Why is Europe committing demographic suicide? - by Carolyn Moynihan

In MercatorNet

Frankly, not even the experts have the faintest idea

Everybody knows about the economic woes of Europe. In the media you cannot get away from it. What we seldom hear about is a problem that puts debt crises and austerity riots in the shade: the region’s demographic suicide. Europeans, on the whole, are not having enough babies to replace themselves -- a trend which threatens the workforce, support of the aged and even the continued existence of some nations. It is a problem that goes back well before the recent housing bubbles and busts, bank failures and bailouts. It is probably a cause of the latter.

Yet it is a mystery to the people we rely to predict such things. Demographers, economists and psychologists are scratching their heads over a phenomenon that breaks all their statistical models and paradigms of human behaviour. Why would people who are prosperous (and, despite the current situation, western Europe is) not want to do what human beings have always done and leave a posterity? How can they contemplate the eclipse of their nation?

One answer might be that the public is simply not aware of what is happening. Lant Pritchett, an economist and Professor of the Practice of International Development at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, told MercatorNet: “Scientists of perception study ‘change blindness’ and can show people have a hard time even visually seeing gradual change, much less gradual change at the social level. Unlike the advocates for climate change there are no ‘extreme events’ like Hurricane Sandy in demography so it is hard to get attention onto the inevitable consequences of current fertility.”

Dr Pritchett and colleague Martina Viarengo are the authors of an essay, “Why Demographic Suicide? The Puzzles of European Fertility”, which is part of a collection of essays published recently by the New York based Population Council in honour of a distinguished scholar, Paul Demeny. The papers are heavy going but repay the effort to grasp what population experts are saying right now.

This is certainly the case with “Demographic Suicide…”, which states clearly the seriousness of persistent low fertility and the fact that the usual experts simply do not know how to account for it, let alone come up with a remedy. The authors speak of below replacement fertility (BRF) as “a revolution in human affairs”, a “paradigm-shattering phenomenon”. They are not exaggerating. They end by posing the “big open question of how children fit into an overall pattern of ‘family’ in the post modern era.”

“Replacement” as the goal of population policy

Sixty years ago the question was completely different. Influential people like the founder of the Population Council, John D. Rockefeller III, were worried about population growth in the developing world resulting from the fall in death rates (thanks to better health care) and continuing high fertility. They thought that people could not have good quality lives with so many mouths to feed. The fact that former colonies of Europe were becoming independent and you never knew what they might do politically added to First World jitters. Nothing but a concerted effort to stabilise population would do. Demographers did their projections and “replacement fertility” (2.1 children per woman) became their holy grail.

With backing from the UN and the cooperation of Third World governments the “war against population” (as economist Jacqueline Kasun has called it) was launched. The contraceptive pill was rapidly deployed with government subsidies. Abortion became a reproductive right. These methods had their strongest effect in the rich countries, where fertility had been in decline anyway but was boosted by the post-war baby boom. Developing countries took to draconian methods such as sterilisation campaigns in India and the one-child policies in China. Economic development, education and health care also contributed to lower birth rates.

Globally, the goal of replacement level fertility is now within reach. According to the UN’s medium estimate the average woman today will have 2.36 children – down from 4.95 in the early 1950s. New research suggests the 2.1 mark will be reached by around 2050. The trouble is that, while some countries will still be above that magical figure, some will be well below. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that even globally population will stabilise; decline is more probable. Already half the world’s nations, including many of the less developed, have total fertility rates (TFR) below replacement.

Some of the lowest rates in the world are in East Asia, but among the 27 countries of the Europe Union not one currently has a TFR of 2.1 or more, although Ireland, Iceland, Turkey and perhaps France are around 2, and the UK and the Nordic countries have rates between 1.87 and 1.98. At least a dozen EU countries are under 1.5; Spain and Germany are on 1.36 and Italy 1.41 (2010-2011 figures).

Behind these figures are the decisions of women and men shaped not by the imperatives of evolution or the rationales of economics – let alone the assumptions of demographers -- but by factors that experts in those fields are not even equipped to understand.

Demography, as Pritchett and Viarengo point out, is a descriptive discipline and cannot make predictions without a behavioural theory to go with them – which it did not have when its practitioners assumed that fertility would magically stabilise at replacement.

Evolutionary psychology, a popular source of behavioural theory, might (might) tell us what humans will do about procreation in the context of limited resources (have fewer but better quality offspring), but it seems quite useless to explain why people whose wealth and social status are increasing would stop having children. “BRF in Europe seems a paradigm-shattering phenomenon for evolutionary psychology,” Pritchett and Viarengo note.

