing power of the average European. Even after all the adjustments for social services and differences in working hours, that means the average American will have a net purchasing power advantage of about 25%.

Of course, that assumes those social services will still exist in 20 years; they may not. Although Americans are very concerned with the size of the American national debt, as a percentage of GDP, it is rather bland. At a national debt of about 65% of GDP, America has a better debt ratio than Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, or Greece. The need to pay interest on this debt coupled with slower growth mean that the debt itself will almost certainly continue to grow, and rapidly. With the retirement-age population of Europe scheduled to increase 50% over the next 20 years or so, the costs of social services will skyrocket; after all, in addition to pensions, the elderly need a lot more healthcare. During that same period, however, the population within working age will go down no less than 7%, perhaps as much as 15%. So as the costs of social services climb steeply, the tax base will be shrinking; combined with slow economic growth and mounting national debt, it is doubtful that Europe will be able to continue to provide social services at the same rate.

In fact, the changes have begun. Faced with a crippling recession in the 1990’s, Sweden reformed their tax plans and social security systems somewhat, resulting in new growth and lower inflation. In a similar way, Margaret Thatcher’s reforms of the ‘80s and ‘90s resulted in an economic revival in England that continues to this day. Time and again it has been shown that a change away from a Socialist welfare state to a Capitalist market state results in economic growth that benefits everyone.

But it is unlikely that reforms will be comprehensive enough or soon enough to avoid catastrophe. For a number of reasons, ranging from the power of labor unions to the sheer inertia of a voting public that has assumed that these services would always be there, Europeans have been resisting social security reforms all over Europe.

One interesting change in the typically protectionist attitudes of Europe is immigration. While still considering clamping down even further on immigration from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, many nations have loosened or are considering relaxing immigration from Eastern Europe.

Eastern Europe is poorer than Western Europe; the relaxation of labor laws and immigration laws will almost inevitably result in a westward migration within Europe. This will accelerate the woes of Eastern European nations without providing enough help to the West. A rolling economic crisis will erode social services and economic ability from east to west until the nations of Europe either abandon Socialism or vanish.

As for the human changes, please see my article Proud Vanguard of the Resurgent Patriarchy.

Death and the Maidens

As I have discussed previously, modern demographic predictions are of eventual under-population, not over-population, and each few years the experts must revise their estimates on population growth downwards. One of the causes of this continual downward adjustment may be quite simple.

Technology.

Specifically, sonograms. You see, up until the 1970s determination of a child’s gender before birth was difficult, expensive, time-consuming, and oft-inaccurate. With sonograms, however, it became something possible in a few minutes and, eventually, for a few dollars. Nowadays unltrasound machines fit easily in vans, allowing them to drive around and check on the health (and gender) of the unborn anywhere roads can go.

The result has been the purposeful aborting of tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of unborn children simply because they are female.

In India brides are expected to pay a dowry for the privilege of marrying. Indeed, a young bride being murdered by her husband and his family for not bringing in a large-enough dowry is common enough that it is a specific crime in India. This economic pressure, combined with the cultural and religious preferences for male children found in India, have resulted in deeply skewed sex ratios; in urban centers in the Punjab, girls make up as little as 33% of the population, depending on the specific generation.

China is similar, with ratios potentially as skewed (although it is harder to get reliable data from the Chinese interior). Although there is no dowry culture in China, the tyrannical one-child policy has resulted in at least as much pressure of female births there. The ‘official’ country-wide number shows that 44% of Chinese are women. Other estimates are that on the age range of 8-years old to 21 years old there are at least 20 million more men than women.

South Korea faces slightly less ominous numbers, with an estimated 45% girls under the age of 17. Young females are serious under-represented (less than 46% of births) in India, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bangladesh, and Nepal – as well as other nations.

While the numbers from India and China seem to reflect the effects of both sex-selective abortion and infanticide, the fact remains that some purposeful deaths of girl children may be masked from initial statistical review. In other words – the numbers may very well be worse than they look. Since the cultures that indulge in sex-selective abortion and infanticide place a lower value on the life of girls than of boys, the long-term health and survival statistics on girls are obviously lower, as well. Bluntly, girls don’t get the same access to health care, emergency treatment, and education that boys do. Already fewer by birth, by the time they are of marriageable age, their numbers will have shrunk.

