Demography

We are witnessing the process of demographic crisis in its early stages

Cassava is a woody shrub native to South America. For people living in drought-prone tropical regions, it is a godsend: delicious, calorie-dense and highly productive. The indigenous peoples of the Americas who first cultivated cassava are reliant on it and have developed an arduous, days-long process of preparation that involves scraping, grating, washing and boiling the plant before it is eaten.

Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, met Rishi Sunak this week at the start of her two-day visit to Britain, as part of her mission to convince Europe that she’s a conservative not a fascist.

Top of her agenda was the importance of continued military aid to Ukraine, but after that the two issues about which she hopes to be most persuasive are the ones that threaten Europe most: migrants arriving on boats, and Europe’s plummeting fertility rate.

Parenthood is seen as a troublesome burden

As the media cycle lurches from the promotion of one existential crisis to another, demography continues to dominate. In the UK, low birth rates and ageing populations mean we won’t be able to afford healthcare and pensions; we have too many of the “wrong type” of immigrants and too much of the “wrong type” of emigration. Of course, some countries have it worse. China, having shot itself in the groin with its one-child policy, is set to become smaller than India, for whom a growing population could be either a blessing or a curse (take your pick). Globally, fertility rates are falling, but eco-worriers remind us that “overpopulation” continues to contribute to the climate emergency.

The UN recently announced that India will become the most populous country in the world, surpassing China by the middle of this year. That’s only the tip of the iceberg in a massive global shift in population that will alter the balance of world power in the next 30 years.

China lost population last year for the first time in six decades. As Axios reports, China will eventually end up in the same boat as Japan — an aging population with a workforce insufficiently large to care for it.

Worldwide demographic decline will soon pose a serious challenge for humanity.

Today, the spectre haunting the global order is not communism, as Marx predicted, but seemingly relentless demographic decline. We can already see its consequences in everything from the fight over pensions in France to the persistent labour shortages across almost all the high-income world. In the future, a lack of human labour is also likely to accelerate a shift towards automation, reshaping economic and political conflict for decades to come.

The example of South Korea is a warning shot

In an article for the Atlantic, Anna Louie Sussman examines why South Korea’s total fertility rate has fallen so precipitously. In what the Koreans call a “gender war”, Sussman suggests that the cause is the “deterioration in relations between women and men”. “I think the most fundamental issue at hand is that a lot of girls realize that they don’t really have to do this anymore,” one South Korean women tells the author. “They can just opt out.”

To stop their population implosions, countries are turning to immigration, stimulating birth rates and strengthening social services. None of them might be enough – and the long-term fix might be a radical one

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida had a grim message. The country’s extremely low birth rate had placed the nation’s future in peril.

“Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society,” he declared in a speech in January to the country’s national legislature, the Diet.

“Focusing attention on policies regarding children and child-rearing is an issue that cannot wait and cannot be postponed.”

Interesting read. Nothing can be done about Canada, mass immigration will not solve population decline but will increase societal destruction.