For most of human history, humans have had to reproduce as fast as they could; children were the only 401K, and infant/child mortality was harder on that retirement plan than the recession is on your Roth IRA today.
Capitalism and the generalized prosperity that’s attended it in the past 150-odd years has changed that dynamic. In a sense relative to the rest of the world throughout history, capitalism and general prosperity has taken human  life from “nasty, brutish and short” to “relatively civilized, at least modestly comfortable, and where obesity is the biggest health problem among the poor“.

One of the blessings that’s attended these changes is the existence, throughout the world, of “cheap food”.  When I say “cheap”, I’m not talking about supermarket shelf price, by the way; 500 years ago, over 95% of the world’s population worked from dawn to dusk six or seven days a week trying to subsist.  Do you work two shifts seven days a week just to feed your family and live in a hovel?  Who does?  No – food is incomparably cheap these days, historically speaking, even if the price of eggs is getting kinda out of hand.

“Cheap food” has enabled the parts of the world still governed by dictators, petty overlords and warlords to sustain populations that would have been mathematically and logistically impossible 100 years ago.  Of course, the lack of actual personal prosperity, and the attendant uncertainty of life, has kept the birthrates in these places high (albeit lower than when I was a kid).  The presence of global media, communications and markets have also made life safer in the parts of the world run by despots, warlords, and amok bureaucrats; it’s a truism that no famine can take place in a nation with a free market and a free media (every famine in the past 100 years has taken place in places with neither); the globalization of communications and markets has made it possible for weathy nations (with their epic surpluses of food) to ameliorate the worst ravages of famines, the great population-leveler of days gone by.

So on the one hand, a tide that has been rising since the birth of the modern world has been lifting all boats.
On the other, this has led the world into two basic demographic paths:

1. “First World” countries, with safe, practically-boundless supplies of food and historically-unprecedented prosperity, find it unneccessary to reproduce as much – even, in the case of Western Europe, to fall below replacement level, leading in just a few generations (from the end of WWII to today)  to the specter of being demographically “upside down”, with average ages creeping up into the forties and retirees outnumbering working citizens, and thus having to choose between economic shrinkage (with its attendant ravages on taxes to support  “service”-heavy governments – but let’s not digress) or importing working-age labor from…
2. “Third World” countries, for whom the relative affordability of food (historically speaking) but the relative scarcity of economic freedom has led to populations that are booming, young (average age less than twenty in many countries) and, since they live in despotic, anarchic or socialist countries, underemployed and poor.

This might lead to a vicious cycle – as we’re starting to see in Western Europe, where ageing populations, which for almost two generations have been at zero or negative native population growth are having to import labor from other younger, poorer countries.  Who are changing the political face of these countries – sometimes against immense resistance from the natives, and all of the attendant strife.

(There are actually two vicious cycles:  overpopulation in the world’s current context happens when populations in un-free nations continue pre-prosperity growth rates; there’s a reason that Paul Ehrlich, overpopulation alarmist of the sixties and seventies, is largely a risible figure these days; widening prosperity (in a historical context) obsoleted his theory in many countries that he’d used as case studies.  Remember when people expected India to become a famine-ridden wasteland?).
The US’ average age is still relatively low – partly due to immigration, partly because our national birth rate is above replacement levels (and even moreso outside the “blue” states – which could reflect anything from lower standards of living or greater optimism in the red states, depending on your point of view, and it’s a digression we won’t follow in any case), but we have a “baby boom” moving through the pipeline that’ll drag things upward a bit in short order.  Still, the US is faring better than most, controversies over illegal immigration notwithstanding.

But here’s the question:  how does the “First” world react to the demographic fact that prosperity itself renders its populations older and less capable of continued economic growth?

1. The French model – work to pound immigrants into line behind a national set of standards set by the dominant culture (which, culturally, resists assimilation of immigrants)
2. The Dutch model – try (at least in theory) to carefully regulate and balance immigration to provide needed labor and skills without overly diluting the national culture (which is marginally less resistant to assimilation than France)
3. The American model – work to assimilate immigrants into a cultural system comprising a set of ideals rather than ethnic cultural norms
4. The Japanese model – actively reject all but the most desperately needed immigrants, and aggressively marginalize the few that do get in.
5. The Russian model – wallow in cultural depression and drink oneself into a stupor, and let your nation’s underworld fleece, terrorize, brutalize and co-opt the immigrants into a permanent, but distracted, underclass.
6. The Finnish model – watch your national median age skyrocket – but live in a place to which nobody actually wants to migrate.
7. The (ahem koff koff) model – subsidize fecundity.  Give tax breaks and/or other rewards to families that reproduce above the replacement rate, promoting measured growth and helping to keep the nation’s median age down to a reasonable level, to ensure future economic growth and national viability in everything from defense to beach scenery.

What’s a hypothetical, ageing society to do?

t’s actually a serious question, so – while my sense of humor is not stuck in neutral, I will delete or, depending on the time of day, actively mutilate aggresssively stupid comments.

Oh, and before anyone tries to tag this as a “racist” question – don’t be an idiot.  This is the first paragraph where “race” has been mentioned.  Let’s note for those of you with diminished capacity for reason that the “First World” liberally crosses ethnic lines; Norwegians, Japanese, Argentineans (itself almost as ethnically diverse as the US), Singaporeans, expanding parts of the Indian subcontinent, Poles (promoted from the Second World not too long ago), Dubaians, and all sorts of people in between (people from every part of the globe in the US itself).  I firmly believe that had the Renaissance and the Englightenment (and the subsequent dawn of individualism, the rule of law, capitalism, representative government and “small-L” liberalism broken out in, say, Gabon or Iraq or Vietnam rather than in Western Europe, that Africa or the Middle East or Souteast Asia would be the heart of the “First World” today.  Put that in your racial-victimology-mongering pipe and torch it up.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 8:22 am and is filed under Capitalism v Socialism, Culture War, Deep Thoughts, Western Civilization, World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.