THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Australia is enjoying a baby boom. Why?

Australia is enjoying a baby boom. Why?

In what he says below Bernard Salt tries desperately to avoid giving credit to the policies of Australia's previous conservative government. Salt says the boom is mostly due to prosperity. But the birthrate rise did not coincide with any obvious leap in prosperity, even allowing for some lags. But the big leap did coincide with the introduction of monetary rewards for having babies. So I am inclined to think that the rise is almost entirely due to the Howard/Costello baby bonus payments and that Rudd's likely scrapping of the payments will largely end the baby boom

Big news during the week: Australia is in the grip of a baby boom. New figures confirm that 285,000 babies were born during 2007 - up 19,000 over the previous 12 months, and up 50,000 from the number recorded in 2001. Australia's fertility rate now stands at 1.93 births per woman. Japan, for example, can manage only a paltry 1.1. The yen might be rising against the Aussie dollar but we can still beat the Japanese at breeding.

Babies are everywhere. But why? During the Great Depression the birth rate plummeted. People do not breed when they are uncertain about the future. But this also means that during times of prosperity, such as the past 18 years, the birth rate rises. Although this increase was far from immediate. It took the whole of the 1990s for Australians to get used to the idea that prosperity was here to stay, for a while at least. As such the birth rate didn't do its hockey-stick up-turn until 2002 - some two years in advance of the baby bonus.

The baby bonus merely accelerated a rising trend, which I think reflected a broader confidence in the future. Australians were already well on their way to "having one for the country" before former treasurer Peter Costello popularised the notion.

There is also the argument that Gen X women who had delayed having children in the 1990s to concentrate on careers suddenly switched priorities at about this time. And to some extent you also have to admit that babies really are infectious. One person has one and before you know it everyone is having a baby. Even celebrities are doing it. Role models such as Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett show that motherhood and glamour are not mutually exclusive. (Are you reading this, Kylie?)

Other factors have also contributed. Medical advances in IVF, and especially in the care of later pregnancies, have given older women the confidence to have children.

A firm and rising birth rate is a federal treasurer's dream. After all, this is an investment in the taxpayer population base in the late 2020s. (A rising tax base makes politicians look good economic managers.) Although it must be said that a rising birth rate can also place pressure on the labour market since more women come out of the workforce to have children, adding to the immediate skills shortage.

But the future of the current baby boom must be questioned with the likely onset of recession in 2009. The figures released this week relate to births in 2007. This time next year the figures will reflect the 2008 trend. And most babies born in 2008 will have been conceived amid the euphoria of prosperity but will be born into a period of uncertainty. Oddly enough the fluctuation of the birth rate over the next two years will be one measure of how seriously Australians regard the current economic crisis.

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Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don't forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH (2). Email me (John Ray) here

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Australia is enjoying a baby boom. Why?

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