Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Future of the West – Through Children
Elon Musk has said that the earth is basically empty, and he is right. We could fit the entire world’s population in New Zealand without exceeding the population density of Manhattan.
The problem is that richer countries are in deep, deep demographic decline. Here is Japan’s population pyramid (2020):
This is deeply troubled. The average Japanese woman is too old to procreate.
The healthiest Western country (in terms of population growth) is Israel.
Check out this website and enter your own country to see the results. Demographics is, at some point, destiny.
The alternative is to invite immigrants and hope they assimilate (the path most of Europe has taken to overcome its own domestic population crises). That is a risky proposition, to say the least. And one that countries like Japan and Korea are quite unlikely to adopt.
Published in General
I’m betting robots.
Don’t confuse wealth with money.
Addressed among other issues in the Greatest Interview On Any Subject, Ever, with Mark Steyn on the Northern Alliance Radio Network.
https://www.adrive.com/public/RaM8Mj/NARN%2012-02-06%20NARN%201%20Hour%202%20Mark%20Steyn.mp3
ibid.
In order for there to be those capable of leading etc, there still have to be bodies produced. The rest is “programming.”
That is how Stalin and Hitler thought: fewer people must mean more wealth for the rest. They failed to understand that it is people who create the wealth!
Why is it a problem for anybody else?
Pressuring the young ones to deliver grandchildren has ALWAYS worked.
Marry. Have babies. Homeschool them. Don’t leave out the homeschooling.
Got me — what do I care?
Less glib answer:
Poorer countires gaining proportionally over richer countries will not make them richer. Importing things they cannot make or processes they cannot sustain from richer countries are the key to wealth.
Seen Idiocracy? I think we’re living in it.😬😬😬
No. Fifty-sixty percent of what people are has to do with their genetics as I’ve said constantly. I am worried that low I.Q. and anti-social people are irresponsibly outbreeding the intelligent and the sensible.
I don’t quite follow can you elaborate?
It will make no difference, I suspect. Rich countries will remain rich, their demographics may change, but they’ll still be rich. At the end of the day economies need brains and bodies, and they don’t care what colour these come in or what religious beliefs they have. Which will put some (ahistorical) noses out of joint, but hey, everybody’s a critic.
Sure, but more importantly exporting things that they can make more competitively.
Do you really think people whose best “brains” have created the Taliban etc as their highest examples, would be capable of – or interested in – maintaining the kind of civilization and technology they have essentially just been leaching from for decades or centuries?
Where is the Palestinian iPhone?
History is very long. Selecting a civilisation’s highest or lowest point to draw an axiomatic conclusion about it is…unwise. Unless one is invested in aggrandising oneself?
I tried calling but it was occupied.
You might enjoy reading The Marching Morons by C. M. Kornbluth. I suspect that this story inspired the movie, but I don’t know that for sure.
Absolutely 100 percent wrong. Color doesn’t matter but religion and culture does. Rich countries became wealthy because their cultures and religions allowed the generation of wealth, not because they stole from weaker and poorer countries. (Though rich countries did do alot of stealing as well.)
Ethiopian and Nigerian immigrants tend to leave the negative parts of their culture behind and become patriotic and successful Americans while Somalis for some reason tend to grab onto the worst parts of their culture. I want a wall and I want to be judgey about what immigrants come to America but I have no interest in judging on something as literally skin-deep as color.
If Britain had not invaded India. Would the Mughal Empire have made Bollywood, the Indian tech billionaires or have given your ancestors the opportunity to learn how to read?
I don’t think that this is true, about Hitler and Stalin. Hitler’s Germany had pro-family policies, and the population of the USSR grew quite a bit under Stalin, I think.
Regarding Israel: Does anyone know of an explanation for Israeli demographics? Do they have pro-family policies that might be adopted elsewhere? Is it the strong nationalism of the Israeli people? It doesn’t seem to be purely a matter of faith, as iWe reported in #28 that the birth rate in Israel is healthy even among non-religious Jews.
More generally: What do you all think is the explanation for the decline in birth rates in almost all advanced “Western” countries — which includes some in the East, such as South Korea and Japan?
I recall Jordan Peterson saying that the education of women leads to, first, economic growth, and then, second, demographic decline.
My own suspicion is that feminism has much to do with it. Economic opportunity for women competes with motherhood, resulting in fewer children for those who have any, and probably a larger number of women remaining childless. Tragically, some postpone having children in order to pursue a career, thinking that they will be able to be mothers later, and in some cases this is not correct, as female infertility increases significantly with age.
It also seems plausible that the growth in the proportion of homosexuals in the population would have an effect on the birth rate, though I don’t know the size of this effect yet. The data that I’ve seen indicates that homosexuality, and other perverted self-identification, has increased greatly between my generation (Gen X) and the next (Millennials), and even more for the most recent generation reaching adulthood (Gen Z).
I suspect that people concentrating in larger, more-crowded cities is part of it. Which explains lowering fertility in places like Japan where many people “look forward to” living in a tiny perhaps one-room apartment and working until they die.
Israel has less of that, at least for now.
One part of the problem I’ve mentioned before is that new cities used to spring up organically, at a crossroads or a confluence of rivers etc. We should be doing more of that. But now, we seem intent on continuing to cram more people into existing cities, because people expect so many things to be in place already – power, water, sewer, high-speed internet… – which would require some pre-planning and advance construction for new cities before people would begin to move into them.
And people going into already-cramped cities and renting a small apartment for a huge amount of money, have less ability or incentive to have children.
But did they understand that the quantity of wealth in the world is not fixed–that wealth is the product of human activity?
An anecdote I heard on a podcast once: A young Israeli was asked about this and answered that her country was still a cause.
In order from least controversial:
Randomness or “luck” plays a part in everything, but poor countries now are not generally poor because Big Europe came and took their stuff — who came and took Europe’s? Transplanting our institutions abroad does not work. Why not?
I agree with this to an extent, but not into blank-slate-ism, which *may* be where you are.
Heaven knows, everybody is good at something, and most people are better at many things than I am.
Mein Kampf:
The underlying argument was that the more natural resources and the fewer the people, the richer the remaining people would be. This is also a primary reason behind Stalin’s Holodomor, which killed millions of Ukrainians. Which led, by the way, to markets in which people sold other people for food:
These were both engineered by the leadership who took on both the ethics of eugenics and coupled them with Malthusian logic about the fixed nature of resources.
Yes.
Which institutions? I think that Anglo-Saxon Protestantism was a key element in the success of our institutions, and it was generally not transplanted abroad.
Japan does seem to be an exception. Western institutions worked well in Japan for many decades. I suspect that traditional Japanese cultural practices were quite similar to Protestantism in many practices, though for different reasons.