To Breed or Not to Breed

We're enjoying a quiet holiday weekend here in the Darwin household, but so that ye may know we (or at least our tireless source of leads) are not slacking, here's an interesting article from Commentary Magazine about the trend towards childlessness among married couples in the developed world.

Though you've doubtless seen such things here before, this one is interesting (among other things) in that it provides some primary source material quotes from ancient sources during the Greek and Roman demographic collapses, when the elites lost the will to reproduce.

Ours, moreover, is hardly the only age or civilization to experience a demographic crisis. “In our own time,” wrote Polybius in roughly 150 B.C.E., “the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birthrate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit.” The reason for this decline, he believed, was decadence. “For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear children born to them, or at most as a rule one or two of them, . . . the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.”