What are the effects? Well, it doesn’t seem to be an increase in choices or freedom for women. In India women are already being ‘purchased’ as brides (or more precisely, as sexual partners/mothers); oddly enough, local brides are still expected to pay a dowry. Since the sex ratio is most imbalanced in wealthier Indian communities, and ‘importing’ a bride is expensive, the contradictory effect is to maintain the demands on local women of providing a dowry while money is sent out of the community for outside brides.

China seems to be a bit more chilling. Human trafficking is on the increase in China with over 42,000 women rescued from kidnappers in a single three-year period; but the problem is much, much larger than that. China’s imbalance of genders seems to have made it the largest market for internal human slavery. While many families, especially in rural areas, simply advertise for a bride for their sons, there is a growing market for kidnapped women who are delivered for a fee. They are then raped and forced into the family.

Similar tales seem to be beginning in other places with an unnaturally high male to female ratio, such as Kyrgyzstan where it has the added ‘respectability’ of being an ancient custom.

Perhaps the strangest of all the effects of the artificial skewing of sex ratios is the response of feminists. Now remember; feminists see abortion as an absolute right; any attempt to limit free access to abortion, or to convince women abortion is wrong or immoral is evil, they claim, and even the motivations for pursuing an abortion are protected as part of the right to privacy and the needs/rights of the mother to have an abortion outweigh any rights of the fetus.

Well, unless you know the fetus is female, that is.

India, China and other nations have laws making it illegal to abort a fetus based on its gender. Actually, the laws are applied in such a way to make it illegal to abort a fetus if you know that it is female. In these nations it is illegal to get an ultrasound that tells you the gender of the child to prevent you from making sex-based abortion decisions – in other words, women are denied access to all of the facts about their pregnancy to limit their abortion options.

Are feminists outraged by this abridgement? Nope, they applaud it and want stronger laws limiting abortions. More to the point, the very few feminists who speak of it are generally supportive of these laws restricting abortion access. But the majority of feminists; including NOW, Planned Parenthood, and NARAL; simply say nothing.

This is an oddly-transparent contradiction in the feminist support of abortion. We are told women must be unhindered by laws restricting abortions; that doctors, even husbands cannot really participate in or understand the decision being made; indeed, the bumper sticker buzz phrase of the pro-abortion movement is “keep your laws off my body” – yet these laws restricting access to the full data needed to make a choice about abortion are met with the deafening silence of the major pro-choice/feminist groups.

There is a simple solution – these groups recognize the inherent contradiction of their pro-abortion stance and the need for laws limiting it. Regardless of your framing, your vocabulary, or your meme choice, the facts on the ground tell us one thing: all over the world, women are using abortion to eliminate their own daughters. From India, China, South Korea, South Africa, and other ‘developing countries’ the ‘right to choose’ is being exercised to choose boy children over girl children. Why aren’t feminists crying out against this?

My theory is they will never utter a phrase that might paint abortion as something other than an absolute right, one that cannot be restricted in any way. They are horrified at the results of sex-selection in India and China, and understand the need for the laws restricting sex-selection there – but remain silent to protect their own overriding interests.

There is some evidence that Western European mothers have a slight preference for girls over boys. I assume that this would never be a topic of concern for feminists, even if it were to become as extreme as the gender imbalance in modern India.

Altogether, though, this may help to explain why demographers needs to adjust their population estimates downward so often. For years the girl deficit was largely hidden, and even now it is largely underestimated. As a result, the Total Fertility Rate estimates are accurate – it just that there are too few women available to have children anyway.

More on this topic at Protein Wisdom. Great minds think alike, I hope.

More on Birth, Life, Death, Ruling the World, and the Media

One of my longer entries is on birthrates and population. In that article I discussed historical Total Fertility Rates (TFRs), population trending and predictions, and possible impacts of population decline.

Its been almost 18 months since I did the research for that initial work, and I would like to revisit the subject. I am again going to the CIA World Factbook (this time the 2005 edition, not the 2003 edition) for big numbers with some additional information from the U.S. Census Bureau, the UN for population predictions, and some other groups.