The economic model

That leaves economics, Pritchett’s own discipline and one that he admits is also at a loss to fully account for persistent low fertility. “The joke about economists is that they are people with a head for numbers that lack the personality to be actuaries,” he told us in an email.

We had asked what could motivate nations to turn this problem around. He said: “I am pretty good with numbers but not only do I not know the answer to this question, being a new phenomenon, we have yet to discover numbers and data from experiences of turning it around so I don't know even know what to do to begin answering this question: that is why the piece was titled ‘puzzles’ not ‘answers’."

All the same, economics has a lot to say about procreation and most of it is a little bit shocking to the layperson who comes across it for the first time. Roughly it goes like this.

Children are “complex capital goods” in whom parents invest with the expectation of a return, or “child services”. These services can be produced by a large number of low quality children or a small number of high quality children. In conditions of rising income people want fewer but higher quality children, investing more in their education and so on. This drives up the price of a child -- together with an opportunity cost in the form of the time it takes to consume the services (pleasure or satisfaction) a child produces -- compared with other goods, such as a summer holidays or a better house.

The trouble with this type of behaviour is that children can be priced off the market completely – and perhaps unintentionally – because once you get down to one child the next step is not a “little bit” of high quality child, but none at all; not a gradual change but a “massive discontinuous drop in the demand for child services,” as Pritchett and Viarengo put it. This can be seen in rates of childlessness in a few European countries at or approaching 20 percent among women aged 45. (There are sub-regional differences which are interesting and worth looking up in the essay.)

Substitution

Clearly, childlessness is the biggest challenge for population theorists. What might people be choosing instead of a child? Pritchett and Viarengo look at possible substitutes for the “little hedonic bundle” that a baby represents and find two likely candidates.

The first is social security for the aged, which replaces the support aged parents once expected from their children – something that is unsustainable, though, in conditions of population decline. The second is the market work that women have embraced and that may return them more meaning and status than motherhood has done up until now.

When it comes to a substitute for the love and intimacy that having children provides in traditional family life, however, the authors of “Demographic suicide” are stumped.

They note that “sexual activity, childbearing and marriage have become disconnected so that increasingly it is socially acceptable to have one without either of the other two,” particularly in northern and western Europe. But: “It is not at all obvious to us what is going on with the ‘demand for intimacy’.” While in some countries people continue to have children without getting married, and in others to marry but have very few children, there are signs (in Finland, for example) that marriage and fertility – especially through an increase in childlessness – are declining together.

“What is substituting in the lives of women and men for the love and intimacy that came from parent–child relationships? It is certainly not a significant increase in marital love and intimacy without children substituting for less marital love and intimacy with children—particularly in countries where marriage and long-term cohabitation have declined.”

One answer to this question might be “same-sex relationships”. But even where children are added to these partnerships by technical means they can hardly solve the social problem of low fertility. And even if they are regarded as married that is not going to boost the birth rate.

Yet marriage, properly defined, does seem to be the answer – the only one we know from long experience -- to the demand both for intimacy and for enough children to give the human race a future. Pronatalist policies such as baby bonuses, paid parental leave and gender equity in the workplace appear to have made some difference to the birth rate in countries where they have been introduced, but there are human motivations that such incentives do not touch – things like till-death-us-do-part commitment to a spouse and the willingness to sacrifice easier pleasures for the joy of seeing mutual love bear fruit in the form of a child.

The question, finally, is what can foster such motivations. In the past it was religious faith. Is there any substitute for that?

Nuevos Herodes quieren imponer su ideología de muerte, denuncia Arzobispo Eguren

PIURA, 28 Dic. 12 / 07:00 pm (ACI/EWTN Noticias).- El Arzobispo de Piura y Tumbes (Perú) y presidente de la Comisión para la Familia y la Defensa de la Vida de la Conferencia Episcopal Peruana (CEP), Mons. José Antonio Eguren, denunció que “los poderosos de hoy”, a manera de “nuevos Herodes, quieren imponernos su ideología de muerte que es totalmente ajena al sentir de la inmensa mayoría de nuestros pueblos, amantes de la vida”.

En su homilía por la Fiesta de los Santos Mártires Inocentes, que dedicó a los niños y niñas víctimas del aborto que fallecieron en Piura y Tumbes en 2012, Mons. Eguren señaló que “con dolor constatamos hoy en día que la sombra de muerte del aborto pretende envolvernos en el Perú y en nuestro continente latinoamericano”.

