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Demographics and political economy

Here is a memorable little essay by a Canadian economics professor demonstrating that behind even very sophisticated economic systems lie the brute facts of demographics. It begins this way:

As you get older, your productivity will, eventually, decline. If you live long enough, you will reach a point when you can no longer provide for yourself.

You cannot bake bread when you are young, bury it in the ground, and then dig it up and consume it when you are old. In your golden years, you must rely on someone younger and fitter to bake bread for you.

In every society, the old have some claim on the resources of the young. Only the nature of the claim varies.

From this, in syllogistic fashion, the author unpacks some implications for modern political economies.

For instance:

Tax-financed supports for the elderly are also vulnerable to demographics. Yes, taxes can be raised to provide bread for large numbers of elderly folks, but there is a limit to how much revenue can be raised from a given tax base. Eventually bread rations may have to be cut.

Accumulating assets — burying gold in the ground — doesn't protect one from demographic forces either. If you're a member of a large generation, then everyone else will be digging up their gold and trying to exchange it for bread at the same time as you are. The price of gold will fall, the price of bread will rise. (Substitute housing for gold if you wish).

I would drill even deeper into this and ask: what is at back of demographics? The answer is human reproduction, what George Gilder in his brave and brilliant book Men and Marriage called the sexual constitution. From there it is a very simple trace of logic to the realization that human sexuality can never, ever, be a purely "private" matter. It is, always and inevitably, a matter of absolutely vital public importance.

It is a mark of the degradation of our civilization’s sexual constitution that most folks accept without critique the popular reduction of “sexuality” to the momentary pleasure of the act. The irrevocable connection of this act to such momentous matters as human procreation and the perpetuation of society has been obscured by an extraordinary collection of deceit, impudence, fraud and hucksterism.

Western society has now spent many years involved in various experiments where the culling of younger generations comprises the true (though concealed) content of a vast propagandistic effort of reducing procreation to that momentary pleasure. We have embarked, under false pretenses, on a revolution in the human sexual constitution.

At last we are beginning to suffer the demographic consequences. Our prosperity suffers; our political economy groans under pressure from the revolution. The claims of the old upon the resources of the young must be extracted from ever-smaller cohorts of the young, millions of them having been snuffed out before birth and millions more contracepted into oblivion. The difficulties entailed in this straitening are in evidence across the Western world, most spectacularly in Europe.

At base the crisis is spiritual, but its consequences ramify into virtually all areas of life.

Comments (25)

Good observations, but there is zero chance that a majority of westerners will wake up in time to do anything about it. The sexual revolution has been an unmitigated social and moral disaster. It has lead to demographic collapse, the destruction of the family, and contributed to the hollowing out of every major social institution that could provide a counterbalance to state power and its corporate adjuncts. And it will not end until the west is completely ruined politically, culturally, and financially.

First, because nobody has a moral vocabulary which could enable them to understand what is going on. With the exception of the small percentage of Christians who have retained a classical realist conception of human nature, the society is sold on liberal individualism and most people whether "conservative" or liberal cannot wrap their head around any alternative to it. Harm arguments like this one will have no effect; first, because the benefits of sexual liberation are immediate and widely distributed. To undo it would directly threaten most people's conception of personal welfare: commitment free sex through your 20s, marriage in your 30s with double-income and no kids, divorce on demand. Meanwhile, the disastrous consequences of these "lifestyles" are deferred and they seem causally unrelated to aggregate sexual behavior on the surface.

Western man is like an alcoholic: losing job after job, health in decline, reputation in eclipse, and yet he blames everything but the drinking for his problems. Our culture is dead, corporations and government are the only institutions with any real power anymore, and we are in midst of a lemming-stampede off of a demographic precipice. And yet we blame our problems on everything but the radical social changes of the last 50 years that set this whole thing in motion.

Good heavens, what a beam of sunshine you are, Untenured.

"Harm arguments like this one will have no effect." The statement strikes me as excessively deterministic and absolute. "And it will not end until the west is completely ruined politically, culturally, and financially." The statement strikes me as excessively confident.