Ready for the numbers? The global TFR estimates vary, but were about 2.7 in 2002 (the year that I used for the statistics in my previous article). In 2005 global TFR was at 2.62. The European TFR is an aggregate 1.4, the ‘developed world’ (in other words, Europe plus America, Canada, Japan, and Australia) is 1.6. South America is at a TFR of 2.5, as is Asia as a whole. Central America is at 2.8, the Middle East at 3.6, and Africa is at 5.

TFRs for a number of countries have had minor adjustments, typically reflecting lower TFRs than just 2 years ago. Interest in the so-called ‘birth dearth’ has led to more research in the last 2-5 years giving us more accurate numbers in 2006. China’s TFR dropped from 1.7 to 1.6 between 2002 and 2005, while the American TFR dropped from 2.1 in 2002 t 2.0 in 2004. The South Korean TFR dropped from 1.26 in 2000 to 1.15 in 2005. The Philippines TFR of 3.5 in 2002 has dropped to an estimated 2.7 in 2005. Again, many of these adjustments in TFR rates reflect new research, but there does seem to be an ongoing decrease in TFRs that is more rapid than was previously believed.

The most alarming downward revision may be in Japan. Japan’s TFR in 2002 was 1.32. Researchers revised the 2003 estimate to 1.29 and the new estimate for 2005 is 1.22. This is a rapid drop in TFRs and has led to the question seen in the Japan Times; “When will the last Japanese child be born?”.

Better direct access to the Middle East revised many of those numbers upwards, especially in Afghanistan. There also seems to be an increase in childbearing after American occupation. This largely kept the global TFR flat (or close to it) between 2002 and 2005.

There has been more research on replacement TFR, as well. Due to immigration, the American replacement TFR is now set at 1.8. At the same time, AIDS, war, and other factors have increased the replacement TFR for the developing world to 2.5. Taken together, the ‘flat’ global TFR combined with the increases in replacement TFRs mean that population projections are lower now than they were 16 months ago.

The UN now has the 2004 revision for its population growth estimates, including TFR estimates. There are two interesting things about the UN estimates. First, they are being continually revised down across the board. Second, the UN ‘low’ estimate is usually closest to reality, although it tends to be too high. When I had previously listed the predicted global TFR for 2025 at about 2.3 I was using the 1998 revision of the UN’s data. Looking at the 2004 revision, I will adjust my estimate to a global TFR of 1.9 in 2025.

That is a pretty serious change. It means that the population peak will come sooner and be lower still.

The UN report mentions that they predict that population decline will be relatively small and temporary, resulting in a ‘leveled off’ population of about 9 billion in 2300. Of course, one of these assumptions is that human life expectancy will continue to increase linearly with no limit (i.e., humans in 2300 will have a life expectancy of about 106) and that TFRs will rebound to replacement. They admit that an average (over time) global TFR of 2.4 will result in a year 2300 world population of about 36 billion while an average (over time) global TFR of 1.9 results in a projected year 2300 world population of possibly less than 1.9 billion, even with all other assumptions intact. Any change in death rates up, birth rates down, life expectancies that do not trend up linearly, etc., etc. and the total population is lower.

There are some interesting things coming out of the most recent demographics research. One commonly accepted ‘truth’ is called the ‘demographic transition theory’. This is the ‘elevator pitch’ for demographic transition: rather than a single theory, it is a number of theories based upon the idea that fertility rates (TFR) drop after death rates drop because it is not necessary to have “excess” children to result in the family size you want. Closely related is the idea that as economic opportunities increase there is less need for children to add to family income. Seems pretty simple, really; as fewer children die in their youth and you need fewer hands in the fields, people have fewer kids.

Well, its wrong. More and more research shows that decreases in TFR do not show any real correlation to decreases in infant mortality, the death rate, or economic progress in the developing world. The discrepancies between death rate and TFR are especially strong outside Europe. The demographic transition theories assumed that a higher percentage of children would reach adulthood and that they would live longer, creating ‘positive population pressure’ to offset the decreases in TFRs. In reality, this is certainly not reliable, causing population projections to be consistently too high.