El Arzobispo exhortó a los fieles a no permitir “que unos cuantos políticos y juristas oportunistas, en alianza con organizaciones abortistas que poseen mucho poder económico, cambien las leyes de nuestra Patria y legalicen el aborto en el Perú”.

“Hoy en día, hay que decirlo una y otra vez: un ser humano por nacer es tan digno de vivir y de ser amado, de ser protegido y defendido, como lo es un recién nacido”, subrayó.

Mons. Eguren reiteró en su homilía que “el aborto no puede ser nunca un derecho humano. Es exactamente lo opuesto”.

El Arzobispo de Piura y Tumbes señaló que, al mirar a la Virgen, “que lleva a Jesús en su seno, vemos que allí donde hubiera podido cometerse un homicidio, se hubiera podido consumar un deicidio. ¿Qué mayor prueba que ésta, de que la vida humana es un don sagrado que siempre debe ser respetada y acogida desde la concepción hasta su fin natural?”.

“En el misterio de Dios encarnado comprendemos mejor la sacralidad de la vida humana: si bien ella ha sido originada por nosotros, no proviene sólo de nosotros, sino de Dios. Que la Navidad sea ocasión para reafirmar un Sí a la Vida por Nacer y un No rotundo al crimen del aborto”, dijo.

Mons. Eguren también recordó que el Papa Benedicto XVI, en su Mensaje para la Jornada Mundial de la Paz 2013, “nos advierte contra el gran mal que significa la liberalización del aborto y se opone firmemente a reglamentar este falso derecho o libertad que amenaza el derecho fundamental a la vida, mediante leyes, sentencias judiciales, convenciones internacionales, planes nacionales, o decretos supremos inicuos, basados en una visión reductiva y relativista del ser humano”.

El presidente de la Comisión para la Familia de la CEP dijo a los fieles que “hay que afirmar con claridad que el derecho inviolable de todo ser inocente a la vida desde su concepción, no es una verdad de fe, y por tanto un asunto simplemente confesional, aunque reciba de la fe una nueva luz y confirmación”.

“Este derecho está inscrito en la misma naturaleza humana, y por tanto se puede conocer por la razón y es común a toda la humanidad”, aseguró.

Mons. Eguren indicó que “cuando afirmamos que la vida humana debe ser respetada y protegida de manera absoluta desde el momento de la concepción, desde el primer momento de la existencia, estamos hablando de un asunto de humanidad”.

“Si la Iglesia hace suya la causa de los niños por nacer, si Ella se hace la voz de los que no tienen voz pero sí el derecho intocable a la vida, es porque ‘el hombre es el camino primero y fundamental de la Iglesia’ y porque nada de lo humano le es ajeno al Evangelio que Ella anuncia por mandato de su Señor”, dijo.

“La Iglesia no puede abandonar jamás a la persona humana, señaló.
Mons. Eguren expresó que “además de orar por los niños y niñas abortados en el año 2012, queremos pedir al Señor por la conversión de todos aquellos que directa o indirectamente han procurado un aborto”.

El Arzobispo también pidió “por la conversión de aquellos que traman una y otra vez con insidia e intriga la despenalización y la legalización del aborto en el Perú”. “Recemos también esta noche para que el aborto nunca sea aprobado en nuestra Patria”, dijo.

Mons. Eguren también hizo un llamado a los políticos peruanos, recordándoles que “la apertura y defensa de la vida está en el centro del verdadero desarrollo. Incluyamos en nuestros planes políticos, sociales, culturales y económicos al niño por nacer y junto con él a la familia, célula primera y vital de la sociedad, patrimonio de la humanidad”.

“Ninguna otra institución puede sustituir a la familia. Sólo así la inclusión social de la que hoy tanto se habla, será verdadera y podremos darle a nuestro futuro un rostro verdaderamente humano”, señaló.

El Prelado exhortó a los jóvenes con vocación al matrimonio a buscar “siempre las exigencias del amor hermoso; que tengan relaciones afectivas sinceras y puras; que se preparen al matrimonio en la castidad y pureza. Jóvenes: no caigan en la tentación de reducir el amor a un mero placer egoísta y genital”.

“A los padres de familia les pido que acojan con amor a cada hijo con el que sean bendecidos. Acójanlo desde el primer momento en que se enteran que ya esta viviendo en el vientre de su madre; denle todo su amor y protección ya que como ustedes, tiene el derecho sagrado e inviolable a vivir y a nacer”, indicó.

