Adrien Lienhart Book Review

Economics Major
2015-2016
What to expect when no one’s expecting:
America’s coming demographic disaster By Jonathan V. Last

Author

Jonathan V Last is an American journalist born in 1974. He writes articles in American

newspapers such as “The Weekly Standard” where he is a senior writer and featured in the
“Wall Street journal”, “New York Post”, “Los Angeles Times” and elsewhere. He
currently blogs at JonathanLast.com. “What to expect when no one’s expecting” is the
author’s first book.

Summary

The main topic of this book is demography. LAST first analyses the American situation on
demography and shows how catastrophic it could become without action. The surrounding
environment unconsciously spread the ideas of having less/or no children at all. For
example, in his old neighbor, the spread of having pet hotels, playgrounds, and spas show a
vision of people taking care of dogs because they would not bother anymore at having
children. Last says that a lot of officials, from governments to NGO’s are saying that, due
to population growth, the earth risks being overpopulated, and therefore risks famines due
to lack of resources, which is looking a lot like Malthusian theory. LAST is strongly
against this idea, and justifies it by the fact that today, a lot of countries are having a
decline in demography. To calculate the demographic numbers, LAST uses the Total
fertility rate (TFR), which is “ The number of babies the average woman would bear over
the course of her life if she were to survive until the end of her reproductive years and the
age specific birth rate remained constant.” The most crucial number for demography is 2.1.
Having a fertility rate of 2.1 children per women or more means that the population is able
to renew itself, it shrinks if it is lower. This number could surprise us by the fact that,
despite having a fertility rate of 1.93, the population of the United States continues to
grow. LAST explains that this is due to “demographic momentum”. The population
continues to grow due to “the built up supply of people from earlier generations. You don’t
see the effects of fertility decreases until the last above-replacement generation dies” In the
United States, the first generation of having sub replacement levels of fertility were born in
the 1960’s, so, until they die, the American population will grow.
What are the causes of the decrease of children per women? According to LAST, there are
many reasons that have a more or less big impact on our lives.
Paul R. Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” in 1968 influenced many politicians that there
would be a serious problem of overpopulation, despite having had today most of his
expectations wrong (the price of primal resources did not increase contrary to what he
predicted, the number of children per women is only rising in 3% of the country’s earth).
Another reason for the decrease of fertility would be abortion, according to Last. Margaret
Sanger, the woman behind the act, wanted to legalize abortion in order for poor people to
have less children as they would take less care than rich people according to her. The
“success” of abortion did not stop at class limits and by 1980, more than 1.5 million babies
were aborted each year, which harmed the fertility rate so much that in 1983, there is a
decrease in the number of live birth from the previous year1.
Having a child has never been so expensive to have. For instance, the “real cost of College
has increased by 1000 percent since 1960”. Elite schools such as Columbia can charge up

1
Center for disease control, Vital statistics of the United States, 1997
 Adrien Lienhart Book Review
Economics Major
2015-2016
to 70000 dollars per year. This example of investment that parents will have to make could
make them think twice before having more children. Speaking of Colleges, the more
qualified a woman is, the better job she gets and the less likely she is to have children.
Once the demographic momentum gone, the country that stopped having children faces
some serious situation. The population shrinks dramatically. Having lost already one
million inhabitants, Japan is expected to lose another six by 2025. Even if it choses to rise
its fertility rate to 2.1 (which is highly improbable, but is the expectation of the UN
nonetheless) it would lose 30% by the end of the XXI century; if it stays at the same rate,
there will be 56.8 millions of Japanese by 2100. The critical thing here is not only that the
population will decrease, but also that the population will have more and more elder
person, people not working and needing a retirement pension, meaning that there will be
less working people paying for the retirements of the growing elder population.
LAST is very clear on this point: “no country has transitioned back to replacement-level
fertility (for any five year period) once falling below it”. In order for our population to stop
declining, what should we do? This question seems very hard to answer. If we look at
Singapore, they have first tried to limit the number of children, which was so effective that
in 10 years the fertility rate dropped by 53%. After realizing that a low fertility rate would
be critical for the country, they created a program called “ New Population Policy” that
would undo what they had previously done. They did tax cuts for births, unpaid maternity
leaves and even direct subsidies (giving birth to a 3 rd child makes you win 18000 Dollars!).
Nonetheless, the measures were ineffective, and today the fertility rate of Singapore
declined to 1.1 children per woman. We could then wonder ourselves what could work
then, as the Singaporean situation seems more than desperate! Fortunately, LAST ends his
book on an optimistic view and give us one main solution: The Long term. If you want
people to have children, you need to help them financially not just for a year or two, but
also during the time the parents are having high expenses for children (especially college
fees).

Conclusion & Comments

In his book J.V.Last shows us with plenty of numbers that, contrary to what we would
commonly think, we are not facing a “Population Bomb”, for the simple reason that in
most countries, the fertility rate is getting closer to 2.1 or less, and in some countries the
population has already begun to decrease. Contrary to another common thought, it won’t
be better, as we wrongly think we would have more space, but because this could lead to
an aging population, and the disappearance of small cities that are only having older and
older people. I agreed most of the time of what the author was explaining: if we look at the
European scale for instance, we can see that most of them have less than 1.7 children per
women, and as population decreases more and more, the bigger the problem will be, that is
why a common EU policy on the subject would be crucial. However, I’m skeptic of
LAST’s view on abortion. I don’t think aborted children should be born if their parents did
not wish them. In Freakonomics, Levitt finds a causality of the decrease of crime in the
1990’s: As abortion was authorized, many children that would have had a bad childhood as
they were not wished, which would have put them in a position to be more likely making
crime, where not born. By being pronatalist and pro life, Last could be putting into
question one of society’s progress, being the control of birth. Should we go back on social
advances in order to procreate more?