In a December column in the New York Times headlined More Babies, Please, Ross Douthat argued that the “retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion", revealing “a spirit that privileges the present over the future”. The Weekly Standard's Jonathan V. Last has made the case in his controversial book What to Expect When No One's Expecting that the selfishness of the childless American is responsible for no less than the possible destruction of our economic future by reducing the number of consumers and taxpayers.