El Arzobispo recordó a los padres que “sin la gracia del sacramento matrimonio y de la Eucaristía dominical, les será muy difícil amarse como esposos, crecer en el amor fiel, educar a sus hijos en la fe y formar un hogar que sea cenáculo de amor y santuario de la vida”.

Mons. Eguren concluyó pidiéndole a aquellas mujeres embarazadas que atraviesan situaciones difíciles o de confusión, que “no caigas en la tentación de abortarlo. Nada justifica matar a tu hijo”.

“No añadas al sufrimiento de matarlo el sufrimiento que vivirás después, porque relativamente fácil puede ser sacar a un hijo del vientre, pero muy difícil será sacarlo después de tu mente y corazón”, señaló.

Eutanásia financeira - por António Bagão Félix

In VER 

A economia da saúde está cada vez mais dependente da saúde da economia. Daí a necessidade de uma séria ponderação do custo-benefício e da equidade da despesa. Nada de incomum, mas com a enorme diferença de aqui estar em jogo o mais absoluto valor: o da vida.

Vem isto a propósito do parecer do Conselho de Ética para as Ciências da Vida sobre a utilização de medicamentos oncológicos, contra a sida e artrite reumatóide, responsáveis por parte significativa do gasto com fármacos.

A ideia do parecer – e das declarações do seu presidente – é a de que deve haver “racionamento ético” (foi o termo) no seu uso quando se trata de prolongar a vida dos doentes. Propõe-se que em “diálogo e com toda a transparência” (sic!) com os doentes se “negoceie” a medida terminal da vida: “viver mais 1 mês custa X, 3 meses custa Y. O que acha, meu caro doente?”

O espartilho orçamental não justifica tudo. E muito menos visões redutoras do valor da vida.

Imersa na primazia da quantidade, a pessoa humana é reduzida à condição indigna de instrumento ou meio. Deixa de ser vista como princípio, sujeito e fim de toda e qualquer acção.

A ética de cuidar não se esgota na ética de curar. Se esta forma de “eutanásia financeira” faz doutrina, que futuro para os cuidados paliativos e continuados?

Este é o país onde, na lei, se desvaloriza a vida antes do nascimento. Agora quer-se desvalorizá-la antes da morte. Com uma desumana equação de euros versus um pedaço de vida.

Este é o país onde há dinheiro para o aborto voluntário e respectiva licença da Seguança Social. Mas, ao mesmo tempo, se quer “tabelar”, por razões financeiras, o tempo final da vida. Qualquer “troika” não faria melhor…

Artigo originalmente publicado no Jornal de Negócios. Republicado com permissão do autor.

O mal-entendido - por João César das Neves

In DN

Uma das poucas coisas em que há acordo é que Portugal precisa de crescimento. Não só é a única forma de vencer a recessão e desemprego, mas a sua falta é a causa da desconfiança financeira. A Irlanda, muito mais endividada que nós, deixou de ser alvo dos mercados porque a sua economia revelou um dinamismo que tem faltado a outros, como nós.

Infelizmente este consenso, que deveria levar a atitudes e projectos comuns, quebra logo a seguir, devido a um estranho mal-entendido. É espantoso mas muitos dos que afirmam com clareza a urgência de promover o crescimento e criação de emprego, logo na frase seguinte se põem a falar de outro tema, propondo medidas e intervenções que não só pouco têm a ver com a dinâmica produtiva, mas até a prejudicam.

Este terrível erro, que pode ter consequências gravíssimas no futuro, advém do esquecimento de um facto simples, evidente, incontornável, base central da vida económica, mas frequentemente omisso nos raciocínios de muitos que se dizem especialistas nessas coisas. O crescimento económico só se pode verificar nas empresas, através do trabalho produtivo e investimento rentável, envolvendo mercados equilibrados e eficientes, para satisfazer as necessidades da população. Através do esforço, engenho, iniciativa e dinamismo dos agentes económicos, empenhados a fundo em actividades lucrativas, é que se consegue o tão desejado progresso.

Deste princípio básico e indiscutível saem vários corolários elementares, que as discussões comuns violam de forma ingénua. Por exemplo, se crescimento é isto, então não se trata de uma questão de política, decretos e institutos. Trata-se de economia, empresas, empregos, não diplomas, estudos, discursos. O Estado tem um papel decisivo na sociedade, mas não é fazer crescimento, ter bébés ou marcar golos.

