Electrocuted French Youths Spark Riots - Page 2

The summation paragraph of Jim Hoagland's editorial from yesterday's Washington Post reads:

So there is no single explanation and no single answer. The United States has responded to the collapsing social and family structures of the Muslim Middle East and Central Asia with the fire and brimstone of war. The French respond to a related challenge within their borders with political insincerity and economic handouts. The failures of both countries have more in common than either is prepared to acknowledge today.
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I recommend clicking the link and reading the rest of the article. As with all of Hoagland's work, it's well worth the time.

Update: I never did manage to track down that population study. If anyone finds it, please let me know.

Well, that took a while. From the current Atlantic:

Baby Bust
A paper by three Austrian population experts takes up Europe’s falling birthrates, which have dropped below replacement level in many countries, and investigates whether they are likely to rebound, level off, or continue to fall. Current United Nations projections estimate that birthrates will level off at around 1.85 children per woman in most countries. But it’s just as likely, the authors argue, that Europe will find itself caught in a “low fertility trap” that keeps driving the Continent’s population downward. They cite three elements that might create this cycle of childlessness. First, there’s the negative momentum created by a declining population, in which fewer women enter their prime childbearing years every generation, and their lower numbers lead to fewer births overall even if the birthrate suddenly returns to replacement level—and many fewer if it doesn’t. Second, people who grow up in a largely childless society may internalize a much smaller “ideal family size” and have fewer children. And third, as the population of Europe ages, the income prospects of younger workers will likely decline, creating an age of diminished expectations that will lead young people to delay having children still further, or have none at all. The low-fertility trap, the authors caution, is only a hypothesis, but it’s plausible enough to deserve “serious consideration”—especially since it may soon be too late for government policies to reverse the possible downward spiral.

—“The Low Fertility Trap Hypothesis,” Wolfgang Lutz, Vegard Skirbekk, and Maria Rita Testa, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis

That Mark Bowden article in the Atlantic is fucking awesome, by the way.

I'm in the middle of it right now. It's riveting.