A Point of No Return? Not Enough Fertile Women

Europe, Japan, Russia, and a handful of other advanced nations are seeing their native populations shrinking before their eyes.   Modern women are not reproducing, and suddenly real estate prices are plunging as more and more properties go unoccupied.  Tax receipts are shrinking and governments must rely more and more on deficit spending to meet entitlement obligations to an aging citizenry.  At a point, the process becomes irreversible, when too few fertile women remain to provide enough young men to defend the country from outsiders who covet what earlier generations have produced.

By mid-century they will have barely half as many inhabitants as they do today, and half of those who remain will be elderly. Hardly men of military age and women of child-bearing age will remain. Their economies will implode long before the mid-century mark, as soaring retirement costs crush state budgets, and young people emigrate to escape the burden of supporting the elderly. _Spengler

Spengler is referring here to Georgia, the Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus.  But Russia and several Eastern European nations are close behind in the race to depopulate themselves.  Japan, Italy, Greece, and Spain are well within reach of the leaders.

But history offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained material advance in the face of long-term population decline. It seems highly unlikely that such an ambitious agenda can be achieved in the face of Russia’s current demographic crisis. Sooner or later, Russian leadership will have to acknowledge that these daunting long-term developments are shrinking their country’s social and political potential. _WorldAffairs

 Long-term population decline means long-term economic decline.   And what is true for Russia and Eastern Europe is also true for most of Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and a few other countries.

We have long argued that Japan has put itself into a horrid place demographically as her birth rate keeps on plunging and as Japan is no longer replicating itself. Things have gotten so bad demographically that the government itself says that Japan’s population shall halve in another 50 years…. At this point, little… indeed it appears nothing… can be done to stop this terrible demographic collapse. We are watching a demographic train wreck happen in very slow, but inexorable motion. _DennisGarman_via_HSDent

The train wreck becomes inexorable when a combination of low numbers of fertile women + psychological inertia + the original forces which caused the low birth rates all combine to prevent a resurgence of population. This "irreversibility" of demographic collapse is far more likely to occur in some countries currently experiencing a decline in fertility, than in others.

It is a matter of "patriarchy", in a sense.  Countries which can more easily revert to patriarchal values and traditions will find it much easier to re-build once declining populations.

Throughout the broad sweep of human history, there are many examples of people, or classes of people, who chose to avoid the costs of parenthood. Indeed, falling fertility is a recurring tendency of human civilization. Why then did humans not become extinct long ago? The short answer is patriarchy.

Patriarchy does not simply mean that men rule. Indeed, it is a particular value system that not only requires men to marry but to marry a woman of proper station. It competes with many other male visions of the good life, and for that reason alone is prone to come in cycles. Yet before it degenerates, it is a cultural regime that serves to keep birthrates high among the affluent, while also maximizing parents' investments in their children. No advanced civilization has yet learned how to endure without it. _TheReturntoPatriarchy

Nations with strong traditions of patriarchal tribes and religions -- such as Islam -- will find it much easier to bounce back from a falling fertility, than nations that have lost touch with their earlier patriarchal traditions.

Many have argued that European nations would never allow themselves to experience demographic collapse or to surrender to an invasion of more fertile Muslims.  The argument of which is the greater threat to Europe: an Islamic invasion or demographic collapse?, is a moot point.  The two calamities are not mutually exclusive, but are synergistic.  Each disaster will accelerate the other.

Some are calling for a Tea Party for Europe.   It is far too late for that.  Europe has none of the traditions of individual freedom that most generations of Americans were weaned on (at least until the current Obama zombie generation).   Some countries of Europe -- the ones that have not thrown over their early traditions for the recent suicidal ideologies of the radical environmental left -- will survive both the demographic implosion and the Muslim invasion.  Survive.  In the same way that Israel currently survives.

It is claimed that Islamic invaders to Europe will soon -- within a few generations -- adopt the same low birthrates that native Europeans exhibit.  That may or may not be true, but either way it is irrelevant.  The deed will have been done within a few generations.   It will require generations more for the aftermath to be swept up, and the smoke of war to clear over a devastated landscape.

Links on European Demographics

Earlier Al Fin article with some links to demographic projections

Fabius Maximus archives of future demographics