Low population causes recession?

By Fr. ROY CIMAGALA
February 12, 2010

THAT was the drift of an article I read recently. The president of the Institute for the Works of Religion, aka Vatican Bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, claimed that bankers are not the cause of the current global economic crisis, but rather the low birth rate obtaining in many countries these days.

“The true cause of the crisis is the decline in the birth rate,” he said. The cause is ordinary people who do not “believe in the future,” and have few or no children. The bankers and other economic players are only agents and tools of an ailing social structure that needs to be transformed.

The Vatican economist said that since people are not anymore interested in having children, we are creating a negative economic context that can only lead to recession.

He noted that in Western developed countries, the birth rate has fallen to 0%, i.e., 2 children or less per family. This can only mean impending disaster to said countries.

I personally feel there is at least a correlation between low birth rate and recession. I won’t go so far as to affirm a cause-and-effect link, since there are just so many factors affecting the dynamics to isolate low birth rate as the cause of recession.

But I also believe that low birth rate is a significant factor, if not the defining one. We in the end are the ultimate resource responsible for our economic growth. Of course, it’s not just numbers that matter, but also the quality. Just the same, all things considered equal, the more we are the better we are going to be.

We just have to make the necessary investment, the necessary sacrifice, trying to make it effective and productive, so that we can put everyone in his best condition to be assets not liabilities to our economic development, as well as in the other aspects of our growth. Education and continuing formation should be a prime concern.

My exposure to different families leads me to conclude that the bigger family more than the smaller one is better able to fend off all sorts of difficulties and to tackle all sorts of challenges.

Of course, this is easier said than done. In real time, the dynamics can be so complicated to dare to simplify it with some theoretical guidelines. For sure, there are moments, when a smaller family would have the advantage over the bigger one.

But we can’t stop there. There are short-term and long-term considerations to be made, and a proper blending and scheduling of these aspects is important. In any event, some amount of sacrifice is unavoidable, and we should be ready for it.

To me this question of the relationship between population level and our economic status should not be framed only within purely economic and financial terms. That would impoverish the analysis of the issue.

We always have to consider the moral and spiritual dimension, since we are not only economic entities, but firstly and lastly, moral and spiritual persons. Much of the economic crisis we are suffering can be traced to moral and spiritual causes – vices, laziness, greed, lack of care for the others, and worse, lack of faith and charity.

There are now many studies that reinforce the thesis that in the end the main cause of our current global crisis is precisely our crisis in the spiritual and moral life. We are spending more than we earn. There’s a lot of imprudence in our spending behavior, focusing more on instant comfort and pleasure than on productive investments, on self-seeking than on solidarity.

What happened in the States regarding the sub-prime crisis, what is happening in Dubai and in Greece now, are all indicative of a lifestyle that is more wasteful than productive. Perhaps, we can say they are getting what they deserve, a comeuppance they have been building up themselves.

It’s a lifestyle that is afraid of the authentic responsibilities and sacrifices in life. It tends to create a fictional world, its own version of the land of milk and honey. It luxuriates in consumerism and all forms of hedonism and intemperance. It is allergic to having children, to caring and bringing children up to maturity. They even kill babies.