Producing Jobs, Not Babies

Among the many solicitations for money that I have received recently was an appeal by a group that was concerned about population growth; it desired population control. Yesterday, the sub-head on a New Yorker article read: 

As the global population grows, we’ll have to find ways of feeding the planet without accelerating climate change.

These neo-Malthusian concerns are surprising to me because the media lately have been filled with stories about the complete opposite: the declining birth rate in this country (and elsewhere). For example:

Across most of the world, fertility rates are falling. As economies develop, fertility rates tend to decline — and when economies develop especially quickly, fertility rates often plummet to particularly low levels. In many countries they are already below 2.1 births per woman, the “replacement level” needed to keep populations steady from one generation to the next.

If current trends continue, by 2050 more than three-quarters  of countries will be below replacement-level fertility. By 2100, populations in some major economies will fall by 20 to 50 percent. (1)

Among the reactions to this trend is the pro-natalist movement—a “once-fringe movement claim[ing] having more babies is the only way to save civilization.” (2)

If there is a crisis because of too few people (rather than the historical Malthusian over-population doom story), the drive to increase births is completely wrongheaded. Let me explain.

From an economic point of view, what is a baby? A parasite. It demands food, clothing, constant monitoring, but since it does no work, earns no pay, it is a drag on the economy of the nation. Besides it often keeps its mother from pursuing her profession, causing a reduction in income for the family. (3)

In the United States, although so many right-wingers claim concern about unborn children, once the children are born, the concern falls away. Health care services and insurance coverage are under constant threat of disappearing. With anti-vaxxers in government health positions, vaccine guidance is questionable, leaving children exposed to many previously-defeated diseases. And if a child survives, it won’t be an asset to the economy for usually two decades or so (after finishing its education).

*

There is a counterbalance to the problem of a declining birthrate in the US. It is so obvious (but hateful to too many people): open the doors to more immigrants. Here are adults desirous of work (it is incredible that ICE drags people away from their jobs). When they tackle jobs that American citizens are loath to take, they add to the nation’s economy. And jobs are waiting:

Why Factories Are Having Trouble Filling Nearly 400,000 Open Jobs(4)

The Administration’s policies are stupidly counter-productive.

The president’s crackdown on immigration, which includes attempts to revoke deportation protections for migrants from troubled countries, may eliminate workers who could have filled those jobs.

And pace the pro-natalists, no wearer of a diaper can run a lathe or spot-weld a joint.

 

***

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/20/world/americas/birthrate-fertility-feminism.html
2. https://www.npr.org/2025/04/30/nx-s1-5382208/whats-behind-the-pronatalist-movement-to-boost-the-birth-rate
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/opinion/motherhood-penalty-career.html?searchResultPosition=1
4. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/23/business/factory-jobs-workers-trump.html?searchResultPosition=1

 

E Pluribus Unum

Recently, I donated a shedload of money to my alma mater; in return, my alma mater sent me a shedload of paper. The only paper I have retained is a pamphlet entitled “Great Grads 2020.”

According to the pamphlet, these graduates are “poised to make great contributions in fields as varied as structural engineering, Early Childhood Education, landscape architecture and medicine.” What struck me most about the graduates were their national origins and ethnic backgrounds. Here’s the list:

Benjamin Akhavan—Jewish-Iranian

Propa Akter—Bangladeshi

Gina Bravo—Mexican

Kereen Brown—Jamaican

Yardelis Diaz—Unspecified Latinx

Alexandros Gloor—Greek-Italian

Sabastian Hajtovic—Turkish

Isabella Joseph—Indian

Mahmoud Khedr—Egyptian

Marija Krstic—Serbian

Terrell F. Merritt—African-American

Mathiu Perez Rodriguez—Ecuadorian

Rossmery Almonte Tejada—Dominican

And most exotic of all:

Daniel “Cash” Langford—Texan

Who cannot not love a school that offers such a diverse populace an opportunity to succeed? Who cannot love a country that has opened its doors to such a wide-range of nationalities? 

Oh wait. I forgot the wall-builders, the excluders, the bigots, the hate-mongers.

