Expert: Stop population decline!…get rid of marriage and family?

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D. | April 19, 2012

An OpEd in yesterday’s New York Times says that in order to reverse Europe’s population implosion policy makers must first reject objections by advocates of traditional marriage and the family.  After all, the reasoning goes, nations with the highest fertility, Sweden and France, have the highest out of wedlock births.

But this doesn’t  jibe with what we know about long term national economic and strategic  competitiveness. It would have us throw out marriage–and institution that has undergirded society for thousands of years–with no evidence that it would help the nation in the long term. It ignores what we know about where higher fertility comes from (in many places the pockets of society that are most religious and traditional). And it takes no account of the mounting data that traditional marriage and family is good for children, tomorrow’s workforce.

The bottom line is that marriage and family breakdown actually threaten to squander the demographic advantage.

Indeed, the OpEd contradicts a recent article in the NYT lamenting the fact that the U.S. has more than 40% out of wedlock births, and that this in turn raises the risk to children of increased poverty, poor health, and lower education. In other words, even though the U.S. workforce is expected to increase 16 % by 2050–a highly coveted advantage indeed considering that the UK will only expand by 5% and France’s workforce will decline by 2% in the same timeframe–U.S. productivity could decrease anyway.

Research from the Cato Institute shows why national productivity improves when workers are raised in the traditional family, and especially the extended family. These workers are less likely to be unemployed and have less time between employment.

The “quantity” over “quality” argument is the opposite extreme from the old adage supporters of China’s brutally enforced one child per family policy. Neither rings true.

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter