Mark Steyn - America Alone

“The CDC,” he repeated.

“Who,” she said.

“The CDC,” he repeated, wondering why she hadn’t heard his answer to the question the first time. This diseased version of the Abbott and Costello routine went on a while longer, before the doc realized she had to spell it out: W-H-O, the World Health Organization.

“Oh, yeah. Them, too,” said Hizzoner.

Yet under the who’s-on-first shtick lay an important truth: if an infection shows up in an Atlanta hospital, no American doctor looks for guidance from a Canadian government agency. But if it shows up in a Toronto hospital, the Ontario health system takes it for granted that the best minds of the CDC in Atlanta will be staying late at the office trying to work out what’s going on.

The answer to that Canadian doctor’s vaudeville feed — “Who’s on first?” — is America. When something goes awry, in a Sri Lankan beach resort or a Toronto hospital, it’s the hyper power who shows up. America doesn’t need to “join the world”: it already provides a lot of the world’s infrastructure. What Hutton means is that he wants the United States to stop being an exception and make like Europe. What would that mean? Well, it would mean more government, less religion, and a collapsed birth rate.

One should be cautious seeking correlations between social structures and fertility rates. They’re falling around the world and no expert knows how to reverse them. Is it lack of religion? Whoa, steady: in Europe, the highest levels of church attendance are in those Mediterranean countries with the most wholly kaput birth rates, while Scandinavian nations with all but undetectable levels of religious observance have some of the healthiest — or, at any rate, least unhealthy — fertility rates on the Continent: 1.64 births per couple in Sweden versus 1.15 in Spain.

Likewise, of the fiercely Islamist nations causing the world so much woe, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have birth rates of 5.08 and 4.53, while Iran’s has plummeted since its long war with Iraq to 2.33.

What about economic liberty? Taking the fourteen core pre-expansion EU economies, four of the five healthiest fertility rates belong to four of the five countries that also score highest for economic freedom: Ireland, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands. The fifth highest fertility rate (1.89) belongs to France, which has one of the lowest rankings on economic liberty. But France is also the country with the highest Islamic population, and the evidence suggests a third of all births there are already Muslim. If one were to adjust accordingly, you could make a case for close correlation in Europe between economic freedom and fertility rates. The three lowest birth rates belong to the countries at the bottom of the economic-liberty indicators: Greece, Italy, Spain.

On the other hand, in the rest of the world, territories with high economic liberty — Hong Kong, Singapore — are nose-diving into the demographic asphalt. So how about the marriage rate?

That’s close enough to suggest that, when your tax and social policies encourage nontraditional family models, one consequence is fewer children. Yet again, though, that doesn’t apply to Japan, which still has a higher marriage rate than most European countries. Or maybe it’s speaking English. In the core “Western world,” compare the Anglo-Celticsettled Anglophone democracies with the rest of the G-8:

Or maybe it’s already the Muslim populations that are keeping European maternity wards going. Insofar as one can penetrate the multiculti obfuscation on the issue, the five Continental nations (excepting war-ravaged Bosnia) with the highest proportion of Muslim citizens are also the five Continental nations with the highest fertility rates — Albania, Macedonia, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark.

But at one level this is overthinking it. Everyone writes about the differences within “the West” these days — specifically the differences between America and everybody else. In 2004, Niall Ferguson, a Brit history prof at Harvard, pronounced the Anglo-American “special relationship” doomed. “The typical British family,” he wrote, “looks much more like the typical German family than the typical American family. We eat Italian food. We watch Spanish soccer. We drive German cars. We work Belgian hours. And we buy second homes in France. Above all, we bow before central government as only true Europeans can.” He has a point, though cultural similarities are not always determinative: Canadians eat American food, watch American sports, drive American cars, work American hours (more or less), and buy second homes in Florida. But they still bow down before central government as only true Europeans can.

What’s more relevant surely are not the differences but the result of those differences: America’s population growth is secure and Europe’s is in precipitous decline. The United States and Canada make a useful study in this respect: neighboring nations that speak the same language (mostly), have an integrated economy and a shared taste in everything from Dunkin’ Donuts to the Celine Dion Christmas album. But: America’s marriage rate per 1,000 is 11.7; Canada’s is 6.8.

Her Majesty’s chilly Dominion is the land where the straights live in common-law partnerships and the gays get married. And the upshot is: America’s fertility rate is 2.11; Canada’s is 1.48.

And where does that lead? Canucks are aging faster than the Yanks. In 2000, oldsters formed 16.3 percent of America’s population and 17 percent of Canada’s — close enough. In 2040, they’ll form 26 percent of America’s population and 33.3 percent of Canada’s.

And there’ll be a lot fewer young Canadians to stick with the bill for increased geriatric care. Take the “aged dependency ratio” — the number of elderly people receiving state benefits relative to the working-age adults slogging away each day to pay for them. In 2000, America, Australia, and Canada all had 0.26 seniors for every working stiff. In 2040, America will have 0.47 seniors for every worker, Australia 0.56, Canada 0.63. Across the developed world, we’re at the beginning of the end of the social-democratic state. The surest way to be in the demographic death spiral is to be a former Communist country in Europe: the five lowest birth rates in the world are Latvia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Russia, and Ukraine. But the next surest way is just to be in Europe: nineteen of the lowest twenty birth rates in the world are on the Continent (the twentieth is Japan). Conversely, the only advanced nation with a sizeable population reproducing at replacement rate is the United States. True, there are significant variations from red state to blue state, immigrant to native-born, and in other areas: Mormons in Utah have one of the highest fertility rates on the planet, while the city of San Francisco could easily be mistaken for an EU capital, though in fairness to the good burghers of that town they had to embrace homosexuality to achieve levels of childlessness the Continentals have managed to achieve through ostensibly conventional sexual expression.