First, let me state I’m not a proponent of either the “Birth Dearth” or “Overpopulation” positions. I think both stances lack nuance. But that’s not the point of my post. I get periodic news updates on my smart phone, and I saw this title which piqued my interest, Beckhams a ‘bad example’ for families. I’m not totally averse to celebrity gossip, but I wasn’t ready for what I was confronted with:
David and Victoria Beckham may have been overjoyed to welcome their new daughter, Harper Seven, last week but, according to a growing group of campaigners, the birth of their fourth child make the couple bad role models and environmentally irresponsible.
As the world’s population is due to hit seven billion at some point in the next few days, there is an increasing call for the UK to open a public debate about how many children people have.
Now the Green MP, Caroline Lucas, has joined other leading environmentalists in calling for the smashing of what TV zoologist Sir David Attenborough has called the “absurd taboo” in discussing family size in the UK.
The United Kingdom has experienced serious natural increase in recent years…but that is mostly the function of immigration and the fertility of some immigrant groups! Does anyone suppose that these people are looking to the Beckhams as “role models”? The Beckhams are nice target because they’re wealthy and white. Though one could argue from an environmental perspective that their jet-setting lifestyle has a large carbon footprint I doubt that an extra child impacts this much on the margin (they aren’t going to put the child on a separate flight). Rather, because of their wealth they’re actually able to support these extra children in the style and manner which affluent Westerners see as the birthright of all children in theory.
Let’s look at the reality of fertility in the UK, Fertility by ethnic and religious groups in the UK, trends in a multi-cultural context:
These data imply that Bangaldeshi Britons have a total fertility rate about 1 above that of Bangladeshis!
This is probably a function of the fact that Bangladeshi Britons are overwhelmingly still immigrants, and despite their poverty and backwardness in the United Kingdom, still feel as if they are experiencing resource surplus. They invest their surplus gained through employment and public welfare into more children.
Bangladeshis also have the shortest generation times:
The Indian community in Britain is of particular interest, as it is multireligious. Here are the fertility trends broken down by sect:
They don’t explore the reason for the drop in fertility, but here’s my hypothesis: the children of Ismailis from East Africa who arrived in the 1970s entered into their childbearing years in the 1990s and 2000s.
My overall point here is this: if environmentalists care deeply about population control in developed countries they would show their courage if they did not just critique the “low hanging fruit.” Middle class people who are well integrated already adhere to the two-child norm (at most). Rather, it is the lower class and separate subcultures, such as Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims, who have different values and so different fertilities. In a nation like the United Kingdom the number of children you have is an expression of preference, shaped by your Weltanschauung (in the case of immigrant Muslim communities), or a reflection of your lack of forethought and self-control (the lower classes). Unless you do what China did you need to change these parameters. Both these segments need to be forced to assimilate into middle class mainstream norms.