Ruth Institute Blog

The Upcoming Demographic Winter

There is a name for people who don’t believe that there will be a demographic winter.  That word is “innumerate.”  In other words, those people just can’t do math. As the famous Teen Talk Barbie once said “Math Class is Hard.”  Fortunately for Dante, I’m here to administer a bit of remediation.
The first thing that strikes a knowledgeable person about the prediction about the demographic winter is how certain we can be of it.  I was born in 1973.  Like a fine wine, they’re not making any more people of my vintage anymore.  Nope.  Everybody who will be born that year was born long ago.  We can, using actuarial tables predict with remarkable accuracy the maximum number of 57 year olds we will have in the year 2050.  All we have to do is look at birth records.

With that information in hand, all you have to do is a bit of math and you have some pretty scary information on your hands.  Seeing as how math is not Dante’s strong suit, let me see if I can explain it simply.  Let’s say you are playing poker.  You have a thousand chips.  You draw an excellent hand.  You bet heavily.  By the time the final showdown happens, fully half of your chips are in the pot.  You are horrified to find out that your excellent hand is beaten by an opponent with an even better hand.  You’ve lost 50% of your chips.  Now, if you just want to get back to even, you now have to gain back 100%.

Applying this logic to a human population, the results are the same.  Let’s say you have a human population that has a total fertility rate (TFR) of 1.  Some European countries have TFRs in that range.

Let’s get down to brass tacks.  If a population has one generation in which the TFR is 1, they lose half of their women in child bearing years in the next generation.  In order to get back to even, they have to have a birth rate that doubles the replacement rate of 2.1.  Will any country that has had demographic decay suddenly have a generation that has a TFR of 4.2?  I doubt it.  Gulp.

Now, let’s get back to poker.

Dante Atkins can be forgiven for this next error he makes.  Most people are just as ignorant of how exponents work as Dante is.  Let’s say you’re playing poker with a hundred chips.  Every turn you lose 50% of your chips.  In how many turns would you lose all of your chips?  The answer: 7.  Now, let’s say you have a cool million chips. How many turns would it take to lose it all at the same rate of 50% losses per turn?  21.  Your pile of chips is now ten thousand times bigger.  Yet you only lasted three times longer. Ten thousand times the population only survives three times longer. Not ten thousand times longer. Not a hundred times longer. Not ten times longer. Isn’t that a shocking illustration as to how exponential growth (or shrinkage) works?

Populations with a TFR of 1 can move from sustainable to non sustainable much more quickly than the average person would suspect.  Gulp.

Could Western Culture decline?  Maybe.

Would the world be a better place without Western Culture?  That’s hard to say.  Because even somebody as brilliant (except for that whole math thing, of course) as Dante Atkins would have to admit that we have no idea what a world without Western Culture would look like.  Personally, I think Western Culture has brought many good things to the world.  Are Western people more brutal than others?  That doesn’t seem likely to anybody who knows much about world history.  Sure there have been some truly horrific things brought to us by the West (the Two World Wars spring immediately to mind) but I doubt that the world would have been a paradise if the power of the Western World was wielded by non-Western Cultures.  Many if not most of them were just as brutal given their capacity to inflict harm on others.  After all, humanity is humanity no matter what the culture.  Hey, at least with Western Culture, we have these neat iPads and computers to help us pass the time.  And if today’s Third World is any indication, a world without Western Culture is nothing to be envied.  Perhaps we should conserve our culture after all.  Is that argument racist or culturist?  I don’t think so.  But the more important question is this: is the argument true?  It is.

But culture aside, what will the results of the demographic winter be?  Economically, it will be a disaster.  Dante Atkins cannot dispute this.  After all, could Dante Atkins please explain how either population or productivity will increase enough to pay for the benefits we promised to our citizens in their old age?

Could he please explain how businesses will remain profitable if there are not enough people born to maintain sufficiently high demand?  Could he explain what happens to human rights when people begin to fear declining population, and come up with a reason as to why those abuses would not happen if the population of the West declines in future?

If he has answers to these questions, he should let us know, as there are experts wringing their hands over it, even as we speak.  Dismissing the problems caused by population decline with the canards of “racism” is changing the subject, in the hopes that no one will notice.  It is a despicable dodge.