Rebuilding the economy requires restoring the traditional family...

... to its proper place. So argues David P. Goldman (aka, "The Author Formerly Known As 'Spengler'"), in the March 2009 issue of First Things:

Unless we restore the traditional family to a central position in American life, we cannot expect to return to the kind of wealth accumulation that characterized the 1980s and 1990s. Theoretically, we might recruit immigrants to replace the children we did not rear, or we might invest capital overseas with the children of other countries. From the standpoint of economic policy, neither of those possibilities can be dismissed. But the contributions of immigration or capital export will be marginal at best compared to the central issue of whether the demographics of America reverts to health.

Life is sacred for its own sake. It is not an instrument to provide us with fatter IRAs or better real-estate values. But it is fair to point out that wealth depends ultimately on the natural order of human life. Failing to rear a new generation in sufficient numbers to replace the present one violates that order, and it has consequences for wealth, among many other things. Americans who rejected the mild yoke of family responsibility in pursuit of atavistic enjoyment will find at last that this is not to be theirs, either.

It will be painful for conservatives to admit that things were not well with America under the Republican watch, at least not at the family level. From 1954 to 1970, for example, half or more of households contained two parents and one or more children under the age of eighteen. In fact as well as in popular culture, the two-parent nuclear family formed the normative American household. By 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, two-parent households had fallen to just over two-fifths of the total. Today, less than a third of American households constitute a two-parent nuclear family with children.

Housing prices are collapsing in part because single-person households are replacing families with children. The Virginia Tech economist Arthur C. Nelson has noted that households with children would fall from half to a quarter of all households by 2025. The demand of Americans will then be urban apartments for empty nesters. Demand for large-lot single family homes, Nelson calculated, will slump from 56 million today to 34 million in 2025—a reduction of 40 percent. There never will be a housing price recovery in many parts of the country. Huge tracts will become uninhabited except by vandals and rodents.

Read the entire article, titled, "Demographics & Depression."

Comments

[David Charkowsky]

It seems to me that we are being punished (in some sense) for our collective mis-valuation of the 401k contribution over the human person.

[His Prince Michael]

The title of this well-written piece, is succinctly
accurate. My late beloved father Efren, once told
me as an early-teen: "Society's problems begin at home".
Again, Pop was right.

THE Battle, has just begun, and GOD, is GREATER!
http://www.all4webs.com/q/f/love4yahweh

[Telemachus]

QFE: "But it is fair to point out that wealth depends ultimately on the natural order of human life."

And to David Charkowsky, yes, but I'd put it differently: Modern Man's obsession with "safety and satisfaction"-pragmatism has led us to create a monstrous society of infantile hedonists, people who merely want someone to tape together the world long enough so that they can enjoy it; after that who cares?

Not only does our country need to re-learn a strong, fecund family life, but hard work as well, rejecting the virtual reality that has gradually been imposed upon us by the "social engineers" who thought they knew better than God what a good and orderly society looks like. Let's reject the false prophets of socialism, roll up our sleeves, and get to work. Let's live our lives.

[Linus]

Yes, that is certainly a basic element, one could say it is the most essential element. In the long run God will not bless a Nation that turns its back on His commandments. Yet there are other important elements like following sound personal and public and private economic policies. I've always been convinced that there are economic laws which are part of the Natural Law. If we violate them God will not work miracles to save us from our own stupidity.

[Augustine]

As I stated before, the economist Dan Arnold has been pointing this fact out indirectly since 2002 (see http://www.thegreatbustahead.com/pi_article_feb2004.pdf).

He doesn't ask what causes the demographic winter, but we here know the answer: contraception and abortion. IOW, the Culture of Death.

[David]

What, in Goldman's view, was the "Republican watch" supposed to have done to prevent the breakdown of the family? Would not the Humanae Vitae dissenters before them (and of course, farther back, the Lambeth Conference) have much more pain to bear?