Posted on 12/24/2011 7:07:09 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Population decline is the elephant in the world's living room. As a matter of arithmetic, we know that the social life of most developed countries will break down within two generations. Two out of three Italians and three of four Japanese will be elderly dependents by 2050. If present fertility rates hold, the number of Germans will fall by 98% over the next two centuries. No pension and health care system can support such an inverted population pyramid. Nor is the problem limited to the industrial nations. Fertility is falling at even faster rates - indeed, at rates never before registered anywhere - in the Muslim world. The
world's population will fall by as much as a fifth between the middle and the end of the 21st century, by far the worst decline in human history.
The world faces a danger more terrible than the worst Green imaginings. The European environmentalist who wants to shrink the world's population to reduce carbon emissions will spend her declining years in misery, for there will not be enough Europeans alive a generation from now to pay for her pension and medical care. For the first time in world history, the birth rate of the whole developed world is well below replacement, and a significant part of it has passed the demographic point of no return.
But Islamic society is even more fragile. As Muslim fertility shrinks at a rate demographers have never seen before, it is converging on Europe's catastrophically low fertility as if in time-lapse photography. The average 30-year-old Iranian woman comes from a family of six children, but she will bear only one or two children during her lifetime. Turkey and Algeria are just behind Iran on the way down, and most of the other Muslim countries are catching up quickly.
(Excerpt) Read more at atimes.com ...
These demographics will still take time to achieve their full effect. God’s timetable is probably much shorter. Diverse and oppostional cultures are collectively manifesting a hopeless pessimism that will lead to the final conflict.
They might not right now but they will. They have been getting lots of Western money and many Muslims return to their homelands and bring with them these desires for freebies.
The one with population growth run “amok” will survive. :Lets get Darwinian - geographic diversification is critical for long-term survival of any species. Only a intelligent life that achieves the economies of scale that go with large populations can achieve the geographic diversification that goes with inhabiting other planets and/or spacecraft permanently away from earth.
This so-called balance you want on one planet dooms us to death, a death the can be prevented by preventing us from going beyond earth. This death of mankind in your way of thinking is guaranteed because the sun will expire.
We do not know the hour Christ will come so we need to be around for the long-run.
However, modern society has replaced this formula with social security schemes. We can now save and invest for our own retirement, so in this environment, children are a high cost burden, interfering with our saving (and spending). But a critical mistake has been made in this formula. We are not all saving exclusively for our own retirement. What I will get from social security is not what I put in to it, but a designated amount coming from current despositors, the young. So what we really did is create a system where we got rid of our children because we thought we didn't need them, but are still relying on someone's children to pay for our retirements. The demographic implosion will cause the old to lose their benefits. If everyone had ben saving for their own retirements and no one else's, demographic fluctuations would not matter.
We in the US will be luckier in the future, however, because we do welcome immigrants. Closed societies, like Japan and the middle east, will be hit much harder. We also should be seriously working on improving our productivity through innovation and robotics.
And if anyone thinks a demographic implosion will not affect wealth and standard of living, here is an interesting talk:
The other issue is that the rising extremist Muslim tied across more modernized Muslim nations like Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt can easily drive up the birth rates in those nations.
Plus, the goat humpers have their ancient tried and true tactic of repopulation via captured infidel women.
But they don’t depend on welfare in their native desert state. That’s why they don’t care about things like infant mort rate due to no medical treatment for women etc. The most rabid among them, who pine for the pure 7th century state of sharia, don’t really care if 9/10 of humanity dies out. A small number of muslim males can impregnate all of the surviving captive women, in their insane view of the world post 4 horsemen.
The elderly white Euros won't be manning the barricades against them. They will simply be swept away. Muslim conquerors have no use for elderly enemies. They love captured children, whom they can raise as muslims, slaves or eunuchs, depending on their whims. But they have no use for elderly captives.
Good point.
We don’t care about the New Guineans, but their examples provide useful lessons for the macro example of general civilizational collapse.
I need to read Mr. Steyn’s book, but I can only take so much doom and gloom.
In any case, the Moslem world is apparently suffering a decline in fertility, too, apparently even more catastrophic than the West. Assuming those are the bad guys to whom you are referring.
They failed to get off their island(s). This demonstrates why we need the economies of scale to expand elsewhere beyond earth in a few thousand years. Stagnating on an island was not the way to go.
Merry Christmas - you are right that we shouldn’t think of Earth as our “closed system”. The universe is vast and the Earth isn’t a closed system as it has external forces, such as the sun, acting on it.
If it were up to me I would kick anybody off of Freerepublic who believed in overpopulation. But maybe Jim likes to leave their lunacy on display for us to mock.
I'd like to see proof of this.
Natural population balance? What’s that?
The Japanese are depopulating, but at least they aren’t importing ruin.
True.
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