There was no precedent for the massive rise in the populations of the developed world that started around 1800, just as there isn't one for the decline in birthrates we are now seeing. But as recently as the 1950s and 60s, it was the norm for families to have 3 or 4 children. Behavior changed, there were causes of those changes, and different causes can take their place. If austerity becomes a way of life in the West at least for awhile, women may lose a main source of employment in governments, and thus have more children. Likewise if the much-touted college bubble ever pops. Those are only negative developments, and society can also positively promote more births. The Patriarch of Georgia singlehandedly raised the country's birthrate by 20%.
Japan has been dealing with declining birthrates for some time now, and this doesn't appear to have diminished the determination of the Japanese to keep their country for themselves. The chart at Al Fin's shows that Russia's population today is about the same as it was in the early 80s. That constitutes a crisis?
Today on an investment blog I read, I came across this:
That’s one of the issues with a paradigm shift—at the beginning, you can’t tell if it is temporary or permanent. Around 1900, it looked like the US might supplant the UK as the world’s industrial power. That turned out to be lasting. Around 1990, it looked like Japan might supplant the US as the world’s industrial power. That turned out to be temporary. Around 2010, it looked like China might supplant the US as the world’s industrial power—and we have no idea right now if that is a temporary conceit or will become a permanent feature of the landscape.Same thing with demographic decline: it's difficult to decide whether a paradigm shift is in process and we usually can't know until long after.
Dennis,
ReplyDeleteWe're engaged in a grand experiment in the attempt to breed a subspecies of humanity that is resistant to birth control. I think we'll succeed on that score. Homeschoolers, Amish, and Mormons are a few of the prototype New Reactionary Man :-)
Some food for thought:
ReplyDeleteThe religious are breeding. This might be better in some ways, but it is the religious extreme, even by my fairly reactionary standards, that is breeding the most:
http://takimag.com/article/religious_extremists_will_inherit_the_earth#axzz1TWHYOPVc
Singapore hasn't been able to get women to have more children, even with significant incentives. I guess girls just wanna have fun:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/america%E2%80%99s-one-child-policy?page=1
Robin Hanson points out that fertility looks bad, creating signalling effects:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/12/fertility-looks-bad.html
China won't replace anybody as the manufacturing superpower because they make junk.
ReplyDeleteObviously there are ways for governments to raise the birthrate among the native population if they really want to. I think the the question 'Is the Demographic Shift Permanent?' can only be answered by asking why any government would want to raise the birthrate. The Arab spring confirmed the numerous predictions of political unheaval in the Islamic world (or in any society where there is a high proportion of young (men)).
ReplyDeleteThe one child policy of China was almost certainly insistuted for that reason to keep the current ruling clique in power and it has worked rather well. Governments in authoritarian countries understand that a high birthrate means trouble down the line for their children.
In democratic societies there would have to be a revolutionary change for the birthrate to be raised , but how are you going to have a revolution with the age structure in the west ? You can't.
Permanent ? Yeah
It may be a red herring that the notion that a present negative birthrate will lead to the decline of the West. History doesn't bear it out. Regarding the population charts in Gregory Cochran's Farewell to Alms, most of history is not an upward trajectory of a positive birthrate, but a wave of increases and declines of birthrates. The West didn't get out of the Malthusian trap until around 1800 and it's only after that that we see an accelerated birthrate. Besides, history has shown steeper declines in population with recoveries. During the Black Death, Europe lost about 1/4 - 1/2 of its population and recovered. Nothing is written in stone. Sure, a population cannot have a negative birthrate forever. But a negative birthrate for 3 generations doesn't mean necessary doom. In the short and long term, immigration is a much greater threat. Thir World immigration is a threat to the West's very genetic survival.
ReplyDeleteProbably the greatest reproduction inhibitor in history has been the feminist-inspired policy of doing everything possible to keep women in the workforce and in college for as long as possible, through affirmative action and other forms of social engineering.
ReplyDeleteThis is also dysgenic, as it is women who would have intelligent and law-abiding offspring who are most likely to respond to it.
