Chase-An Overview of my Demographic Concerns

So I’ve given a lot of thought to the topic of my first blog entry. I mulled over quite a few, but there is one topic that I have been reading and thinking about for some time: demographic decline in the West and East Asia and its possible result in economic, societal, and cultural collapse. In a nutshell, the problem is simply that every first-world nation except the United States have fertility rates below replacement level. That means that their populations will decline, leaving less and less able-bodied and vigorous young go-getters to drive their economies, and more and more elderly and retired people that need to be taken care of by their children. Immigration will be the only way to save their shrinking workforce and economy. This might ultimately mean that Europe and Japan will go the way of the Roman Empire...

Ok, so it’s awfully pretentious of some no-credentials undergraduate student like me to be writing about such a massive issue. But this is some serious stuff, a lot more serious than climate change or the price of oil or whatever crisis of the day people are talking about. I hope this blog entry gets people thinking about something that has a tremendous potential effect on our children’s and grandchildren’s world.

Our world is changing. And I’m not thinking of its temperature. Social scientist say that to maintain a countries population the average woman needs to have 2.1 children. That makes sense, as each married couple replaces itself with two kids, and there’s an additional tenth of a child to make up for any children who die prematurely. But in the European Union the fertility rate is at 1.5, with Lithuania at the lowest (1.22) and France at the highest (1.98), according to the CIA World Factbook.1 As Europeans have less children, the average age of the population gets older and more people retire and need money from the welfare-state. In order to maintain its economy, an increasing number of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East are needed to boost the shrinking workforce. These immigrants are primarily Muslim, and with them they bring the seeds of Islamic society. This situation, to say the least, is not good. The whole situation makes me recall when in my high school Humanities class we discussed the fall of the Roman Empire. One of the biggest reasons for the Empire’s fall was its decline in population. With their great success and lives in pursuit of pleasure, the Romans began to stop having babies. No new babies means no new soldiers, workers, or government officials. Without people power the huge state of the Empire collapsed, and the Romans were unable to resist as they were swept away in wave after wave of barbarian migrations (the result of my German ancestors, I suppose). Shrinking and aging population and huge and expensive bureaucracy in the EU sounds quite similar.
People might say, “Ok, the white European population is certainly in decline, but these immigrants will assimilate and discard much of their culture for the wonderful consumerism of the West. To worry about people with a different skin color taking over is a quite racist and xenophobic thing to do. What culture they do keep will add a nice zest to the European food-scape.” I’d say it is arrogant to assume that our post-modern materialistic culture is so inherently superior that it’ll assimilate all foreigners like the seemingly invincible Borg of Star Trek. And it doesn’t sound like some Europeans even want to let them assimilate, as the leader of the Church of England Archbishop Rowan Williams is calling for a degree Islamic law to be adopted in the United Kingdom.2 Having in one country two legal systems from two completely different world-views sounds like a very bad idea to me. Unlike the United States, Europe is not a society founded by immigrants (at least not in recent history), so I‘m not sure if Europe can integrate its new citizens like we can. There’s a good chance Western Europe will end up looking like the Balkans in the not too distant future.

There is an excellent book I read by Mark Steyn titled America Alone.3 He discusses the demographic situation in Europe and the implications it could have on the United States. I really like the essence of his argument as he puts it in his prologue on page xxxv:
“Age + Welfare = Disaster for You
Youth + Will = Disaster for whoever gets in your way”
Though not an academic work, I feel his ideas cut to the heart of this issue, and thus the I highly recommend his book.

On the other side of the world Japan has a similar problem, but a different solution. With a fertility rate of 1.22, and if it doesn’t change soon Japan’s economy is in serious trouble.4 Japan could open its doors to immigration, but the homogeneous nation seems antsy about that idea. So instead they turn to robots, which could result in an interesting evolution of society, for better or for worse.5

The United States, so far, has a healthy social scientist recommended fertility rate of 2.10. Of course our population continues to grow as well through immigration, but it’s driven by Latin Americans, who are Roman Catholic and share many of our values, and so I don’t think it poses the same threat as Europe’s immigration problem does (it could even greatly help us, but that‘s another blog article entirely). Though our economy might have hit a rough spot right now, I think our growing population will serve us well in the future. But there are still people buying into outdated Malthusian ideas about how eventually we will all starve because there are far too many people. Radical environmentalists are constantly bombarding people with prophecies that we are on the verge of ecological collapse-that our exploding population will soon run out of all its resources and there will be famine, war, draught, disease, and pestilence. They‘ve even convinced a environmentally conscious woman to abort her child and sterilize herself to be sure she doesn‘t end up making more ecological disasters (meaning new human beings).6 But people like the old Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich are completely wrong. Ehrlich’s predictions that we would all starve to death in the 70’s and 80’s failed to come true. The reason being that when a human being is born into the world, he doesn’t just bring an appetite and a carbon footprint; he brings the potential for creativity and innovation. It may sound hokey but people are our most valuable resource. Technology has more than kept up with our growing population, much to people like Ehrlich’s chagrin.7 But if there are no people to innovate or to invest in new technologies, than how can be produce enough to support an elderly population?

What alarms me about this is the underlying causes of this problem. I can think of two probably ones. First and probably least influential (as of right now) is a change in ethics. Radical environmentalists encourage people to value animal life on the same level as human life, such as in the philosophy as Peter Singer. This doesn’t bring animals to the human level, but rather brings us down to theirs, and so a can of worms is opened up and it can be considered moral for human beings to drive themselves to extinction to “save the planet.” (what is quite ironic about this is that it doesn‘t even make evolutionary sense, as a species priority is to preserve itself, at the expense of others if necassary). Secondly and more problematic is our shift from a culture centered on family to one centered on the self. People put off having children for their careers, or so they can enjoy life with less responsibilities. And in the long run those notions are incredibly detrimental to society.

I hope to continue this topic in later blog entries. There are many areas that need further discussion, for example, what this means for China or the change in ethics that could accompany a huge demographic shift. As an Orthodox Christian, one particular issue that emerges from population decline is what it means for the Church. In Greece, Russian, Romania, and every other country where Orthodoxy is the dominate religion fertility rates are well below replacement levels. This could mean that Orthodoxy in America will have an increasing importance in the years to come. Hopefully I’ll be able to write some more in the future, but these next few months I expect to be pretty busy. I hope you’ve enjoyed my article, and that it has provided food for thought. In between now and the next blog I hope to watch a new documentary about this very subject matter: Demographic Winter.