Só que o segundo fôlego de quem fala sobre estes assuntos é sempre dedicado à intriga ministerial. Promover crescimento é, segundo eles, dar subsídios (que implica impostos que oprimem a economia), criar incentivos (que distorcem o dinamismo e rigidificam a estrutura), fazer planos (que estabelecem clientelas e prejudicam negócios), ajudar sectores (que perpetua favores e encarece produtos). Esta foi precisamente a política seguida pelos sucessivos ministérios que nos trouxeram à crise. Eles achavam saber melhor que a sociedade o que havia a fazer, e o resultado está à vista. A década perdida da economia portuguesa, que já se aproxima de década e meia, foi o mais intenso período de política de crescimento da nossa história. Isto não constitui um paradoxo pelo simples facto de que crescimento económico não é política, mas economia. Em certo sentido é o oposto da política.

A razão deste mal-entendido não é distracção ou ignorância. O motivo é que grande parte daqueles que exigem crescimento têm uma agenda própria, que pretendem mascarar de progresso. O que se passa é que na nossa comunicação social raramente se ouve a voz das forças produtivas, dos consumidores, dos pobres. Quem domina o espaço mediático são os grupos de pressão, interesses instalados, organismos de poder. Esses são os que ganham dinheiro com os subsídios, incentivos, planos e ajudas. Esses, mesmo que o crescimento nunca chegue a ser promovido, já receberam o seu. O que eles querem não é crescimento mas política de crescimento.

Portugal precisa de crescimento. Para isso é urgente liberalizar a economia, deixar trabalhadores e patrões fazerem aquilo que sabem, satisfazer clientes, nacionais ou estrangeiros, sem terem ministros, deputados, burocratas e intrigistas a tapar o caminho. É urgente que as principais preocupações das empresas sejam as necessidades dos consumidores e a ameaça dos concorrentes, não os regulamentos e formulários, requerimentos e licenças, grupos de pressão e interesses. Disso temos tido a nossa conta nas últimas décadas, e com eles aprendemos a destruir o crescimento. Agora está na altura de inverter o processo porque, como todos estamos de acordo, Portugal precisa de crescimento.
 

Five Pillars of a Decent and Dynamic Society - by Robert P. George

In jp2alf

John Paul II Australian Leaders Forum

Sydney

11 August 2012

Any healthy society, any decent society, will rest upon three pillars. The first is respect for the human person—the individual human being and his dignity. Where this pillar is in place, the formal and informal institutions of society, and the beliefs and practices of the people, will be such that every member of the human family—irrespective of race, sex, or ethnicity, to be sure, but also and equally irrespective of age, size, stage of development, or condition of dependency—is treated as a person—that is, as a subject bearing profound, inherent, and equal worth and dignity.

A society that does not nurture respect the human person—beginning with the child in the womb, and including the mentally and physically impaired and the frail elderly—will sooner or later (probably sooner, rather than later) come to regard human beings as mere cogs in the larger social wheel whose dignity and well-being may legitimately be sacrificed for the sake of the collectivity. Some members of the community—those in certain development stages, for example— will come to be regarded as disposable, and others—those in certain conditions of dependency, for example, will come to be viewed as intolerably burdensome, as "useless eaters, as "better off dead," as Lebensunwerten lebens.

In its most extreme modern forms, totalitarian regimes reduce the individual to the status of an instrument to serve the ends of the fascist state or the future communist utopia. When liberal democratic regimes go awry, it is often because a utilitarian ethic reduces the human person to a means rather than an end to which other things including the systems and institutions of law, education, and the economy are means. The abortion license against which we struggle today is dressed up by its defenders in the language of individual and even natural rights—and there can be no doubt that the acceptance of abortion is partly the fruit of me-generation liberal ideology—a corruption (and burlesque) of liberal political philosophy in its classical form; but more fundamentally it is underwritten by a utilitarian ethic that, in the end, vaporizes the very idea of natural rights, treating the idea (in Jeremy Bentham's famously dismissive words) as "nonsense on stilts."

In cultures in which religious fanaticism has taken hold, the dignity of the individual is typically sacrificed for the sake of tragically misbegotten theological ideas and goals. By contrast, a liberal democratic ethos, where it is uncorrupted by utilitarianism or me-generation expressive individualism, supports the dignity of the human person by giving witness to basic human rights and liberties. Where a healthy religious life flourishes, faith in God provides a grounding for the dignity and inviolability of the human person by, for example, proposing an understanding of each and every member of the human family, even those of different faiths or professing no particular faith, as persons made in the image and likeness of the divine Author of our lives and liberties.