> Singapore hasn't been able to get women to have more children, even with significant incentives. I guess girls just wanna have fun:
ReplyDeleteThe price is just too low. It's like saying I haven't been able to get many dozens of eggs at $0.70. It worked in Russia because the price was right.
> Russia's population today is about the same as it was in the early 80s. That constitutes a crisis?
The pop is probably a lot older, though. So it really was a crisis. Fortunately, after the effective incentives put in place by Mr. Putin starting 4 years ago or so, it's now more of a 'problem' not a crisis.
Mormons?
ReplyDeleteThe Mormon Church supports massive immigration. World wide there are more non-white Mormons than white Mormons.
Mormons arn't the Great White Hope.
The Mormon Church supports massive immigration.
ReplyDeleteThe Church may support massive immigration but rank and file Mormons definitely don't, as Chris Cannon and Bob Bennett can attest.
> This is also dysgenic, as it is women who would have intelligent and law-abiding offspring who are most likely to respond to it.
ReplyDeleteLaw-abidingness traits really are double-edged swords, though. Russians, Poles, and Balkanids who generally tread upon fairness and law will probably exist in 500 years, where Dutch and English undoubtedly have somewhat lower odds of continuing in existence.
I also agree with Nietzsche that a 'barbaric' energy ultimately lifts German and Slavic art just a little bit above French or Italian art, even though the French have the most subtle intelligence (I don't mean IQ) in the world - or did in the 1880s when Nietzsche wrote this.
Finally, take a look at our own selves: a pack of perfectly wicked intellectual outlaws, a bunch of horrible savages.
Look at the average age in European countries, ie the amount of old people vs the young and it is way, way past the point of no return in many Euro countries. Ditto for Japan. Could it theoretically be reversed? Yes. Realistically? Probably not.
ReplyDeletePopulation growth creates far more problems than it solves. With some ingenuity and a downsizing of the welfare state, the mismatch between numbers of elders and youth could be mitigated without too much trouble.
ReplyDeleteThe trouble isn't that Western countries aren't procreating enough. It's that the poorest, lowest-IQ, most dysfunctional countries are procreating too much. That is the disparity we should be worrying about, as I think you are, but trying to catch up to Africa and the Middle East in birth rates would only be possible if our society devolved to their level. And even if it could be done, it shouldn't be, if quality of life counts for anything.
Anonymous, as Japan ages it will be even more sane politically than it already is. It will believe in the chain of generations, in Japanese blood, more than it now does. Of course the age inversion will create a lot of economic trouble, but I think they'll get through it more or less.
ReplyDeleteOne can't quite say the same about W Europe because it's already full of high-fertility foreigners. Japan and S Korea's situation is much preferable.
I remember an old Star Trek episode featuring a run-in with those nasty Klingons. One of the more endearing plot complications involved the supposedly benign appearance of tribbles, fuzzy little critters that could only coo and eat grains. Problem was, removed from their natural environment and therefore free of predators and other constraints on their population growth, they reproduced to the point they were about to take over the entire space station.
ReplyDeleteThird World populations living in the First World have children at the same rate as they did back home, only now, they benefit from Western medicine.
Next thing you know, we'll have untold numbers of newly-minted Americans cleaning out our food reserves.
Third world birth rates do converge with native European birthrates with time. This has largely happened in the Netherlands, for example.
ReplyDeleteAgreed that Mormons are not the great white hope some white folk have made them out to be. Their birth rates will come down as they grow more mainstream and their congregations will become increasingly non-white as they proselytize in a multiracial America (and world).
Certain Mennonite groups have the potential for explosive growth but remain small enough that they could well fizzle out before they really make a difference. The Old Order Amish are the largest group at 260,000 and a 5% growth rate per year. Old Colony Mennonites probably number around 100,000 scattered throughout Latin America.
Germany has recently made serious efforts to raise its birth rate. The next few years should be telling.
re: Russia, what RS said. The quantity may be the same, the composition is not.
