With the data becoming ever clearer about America’s declining birthrates, Tim Carney notes the arguments of those who believe this trend might be a good thing—and points to a recent study that demonstrates a few of the benefits accrued by a society whose members have children:

The researchers, led by the British psychologist Lukas Wolf, tried to separate out confounding factors. They didn’t want to see if parents were more or less pro-social—or young people or women or anything like that. They tried to discern whether people in general were more generous and pro-social simply because children were around.

One aspect of the study involved fundraising efforts on different main streets. The researchers “recorded the number of children and adults on a shopping street and collected donations from adult passersby for a cause not specifically related to children.” They found “a significant positive correlation between the proportion of children present and the number of donations.” This wasn’t explained at all by parents being more generous, the researchers said. It was the presence of children that seemed to make a difference.

Wolf and colleagues also conducted eight experiments, online or in a lab, where they asked participants to describe different settings or situations, some of which involved children. This divided the participants into those who had children on their mind and those who didn’t. Both groups were then asked about their aspirations toward generosity, service, duty, and similar pro-social virtues. The experiments, with more than 2,000 participants, found small but significant effects suggesting that thinking about children makes people more conscientious.

Being around children makes us all behave better. So we should worry about a society with fewer and fewer of them.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].