It’s no longer news that babies have become a status symbol. We’ve gotten used to judging celebs’ bumps and observed the rise of the baby-centric fashion statement. The excitement this week over Kate Middleton’s royal fetus — and the medical bills already associated with it — serves as another reminder that, like a dressage horse or a third vacation home, children might be covetable, but they’ll certainly cost you.
To be a status symbol, a good must be inaccessible to the masses. And indeed America’s birth rate, as New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat reminds us this week, has plummeted along with our economy. “American fertility plunged with the stock market in 2008, and it hasn’t recovered,” Douthat writes. “This time, the birthrate has fallen fastest among foreign-born Americans, and particularly among Hispanics, who saw huge amounts of wealth evaporate with the housing bust.” But it’s not just the economy, stupid. Douthat has another theory: “The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe.”
I agree that this is a problem with decadence. But the decadent thing is having children, not remaining kid-free.
Via: The Decadence of Procreation
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