Demographic Timebombs: Another (and Global) Perspective

[Meengla]

The following is a 'comment' made to an article by Pat Buchanan's article about Russia's Demographic Time Bomb. I think the comment is very interesting, is global in its application, and must be brought to the larger audience (here!).

Any emphasis added are mine.

Russia’s Demographic Time Bomb | The American Conservative

I’m not quite getting the nostalgia for European colonial empires and vast armies and navies. Moreover, one wonders about the ethnic and racial focus of the article.

All over the world, fertility is going down. Not just in Europe. Even in the areas which are still experiencing population growth, and even among the groups within declining population countries that are still experiencing that growth, the long term trend is towards reduced fertility, resulting in lower population growth, and, eventually, population contraction.

The “world,” nor even merely the white world, is not going to end with a “whimper.” Nor are Asians, African and Middle Easterners going to “invade” Europe and “repopulate” it. There are going to be fewer of every group, in the not too distant future. Immigration pressures should decrease, not increase. And now fertile immigrant populations will increasingly conform to the norms of their host countries.

The trend is based on the move away from subsistence agriculture and the move towards the education of girls and women, it is spreading and becoming global, and it is two hundred years or more in the making. Barring some huge reversal of those trends, places like Latin America, Central Asia and Sub Saharan Africa are going to be, very shortly (given the time scales) joining Europe and Japan.

Moreover, to my mind, it is almost inconceivable that this overall trend is not seen as a good thing. One need not be some kind of environmentalist fanatic to believe that endless population growth is not to be desired. More and more humans, living an increasingly lavish lifestyle, using up more resources, creating more pollution, of every kind, putting more and more pressure on the limited remaining wild and underdeveloped places, etc, etc. Is that what we want? Is more always better? Wouldn’t somewhat fewer humans living better lifestyles, so that each person has more of a chance of living up to his or her potential, be better than an endlessly expanding hive of folks struggling to live in an increasingly barren, dry, overdeveloped wasteland?

I also find the tone of the article to be oddly ghoulish. It is not as if actual, living human beings are going to be going missing, “vanish,” or “disappear.”

I wonder too about the need for all these people. The USA, in 1930, had fewer than 125 million people. In what amounts to pretty much the same territory today, we have well over twice as many folks. But, did people in 1930 think or feel that there somehow weren’t enough of their fellow Americans? Individual persons, no doubt, were alone and lonely, but simply increasing the population was not likely to solve that problem. Was grass growing on the streets of New York? I don’t think so.

Grass was growing in some of the areas that are now suburbs of New York, but was that such a terrible thing? My folks grew up in what is now officially the New York “metropolitan area,” but, when they were kids, it was more rural than anything else. There were almost no suburbs. There were small towns, surrounded mostly by farms, forests and land that had once been farmed but that wasn’t, at that time (1930′s, ’40′s), doing much of anything. The biggest local “industries” were greenhouse plants and flowers. Even in my youth, in the same area, many of the greenhouses were still operating, there was lots of open and vacant land, and even some farms still operating. Now, all that is gone, bulldozed over, with suburbs pretty much stretching from town to town, and little to no open land left anywhere. The greenhouses have come down, replaced by subdivisions. The farms are long gone. Is that so wonderful? Sure, folks, including myself, had to live somewhere, and suburbia actually can be a pleasant place to grow up in. But do we need more of it? Would it be a sin if some of it were turned back to nature? Or to farming (the land is still quite rich)?

Also, not so long ago, no one saw the current depopulation trend coming. No, the same experts who are today predicting a population crash were only yesterday predicting an endless population run up. Well, trends have a way of reversing, over time. And even more so they have a way of moderating.

My best guess is that this trend will moderate too. That changes in policies, not merely crude ones that award cash and prizes to couples who have kids, but changes in societies at a much deeper level, will see, after a time, a rising populations again.
With technological advances already made, most folks in the world, even today, could be spared the rat race. But economic, legal and political systems stand in the way of that kind of more even, more reasonable, distribution of the wealth that has been created over the last couple of hundred years. With even more advances coming, and with a refusal of the “99 per cent” to remain frozen out of the gains, eventually, will come a point where having more than a child or two starts to seem like a good deal again.