Certainty turning error into understanding in even a handful of minds is very much more than no effect. Based on my own journey from error into illumination many seeds of understanding are sown in initial disdain and rejection. It's going to be a long hard grind, regaining sanity; all we can do is put in the best work we can.

It's going to be a long hard grind, regaining sanity; all we can do is put in the best work we can.

Who are the 'we' here? I'd guess they are a tiny educated minority who have emancipated themselves from the fetters of conformist opinions that it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question.

Too few to change things, I fear.

There are difficulties that beset using a demographic argument to change public policy in these areas.

First of all, it's understandable that most people believe that if an act is not wrong in itself, it's a bit thick for it to be prohibited on the grounds that if done en masse it has bad demographic consequences. Nuns and priests take vows of celibacy, and as long as that isn't wrong in the individual case, we can't propose that it be stopped because if too many people did it there would be no one to care for the nuns and priests themselves in their old age. Similarly, there are always going to be single people, even people "called to singleness," whether or not they actually take vows, and we don't want to regard all of them as spongers or as having shirked a duty to marry and have children in their youth.

Everybody who, say, gets married and opts to have no children, even for the most blatantly selfish reasons, can argue that he's "giving to the community" in other ways, etc., and that his _individual_ choice not to procreate can't or shouldn't be blocked merely on the grounds of the aggregate effect if too many people make the same decision.

Conversely, America already has some noticeable pro-natal policies in place, surprising as this may seem. For example, the child tax credit is pretty hefty and should act as an incentive to people to have children. And the tax credit comes on top of the old dependent exemption, so people with children actually have it put "in their faces" every April 15 that the government is rewarding them for having and raising children. Then, of course, there are all the messy incentives for welfare mothers to procreate.

Yet none of this has protected millions of unborn children from being slaughtered, nor has it appreciably taken care of the demographic problem.

Now, of course, abortion is wrong and evil, and I fight it every chance I can get. But it's wrong and evil in each individual case. Even if we had no demographic problem, it would be wrong wherever it was performed. It's intrinsically wrong.

Strategically and psychologically, we can ask whether pointing to the demographic problem is likely to alert people to the wrongness of abortion. Myself, I tend to doubt it, for the reasons I've already outlined. I can imagine that a pro-choicer might suggest still more governmental incentives for child-bearing while at the same time wanting to keep abortion legal--the idea being to get people to abort less or to have children before they begin aborting the rest or something like that. It seems to me unlikely that the demographic problem is going to alert people to the wrongness of the act itself.

In contrast, I would say that pointing out the increasing commodification of children in in vitro fertilization has more of a chance of alerting people to the wrongness of in vitro. This is because there is a rather tight connection between the _reason_ for the wrongness of in vitro and the commodification of children. The increasingly callous nature of that--throwing out girl embryos or embryos with some extremely minor genetic anomaly, for instance--just highlights the view of the child as a product inherent in the act itself.

I'm not sure that aggregate demographic outcomes bear quite that same relation to the wrongness of abortion.

Interesting, thank you.

Lydia, while I agree with the gist of your argument, I have read people arguing that concern for the environment/overpopulation/whatever is actually one of the reasons that keeps them from having kids (see the Wikipedia article on "childfree" for example).

However dishonest and ridiculous that concept, showing the economical damage of a dwindling population pretty much kills it.

Interesting, thank you.

Lydia, while I agree with the gist of your argument, I have read people arguing that concern for the environment/overpopulation/whatever is actually one of the reasons that keeps them from having kids (see the Wikipedia article on "childfree" for example).

However dishonest and ridiculous that concept, showing the economical damage of a dwindling population pretty much kills it.

Well, Jane, it might be relevant if you're dealing with people who care about the human race. If they've drunk deeply of the wells of environmentalism, they may accuse one of "speciesism" for countering with the demographic argument. After all, if we're really some sort of cancer on the planet, or even harming the planet by our existence in such numbers, etc., then the sooner our population is downsized the better, and if we humans suffer some pain in the process (elderly people without enough younger people to care for them, for example), a really die-hard on the anti-population front would just regard that as the tough price we pay for having bred "too many" people in the first place.

