Contrary to the conventional narrative about European demographic decline, a trio of researchers claims that increased prosperity is now causing Old World birthrates to rise. But what are the statistics behind the statistics?

Although there are still some kept awake by Soylent Green nightmares of overpopulation, many recognize that the developed world has long experienced a birth dearth. The pattern has been consistent: wherever societies modernize and attain prosperity — be it Europe, North America, Asia or elsewhere — a drop in birthrates to below replacement level (2.1 children per couple) follows. (This doesn't mean prosperity necessarily causes demographic decline, only that there has in modern times been a correlation between the two.)

Yet, if three university researchers are to be believed, this trend is self-correcting and is already reversing itself in nations such as Australia, Sweden, France, the United States and Britain. AFP's Marlowe Hood reports on the issue, writing:

The further . . .  countries advanced along a widely used measure of social progress called the Human Development Index (HDI), earlier studies showed, the fewer babies were born per woman.

The HDI scale takes into account life expectancy, GDP per capita and literacy rates, and runs from zero to 1.0.

. . . A trio of researchers led by Mikko Myrskyla [a demographics doctoral student] of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia analysed recent data from most of the world's nations to see if any new trends had emerged.

What they uncovered was "a fundamental change in the well-established negative relationship between fertility and development."

On average, national birthrates begin to bottom out when the HDI hits about 0.86, and climb again when the development index approaches 0.95, they found.

In a nutshell, the researchers are saying that increased prosperity is associated with decreased birthrates — but only to a point. Once prosperity increases beyond a certain threshold, birthrates spike upwards. 

It has long been correlated that the more education and work opportunities women have, the less likely they are to bear children (this is the result of inculcation with careerism). Yet the researchers claim that today's women's greater education and opportunities are engendering a sense of economic security and that this, in turn, makes couples more likely to have children, as they will be better able to shoulder the high cost of childrearing.

Now, the fact that this is a feminist conclusion in a feminist age is enough to raise a red flag, but, really, the problem starts with a misreading of the data in the first place. And a clue as to the truth can be found at the end of Hood's piece. He writes that Japan and South Korea have experienced no increase in birthrates despite ranking sufficiently high on the HDI scale (the researchers explain this away with the dubious claim that women's role in those societies hasn't changed much). He then concludes with, "But other anomalies such as Canada and Germany, whose birthrate lags behind similarly rich nations, have yet to be explained." 

Is that so? Well, perhaps doing so is harder when you're guilty of the scientific equivalent of trying to put a square peg in a round hole.

If ever there was just one problem with this research, it had its own baby boom, one that could put the Octomom to shame. First, the graduate students are ignoring the demographic elephant in the middle of Europe: Moslem immigration. Sure, the birthrate in some European countries is up, but it isn't actually native European women who are exhibiting this fecundity. For instance, France's birthrate has surpassed 2.0 for the first time in 4 decades, but let's take a peek behind that statistic with Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse of the Acton Institute. She writes, "in France, approximately one birth in three is to a Muslim family. Stripped of the Muslim influence, the fertility rate of the native-born or traditionally European French would be 1.2, similar to the rates in Italy and Spain." Note that, for the most part, the fertility rate doesn't get much lower than 1.2 unless you're a Catholic nun.

Thus, it isn't hard to explain why some developed countries are experiencing this mini-baby boom while others are not. It's a "duh" factor: if you absorb large numbers of immigrants from high birthrate countries, your birthrate goes up. If you don't, it doesn't (I'll accept my Ph.D. in demography now, thank you). For a few examples, Japan and Korea have either little or no immigration, while Spain and Italy have relatively little from high birthrate countries. In contrast, like France, the U.K. has large numbers of Moslems and other foreigners, and the U.S. has been inundated with millions of high-birthrate immigrants from south of the border.

Then there are two other obvious holes in the researcher's theory. They fancifully surmised that now, quite suddenly, in a departure from patterns observed everywhere and every time, women's higher education and workplace achievement has inspired them to get in the family way. But if this were true, it would follow that such high-education women within a country might have a higher fertility rate than their low-education peers. Did the researchers try to demonstrate such a phenomenon? Moreover, the nations in question have been prosperous for quite a long time. So why would it have taken until now — an economically troubled period — for this baby boom to manifest itself?

Now for one more question: how could the researchers miss such obvious points? Well, perhaps their marketing is as smart as their science is stupid. That is to say, if you want to get exposure, what better way than to make an eye-raising claim that also happens to promote a fashionable goal, in this case the feminist one of advancing women?

And this is why the public is so often peddled destructive junk science. The fringe and the fanciful attract far more eyes than the sound and the sublime. Man bites dog — and only more animal rights laws can save Fido — is always a better story than dog bites man.

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