Where are the Children - Part Two

Sometimes when I can't sleep, I play mind games with numbers, sort of like counting sheep.  I woke up one day last week around 4 AM and couldn't get back to sleep, so I got to thinking about my blog post about children.  It occurred to me that, considering what I said about middle class demographics and their birth rate, the number of middle class surnames in this country will rapidly decrease.  Here is my reasoning.  If the birth rate among the middle class is less that two/family (which it is), there is only a fifty percent chance that the surname of the father will be carried on to children.  Assuming that he has a male child, that child has a fifty percent chance of having a male child if he marries and has children at all.  If you carry this out over very few generations it means that, starting with the original father, their is a 50/50 chance of his surname being carried over for  one generation, a 25% chance that his surname will be carried over for two generations, a 12.5% chance that the surname will last 3 generations, and only a 6% chance that it will carry four generations. In a span of around 80 years, most surnames will be extinct.  There are of course some variables.  Some women will have children out of wedlock, and carry their surname forward. Some religious faiths Catholics and Mormons for instance tend to have more children, and their will be a few other outliers, but overall with our current birthrate the number of surnames will decrease among the middle class.

As in many of my posts, I am now segue into the real point of my blog.  One of my good friends sent me a link to a video about Muslim demographics.  Here's the link. http://www.youtube.com/embed/6-3X5hIFXYU   Now I tend to be an Islamic apologist, and I don't believe that they are universally out for world domination, are at war with us, or that their world view is all bad.  I do have some serious reservations  about fundamentalist Muslims just as I am suspicious of fundamentalists of all religions.  But, I tell you, this video is a real eye opener.  It is obviously an anti-Muslim peace of work, and I'm not sure of the voracity of all the statistics in the video, but I do believe that the overall demographic trends it proposes are generally true. I did look this up, and many of the most outrageous claims are false, and the rate of demographic shift is exaggerated.  That is that all of Europe and Russia is destined to soon become completely dominated by people of Islamic faith, and it looks like Canada and the United States may not be far behind.

I can't imagine anything we can do to reverse this trend.  It's a basic fact that poor people tend to have more children, doing so has always been a way to provide security for the parents in their old age.  At the same time, through our welfare system, we have enabled the poor to have more children.  I'm not advocating for any change here, it is unconscionable to consider cutting off benefits to the poor and to their children in order to control their birth rates.  As a nation, I guess we could provide financial assistance to increase birth rates among the middle class, but we could not do this exclusively for the middle class, and there is no way that our country is going to embark on such a huge voyage of social engineering.  The only thing I can possibly think of to slow or reverse this trend in this country is to bring economic justice to the poor and middle class so that the poor will not need to have large families and the middle class can once again afford to have larger families.