I don't know of a lot of people who have those concerns about overpopulation, etc., who really are pro-human when push comes to shove.

Even if they claim that overpopulation is causing poverty in the third world, pointing them to demographic collapse isn't going to make a difference. The person might in that case agree that Europeans, Americans, and Canadians need to have more children to shore up their welfare states while still insisting that Indians, Africans, and Chileans need to have fewer, because they "can't afford them."

Short of divine intervention in the order of the Milvian Bridge, I'm going to have to agree with Untenured on this one.

The only thing I can think of that will 'solve' the demographic problem is if we come up with a technological breakthrough that makes the demographic issue moot. Like bread that lasts so long you can store it. Or what the Japanese are doing by creating robots to take care of the elderly. Or health being improved so much that the elderly can take care of themselves forever. But these are 'hail Mary' solutions. Besides, whenever we invent something, it's not always used for the purposes we think. And there are unintended consequences. Conservatives have pointed out the automobile did more to harm the family than the feminists did.

My purpose here was to emphasize, very briefly, how an empirical view from many angles, tends to produce massive evidence supportive of the older or traditional teaching on human procreation. We can be economists or biologists or demographers, and each in our own way we can illustrate the extreme deficiency of the modern liberated teaching. The social democrat who actually believes in empirical science, cannot, if he is honest, fail to face the yawning consequences of the sexual revolution. The scientist who examines human society with an eye toward improving it cannot, with integrity, deny that, e.g., children raised in intact families are much more likely to succeed and produce than children raised in broken homes; or that males unbound by any pressure, legal or social, to care for their children and mothers of their children, will often degenerate into gangs and clans and other menaces. Crime is a young and single man's game. Its sway is most potent among the fatherless and absentee fathers. These are facts even those who do not share our moral or theological view must accept.

it's a kind of collective madness. It's mass like suicide by proxy.

P. D. James wrote a novel about it, which I recommend (stay away from the movie) called Children of Men.

@Lydia 2:06: Right. Which is why nothing will change until a significant number of people re-discover the notion that sexual behavior is properly oriented towards procreation and family. Until people recognize the moral wrongness of their seemingly "harmless" private sexual dalliances, they can't be motivated to behave any differently.

The problem is that there is no social alternative to liberalism anymore. Such an alternative would have to come from our religious heritage, and that heritage is in shambles. Mainline protestants are going the way of the dodo, and non-denominational protestants are in the middle of a moral "race to the bottom" to see who can juxtapose "Jesus loves you" with the most conformist and personally convenient set of moral teachings. Only the Catholic church holds the line, and even there you are lucky if you can find a bishop who will speak openly on sexual morality. And it is only going to get worse, because a sizable percentage of people in the millennial generation and younger don't even have the concept of sexual morality.

Westerners wont abandon sexual liberalism until they start to feel the consequences of their aggregate behavior. And by then it will be far too late, because bankruptcy and depopulation will be terminal.

Sorry to project yet another dark beam of sunshine, but the writing is on the wall for anyone who wants to read it.

Mainline protestants are going the way of the dodo, and non-denominational protestants are in the middle of a moral "race to the bottom" to see who can juxtapose "Jesus loves you" with the most conformist and personally convenient set of moral teachings.

Some of the discussions I've seen on socially conservative sites about Fireproof are eye-opening about the evangelical community. A number of social conservatives watched it and were horrified that the movie seemed more sympathetic to a wife who was nearly engaged in a full-blown affair with another man than with the husband who was routinely denied by a workaholic wife and sought a little refuge in pornography (the type of which was never explained--it could have just as easily been Playboy as Japanese midget BDSM porn). Yet, a significant amount of commenters and writers identified with the wife, even though she was on the verge of committing actual physical adultery (which any Christian should know is a bright-line morality test).