The second pillar of any decent society is the institution of the family. It is indispensable. The family, based on the marital commitment of husband and wife, is the original and best ministry of health, education, and welfare. Although no family is perfect, no institution matches the healthy family in its capacity to transmit to each new generation the understandings and traits of character — the values and virtues — upon which the success of every other institution of society, from law and government to educational institutions and business firms, vitally depends.

Where families fail to form, or too many break down, the effective transmission of the virtues of honesty, civility, self-restraint, concern for the welfare of others, justice, compassion, and personal responsibility is imperiled. Without these virtues, respect for the dignity of the human person, the first pillar

of a decent society, will be undermined and sooner or later lost—for even the most laudable formal institutions cannot uphold respect for human dignity where people do not have the virtues that make that respect a reality and give it vitality in actual social practices.

Respect for the dignity of the human being requires more than formally sound institutions; it requires a cultural ethos in which people act from conviction to treat each other as human beings should be treated: with respect, civility, justice, compassion. The best legal and political institutions ever devised are of little value where selfishness, contempt for others, dishonesty, injustice, and other types of immorality and irresponsibility flourish. Indeed, the effective working of governmental institutions themselves depends upon most people most of the time obeying the law out of a sense of moral obligation, and not merely out of fear of detection and punishment for law-breaking. And perhaps it goes without saying that the success of business and a market-based economic system depends on there being reasonably virtuous, trustworthy, law-abiding, promise-keeping people to serve as workers and managers, lenders, regulators, and payers of bills for goods and services.

The third pillar of any decent society is a fair and effective system of law and government. This is necessary because none of us is perfectly virtuous all the time, and some people will be deterred from wrongdoing only by the threat of punishment. More importantly, contemporary philosophers of law tell us the law coordinates human behavior for the sake of achieving common goals — thecommon good — especially in dealing with the complexities of modern life. Even if all of us were perfectly virtuous all of the time, we would still need a system of laws (considered as a scheme of authoritatively stipulated coordination norms) to accomplish many of our common ends (safely transporting ourselves on the streets, to take a simple and obvious example).

The success of business firms and the economy as a whole depends vitally on a fair and effective system and set of institutions for the administration of justice. We need judges skilled in the craft of law and free of corruption. We need to be able to rely on courts to settle disputes, including disputes between parties who are both in good faith, and to enforce contracts and other agreements and enforce them in a timely manner. Indeed, the knowledge that contracts will be enforced is usually sufficient to ensure that courts will not actually be called on to enforce them. A sociological fact of which we can be certain is this: Where there is no reliable system of the administration of justice— no confidence that the courts will hold people to their obligations under the law

— business will not flourish and everyone in the society will suffer.

A society can, in my opinion, be a decent one even if it is not a dynamic one, if the three pillars are healthy and functioning in a mutually supportive way (as they will do if each is healthy). Now, conservatives of a certain stripe believe that a truly decent society cannot be a dynamic one. Dynamism, they believe, causes instability that undermines the pillars of a decent society. So some conservatives in old Europe and even the United States opposed not onlyindustrialism but the very idea of a commercial society, fearing that commercial economies inevitably produce consumerist and acquisitive materialist attitudes that corrode the foundations of decency. And some, such as some Amish communities in the U.S., reject education for their children beyond what is necessary to master reading, writing, and arithmetic, on the ground that higher education leads to worldliness and apostasy and undermines religious faith and moral virtue.

Although a decent society need not be a dynamic one (as the Amish example shows) dynamism need not erode decency. A dynamic society need not be one in which consumerism and materialism become rife and in which moral and spiritual values disappear. Indeed, dynamism can play a positive moral role and, I would venture to say, almost certainly will play such a role where what makes it possible is sufficient to sustain it over the long term.

That is, I realize, a rather cryptic comment, so let me explain what I mean. To do that, I will have to offer some thoughts on what in fact makes social dynamism possible.

The two pillars of social dynamism are, first, institutions of research and education in which the frontiers of knowledge across in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences are pushed back, and through which knowledge is transmitted to students and disseminated to the public at large; and, second, business firms and associated institutions supporting them or managed in ways that are at least in some respects patterned on their principles, by which wealth is generated, widely distributed, and preserved.

