Don't Look at Me! You're the One With the Uterus!

Most modern countries are helplessly aging into gray. Before long, there will be no workers in Europe to fund the generous Euro-welfare states. Soon there will be no Russian soldiers to defend the mineral rich Siberian frontier. And soon the Japanese islands will be a haunted empire of ghosts looking to the east. The following quotes are taken from a recent City Journal article. Most modern environmentalists fail to comprehend the problem. They are too focused on a phantom climate doom or peak oil doom. But it's always the doom they don't see that tends to get them.

Today, women in more than 60 countries, ranging from Austria, Canada, and Poland to Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, don’t bear enough children to keep the population growing. In a handful of countries, women average just one child over a lifetime, less than half the replacement rate. _CityJournal

What’s behind the dwindling births? The chief factor is urbanization. Starting in the Industrial Revolution, households began migrating from rural areas, where Johnny and Sally could work on the family farm to help make ends meet, to cities, where the modern economy made kids a financial burden, requiring them to spend more and more years in school to become employable. Nowadays, it costs between $170,000 and $300,000 to raise a child through high school in the United States or Europe.

High taxes, mandatory schooling up through the late teens, and a social / cultural zeitgeist that discourages children and favours a quasi-urbane, pseudo-sophisticate lifestyle of faux gentility.

Shrinking fertility rates are producing rapidly graying societies. More than 20 percent of Japan’s population, for instance, is now 65 or older, and by 2050, that figure will rise to an astonishing 40 percent. Germany’s over-65 population has increased from 15 percent in 1980 to 20 percent today and is expected to reach one-third of the population by 2050.

Japan is working furiously to insert robot replacements into both service and factory worker slots. Even babies are to be replaced by "baby robots." Caretaker robots will care for the masses of aged Japanese.

Older workers’ experience can be valuable, but they tend to be less productive than their younger counterparts because they generally work fewer hours, are more costly to employ (since their seniority-based wages are higher), and aren’t as adaptable or as up-to-date technologically.

More resources will be devoted to the care of the aged, as fewer and fewer actual workers remain to pay into the system. Europe is just beginning to feel the pinch.

As aging Japanese workers poured ever more of their earnings into retirement accounts, consumer spending suffered, too. Between 1990 and 2000, average Japanese household spending actually shrank, once adjusted for inflation. While savings can lift an economy by providing more capital for business investment, Japanese producers viewed the increasing savings and the falling consumption as a sign of population stagnation, and they stopped investing at home, instead expanding in overseas markets like the U.S.

The ballooning US economy of the 1990s and most of the 2000s encouraged investors in the more sluggish Japanese and many Europeans to invest in US funds and instruments. Thus did a large part of the wealth of entire generations evaporate in a burst bubble of Barney (Frank).

Faced with the inescapable math of fertility decline, many countries have tried to address its economic consequences. The most common policy change has been to reduce the size of the welfare state, especially through adjustments to pension systems, which aren’t sustainable as the ratio of workers to pensioners declines. The European trend until recently was for workers to retire earlier and earlier, even as life expectancy grew. The labor-force participation rate of people aged 55 to 64 in the European Union is just 48 percent, compared with 64 percent in the United States. Countries with some of the gravest population problems also have the lowest rates of participation. In Italy, for instance, only 36 percent of 55- to 64-year-olds are in the labor force.

Too little, too late. Europeans have refused to face reality for several decades now. There is no reason to expect them to wake up now.

A study of birthrates among the French in the 1990s found that immigrant women from Morocco, Tunisia, and other North African countries had a fertility rate of nearly three. But the unemployment rate among the foreign-born in France is twice the rate of native-born French (by contrast, in the U.S. the foreign-born unemployment rate is roughly the same as the native-born rate). Nor have the children of the foreign-born in France proved successful at integrating into the French economy. In many North African neighborhoods in France, 30 to 40 percent of 15- to 24-year-olds are unemployed.

The French are not procreating. It is the immigrants -- who do not tend to work or produce -- who are procreating. It is illegal in France to provide the statistics which might have warned the people early enough to do something about the problem.

In fact, many European cities, schools, and birthing wards are filling with foreign immigrants who refuse to work or otherwise integrate into society. As the cities of Europe decay, as the armies, legislatures, and police forces begin to fill with alien-thinking immigrants, Europe may want to think of a different name to call herself.

The world is on the cusp of transformation. It is simply a different transformation than anything you have been told by your professors or by the media. Buckle up!