What this says to me is that mainstream Protestants are increasingly so caught up in legalism (porn is ALWAYS bad) that they cannot conceive of how coming close to actual adultery with a living, breathing person is the difference between thinking about killing someone who angers you and loading a gun with half a heart to actually shoot them dead. I can't help but think that this habit of missing the forest for the trees is far bigger than just sexual morality, but taints the entire moral compass of many churches.

In every society, the old have some claim on the resources of the young. Only the nature of the claim varies.

What we're going to face here is the claims of the old, taken at face value, draining the young dry. It's simply not mathematically possible for Social Security and Medicare to provide their planned benefits for more than a few more years. Medicare alone is growing at about a 9% annual rate. Such a fast rate of growth would have been daunting for even the Baby Boomers if they were facing that with their parents while the Boomers were in their earning prime.

One of the things that I think will upend this social arrangement is the sort of mentality Maximos displayed when I commented on the fact that if my taxes go up about 5-6 percentage points, I might not be able to keep my house or support my family. His response was to the effect that if I couldn't handle a "modest" increase which would amount to several thousand dollars more in income tax plus new taxes on my (now very modest) company-provided health insurance, maybe I was living too high on the hog. Say what? Most men capable of supporting a family on a single income are already paying about 25-30% of their total household income to support mainly entitlement spending. Entitlements now equal to 100% of all federal tax receipts.

When the chips are down, the younger generations will not tolerate crippling their children's economic security/opportunity or simply not having kids in order to provide for seniors. I think the Boomers will face, in the next 5-10 years, a rather brutal wake up call from Generations X and Millennial (who need only another 5 years in the wilderness to snap out of it, I bet).

Paul, you have a good point that our elites often talk like utilitarians. The man on the street may conveniently eschew utilitarianism when it comes to his personal actions ("Just because that has bad consequences if everybody does it, it doesn't follow that it's wrong when one person does it in any individual case"), but if one theoretically embraces some form of utilitarianism, one seems bound to take into account the dystopian consequences of a greying population with insufficient young people to care for them.

Like Burke's "flies of the summer" there is no past and no future, there is only now. To the extent that people think or plan ahead it is directed at just what college their children should be trundled off to for their barren vocational training. Toss in vacations and possibly retirement and that's it. If there is to be an awakening as to the meaning of time there ought to be some indications, such as I see are found only in a religion oppossed to any and all other faiths and civilizations. Cicero had said that to live only in the present is to be forever a child, true.

Lydia, you're right, of course, but I was thinking of this in a utilitarian perspective: reducing population for the comfort of future generations (the earth being too small and ressources scarce and bla bla bla) vs. a healthy growth for the survival of the current population. But this is already being adressed in the thread.

Time was, some 80 or more years ago, when most Christian sects were willing to teach publicly and explicitly that married people as a whole have a general OBLIGATION to society to have children - that's in addition to and distinct from the spiritual obligation we have to God to be open to children, and distinct from the obligations we have to our spouse and our other family members. One of the duties of marriage qua social unit was to make the next generation of society. This obligation falls generically on all married couples, simply in virtue of their marriage. As a consequence, it was always considered (within Catholicism) a matter of exception to the rule, requiring some extraordinary need or purpose, for a married couple to choose voluntarily to be childless - something for which OTHER needs of society might trump society's needs for this particular couple to be fruitful.

There isn't any reason I know of for Christians to have stopped teaching this, other than simply not wanting to have to connect sex to children - the old contraceptive mentality.

Paul, Adam Smith dealt with this long ago - it's not necessary that each of us make our own pins. We need to suffer the transition of the Boomers and deal with the health care cost curve - hardly insurmountable barriers. Compared to Europe, China, and Japan, we are in pretty good shape demographically.

"There isn't any reason I know of for Christians to have stopped teaching this, other than simply not wanting to have to connect sex to children - the old contraceptive mentality."

Maybe because developed economies have significantly lowered the infant mortality rate while raising the costs involved in raising those infants to self-sufficiency. Also, it's likely that most women were never all that thrilled about being constantly pregnant and then dying. And it is possible to produce more children then it is possible to properly enculturate (e.g. baby boomers).

