Dear Mr. Shorto,
Your “No Babies” article in the NY Times Magazine is excellent—informative and balanced. I’m glad that that Carl Haub got the last word, which may indicate somewhat where your sympathies lie... In your article, no one was advocating a return to the 50s model of mother at home and father at work, yet this model was highly successful. An interesting article would be to chart (or attempt to understand) what led to the necessity of both parents working.
Sincerely,
John Holecek, Director of Development
McPherson Opera House
Russell, After reading your outstanding cover story in Sunday's online NYT Magazine, I'm wondering whether you spotted Bob Herbert's op-ed column one week ago, "A Dubious Milestone." In this column published after Father's Day, Mr. Herbert notes with some dismay that for the first time in American history, a majority of births (50.4%) to women under 30 were out of wedlock -- and nearly 80% of births to black mothers were out of wedlock. [I have captured the data used by Herbert from Northeastern University.] So while the U.S. birthrate has been accelerating -- far exceeding the European birthrates that support your powerful article on the lowest-low demographic transition in the "Old World" -- not all American babies are born equal, and most appear to have first-time low-income mothers so that the risk of child maltreatment and neglect are relatively high. I'm developing a new national initiative on child maltreatment prevention aimed at leveraging intellectual (research) firepower from both NIH and CDC plus financial (grantmaking) clout from several key private foundations to create a direct attack on this critical social problem of child abuse in the USA. Attached is Richard Krugman's insightful paper from a few years ago where he makes a compelling case for how the professions of medicine and public health both have badly dropped the ball in this arena. Barry J. Smernoff, PhD
AlphaOmega Collaboration LLC
Mr. Shorto-
I enjoyed your recent article in the New York Times on the European demographic problem ("No Babies?" 06/29/08), where you touched on many issues that demographers, sociologists, public policy analysts and political scientists have been addressing to a smaller audience for years. However, I might point out one concern about your presentation to the average NYTimes reader: the American replacement rate is almost entirely bolstered, as the data from recent years has told us, by the Hispanic population in the US, while the replacement rate of the non-Hispanic White population is almost as low as the "lowest low" average in Western Europe. A number of academic studies have been done regarding this issue and its policy implications, but for just some encapsulated figures, you can go to http://www.prb.org/Articles/2006/HispanicsAccountforAlmostOneHalfofUSPopulationGrowth.aspx. The notion that American fathers' have been shamed through social mores into a more equal sharing of household work that compensates for a lack of generosity by the government's welfare programs has been debunked by various household surveys that have suggested that the division of household labor between men and women in America is almost as low as at any point in the past few decades, and is nowhere near as high as the more egalitarian household sharing in the Nordic countries whose population replacement rates outstrip the non-Hispanic White populations' in the US. The flexible system that you allude to is not actually allowing middle and upper class White America to have more children; the US counterparts are having about as many children compared to the European educated classes who are the focus of your article. Much like in Europe with the tensions between old Europeans and Muslim communities, the reality of who is having children is not White America, but Hispanic America, and that is how the US manages to look like the "sparkling exception" as you so phrased in your article.
-Sarah Shair-Rosenfield
Ph.D. Student
Department of Political Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
dear Mr Shorto
I really enjoy reading your article on the sunday magazine which puts together important information from micro experience and macro trend
Economists have tried to explained the puzzle of low fertility but also low participation of Italian women (problem as serious of the falling birth rates, since Italian families have among the lowest income of EU countries)
see for example the book
http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521877411
in which we show that in Italy it is the lack of child care, part time jobs, and rigidity of hours of services and jobs that make so difficult to work and have children
Daniela Del Boca
Professor of Economics
Collegio Carlo Alberto-University of Turin Visiting NYU Economics and IHDSC Director of CHILD
Dear Mr. Shorto,
I read with pleasure your excellent article No Babies? which appeared In the NYT magazine section of today. I thought that you may be interested in a few of my own articles/presentations (attached) which are tangential to your work. In short, I became aware of the change in the population pyramid some years ago and related this to the change in the world’s economic basis – from pre industrial, industrial to now a commutation based economy. Most people make there living with communication and the ‘third world’ countries are accelerating to a communication economy at the same rate as did the US and Western Europe a few decades earlier. Communication dexterity has replaced manual fitness.
My message is, as I am a physician and scientist whose world is communication – hearing, voice, speech and language – that to ensure that the work force will not only maintain it’s productively but most importantly increase so that the increased non working population (young and many old), will be sustained at the same economic level, society can not afford to have individuals with communication disorders and must enable their prevention, cure and care. The major public health issue for the 21st century is communication disorders as was nutrition, and sanitation for the 19th and 20th centuries. If you are interested, I would be very happy to discuss this in depth.
Sincerely yours,
Robert J. Ruben, MD, FAAP, FACS
Distinguished University Professor
Departments of Otorhinolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery and Paediatrics
Albert Einstein College of Medicine