Demography

Children win wars, not generals. Europe and West-leaning Asia do not seem to know that simple truth. Israel does.

“Wanted: New Soldiers for Europe’s Shrinking Armies,” headlines the Financial Times.

The German government is worried: its army is small and decrepit. In Germany, the average age in 1990 was 36. Today it is 44, an increase of eight years in the space of a single generation. If the trend continues, in two generations more than half of Germans will be over 60. And today Germany must convince “Generation Z” to take the army seriously (judging by the levels of sympathy for Hamas, that will be difficult).

Spain has an army of old men: more than 34 percent of non-commissioned officers are aged 50 or older.

The inability of European countries to rebuild solid armies reflects the great taboo that grips the old continent: Europe is the demographic Titanic.

I’ve heard enough about the Crusades, that America was built on stolen land, or that Israel sits on occupied land. That’s life. Get over it. Might make right was the way of the world. But now, we’re seeing conquest through a different strategy, and the West is complicit in its own execution.

As birthrates drop in developed nations, mass immigration reshapes demographics, raising concerns about cultural integration, intelligence decline, and the long-term stability of advanced economies.

When a nation’s population grows, it’s easier for that nation to experience economic growth. This is the conventional economic wisdom that has been unchallenged for centuries. And there was little reason to challenge this axiom, because throughout human history, the global population trend has been one of perpetual increase. But as birthrates are crashing in wealthier nations, without exception, it may be time to reexamine what constitutes healthy economic growth and how it may be achieved without increasing population.

The way Western nations have chosen to respond to crashing birthrates is to rely on mass immigration. Tens of millions of people are being encouraged to migrate from poor nations where fertility remains high into rich nations with low fertility. This gives rise to challenges that remain unresolved and indeed may worsen as people arrive by the millions from cultures with dramatically different values and beliefs than the host culture.

Declining fertility isn’t about career-focused women delaying motherhood—it’s about fewer young people getting married.

Despite family-friendly social and economic policies, birthrates are falling in many rich countries. A recent article in the Financial Times notes that past declines were driven by families having fewer children, but now people are skipping having children altogether. “Nobody really knows what’s going on,” writes FT. “It’s not primarily driven by economics or family policies. It’s something cultural, psychological.”

Why ageing and declining populations are not all doom and gloom.

In Britain and most other countries today, the birth rate has fallen below replacement levels – usually defined as 2.1 babies per woman. Fertility first fell below replacement levels in about 1973, and since 2010 has fallen steadily to about 1.55 babies per woman. In a few countries, including China and Japan, there have already been absolute population declines.

These trends are now prompting a lot of doom-laden commentary from demographers, economists and politicians. They claim that an ageing population, with ever-fewer working-age people supporting ever-more retirees, is creating an unsustainable burden for society.

America’s population decline is decently bad, but it isn’t so bad that you’d notice anything drastically different in our society. We’re all still groaning with impatience when full school buses make our morning commute a good 20 minutes longer, our playgrounds are still used, and, depending on where you live, it’s not all that rare to see moms at the grocery store with kids in tow.

In short, it doesn’t yet feel like we live in a childless dystopian world. That’s not at all the case in Japan.

Japan has a bit of a population problem. Not only is its fertility rate incredibly low (at 1.37 births per woman) but last year government data revealed that for every one person born in Japan, two people died. Those kinds of numbers are a problem for social flourishing, and it’s starting to show.

Imagine if having children came with more than $150,000 in cheap loans, a subsidized minivan and a lifetime exemption from income taxes.

Would people have more kids? The answer, it seems, is no.

These are among the benefits—along with cheap child care, extra vacation and free fertility treatments—that have been doled out to parents in different parts of Europe, a region at the forefront of the worldwide baby shortage. Europe’s overall population shrank during the pandemic and is on track to contract by about 40 million by 2050, according to United Nations statistics.

Demographers, sociologists and your mother-in-law want to know: why aren’t people having as many kids?

Canada recorded its lowest-ever fertility rate for the second year in a row in 2023, according to Statistics Canada, at 1.26 children born per woman. It now joins the ranks of “lowest-low” fertility countries, including South Korea, Spain, Italy and Japan.

Statistics Canada said the drop between 2022 and 2023 specifically reflects an increase in the number of women of childbearing age, but also noted the fertility rate has been steadily declining for more than 15 years.

Of course there may be reasons unremarked upon in the article.

Imagine being 42, child-free, and without a care in the world.

The right hates this. pic.twitter.com/anZZVHgyYI

— Angela Belcamino (@AngelaBelcamino) September 28, 2024