We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Japan is shrinking. According to this story, Japan’s population of about 127 million will shrink this year by about 10,000 people.

To those who haven’t been following world demographics, this hardly seems cause for alarm. It’s a small drop in a large population. There will still be plenty of people in Japan, won’t there?

The problem isn’t with this year’s drop in population, but in what it signifies: Japan is in a death spiral, and no one knows how it might escape.

This may seem alarmist if you aren’t familiar with the problem. Let me explain: Demographic trends move very slowly, but with great weight. It’s fairly easy to predict what a country’s population will be in the next ten or fifteen years: Old people will continue to die at predictable rates. Young people will continue to produce babies, at slightly less predictable rates. The balance of immigration and emigration will stay reasonably constant.

But small demographic effects in the short term produce large effects in the long term, especially with the birth rate. For a population to stay stable in size, each woman needs to produce 2.1 children on average. (The two is for replacement, and the 0.1 accounts for premature mortality.) Suppose that a generation of young women falls below this rate by a mere ten percent. The next generation of young women is therefore ten percent smaller. Even if the second generation and all subsequent generations precisely replace themselves, the overall population will still eventually drop by ten percent.

And that only happens if the fertility drop occurs in only one generation. If the second generation also fails to replace itself by ten percent, then the effect compounds. The third generation is only 81% as large as the first one was. If that third generation under-reproduces, then the fourth generation is 73% of the first, and so on. It doesn’t look like much of a problem in the first generation, but it builds. And this problem has been building in Japan and Western Europe for a long time.

It may seem strange to focus on the young women. Don’t the men count? Why not consider the old women? But in the study of demographics we cannot avoid the basic fact of biology that only young women make babies. And if we’re asking where a country’s next generation will come from, there can be only one answer: from the young women.

As with this news story, most people intuitively think in terms of a country’s overall population. And in those terms, the problem doesn’t seem so bad. But overall population is also nearly irrelevant to long-term analyses. If you’re trying to guess how many people will inhabit Japan forty or fifty years from now, you should examine the size and behavior of only one group of people: pre-menopausal women. Both figures are discouraging.

You will often see stories about how the average ages of various countries are rising. But those stories rarely if ever explain why the age breakdown within a country is significant, except in terms of pension systems or health care needs. The much larger significance, in my view, is how the presence of a large elderly population blinds us to severe but slow-developing fertility problems.

An Example

To see why, try this exercise: Construct a sample population on paper. Assume that everyone dies at age eighty, and divide them up into twenty-year generations. Assume that each generation has been precisely replacing itself, so start with a hundred people in each of the four generations. For reference, let’s say that we start in 1940, when the overall population is four hundred:
Year: 1940
0-20: 100
20-40: 100
40-60: 100
60-80: 100

Now assume that a generation of fertile women (the 20-40 group) decides that they aren’t interested in producing babies. It doesn’t matter why. All that matters is that these women produce only one baby per woman, so the size of the youngest generation is half of replacement:
Year: 1960
0-20: 50
20-40: 100
40-60: 100
60-80: 100

This is a drastic drop in fertility, but note that the overall population has only dropped from 400 to 350. The country’s capacity to perpetuate itself has dropped by half, but its population has only dropped by an eighth.

Now let’s make it worse: The first generation of low-breeding women moves into the 40-60 bracket, and the young women in the half-sized generation also decide to produce only about one baby per woman on average. So the next demographic snapshot is:
Year: 1980
0-20: 25
20-40: 50
40-60: 100
60-80: 100

The population is now 275. That’s a noticeable drop, but it still doesn’t come close to reflecting the real fertility crisis, which is that the country’s capacity to produce new citizens is now a quarter of what it was only two generations ago.

