Demography

Although Mark Steyn writes knowledgeably about a great many topics, he keeps returning to what he calls the biggest story of our time—the planet’s demographic death spiral.

The decline in population is a global phenomenon, but it’s happening faster in the West and in Japan. For a description of where it all ends, Steyn recommends P.D. James dystopian novel, The Children of Men.

Also … PM Meloni Meets With Pope To Discuss Demographic Crisis and Pro-Natalist Campaign

This week, for the first time since assuming high office in October, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni met with Pope Francis to discuss several pressing topics facing Italy, namely its severe demographic crisis and how to solve it.

“Only 3% of 18-24 year olds identify as Anglicans, and only 5% as Catholics.”

Mass migration and the collapse of religion among the young have transformed Europe. And it’s transforming America at a slower rate.

Unlike interest rates or the weather, long-run demographic trends are highly predictable. Today, we are facing a demographic storm that will have far-reaching impacts on the economy and geopolitics.

But automation! Hasn’t Canada been a productivity laggard by choice of the corporate class? They must be missing their slaves.

Fewer babies will be born in all of Europe than in Nigeria alone.

In Europe, “at the rate at which things are going, the population will have halved before 2070, with the continent at risk of losing 400 million inhabitants by 2100,” noted James Pomeroy, an economist at China’s HSBC bank.

The growth of the world population has already reached its lowest rate since 1950 and Europe’s population will continue to contract until the end of the century, noted the Financial Times, citing the United Nations World Population Prospects report.

A collateral question is: where?

When I was a kid, everyone was worried about the “population explosion.” Paul Ehrlich’s book, “The Population Bomb,” was a runaway bestseller.

This led to a lot of dystopian science fiction, like Harry Harrison’s novel, “Make Room, Make Room,” which became the famous movie “Soylent Green.” It also led to a lot of policy changes, from China’s disastrous one-child policy to many policies in industrialized nations aimed at people having fewer children later in life.

A declining population and plummeting fertility rate isn’t a unique Japanese phenomenon. All rich countries will contend with this crisis.

The world has an obsession with Japan’s shrinking population. Each year, news that the country is a little bit smaller can reliably be called upon for column inches, which tend to examine it as a Japanese mystery — one of those inherently Oriental concepts that foreigners could not possibly penetrate, like wabi-sabi or the bushido code of samurai warriors.

The New York Times asked in 2012, “Without babies, can Japan survive?” The Atlantic wrote about “the mystery of why Japanese people are having so few babies.” To be fair, Japan talks about the population crisis as much as anyone, with one paper recently calling for the declaration of a “declining birth-rate state of emergency.”

“We are on the verge of something fundamentally different right now, yes. But a lot of it looks more like the world before 1945 than the world of the future.” There is good news coming out of the global population collapse.

A little while back, a friend introduced me to the work of developmental economist Peter Zeihan. He identifies as a socially conservative libertarian but seems to be slightly further to the left than that. His science is spot on and he presents it in a way that’s agenda-free. He tells it like it is, is known for his accurate forecasts, and I think we need to listen to him. Here is a recent and very concise presentation of his scholarship.