ReplyDeleteThat said, from my interactions with Russian and Ukrainian women, the family pattern seems to be lots of single-child households (often single mothers), and some multiple-child two-parent households (or a father remarrying after the first kid and then having several more). Assuming that tendency toward one or the other is at least partly heritable, one can expect the multiple-children tendency to propagate through the surviving population.
One could make the exact same observation about Western populations. My parents each have multiple siblings. On one side of the family, there are one or no children per couple. On the other side, every couple has at least 2 children, more often 3.
40 years from now, there is going to be very little left of one side of the family, while the other will have spread significantly - assuming the kids don't get infected with liberalism. But we have our parents' generation as a horrible example.
Certain Mennonite groups have the potential for explosive growth but remain small enough that they could well fizzle out before they really make a difference. The Old Order Amish are the largest group at 260,000 and a 5% growth rate per year. Old Colony Mennonites probably number around 100,000 scattered throughout Latin America.
ReplyDeleteOh jeez, what would the point of saving the white race be if they were all Amish and Mennonites?
For starters, they have a lot of health problems owing to inbreeding. Secondly, I don't think I've ever seen a hot Amish chick. And thirdly, I don't think we'll be heading to the moon again anytime soon with them in charge.
Dominion,
ReplyDeleteThe Amish forbid cousin marriage and make concerted efforts to marry between communities in their new settlements. There is a high level of relatedness within well established communities and some offshoots, but this is changing as they spread and non-related groups intermingle.
As for hotness I've been around a lot of them and they don't seem any less hot than regular Swiss-Germans, so far as I could tell.
There's your problem right there; thank God our ancestors werent as concerned with 'hotness'.
ReplyDeleteLet's go back 100 years. In 1911 Europeans, and their offspring in North America and Oceania, must have looked unstoppable to the rest of the world. They had created the industrial revolution, harnessed the power of electricity, created automobiles and created machines that could fly. Outside of the Japanese, was there any non European nation that could even participate in these fields?
ReplyDeleteIf you were from another planet surely you would have thought European peoples would dominate the world.
Then three years later Europe decided to commit suicide. After their second attempt twenty-five years later, their decline was in full swing.
I often wonder how the world might be if The Great War never occurred.
If austerity becomes a way of life in the West at least for awhile, women may lose a main source of employment in governments, and thus have more children.
ReplyDeletePrecisely the opposite will happen. I lived in Japan when their bubble crashed. They had a 10 year period of stagnation and austerity during the 90's. This resulted in an entire generation of Japanese becoming slackers and dropped their birthrate by half. Being a slacker is a rational choice in a no-growth economy (Duh! What other option is there?).
Long term austerity will drop our birthrate by half as well.
I agree with the few comments here that link the decline of out birthrate with the mass immigration disaster; the former has allowed the latter, since there is no way to keep the Ponzi scheme going with an inverted population pyramid.
ReplyDeleteWhile I am pretty certain that there are plenty of neo-communists in the West, in positions of power, who seriously do want to decimate the white people, all they had to do was shut up and let the economists make the argument for them.
It is seriously not enough just to stop immigration and pay the rest to leave; we have to have our own children, and if we need to use surrogacy or other technology to help us, then so be it. Note the plethora of "ethicists" who are desperate to stop this happening.
We can solve this problem; we just have to recognize it as such and this won't happen while our "leaders" continue to lie to us about it.
Anon.
As Cochran will probably tell you it was Clark who wrote A Farewell to Alms, not Cochran.
ReplyDeleteAll the fondly held demographic predictions will come to naught if the shit hits the fan, weather-wise.
ReplyDeleteOf course, most of the current crop of politicians will be useless as well.
"As Cochran will probably tell you it was Clark who wrote A Farewell to Alms, not Cochran."
ReplyDeletecareless substitution
It may be a red herring that the notion that a present negative birthrate will lead to the decline of the West. History doesn't bear it out. Regarding the population charts in Clark's Farewell to Alms, most of history is not an upward trajectory of a positive birthrate, but a wave of increases and declines of birthrates. The West didn't get out of the Malthusian trap until around 1800 and it's only after that that we see an accelerated birthrate. Besides, history has shown steeper declines in population with recoveries. During the Black Death, Europe lost about 1/4 - 1/2 of its population and recovered. Nothing is written in stone. Sure, a population cannot have a negative birthrate forever. But a negative birthrate for 3 generations doesn't mean necessary doom. In the short and long term, immigration is a much greater threat. Thir World immigration is a threat to the West's very genetic survival.
