Every once in a while in the
culture war
, some participant, with complete certainty and confidence, launches an accusation so simultaneously odious and insane that it is hard to know how to respond. Then, somehow, that insane accusation becomes dogma in weird corners of the culture war.
There is a cadre on the cultural Left that is sure that anyone who tries to address America’s baby bust is a white nationalist, a racist, or a eugenicist.
This wild idea flared up again Thursday in a piece headlined “
Would You Have Four Kids if It Meant Never Paying Taxes Again?
” New York Times parenting writer Jessica Grose discusses various efforts to reverse our demographic slide.
UNIVERSAL PRESCHOOL HAS SOME BENEFITS, BUT NOT FOR CHILDREN
Grose quotes demographer Jennifer Sciubba, listing the options for surviving a baby bust: “increase immigration, raise retirement ages, cut benefits or get more people already in the country to work.” Grose concludes, “Most of these solutions are politically unworkable.”
So the next option Grose considers is paying people to have babies. The governments that have tried this, most notably
Hungary
and
France
, have found this is very expensive and only moves the needle a tiny bit.
Grose’s conclusion: You can’t pay people to be parents if they don’t want to be parents. So her alternative: “Encourage people who are already parents to have a second or a third child under eased conditions or to start their families earlier, leaving more time to have more children.”
Now, keep in mind Grose and Sciubba are culturally on the Left — this piece is written from a feminist, egalitarian, and nontraditionalist moral viewpoint on marriage and sex. Yet here’s the response from a Yale economist:
Subtle, clever promotion of eugenics in @nytimes.
The obvious solution to falling fertility is to allow productive young immigrants in.
If you’d rather pay citizens to have children, that implies you care about genetic composition of the next generation https://t.co/eOo4Iv7HhG— Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak (@mushfiq_econ) February 9, 2023
Wait, what?
This is a totally insane response.
For starters, it’s simply disgusting and unconscionable to accuse someone of eugenics for seeking ways to help people have the bigger families they want. Grose in no way opposes immigration or hints that it’s families of a particular race that would be helped by such policies.
This response is also very ignorant in demographic terms. The United States is less than 60% non-Hispanic white, so if everyone in America had more babies, a huge portion would be black, Hispanic, or Asian babies. But that’s understating it.
America’s Hispanic and black populations are much
younger
than the white population, and the median white woman is past childbearing age. That means any pro-natal policy would likely make the U.S. a bit less white. To call that “eugenics” is simply idiotic.
But again, this accusation of racism or eugenics is standard fare these days. For example, Washington Post op-ed writer Ari Brostoff ignorantly
accused
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) of white nationalism for lamenting falling birthrates.
New York Times economist Paul Krugman flatly
said
, without any basis, that pro-natalists are really just desperate for “more white Christians.”
New York Times reporter Lydia DePillis said most baby-bust worrying is racist:
I wish this were the salient point of all declining-fertility stories — it’s better for the planet and societies can learn to adapt, if only they get over their great-power master-race puffery / Ponzi scheme growth models. https://t.co/ze2OGoxoog pic.twitter.com/DKG8eeVX9d
— Lydia DePillis (@lydiadepillis) May 26, 2021
The irony is that the most prominent eugenicists in American history were the peddlers of population control. Nevertheless, expect this insane argument to persist and expect everyone who tries to help couples have more children to get accused of being a white nationalist. Because, hey, such accusations are easier than putting together a coherent thought or making an argument.