We can think of universities and business firms, together with respect for the dignity of the human person, the institution of the family, and the system of law and government, as the five pillars of decent and dynamic societies. The university and the business firm depend in various ways for their well-being on the well-being of the others, and they can help to support the others in turn. At the same time, of course, ideologies and practices hostile to the pillars of a decent society can manifest themselves in higher education and in business and these institutions can erode the social values on which they themselves depend not only for their own integrity, but for their long-term survival.

It is all too easy to take the pillars for granted. So it is important to remember that each of them has come under attack from different angles and forces. Operating from within universities, persons and movements hostile to one or the other of these pillars, usually preaching or acting in the name of high ideals of one sort or another, have gone on the attack.

Attacks on business and the very idea of the market economy and economic freedom coming from the academic world are, of course, well known. Students are sometimes taught to hold business, and especially businessmen, in contempt as heartless exploiters driven by greed. In my own days as a student, these attacks were often made explicitly in the name of Marxism. One notices less of that after the collapse of the Soviet empire, but the attacks themselves have abated little. Needless to say, where businesses behave unethically they play into the stereotypes of the enemies of the market system and facilitate their effort to smear business and the free market for the sake of transferring greater control of the economy to government.

Similarly, attacks on the family, and particularly on the institution of marriage on which the family is built, are common in the academy. The line here is that the family, at least as traditionally constituted and understood, is a patriarchal and exploitative institution that oppresses women and imposes on people forms of sexual restraint that are psychologically damaging and inhibiting of the free expression of their personality. As has become clear in the past decade and a half, there is a profound threat to the family here, one against which we must fight with all our energy and will. It is difficult to think of any item on the domestic agenda that is more critical today than the defense of marriage as the union of husband and wife and the effort to renew and rebuild the marriage culture.

What has also become clear is that the threats to the family (and to the sanctity of human life) are at the same time and necessarily threats to religious freedom and to religion itself—at least where the religions in question stand up and speak out for conjugal marriage and the rights of the child in the womb. From the point of view of those seeking to re-define marriage and to protect and advance what they regard as the right to abortion the taming of religion, and the stigmatization and marginalization of religions that refuse to be tamed, is a moral imperative. It is therefore not surprising to see that they are increasingly open in saying that they do not see disputes about sex and marriage and abortion and euthanasia as honest disagreements among reasonable people of goodwill. They are, rather, battles between the forces of "reason" and "enlightenment," on one side, and those of "ignorance" and "bigotry," on the other. Their opponents are to be treated just as racists are treated—since they are the equivalent of racists. That doesn't necessarily mean imprisoning them or fining them for expressing unacceptable opinions—though "hate crimes" laws in certain jurisdictions raise the specter of precisely such abuses; but it does mean using antidiscrimination laws and other legal instruments to stigmatize them, marginalize them, and impose upon them and their institutions various forms of social and even civil disability—with few if any meaningful protections for religious liberty and the rights of conscience.

Some will counsel that commercial businesses and business people "have no horse in this race." They will say that these are moral, cultural, and religious disputes about which business people and people concerned with economic freedom need not concern themselves. The reality is that the ideological movements that today seek, for example, to redefine marriage and abolish its normativity for romantic relations and the rearing of children are the same movements that seek to undermine the market-based economic system and replace it with statist control of vast areas of economic life. Moreover, the rise of ideologies hostile to marriage and the family has had a measurable social impact, and its costs are counted in ruined relationships, damaged lives, and all that follows in the social sphere from these personal catastrophes. In many poorer places in the United States, and I believe this is true in many other countries, families are simply failing to form and marriage is disappearing or coming to be regarded as an optional "life-style choice"—one among various optional ways of conducting relationships and having and rearing children. Out of wedlock birthrates are very high, with the negative consequences being borne less by the affluent than by those in the poorest and most vulnerable sectors of society.

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Harvard professor who was then working in the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, shocked Americans by reporting findings that the out-of-wedlock birth rate among African-Americans in the United States had reached nearly 25%. He warned that the phenomenon of boys and girls being raised without fathers in poorer communities would result in social pathologies that would severely harm those most in need of the supports of solid family life. His predictions were all too quickly verified. The widespread failure of family formation portended disastrous social consequences of delinquency, despair, violence, drug abuse, and crime and incarceration. A snowball effect resulted in the further growth of the out-of-wedlock birth rate. It is now over 70% among African-Americans. It is worth noting that at the time of Moynihan's report, the out-of-wedlock birth rate for the population as a whole was almost 6%. Today, that rate is over 40%.

