Joel Kotkin Stumbles Over The Truth Of Affordable Family Formation—Then Picks Himself Up, And Goes On
06/05/2012
A+
|
a-
Print Friendly and PDF

Joel Kotkin in The Daily Beast has stumbled over the truth of what Steve Sailer calls Affordable Family Formation. however, as Churchill said about Baldwin, he seems to have picked himself up and hurried off as if nothing had happened.

In It Can Happen Here: Europe’s Screwed Generation and America’s, [June 4, 2012]proposes the thesis that the unavailability of jobs in Europe (and to a lesser extent in America) makes it impossible for young people to get married and have families.
 
Driving this exodus is a growing perception that this collapse is not cyclical but secular. Increasingly, young Europeans are deciding not to start families—the key to future growth—in reaction to the recession. The stories about divorced Spanish or Italian young fathers sleeping on the streets or in their cars are not exactly a strong advertising for parenthood.

This is true, and we've been saying it here for years, because immigration is a major factor—but not for Kotkin!

In his Beast article, immigrants are mentioned as

  1. Victims of this phenomenon
  2. Scapegoats

He writes

"Politicians on the right, in Europe and elsewhere, scapegoat immigrants in part to hold on to their share of older votes."

He seems to think that opposition to immigration is the exclusive province of Archie Bunker-aged voters.

In reality, politicians should be reducing immigration for the benefit of younger, jobless voters. This entire phenomenon he's discussing:of low wages, of Europeans having to leave Europe because immigrants have taken their jobs, is driven by the mass immigration that Kotkin has been advocating for since the 90s. And Kotkin hasn't learned anything in the intervening years—his tediously tendentious latest book is called The Next Hundred Million.

Print Friendly and PDF