Here’s the story: Westerners aren’t replacing themselves poplation-wise because they’re having too few children. Meanwhile, Muslims are experiencing unrestrained population growth. Soon the West will have effectively depopulated itself (at least until there aren’t any folks left except high-birthrate groups like highly conservative members of the Catholic, Evangelical, and Mormon communities, who will launch the next phrase of Western civilization), and Muslims will be encroaching everywhere, leading to a global degeneration to third world status, exacerbated by Muslim fanatacism.
Right?
Well, not exactly.
The dire predictions of the death of the West may be a little premature.
Oh sure, some places–especially Europe–are depopulating themselves right on schedule. So is Japan.
But a new population study suggests the following items:
1) America isn’t radically depopulating itself. Americans are the exception among Westerners and, although their birthrate isn’t quite break even, it almost is, so we’re more or less holding our own.
2) The Muslim world isn’t having a sustainable population explosion. In fact, the urge to have fewer children is hitting the Muslim world hard, and some Muslim countries (Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, Turkey) are now sub-replacement level countries when it comes to birth. As modernization spreads in the Muslim world, birthrates fall there, too.
3) The death rate is going up in many places, and lifespans are shrinking. This is particularly true in Africa, where widespread HIV infection is leading to plummeting lifespans. It is also true in other areas, where the problem may not be AIDS. In Russia, for example, the average lifespan has shrunk by four years due to incresed cardiovascular disease and accidents, both of which are precipitated by increased alcohol abuse.
4) This one (like the last one) isn’t really a surprise, but there are many Asian countries where there are now sharp, unnatural imbalances between the number of males and females. The normal birthrate is about 104-105 males per 100 female babies, but in some places the ratio has gone up to 130:100. These imbalances are caused by sex-selection (i.e., aborting female babies) in cultures that have a strong preference for sons and now have ultrasound technologies that can detect the sex of the child before birth. The imbalances have appeared, as one would expect, in China (where couples are limited to having one child per couple), but also in other places, such as India. This will cause a huge problem in 20 years (or less), when the young men want to get married and there aren’t enough women their age.
So. An interesting time ahead, but one not quite so dire as some have forecast.
China appears to be running into serious trouble already – their one-child-only policy was begun in 1981 which means that the oldest among them are already hitting marriageable age. One solution they’ve turned to is kidnapping girls from outlying areas (such as Vietnam) to sell as brides, but that’s messy and expensive and probably doesn’t lead to domestic harmony.
AIDS is a problem in Russia too (according to my daughter who lived in Moscow for a year). Trouble is, officialdom won’t admit it and continues to pretend that there’s no such thing there.
So population isn’t growing as fast as Paul Ehrlich says, but the conditions left in its wake (AIDS acting as the new plague, depopulating large areas; millions of young Chinese men unable to find wives) won’t exactly make for peaceful and stable conditions either.
Two folks can read the same report and draw different conclusions. The Muslim countries cited in the study–where TFR’s are decliing–are hardly the militant ones. Turkey is pretty secularized. What of Iran and Syria? The Sudan?
Moreover, TFR’s are a poor guage of the “Westerness” of the West. A better demographic figure would be Marital Fertility Rates. In America, with a third of births illegetimate, we aren’t doing our share to preserve the West, demographically speaking. Marriages, one might say, are not reproducing themselves.
I read this news with less optimism than does the good host of this page, whose knowledge and style I admire very much. To me, this news, at best, says, you’re dying but It’s going to be more slow and painful than you thought. In any case, get over to Europe and see the great monuments of the West before they become mosques or something worse.
Chris
Jimmy writes:
“America isn’t radically depopulating itself. Americans are the exception among Westerners and, although their birthrate isn’t quite break even, it almost is, so we’re more or less holding our own.”
This is a bit misleading; the ‘Death of the West’ refers to Western culture that was created and passed on today by Europeans (Caucasians).
Not all Americans are ‘Western’ in culture; this is not necessarily bad, just a reality. America is a multicultural mixing pot (not a melting pot anymore…).
The only reason America has a 2.1 birthrate is because of the breeding of non-Westerners who have moved here and retained their own high-reproductive culture. These demographics are well known and easy to look up.
Good or bad, the people of Western race and culture are by choice vanishing from the world. This is unlike anything we have seen for *any* culture outside of war or disease. The US is no exception, we are just multicultural so it pads the numbers.
I love reports like this one – Westerners won’t accept our liberalism is killing us and so just whistle past the graveyard. Reminds me of Chesterton: When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.
Actually, only about 1/3 of the increase in American birth-rates since the low point of 1976 is due to immigration. The majority is due to non-Hispanic whites having more children, a trend which continues. All other groups in the US population have falling birth-rates, albeit starting from higher bases. Asian-Americans have a TFR (Total Fertility Rate) of about 1.5, Indians and blacks about 2.0, whites ditto, and Hispanics around 2.6.
“Hispanic” is a portemaneau word, though. Puerto Ricans have a TFR of around 1.9; Cuban-Americans of about 1.6.
Incidentally, Mexico is part of “the West” and has been since before the first English settlement in what’s now the US.