Laurie DeRose, an assistant professor in Catholic University of America’s sociology department, told CNA this week that aging and fertility crises have their roots in birth rates that began years ago.
“[It] doesn’t matter so much what age people are dying on average (60, 70, 80, 90) as whether the number of new zero-year-olds is plentiful,” she said.
“The average age is going to change a little if people die at 90 instead of 80 (a bit older), but it is going to change a whole lot if a newborn isn’t born,” she noted.
“In other words, a baby not being born makes the population older for a long, long time whereas an elderly person not dying makes the population older for at most 30ish years.”
Brad Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia as well as the director of the school’s National Marriage Project, told CNA that Japan “is an example of where things can go.”
“I don’t think the U.S. is going to reach that point, but it’s emblematic of the demographic problems many countries are facing,” he said.
Wilcox, who recently published the book “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization,” said Japan’s “workist” culture is partly responsible for its low fertility rate.
“There’s an excessively intense work ethic in Japan, as with many East Asian countries, where people are expected to spend many long hours in the office,” Wilcox said. “A lot of Japanese women are not looking forward to a family life where the husband is going to be away from the home so frequently and for so long.”
Japan’s “struggling” demographic of young men is another factor, he said, with many young men floundering at schools and retreating to heavy internet usage, rendering them less suitable as potential boyfriends and husbands.
“Young women [in Japan] are flourishing, educationally and otherwise, and are expecting a lot more from potential mates,” WIlcox said, “and their expectations are not always being met in significant numbers. That means less dating, less marriage, less children.”
Japan is also a “profoundly secular place,” he pointed out. Religious communities and institutions “tend to foster marriages and childbearing and parenthood, in part because of the social support, in part because they endow meaning and purpose to the sacrifice and suffering that’s attendant to family life.”
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DeRose said combatting workism in Japan could be a path forward to reversing its fertility woes. In a 2021 essay at American Affairs, she argued that policymakers “should think more in terms of enabling men and women to work less rather than seeking to help them still ‘do family’ while remaining career-centric.”
Some solutions include “encouraging more flexible work arrangements” and “rolling back strict licensure and certification rules for work,” she wrote.
Another solution could be “working toward gender egalitarianism in the home,” she told CNA.
“Research on developed countries show that couples are much more likely to have another child if the father is involved in the domestic sphere,” she said
Wilcox, meanwhile, was not hopeful about Japan’s prospects. “There’s already an effort to manage the demographic decline,” he said. “We’re talking about care robots [and] the age of retirement being raised.”
Wilcox also warned about the likelihood of pressure mounting to provide assisted suicide to elderly adults, including through Canadian-style “medical assistance in dying (MAID)” programs.
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