ReplyDeleteThe point is not that we couldn't weather a decline in the European population in our territories, of course we could, the point is that this event will be used to flood us with immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, who will not suffer any population crash at all, ever, and who will essentially replace us.
ReplyDeleteI would have thought this was obvious.
Anon.
It may be permanent, and it may not. What you're really asking is "how worried should we be?"
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's not as bad as it looks. This would give us a very nice excuse for not acting, or to console ourselves if we fail.
This is a losing point of view. I think to truly get the most out of people, you have to put them in situations where they cannot hold back, where they must suceed.
> While I am pretty certain that there are plenty of neo-communists in the West, in positions of power, who seriously do want to decimate the white people, all they had to do was shut up and let the economists make the argument for them.
ReplyDeleteIt's the neo-communists such as Boasians, NAACP, and campus radicals that have prevented academia, media large & small, and society from airing and considering HBD. They use persuasion and more importantly coercion. As a result some economists are ignorant of the subject and others keep mighty quiet about what they know or suspect. Most of the coercion is genteel (if you want this job...), backed by a stiff Watsoning in case of any irregularities, but there has also been hectoring and threats of violence.
The net result is that the neo-communists pretty much caused the econ profession to voice the false claims about immigration that it voices.
It's a little harder to lie to yourself or be suppressed when you actually study the stuff for a living. So most psychometricians, or anyway half of them, accept a degree of HBD as likely true, but this field is effectively ghettoized from the media and the rest of academe.
> Most of the coercion is genteel (if you want this job...), backed by a stiff Watsoning in case of any irregularities, but there has also been hectoring and threats of violence.
ReplyDeleteI forgot, there are also things rather more exotic (to me) like speech laws, resulting in the Wilders prosecution and, more to the HBD point, the Finnish government's criminal investigation of Tatu Vanhanen.
Hans Rosling claims it has all to do with "child survival":
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg
http://www.gapminder.org/
Even Saudi-Arabia's fertility rate is dropping like a rock. So religion is not the solution and feminism is irrelevant.
I completely agree with Mangan that it's very difficult (until afterwards) to tell if you have a paradigm shift on your hands.
ReplyDeleteStill, in the case of demographics common sense says that the decline in fertility is only temporary. Since fertility decline is such a widespread phenomenon, affecting people from Japan, to Iran, to Detroit, it's reasonable to infer that it has a specific cause or causes. Whatever that cause is -- child immunization, feminism, urbanization, industrialization, what have you -- it can be expected to affect some people more than others. That's just the nature of people. So it's reasonable to expect that the people who are less affected will grow as a percentage of the population until the growth rate of the population as a whole bounces back.
So it's reasonable to expect that groups will go through a second demographic transition. This already seems to be happening in Jerusalem, where the rising Jewish fertility rate is crossing over the falling Arab fertility rate.
Populations are never static, they are always shifting. Yet...
ReplyDeleteMany historical populations have disappeared to the point that today we dont even know who they were. Like Sumerians, Babilonians, Philistines, even Sparta and Athens were deserted and occupied by immigrants. Europeans are fast losing terrain and may become insignificant. China's population is five times larger than the USA's, Africa has more people than Europe. Europeans may easily be absorbed and lost among such vast peoples. China has always absorbed and assimilated foreign peoples, it is the only country where even the Jews were totally assimilated. Viewing our relative numbers, we may all be happily integrated into the Han pan-ethnicity.
Fertility rates are self correcting to some degree. Once Germans and Japanese can swing their arms without hitting someone else, they will be more likely to consider having children. Cultural factors are significant though...it is safe to say that children are not seen as a blessing anymore in the society that doesn't believe in blessings or God. Who can say whether it will rebound. Populations have gone extinct before, and will again.
