Elon Musk’s many detractors gleefully mock him when he says, as he repeatedly does, that “biggest issue the world will face in 20 years is population collapse.” In his view, it poses a far bigger threat to humanity than climate change. As far as the academics who berate him are concerned, the planet’s richest man is spouting dangerous nonsense. Is he? You do not need to be an accredited demographer to understand that, if birth rates stay below replacement levels, as they currently are in most major countries, and before long will get that way in those regions of Africa where they are still relatively high, the day will inevitably come when the remaining members of the human race finally depart this earth as did the last of Neanderthals tens of thousands of years ago although, unlike them, they will not bequeath any genes to a related species.
Just when this happens is anyone’s guess. A couple of years back, a special United Nations body which was set up to ponder the matter predicted that, when the year 2300 came round, the world’s population would be somewhere between two billion and 26 billion, which was not very helpful. However, if present trends are anything to go by, then our descendants, most of whom will be in their dotage, will occupy a prominent place on the endangered species list.
Until very recently, hardly anyone apart from people who worried about pension funds that, to remain viable, would need money coming from generations yet to be born, found this dismal prospect dispiriting. Most regarded it with equanimity, while those who worried about carbon footprints, the welfare of wild creatures, rare insects and plants, saw it as a sign that homo sapiens was coming to his senses.
The upbeat mood would have persisted had the main economies kept growing at a sprightly pace, but in most developed countries they ceased doing so over a decade ago. Though some people, among them Elon Musk, have continued to do extraordinarily well, millions feel they are getting left behind, which is one reason why so many in the United States voted for Donald Trump, the French are split between supporters of Marine Le Pen and hard leftists such Jean-Luc Mélenchon, an increasing number of Germans are turning towards the rightwing AfD and, in the United Kingdom, most people would like to see the newish Labour government kicked out.
Is a reluctance to have children a symptom of the deepening discontent that is felt by so many not just in the Western democracies but also, for obvious reasons, throughout the Muslim world and, if reports are anything to go by, in China and even in India? It probably is. While in some countries the falling birth rate is blamed on economic factors such as housing which is becoming too expensive, the costs involved in educating youngsters and the like, such explanations are unconvincing. There must be something else involved. After all, not that long ago, when most people were far poorer than their counterparts are today, they were more than willing to support larger families than is now normal.
In Japan and South Korea governments have taken to warning their compatriots that they are confronting an extinction event. They have good reason to fear what is coming their way. In Japan, the current fertility rate is 1.2 per woman – in Tokyo, it is 0.99 – but for the population to remain stable it would have to hover around 2.1. While the Japanese leaders have not exactly resigned themselves to seeing their country wither away, they seem to take it for granted that the measures they are taking, housing benefits for married couples, stuff like that, are unlikely to have much effect.
South Korea is in even worse shape than Japan, with the birth rate plummeting to an astonishing 0.72 per woman, the lowest in the world – 0.55 in Seoul – which means that the population is set to halve before many who are school kids today start retiring. By then, both Japan and South Korea will have ceased being anything like what they are today, So too, for that matter, will China, where the official birth rate has dropped to 1.18 but which, given the regime’s habit of improving unwelcome statistics, could well be considerably lower. This is bad news for those who take it for granted that China is about to dislodge the US and become the next superpower.
Elsewhere, the problems caused by depopulation are only marginally less dire than in East Asia. The only well developed country which is bucking the trend is Israel, which boasts an exuberant fertility rate of 2.89 births per woman. For those who assume that a people surrounded by enemies who make no secret of their sadistic desire to slaughter most of them would refuse to be burdened by children, this may seem very strange, but it does offer some clues about what is going on in most of the rest of the world. As recent events have reminded us, Israelis have a remarkably strong national ethos. They believe in themselves and are absolutely determined to stay around. This has helped protect them from the malaise which is sapping the will of people in so many other countries which may share the same values and belong to the same civilisation, but are prey to cliques whose members are more interested in demoralising their fellow citizens than in encouraging them to think better of themselves and their collective future.
In the run-up to the US presidential elections, Kamala Harris pinned all her hopes on abortion which, she believed, was the only issue that would ensure her the female vote. Up to a point, she got it right. Though in the end proportionally fewer women voted for her than for her male predecessors Joe Biden and Barack Obama, she did better among them than Donald Trump. Does this mean that most women in the US and other Western countries would rather remain childless? Not necessarily, many voluntary spinsters say they regret not having given birth when they were still able to do so. Nonetheless, the growing influence of feminist attitudes, plus the increased participation of women in the workforce that has been made possible by technological progress, has surely had a considerable impact on birth rates. By overthrowing the “patriarchy,” reducing the importance of the traditional family and treating men as disposable accessories, feminists have certainly done their bit to help bring about a social and cultural order that has been programmed to self-destruct and leave behind a huge number of crumbling artefacts that will be of little interest to whatever creatures inherit the earth.
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