But aren’t we better than they are?

*

One of the graduates was awarded the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, “America’s premiere award for undergraduates majoring in math, science and engineering.” The take-away from that: Even Republicans can benefit society, if they put their minds to it.

Spirits of St. Louis

In the year 1927 the two most illustrious figures in the United States were almost certainly Babe Ruth, who hit 60 home runs during the baseball season—a record that would stand until 1961—and Charles Lindbergh, “Lucky Lindy,” the pilot of Spirit of St. Louis, who was the first person to fly solo non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean. 

Ruth’s fame continues to this day. Lindbergh’s flame blew out in December 1941, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States entered the Second World War.

Before the sneak attack, Lindbergh had become the face and major mouthpiece of the America First Committee, “the isolationist, defeatist, anti-Semitic national organization that urged the United States to appease Adolf Hitler.”(1)

In one notorious speech, Lindbergh singled out the “British and the Jewish races” as the major forces who “wish to involve us in the war.” And it was “for reasons which are not American.” 

We can accept that the British “race,” as a sovereign nation, would pursue its own national interest, which might not always coincide with that of the United States. But the Jewish “race”? By asserting that the Jews—as a “race”— pursue their own interests, driven by “reasons which are not American,” Lindbergh openly demonstrated a vicious strain of anti-semitism. What Lindbergh was proclaiming, Susan Dunn points out, was that  “[t]he nation's enemy was an internal one, a Jewish one.”  

*

[T]hroughout the [presidential] campaign, Trump also promised to put America first, a pledge renewed – twice – in his inaugural address. It was a disturbing phrase; think pieces on the slogan’s history began to sprout up, explaining that it stretches back to efforts to keep the US out of the second world war.
In fact, “America first” has a much longer and darker history than that, one deeply entangled with the country’s brutal legacy of slavery and white nationalism, its conflicted relationship to immigration, nativism and xenophobia. Gradually, the complex and often terrible tale this slogan represents was lost to mainstream history – but kept alive by underground fascist movements. “America first” is, to put it plainly, a dog whistle.(2) 

 ---

Nearly ever present by the President's side, perhaps no one is more responsible for the Trump agenda than Stephen Miller.(3)

Miller, the Trump whisperer, has been a major—perhaps the major architect of the President’s malignant immigration policy. Although Miller is only 32 years old, his xenophobic nastiness goes back to his teen-age years. One is not surprised, therefore, that with that history Miller would shed few tears over the forced separation of parents and children.

What did surprise me—indeed, shock me—the other day was to learn that young Mr. Miller was Jewish.(4) Perhaps naively, I have always believed that all Jews would be cognizant of their own history of persecution, exclusion, and expulsion and, therefore, would be foremost in the defense of the oppressed and downtrodden. 

Apparently, young Mr. Miller has never heard the story of the SS St. Louis, which in 1939 left Germany with 900 Jews aboard. 

They were anticipating an escape from the Nazis to a new home and freedom from oppression:

They hoped to reach Cuba and then travel to the US - but were turned away in Havana and forced to return to Europe, where more than 250 were killed by the Nazis.(5)

I wonder who Miller would empathize with: the 1939 equivalents of ICE agents, barring the door to safety, or his fellow Jews, refugees in deadly danger of extermination?

*

This past Tuesday brought news of a happier sort. The Hockey Hall of Fame selected its class of 2018 inductees. Among the chosen was Martin St. Louis, a French Canadian, who was born in Laval, Quebec. A somewhat undersized forward, St. Louis did not have a smooth journey to on-ice greatness. But eventually through determination and hard work he became a star in the league. He won numerous major trophies and scoring titles—and in 2004 the Stanley Cup with the Tampa Bay Lightning, the team that gave him his chance to excel. 

St. Louis now lives in Connecticut, an immigrant from north of the border.

So, let us salute l’esprit de St.Louis.