Now let’s appreciate how powerful these trends are once set in motion. Let’s assume that the next generation of women decides that babies are a good idea after all. They decide to have twice as many children as their mothers, which is to say two, or replacement. Will a doubling in birth rate save our little country? Let’s see:
Year: 2000
0-20: 25
20-40: 25
40-60: 50
60-80: 100

The population is now down to 225, down from our starting point of four hundred. Also note that over half of the population is in the non-productive 0-20 and 60-80 categories. They need lots of care, and don’t generate any tax dollars. For many demographers, this is the crisis point. This is the point at which pension systems and socialized medicine fall apart, because there simply aren’t enough workers to support the retirees.

But it gets worse. Much worse. Once you’re in a demographic hole, it’s incredibly difficult to climb out. Let’s see why: Imagine that the next generation of young women have totally different attitudes about reproduction than even their self-replacing grandmothers. Imagine that the new crop of young women are crazy about babies. Each young woman decides to produce an average of four babies.
Before we run the numbers, stop and think for a moment about how very strange that would be to our modern sensibilities. When four is the average, you can expect to see plenty of women with six or seven babies, balancing out those who only have one or two. We’re talking about a baby-crazy generation of young women. And yet that self-doubling generation hardly makes a dent in the country’s overall population problem:
Year 2020
0-20: 50
20-40: 25
40-60: 25
60-80: 50

Even though the hospital nurseries are packed with screaming infants, the country’s population is now 150, or 37.5% of what it was it was eighty years ago. And the age balance situation is worse than a generation ago: Only one third of the population works and pays taxes. The rest are too young or too old to be of much help.

This example is an extreme simplification for the sake of illustration, though a birth rate at half of replacement isn’t much of a stretch. Some countries is Western Europe already have birth rates at half of replacement. But the point is to understand how powerful these trends are, and why an overall population figure is misleading. By the time your population has already dropped noticeably, you’re already deep in the hole.

What to do?

Now for the worst part: Nobody knows how to fix this. Nobody really understands why young women are choosing to have so few babies, and nobody knows how to persuade them to do otherwise. A few governments have tried various types of bribes, with little success. The countries with the biggest problems are heavily socialist, so bribes are all they know. So they have no solutions, and most probably hope to simply die before the problems become too severe.

Lots of very smart people have devoted their lives to studying these types of problems, so I hesitate to offer the suggestion of an uninformed amateur like myself. But this is a blog, so here goes:

If you read the people who really study this stuff, you’ll find a shocking lack of agreement on exactly what the problem is. Most focus on the implications for socialism: You can’t pay for cradle-to-grave care when so many are so near the grave, and so few are doing the productive work that funds the system. Others worry about the effect on the medical system, which are profound.

But I worry about the futures of whole countries. These days it’s common for people to imagine that we’ve transcended the creation or destruction of whole countries. Ask someone how long they think America will survive, and they’ll think you a lunatic. Unconsciously, they think: America will last forever, won’t it?

You can try to correct their error, but I don’t recommend it. You can speak in gentle tones about how many mighty countries have risen and fallen throughout history. Rome is perhaps the greatest success story, but it fell. Even within this century, we’ve seen huge changes. The great Western European empires of 100 years ago have been shorn of their colonies. The USSR threatened to dominate the world—and then it shattered. Yet somehow few Americans ever seriously consider that their own country, or today’s other powerhouse countries, might not exist 100 years from now. And I hear that the Western Europeans hold an even more militant head-in-the-sand attitude.

That attitude is the problem. People want to believe that their countries are doing just fine, because that belief frees them from any worries larger than themselves. If the country is doing just fine, then I can focus on making myself happy. It’s a very seductive idea.

And this attitude isn’t limited to countries. You can take the same approach to any group membership: religions, languages, families, regions. If people believe that the purpose of their lives is to make themselves happy, then childrearing becomes a difficult proposition. Children provide tremendous joy, but also lots of work, frustration, and expense. If you live only for your own happiness, then you’re unlikely to have more than one or two. Those who will create and raise lots of children usually see themselves as part of some larger group that will go on existing beyond their personal lifetimes.