Another accepted truth that ‘the more education a woman has, the fewer children she has’. In my first post on population I mentioned an Israeli study that showed that this was not true for women who self-identified as ‘devout’ who were Jews or Catholics; instead, devout Jewish and Catholic women tended to have more children as their education increased. More and more research is showing that any correlation between education and a decline in fertility is local, not global.

The TFR for ‘Ultra-Orthodox’ Jews in Israel is 7.0 compared to the national 2.44. In the United States the TFR of Catholics after 1965 was largely seen as no different than any other group. Indeed, some reports claimed that White Catholics had the lowest TFR in America in the mid-‘70’s. Now, however, the American Catholic TFR is highest (about 2.4), especially among Hispanic women (perhaps as high as 2.8).

In short, my earlier predictions were a bit too positive. The population maximum will probably be about 7.3 billion, the maximum will probably be reached in about 2030, and the post-peak population decline will be faster – mainly because of the recently increased death rate.

Don’t get me wrong, I am certain Humanity won’t erase itself. But there will be major changes in geopolitics and economics, changes that will be painful.

One thing that I have never understood is the general assumption by demographers that the stunning decreases in TFR were a natural adjustment to overpopulation. This general assumption is that the spike in births after WWII caused a reaction where women all over the world reduced their fertility to adjust back to a ‘better’ world-wide population. In my opinion, this makes no sense. After all, the key indicators tied in to decreasing TFR are improvements in quality of life; more income, more education, better economic factors within the surrounding society, etc. Why is it that all of those factors caused increases in local fertility until about 1960 and then, overnight, they lead to lower fertility – fertility low enough to endanger entire ethnic groups with extinction?

The Deep Thought Analysis Team has a theory that explains the precipitous decline in global TFR. The first component of this theory is the media.

The UN has been predicting a long-term reduction in population since at least 1972 while at the same time adjusting the peak population downward since 1970. The reports on population have been freely and widely available. However, the media’s attention between 1970 and about 2001 was always on the implication of the highest projected population. From the sensationalistic news coverage in the early 1970’s to the mass coverage of the ‘year 6 billion’, the news is generally very committed to warning of overpopulation as an issue.

‘Entertainment’ has also been pounding the overpopulation drum during that time. From Soylent Green to Population movies have been almost as negative as fiction novels, which range from Make Room! Make Room! (the basis for Soylent Green) and Stand on Zanzibar to dozens of others. The number of non-fiction books to speak of overpopulation is immense, beginning with The Population Bomb in 1968. Paul Ehrlich became a celebrity for The Population Bomb, a celebrity that has faded little over time, despite the failure of any of his predictions to come true.

This outpouring of fiction, non-fiction, news, and activism warning the world of overpopulation has convinced a large number of people that the greatest danger to the Earth is too many people. This doomsaying and outreach continued while the UN and demographers were predicting lower and lower peak populations each year. During the intervening four decades there have been fewer deaths from starvation than ever before in history (despite the widely-publicized political starvation of people in Ethiopia and Somalia), the caloric intake of the developing world is up 28%, India (supposedly a nation that would be ‘erased’ by famine) is an exporter of food, and the largest health threat in America may be obesity. Indeed, food is so plentiful that current food commodity prices are less than 50% of their 1970 level (adjusted for inflation); a reduction so sharp, the prices are still lower without adjusting for inflation.

The second component of our theory for plunging TFRs is the unique changes in reproduction in the last 40 years.

Until 1930 the use of artificial contraception was condemned by all Christian denominations and was generally illegal in the West. After the authorized the use of artificial contraception in 1930, however, all major Christian organizations but the Catholic Church followed suit within a few years. However, most forms of contraception remained illegal or difficult to obtain until the repeal of certain state laws began in the late 1950’s, resulting in the broad availability of prophylactics about 1960. The first effective oral contraceptive (‘the Pill’) was also made available in 1960 (although not generally available until about 1965). Finally, throught the 1960’s and 1970’s abortion was being legalized, first in the West, then worldwide.