The economic consequences of these developments are evident. Consider the need of business to have available to it a responsible and capable work force. Business cannot manufacture honest, hard working people to employ. Nor can government create them by law. Businesses and governments depend on there being many such people, but they must rely on the family, assisted by religious communities and other institutions of civil society, to produce them. So business has a stake—a massive stake—in the long-term health of the family. It should avoid doing anything to undermine the family, and it should do what it can where it can to strengthen the institution.

As an advocate of dynamic societies, I believe in the market economy and the free enterprise system. I particularly value the social mobility that economic dynamism makes possible. Indeed, I am a beneficiary of that social mobility. A bit over a hundred years ago, my immigrant grandfathers—one from southern Italy, the other from Syria—were coal miners. Neither had so much as remotely considered the possibility of attending a university—as a practical economic matter, such a thing was simply out of the question. At that time, Woodrow Wilson, the future President of the United States, was the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton. Today, just two generations forward, I, the grandson of those immigrant coal miners, am the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton. And what is truly remarkable, is that my story is completely unremarkable. Something like it is the story of millions of Americans. I daresay it is the story of many, many Australians. Perhaps it goes without saying that this kind of upward mobility is not common in corporatist or socialist economic systems; but it is very common in market-based free enterprise economies.

Having said that, I should note that I am not a supporter of the laissez-faire doctrine embraced by strict libertarians. I believe that law and government do have important and, indeed, indispensable roles to play in regulating enterprises for the sake of protecting public health, safety, and morals, preventing exploitation and abuse, and promoting fair competitive circumstances of exchange. But these roles are compatible, I would insist, with the ideal of limited government and the principle of subsidiarity according to which government must respect individual initiative to the extent reasonably possible and avoid violating the autonomy and usurping the authority of families, religious communities, and other institutions of civil society that play the primary role in building character and transmitting virtues.

But having said that, I would warn that limited government — considered as an ideal as vital to business as to the family — cannot be maintained where the marriage culture collapses and families fail to form or easily dissolve. Where these things happen, the health, education, and welfare functions of the family will have to be undertaken by someone, or some institution, and that will sooner or later be the government. To deal with pressing social problems,bureaucracies will grow, and with them the tax burden. Moreover, the growth of crime and other pathologies where family breakdown is rampant will result in the need for more extensive policing and incarceration and, again, increased taxes to pay for these government services. If we want limited government, as we should, and a level of taxation that is not unduly burdensome, we need healthy institutions of civil society, beginning with a flourishing marriage culture supporting family formation and preservation.

Advocates of the market economy, and supporters of marriage and the family, have common opponents in hard-left socialism, the entitlement mentality, and the statist ideologies that provide their intellectual underpinnings. But the marriage of advocates of limited government and economic freedom, on the one hand, and the supporters of marriage and the family, on the other, is not, and must not be regarded as, a mere marriage of convenience. The reason they have common enemies is that they have common principles: namely, respect for the human person, which grounds our commitment to individual liberty and the right to economic freedom and other essential civil liberties; belief in personal responsibility, which is a pre-condition of the possibility and moral desirability of individual liberty in any domain; recognition of subsidiarity as the basis for effective but truly limited government and for the integrity of the institutions of civil society that mediate between the individual and the centralized power of the state; respect for the rule of law; and recognition of the vital role played by the family and by religious institutions that support the character-forming functions of the family in the flourishing of any decent and dynamic society.

The point was made well by a man who will, I predict, in a few hours be one of the most famous people in the world, U.S. Congressman Paul Ryan, chairman of the budget committee in the United States House of Representatives. He recently observed that a "libertarian" who wants limited government should embrace the means to his freedom: thriving mediating institutions that create the moral preconditions for economic markets and choice. A "social issues" conservative with a zeal for righteousness should insist on a free market economy to supply the material needs for families, schools, and churches that inspire moral and spiritual life. In a nutshell, the notion of separating the social from the economic issues is a false choice. They stem from the same root . . . . They complement and complete each other. A prosperous moral community is a prerequisite for a just and ordered society and the idea that either side of this current divide can exist independently is a mirage.

The two greatest institutions ever devised for lifting people out of poverty and enabling them to live in dignity are the market economy and the institution of marriage. These institutions will, in the end, stand or fall together. Contemporary statist ideologues have contempt for both of these institutions, and they fully understand the connection between them. We who believe in the market and in the family should see the connection no less clearly.