So few should be surprised at how fertility breaks down across religious belief, for example. If you’re a devout Mormon or Catholic, then each new baby is not merely a way to scratch that instinctual itch. Each baby is not just a potential source of happiness that might outweigh the associated costs. Instead, each baby is a soldier for God. Each baby will grow up to spread the truth, expand the Church, and produce more believers. Laugh if you like, but those groups are out-breeding all the others.

So my analysis comes down to a question of group identity: Right now, millions upon millions of Americans live only for their own happiness. A hundred years from now, few will care that they existed, because they had few children and propagated few beliefs.

But the rest believe in something larger than themselves—or claim to. And the topic of children puts those claims to the test. It’s easy to say that you support your country, your religion, or your culture. But do you support it enough to actually do something about it? Not so long ago, this kind of question was aimed at men: Do you support your country enough to take up arms and risk death on a battlefield? But today countries should be asking their young women: Do you support your country enough to bear its children, even if doing so will deny you some of modern life’s delights?

I don’t ask that question lightly. I know firsthand the amount of time and effort it takes to raise a child well. I sympathize with the young woman’s natural response: Why the hell should I give over my body and future to support some abstract entity? Why should I give up some current happiness out of concern for what might happen decades are my bones are dust?

I can’t answer those questions. No one can. The subject makes me uncomfortable, much it likely does you, dear reader. But I won’t apologize for raising it, because it isn’t mine. It’s nature’s.

However we might feel about it, the fact remains that a hundred years from now, some array of people will inhabit the Earth. Do you want representation in that future Earth? Do you want those future people to speak the way that you speak, believe what you believe, and perpetuate the country to which you claim allegiance? Do you want them to read the same stories that you’ve read, listen to the same music, or watch the same movies? Do you want them to look like you, share your genes, even bear your last name? Do you want to be a thumb-sized photograph in some child’s grade-school genealogy project, or an old-fashioned picture on someone’s wall?

No one can force you to want those things. Oblivion is freely available to those who choose it. But if you want the future to remember you, then its requirements are not negotiable, and they are not in the eye of the beholder. Love it or hate it, the rule is simple and inflexible: The future belongs to those who have babies.

Edit after getting some sleep:

This is a big topic, with enough twists and turns to fill a book. So I apologize if I didn’t happen to pick up the particular thread that interests you. But there’s one big point that this post is missing.
I started this post with a story about Japan, and in one respect Japan makes a poor starting point: They don’t accept immigrants. Despite their defeat in WWII, Japan remains insular and shockingly racist. A foreigner can live in Japan for generations, and still be considered a foreigner.

This is not unusual on a global scale, though it may seem so to Americans. In virtually every place and every time, citizenship in a country was tied to genetics. The country was the race, and vice versa.
America is one of only a few exceptions. It has historically welcomed and assimilated large numbers of immigrants. And that provides an partial solution to the need to produce enough babies: In addition to producing new citizens from the citizenry, you can convert immigrants.

Whether this satisfies depends on your particular notions of group membership. If your propagation goals are specifically genetic or racial, then immigration certainly won’t help. But if your goals are political or cultural, then you can accomplish them perhaps even more effectively through conversion rather than production.

Here the practical problems of demographics run into the modern religion of multiculturalism, which actively discourages assimilation. For a country like America that has long relied on assimilation as a self-perpetuation strategy, multiculturalism amounts to suicide.

So for those who want to support their country and culture, but don’t want to spend their lives raising children, there is another way: Fight multiculturalism. Help bring back the concept of Americanization. Help to popularize the idea that our culture is a good one, and it’s perfectly normal to want to share it with those from other cultures.

These cultural survival strategies are not mutually exclusive. They work together. There’s no point producing lots of babies if you don’t raise them to value their own culture in contravention of multiculturalism. And assimilation can’t handle the future on its own. It can provide a boost to growth, but the extant population must still at least come close to replacing itself, which is where we are today.

So breathe easy, ladies. We don’t really need an average of three or four children per woman. An average of just over two will do just fine—if we can slap down the cult of muliculturalism and return to assimilating our immigrants.