Thus the 1960’s were the first time in human history that contraceptives were both readily available and actually effective. Their introduction at the same time as the media and cultural belief in and promotion of the idea of apocalyptic overpopulation resulted in a massive push to promote radical population control in the form of dispensing birth control world-wide, especially to the developing world. Planned Parenthood, the UN, and dozens of organizations and governments have spent up to tens of billions of dollars per year providing contraceptives and abortion services throughout the globe. Massive education campaigns are conducted advocating the use of contraceptives and fighting for access to and the subsidizing of abortion. Indeed, the promotion of birth control and abortion is so forceful that have been cases where ‘family planning’ equipment bumps medicines and even food off of relief supply trips; the birth control is seen as more ‘essential’.

The third component of the theory has to do with attitudes.

In the 1860’s Sir Francis Galton (a cousin of Charles Darwin) came to the conclusion that civilization was thwarting natural selection in humans. In 1865 he wrote ‘Hereditary Talent and Character’, a key element in the creation of Social Darwinism, or the belief that the poor, ignorant, unsuccessful, less intelligent, etc. were genetically undesirable. Galton, however, also went on in later works to advocate the artificial selection of humans for genius. Along with a number of other writers and thinkers, this developed into the concepts of eugenics.

By the beginnings of the 20th Century eugenics was considered a social science and major universities around the world (except in Catholic nations) taught courses on eugenics as a mainstream science. Largely seen as a ‘progressive’ science, it was focused on bettering mankind. Proponents of Eugenics included Alexander Graham Bell, W.E.B. DuBois, and William Shockley.

Another prominent eugenicist was Margaret Sanger (who was the primary source of funds for the development of the Pill). Margaret Sanger worked with Harry Laughlin (a prominent eugenicist inspired Nazi sterilization laws) and actively promoted birth control chiefly as a method of ensuring “more children from the fit, less from the unfit”. Sanger also campaigned hard for both compulsory sterilization laws (she was largely successful in this) and a requirement that a married couple demonstrate ‘fitness’ before being licensed to have a child (something she failed at). This attitude, that the right to have children should be restricted by the government, was echoed in The Tragedy of the Commons, a book released at the same time as The Population Bomb.

The eugenics concept popularized the idea of children as a commodity; ‘fit’ children were seen as a positive, ‘unfit’ children as a negative. Combined with the economic arguments of Planned Parenthood, society came to see children as a burden that must be justified. When added to the overpopulation hysteria, the result is the conclusion by many that having children is inherently evil.

The fourth component of the theory is more subtle than many of the others and a bit harder to quantify.

As mentioned above, the conventional wisdom about fertility has been that; well informed women have fewer children; Highly-educated women also have fewer children; wealthy women have fewer children than poor women; women with a successful career have fewer children, too. Whether these statements are true or false, they are repeated in the media, the classroom, and by advocates of birth control.

The result is not that women with few or no children are lauded, but that women with ‘too many’ children are seen as ignorant, poorly educated, poor, and as failures. This may be especially true in the developing world where women are trying to emulate their ideal of success, or what they are told will result in wealth and freedom.

The entire theory posits that the prevalence and acceptance of birth control and abortion combined with the concepts that children are a burden that must be justified, that overpopulation is a dire and imminent threat, and the social pressures that stigmatize mothers of large families, are acting to drive down fertility rates around the world.

The implications of this are pretty serious; if true, there is no inherent counter to the trend. As long as the various pressures to lower TFRs exist, they should continue to go down. At some point we must assume that the general population will recognize that overpopulation is not an issue, let alone a threat, and TFRs will begin rebounding. Unfortunately, this may not happen until after the die-off of entire cultures, even entire races.

In the absence of such a realization, we must depend upon the actions of religion. Certain religions, primarily Judeo-Christian religions, advocate an expanding population as inherently positive. At current rates, this means that Orthodox Jews and conservative Catholics will increase as a percentage of the global population, and this increase will only accelerate over the next 100 years.

I dislike making predictions about something as variable as population growth, but it is conceivable that the Earth of 2300 will have a population of 5 billion people; 1 billion Jews, 3 billion Catholics, and 1 billion ‘everyone else’.