Jim Penman argues that the 1950s baby boom wasn't caused by post-war optimism but by an epigenetic effect: children who experienced severe recessions between ages six and twelve later had more children. He points to the Great Depression and England's Hungry '40s as examples, and suggests replicating this effect without inducing economic hardship.
Hi, I'm Jim Penman. I'm a businessman who's funded a research institute into, amongst other things, the birth rate crisis. Why are birth rates dropping? I've written previous books including Epigenetics and Character and Biohistory, about to release Birth Rate Crisis. Baby boom, very interesting topic because there was a period when the declining birth rate actually reversed itself in America and in much of the rest of the world to the extent that birth rates were very low in the 1930s and rose to a peak in the '50s. So birth rates were very much higher in the '50s. The question is why? Because if we're interested in understanding what happened to— why the birth rates are collapsing all over the world, we need to look at what happened when they actually rose for a while. Now people have all sorts of explanations for what happened in the '50s. And one of the most common explanations is that it was the result of the Second World War. Now what's wrong with that is that typically big wars tend to cause the birth rates to drop. That happened after the 1914-18 War. It happened after the Napoleonic Wars. It happened after the Civil War in the US. So generally speaking, wars cause populations to drop. But there is something that causes birth rates to rise, and that is economic recessions. And what causes birth rates to rise is when you have a depression, severe depression with high unemployment and a lot of economic misery, children who grow up, who pass their second 6 years of life, approximately between the ages of 6 and 12, tend to have more children. Now there's multiple occasions. Great Depression is one, but also the recession of '75-'85. The kids that grew up then, past their late childhood, then tend to have a little bit of a baby boomlet. But you can go back to the 19th century in England. The kids that grew up in the Hungry '40s, which was a really bad time, As they grew into adults, they had more children. So economic recession is, at the crucial stage of life, is what caused the birth rate to grow. And that's because it has an effect, an epigenetic effect on character. Now, we don't want to have a massive recession to cause the birth rates to rise. But what if there was a way of achieving the same results without the economic misery? We believe there is. And that's the solution to the birth rate crisis.
Rising mental illness and falling birth rates have the same cause, it is this.....
