July 10, 2006

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

Bringing the Children Back to Montana

A substantial part of Western Montana has experienced almost two decades of sustained growth in population, jobs, aggregate income, and per capita income. That has led many to worry about the social and environmental costs associated with that growth and call for public efforts to manage it. Others, however, want more growth, at least in certain sectors of the economy.

They point to what they see as serious failure of the economy: Families with children cannot afford to live in Montana. That has led to a decline in the number of children and the closing of schools. This is blamed on the loss of natural resource jobs in forest products and mineral extraction which, we are told, led to a collapse in pay to the point where families with kids simply cannot afford to live here any more. The self-evident solution is to go back to the industrial structure of employment we had in 1966 or 1976 by promoting extractive industry and getting rid of all those obstructionist environmental restrictions that we have learned we cannot really afford. Then families with children will be able to live in Montana again.

The strange thing is, however, that the number of children is declining in a broad cross-section of the nation, not just in Montana. Many of the places losing children, such as many of our prosperous suburban belts, never had any extractive industry to praise or blame. Actually, the problem of a declining number of children spans the globe. From Japan to Italy, from Taiwan to Russia, from South Korea to France, the number of children being born has declined below the replacement rate so that there are now more deaths than births and population is on the verge of declining or has already begun to decline.

Given that this “problem” is found across the nation and around the world, it seems unlikely that its source lies in the evolution of the Montana economy away from its frontier roots. Actually we know the source of the declining number of children. It is prosperity and our modern lifestyles. Both have both increased the likelihood that all of our children will survive to adulthood and have increased the opportunity costs associated with having large families. We no longer need to have large families and the cost of doing so has become substantial. So people in the developed nations are marrying later and having fewer children. To most that is a quite rational personal decision.

This is not convincing to some because the United States, to a certain extent, is bucking that international trend. We have the highest rate of population growth among the prosperous, developed nations. And many areas of the nation have seen ongoing growth in school-aged populations. So why is Montana not sharing in that pattern?

The answer to that is also simple: Montana, as various extreme rightwing racist hate groups keep pointing out, is one of the most “lily-white” states in the Union. White, non-Hispanic, Americans are behaving like prosperous Japanese, Italians, or French, and are having fewer children. The birth rate among white, non-Hispanic women in the US is well below replacement rates. Left to this group, the nation’s population would be declining. Most of the population growth that is taking place in the United States is associated with immigration, both legal and illegal.

Immigrants tend to be young. That is why they have been so important in the past in energizing our economy. That also means that most of the adults are of child-rearing age. Among Hispanics, the birth rate is well above replacement levels, over 50 percent higher than that of white, non-Hispanics. The combination of young adults and young families pouring into our country and their higher birth rates has been the primary source of America’s recent population growth.

If we want to boost the number of children in Montana, the solution is simple, make Montana more attractive to the growing Hispanic population. Make Montana, demographically and ethnically, more like the rest of the nation.

Having dealt with communities that have seen considerable growth in their populations of school-aged children and young families as the result of Hispanic in-migration, I can already here the barely disguised racist objections. “We don’t want people like that. We want people like us.” That, of course, was said about my Irish ancestors too a century and a half ago. But the problem is that “people like us” have chosen not to have as many children. That means declining school enrollments, closed schools, a declining number of young workers, and an increasing population of old folks like me. That, of course, creates a different set of challenges.

As the nation’s population prepares to welcome its 300 millionth resident, putting us third in line among the world’s nations in population, behind China and India, it is high time we face up to the fact that our state and nation, like many nations around the world, are going through a dramatic demographic shift. We have to focus on the possibilities and problems associated with those changes rather than continuing to debate assertions and arguments tied to our hypnotic attraction to the rear-view mirror and its nostalgic vision of the frontier economy. We ain’t going back. That is a useless distraction, of political value to some, which simply misleads us and keeps us from focusing on the real potentials and challenges of the present and future.