ReplyDeleteThe real issue is that we try now to increase fertility for all the wrong reasons. Our main two reasons are a) to keep perpetual economic growth going and b) to shore up the welfare state. These are about the least exciting reasons to do anything, hence no one--not even liberals who adamantly support both notions--have children. The crisis in the West is a crisis of spirit, not of material, and it never works to try to fool people into doing the right thing.
I wonder whether everyone recognizes the facts of world demography (at least, they are facts as far as I can determine).
ReplyDelete1. There has never been a 'negative birthrate' before in world history - it is a phenomenon of the past few decades - made possible by contraception and abortion. So we are in new territory.
Once population decline has begun, the tendency is for it to accelerate - as the proportion of the population with reproductive capability declines.
Populations in the West have a median age in the middle forties - so more than half the population (of women) is sterile. In sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East the median age is mid-teens, and most of the population is fertile or potentially fertile.
2. Throughout history until c 1800 population growth was controlled by death rates, not birth rates. Now death rates are so low everywhere, it is birth rates which drive population (for a while).
Demographic projections are pretty reliable for births, but of course if mortality rates go back to pre-modern levels, then not many of these births will survive. In principle, many hundreds of millions of those born (plus others) might die during the next couple of decades. Indeed, that seems likely.
As soon as modern public health, medicine and aid dries-up, then there will be vast numbers of deaths from famine, disease and violence - certainly in the third world, but of course the third world is also increasing in the first world.
3. World population is still increasing very fast indeed (and much faster than economic growth), for example it is expected that a billion extra Muslims will be born in the next couple of decades:
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1872/muslim-population-projections-worldwide-fast-growth.
This means that Muslims have increased as a proportion of the world population (according to Huntingdon's Clash of Civilizations) from about 4 percent in 1900 to about 20 percent now to about 25 percent in twenty years time.
4. So there is little justification for hoping that somehow or another things will plateau and adjust, or that there will be a pendulum swing - things are happening too rapidly and in large amounts for this to happen. The die is cast already.
As Treebeard said: "The world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air."
My boy is 14 years old, 6'1", red-blonde hair , green eyes. Dutch from me, swedish-irish from his mother. He behaves like an angel, gets straight a's, has a nice fastball. Had him accidentally when I was 19. It's taken me a while to shed this poison culture, but now I know I will have more.
ReplyDeleteMy advice to everyone here is to go hump someone, in a carefree fashion.
"Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteI often wonder how the world might be if The Great War never occurred."
For us - white european derived peoples, I mean - much better. I tend to think that WWI was the beginning of the end for Western Civilization. We have already begun the long slow slide into the next dark ages.
"kurt9 said...
ReplyDeleteLong term austerity will drop our birthrate by half as well."
I tend to agree. I believe the birth rate declined significantly during the great depression.
" There has never been a 'negative birthrate' before in world history - it is a phenomenon of the past few decades - made possible by contraception and abortion. So we are in new territory."
ReplyDeleteThis is verifiably false. In the Malthusian Age (all time before the 1800s) there were regular ups and downs in birthrate. The birthrate would rise, people wold have more babies, the standard of living would drop, and then there would be a negative birthrate. Then the standard of living would rise, people would have more kids, and the cycle would start over.
Only post 1800s agriculture and medicine have allowed this cycle to be broken.
As Clark shows in Farewell to Alms, the pre-modern birthrate of English women was quite low, which eventually lead to a higher standard of living.
Anonymous 7/30/2011 1:24 PM
ReplyDeleteBy negative birthrate I mean below minimum replcement level, below 2.1 children per women.
This is the rate for all developed countries nowadays (minus recent immigrants) - indeed well below 2.1.
It is the second demographic transition:
http://sdt.psc.isr.umich.edu/
And below replacement fertility at the national level is a novelty - so far as I know - never before in human history (except in tiny subcultures, like celibates).
"So there is little justification for hoping that somehow or another things will plateau and adjust, or that there will be a pendulum swing - things are happening too rapidly and in large amounts for this to happen."
