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David Goldman's book, How Civilizations Die: (And Why IRAN Is Dying Too), highlights the grim future. This is a must read for Iranians.
But Islamic society is even more fragile. As Muslim fertility shrinks at a rate demographers have never seen before, it is converging on Europe's catastrophically low fertility as if in time-lapse photography. The average 30-year-old Iranian woman comes from a family of six children, but she will bear only one or two children during her lifetime. Turkey and Algeria are just behind Iran on the way down, and most of the other Muslim countries are catching up quickly. By the middle of this century, the belt of Muslim countries from Morocco to Iran will become as gray as depopulating Europe. The Islamic world will have the same proportion of dependent elderly as the industrial countries - but one-tenth the productivity. A time bomb that cannot be defused is ticking in the Muslim world.
If demographic winter is encroaching slowly on the West, a snap frost has overtaken the Muslim world. Europe has had two hundred years to make the transition from the high fertility rates of rural life to the low fertility rates of the industrial world. Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria are attempting it in twenty. The graying of the Muslim world in lapsed time, as it were, can have only tragic consequences.
Think of a train wreck: the front car hits an obstacle, and the rear cars collapse accordion-style with the momentum. Driving the demographics of Iran, Algeria, Tunisia, and other Muslim countries is a "locomotive made up of people in their teens and twenties. They were born into families of six or seven children. But this "locomotive" has hit a demographic wall: these young people are having only one or two children. Today's "bulge generation of young Muslims, whose political humiliation and frustration over economic stagnation stoked the Arab rebellions of 2011, will be followed by a generation dramatically smaller than their own.
Today there are more Iranians in their mid-twenties than in any other age bracket. But they are not reproducing. An educated twenty-five-year-old Iranian women today probably grew up in a family of six or seven children, but will bear only one child. The consequences will be catastrophic. Today there are nine Iranians of working age for every elderly dependent. By 2050, when the bulge in Iran’s population will be at retirement age, there will be more Iranians in their mid-sixties than in any other age bracket—seven elderly dependents for every ten working Iranians. The country produces just $4,400 per capita [adjusted constant dollars], about a tenth of America’s GDP, and most of that comes directly or indirectly from oil and natural gas reserves—which are running out.
It’s already too late to fend off the population decline. Aging populations present a danger even to rich countries with well-funded public pension systems. For poor countries with a primitive social safety net or none at all, a graying society will be a disaster. By 2070, Iran will be grayer than Europe.
Across the entire Muslim world, university-educated Muslim women bear children at the same rate as their infecund European counterparts.As soon as Muslims women break the constraints of traditional society, they have one child and sometimes two, but rarely three or four- and almost never six or seven children that their mothers bore.. These demographic and religious developments in Iran find a striking parallel in Turkey as well. A third of the 88 percent-literate Turks never attend the mosque, according to the SVS polls, along with a quarter of 82 percent-literate Iranians.
Muslim leaders show more panic about their own demographic decline than the most despondent Western pessimist. The presidents of Iran and Turkey, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Tayyip Erdogan, both warn of that their nations may be extinguished in a single generation. For the most part, the English-language media has ignored their warnings, but they pervade the Turkish- and Persian-language press and blogs. The sense of impending doom that pervades much of the Muslim world makes these countries dangerous and unstable. The risk to world security is not the gradual triumph of Islam by demographic accretion, but an era of instability, social breakdown, and aggression impelled by despair.
Iran’s Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, warns that national extinction will be the result of his country’s collapsing birth rate. On September 10, 2010, the Iranian president declared during a meeting with officials in Alborz province,“Two children” is a formula for the extinction of a nation, not the survival of a nation . . . The most recent data showing that there are only 18 children for every 10 Iranian couples should raise an alarm among the present generation . . . . This is what is wrong with the West. Negative population growth will cause the extinction of our identity and culture. The fact that we have accepted this places us on the wrong path. To want to consume more rather than having children is an act of genocide.
The Persian-language site Javan Online quoted President Ahmadinejad and also cited sociologist Majid Abhari warning of a “tidal wave of elderly” due to “decreased fertility” coming in the next few decades, leading to “workforce reduction and higher social insurance and medical costs due to an overwhelmingly elderly population.”
There is supposedly a correlation between the literacy rate of women in Muslim countries and their fertility rate. “As more Iranian women went through the school system, the researchers conclude, fewer had children.” And how do they compare with the rest of the Muslim world? Answer: “Iranian women are the best educated in the Muslim world.”Java Online, a Persian language website, had proposed that the following factors contribute to the reduction of fertility:
• Increased education for women
• Increasing employment of women
• Improved health care and family planning
• Higher marriage age
• More frequent divorce
• Urbanization
How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too): David Goldman: 9781596982734: Amazon.com: Books
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