"married people as a whole have a general OBLIGATION to society to have children..."

A nonsensical notion that a weekend field trip to any big box will quickly dispel - some folks married or not simply have no business contributing to the gene pool.

Tony, there are limits to everything. Consider this: A 1% annual increase in population would result in 7 trillion in less than 800 years. (Do I hear scoffing at the time frame? On a site that references the Crusades on its mast head and piles on William of Occam from time to time?) Anyway, there are clearly limits; have you even considered the implications of an ever increasing population?

Obviously, a society that is not reproducing itself is, by definition, not in danger of the 7 trillion worry. If you will examine my comments, I nowhere indicated that the fundamental teaching was for unlimited growth of society. Responsible parenthood, not sheer baby-making.

A nonsensical notion that a weekend field trip to any big box will quickly dispel - some folks married or not simply have no business contributing to the gene pool.

And I suppose the Great Al will tell us which ones are to stop reproducing. I don't claim to be able to see which ones we ought to tell to stop.

"...I nowhere indicated that the fundamental teaching was for unlimited growth of society."

Apologies if you haven't any problem with contraception; I thought you considered it an "evil". There is no way we would avoid unlimited growth without it.

"And I suppose the Great Al will tell us which ones are to stop reproducing. I don't claim to be able to see which ones we ought to tell to stop."

No, but I can tell some of the ones who clearly needed not to be parents. This is one of those things where the unintended consequences of attempting to fix things would only make them worse. Seriously, you have never seen or known anyone who had no business reproducing or parenting? Dude, you need to get out more - is there a Walmart near you?

Paul,

I think it’s significant that the word “procreation” has been replaced with “reproduction.” I can remember (as a child in the 1980s) TV sit-coms that portrayed people who use the term “procreation” as stuffy, out-of-touch prudes.

Apologies if you haven't any problem with contraception; I thought you considered it an "evil". There is no way we would avoid unlimited growth without it.

There is a perfectly sound, well known way to avoid unlimited growth without contraceptives. It is called _not_having_sex when you don't want to have children. I have no problem with not conceiving this way. Even ancient peoples knew about this method AND practiced it in times of trouble and uncertainty.

No, but I can tell some of the ones who clearly needed not to be parents. This is one of those things where the unintended consequences of attempting to fix things would only make them worse. Seriously, you have never seen or known anyone who had no business reproducing or parenting? Dude, you need to get out more - is there a Walmart near you?

Some of the people I see at Walmart not only need to not be parents, they AREN'T parents. That seems OK. But "totalitarian al" wants to go further. Other than for people who are certifiably mentally unable to take on the role of parenthood, (eg the village fool), I don't see why we should be in the business of forcing people to be childless. Teaching them the meaning of responsible parenthood, and then molding society to support responsible parenthood in 10,000 ways we currently fail to support that, would be a much better option. Since responsible parenthood inherently includes considering both personal and social requirements, it would deal with population issues.

Al, if you were serious about the long range population issue, you would be worried about the foreseeable implosion of population in Japan, Spain, and so on.

There is a perfectly sound, well known way to avoid unlimited growth without contraceptives. It is called _not_having_sex when you don't want to have children.

There is also coitus interruptus.

Al, if you were serious about the long range population issue, you would be worried about the foreseeable implosion of population in Japan, Spain, and so on.

I'm sure the immigrants in Europe will not only make up for that, but introduce a wonderful new multicultural ethnic vibrancy that will enrich their host societies. For example, Sweden is now getting to experience rape rates that are 600% higher than they were 20 years ago. Who said that large scale immigration and diversity don't bring interesting new experiences that make life livelier?

Very good observations and excerpts from a brilliant economist, and I like your points as well. However, I find in some cases that it's too generalized for truth for all people. There is always going to be a loophole, always going to be many paths that the majority cannot see, but a select few people with some sharp intuition will use to their protection and advantage.

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