***

(1) Susan Dunn,   https://www.cnn.com/2016/04/27/opinions/trump-america-first-ugly-echoes-dunn/index.html

(2) Sarah Churchwell,   https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/21/end-of-the-american-dream-the-dark-history-of-america-first

(3) https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/23/politics/stephen-miller-immigration-family-separation/index.html 

(4) https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-aide-stephen-miller-meet-great-grandfather-flunked-naturalization-test-203424658.html

(5) https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27373131

Black Holes

The other day I read two articles that I would like to point you to. 

The first is an evaluation of the work of the late Stephen Hawking. (It is available at https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/a-brief-history-of-hawking-s-scientific-legacy) In its discussion of black holes and such astronomical phenomena the article did not include any mathematical equations, luckily for me as I can’t get beyond ten fingers and ten toes.*

What particularly struck me (apart from the way modern scientists have pushed ever closer to unravelling the deepest mysteries of the universe) is who those scientists are. Mentioned by name are Roger Penrose—like Hawking an Englishman—Albert Einstein (Swiss), James Hartle and Leonard Susskind (Americans), Jacob Beckenstein (Israeli), Gerard ’t Hooft (Dutch), and Juan Maldacena (Argentine). 

Certainly for residents of a small planet to attempt to comprehend the nature of the vast universe our home orb is a part of, nothing other than a global endeavor will do. And science, no matter how hard dictators try to make it, is anything but parochial or local or answerable to political dogma. 

*

In the second article, “Tracing the children of the Holocaust” (http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32589411), writer Alex Last followed up, seventy years later, the attempt by the BBC after World War II to find relatives in Britain of children who had survived the Holocaust. 

It all began with a rare recording of an old radio broadcast, which starts with the words: "Captive Children, an appeal from Germany."
One by one, for five minutes, the presenter asks relatives of 12 children to come forward. With each name comes a short but devastating summary of the child's ordeal under the Nazis.
"Jacob Bresler, a 16-year-old Polish boy, has survived five concentration camps, but has lost his entire family…
"Sala Landowicz, a 16-year-old Polish girl, who's in good health after surviving three concentration camps…
"Gunter Wolff, a German Jewish boy, now stateless. The boy is 16 years old and has experienced the ghetto at Lodz, and the Buchenwald concentration camp...
"Fela and Hana Katz, their father and mother have died, they have lost track of two brothers and three sisters."
And so it went on.

In the end Last was able to trace 11 of the 12 children mentioned in the one extant broadcast. Most were no longer alive. But Last was able to meet four survivors.

Unfortunately for some of the children, even when relatives were found, all did not go well. Instead of joyous clasps to the breasts, these children found an atmosphere soured by old family feuds, stinginess, and distain. For example, while in a DP camp three sisters 

got a response from the cousin they sought in London - a hospital doctor. But it was not what they expected.
"I got a letter back [said one sister] telling me I had to stand on my own two feet, and that kind of annoyed me, this attitude. So I wrote him, he needn't worry, I won't come to him for anything, that I will stand on my own two feet because I had a good teacher and that was Hitler. And he taught me a lot.”

On the other hand, others, like Jacob Bresler, were lucky:

Mr and Mrs Samuels were more than lovely. And they became my parents, practically, for the rest of their lives. They were angels. You don't meet people like this today, and if you do, you should carry them on your hands, and celebrate them as the most fantastic human beings that were ever alive. To this day, I do not have the words to express my gratitude, and they really loved me, and I loved them.

                                                                                *

Last year at my bank I noticed that the teller had two little flags attached to her name tag. One was the Stars-and-Stripes, but the other I did not recognize. When I asked her, she replied that it was the flag of Jordan. “That’s what I like about this place,” I told her. 

They may not all be scientists searching for the deepest secrets of the universe, but our mixture of peoples, some having escaped from murderous homelands or from crushing poverty, is a cause for celebration. But how much longer can we celebrate when we have an administration hell-bent on kicking people out and bolting the door in their faces? 

*

General relativity predicts the existence of black holes, regions of space where matter and energy are so dense that nothing can escape from their gravitational pull, not even light.**

Trump’s Washington is a political black hole whose denseness does not allow light to escape—or compassion to be released.

***

*So I lied! I studied Advanced Calculus and Differential Equations in college.

** https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/a-brief-history-of-hawking-s-scientific-legacy