ReplyDeleteI disagree; for example in Israel the pendulum is already starting to swing back, so to speak. The percentage of Jewish births dropped steadily from the 1950s until 2003 when the trend reversed. Since then, the percentage of Jewish births has been rising steadily.
I expect this pattern will eventually start to repeat itself throughout the Western world.
This is the rate for all developed countries nowadays (minus recent immigrants) - indeed well below 2.1.
ReplyDeleteFertility is dropping like a rock in much of the developing world as well (Latin America, Indian, Muslim Middle-east). Even India is down to around 2.6 or so. Most of Southeast Asia is below replacement. I don't think the West is going to get swamped by the "southern hordes".
@ Kurt9 and Sabril I'm sorry - but you just do not know the facts:
ReplyDeletehttp://isteve.blogspot.com/2011/05/winning-future-globally.html
As for Israel:
http://www.sneps.net/RD/uploads/JQR%20Demography.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_age
These are tsunami changes - in population size and in proportions.
It is amusing that all of those population projections assume that we will manage to feed all those people.
ReplyDeleteFor example, Steve says that the UN claims that Afghanistan's population will increase from 12M to 110M by the end of the century. Where is all the food coming from to support an order of magnitude increase in population there?
Any disruption to the ability of the current net exporters of food to continue to do so will see a population crash ...
@ Kurt9 and Sabril I'm sorry - but you just do not know the facts:
ReplyDeleteI do know the facts. Just go to google's public data explorer, which uses World Bank data. The facts are all there. You can select and deselect various countries and compare the fertility rate data. You will notice significant drop in fertility of almost every country in the world, outside of Sub-Saharan Africa.
"I do know the facts"
ReplyDeleteI'd like to think that I know the facts too. I've been looking at this stuff pretty carefully for a couple years now, and I agree that third world fertility is dropping pretty fast.
BGC, exactly what facts am I missing?
For what it's worth, here's a much more optimistic - indeed surprisingly so - appraisal of Israeli demography:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ME24Ak01.html
Third world fertility can easily reverse itself and shoot upward again, unlike first world fertility. Why? Look at the proportion of fertile women in each group. No comparison. Throw your TFR predictions out the window, they are no better than someone's best guess. Better yet, look up 5 methods of computing TFR and do your own guessing.
ReplyDeleteAl Fin
Dennis,
ReplyDeleteTwo good articles showing that white fertility decline might be overblown:
http://demographymatters.blogspot.com/2009/05/is-european-fertility-rebounding.html
http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?aid=1408
Oh man. That Spengler article seems very premature now that much of Israel's "secular" population is out in the streets, screaming for lower real estate prices.
ReplyDeleteDon't think we're going to see much fertility from these people in the near future.
If austerity becomes a way of life in the West at least for awhile, women may lose a main source of employment in governments, and thus have more children.
ReplyDeleteTo increase nesting behavior, you need to have conditions conducive to nesting behavior. These include a "nest" i.e. a piece of territory for a woman to bear and rear children. A woman is not going to be inclined to have children without a stable "nest" suitable for her available. The cost of real estate has risen dramatically over the past 5 decades, reducing the availability of such "nests".
Another condition is that a woman has to feel that a man is, for lack of a better word, "alpha" enough in order to be impregnated by him. In the past this condition was much more readily satisfied due to the social norm of patriarchy and the fact that men had sufficient means that women did not to sustain a family. These days of course patriarchy is gone and men's means for sustaining a family is less available, less stable, and accompanied by women having independent means. So this condition is less satisfied.
The problem now is that the people with ownership and control of heavily centralized wealth and capital don't have an incentive to reverse this situation since they benefit greatly from it with access to and control over a large pool of women. They've basically enslaved the population, castrating the males and monopolizing the women and making them dependent on them.
To increase nesting behavior, you need to have conditions conducive to nesting behavior.
ReplyDeleteSteve Sailer calls this Affordable Family Formation.
White Flight conflicts with Affordable Family Formation. It is also in tension with Alpha-ness.
ReplyDelete