Friday, March 10, 2006

Western civilization and demographics

I have seen a lot of articles lately about the decline of the population in the civilized world and how it threatens the future of Western civilization.

There are people who are worried about the growing population of the world in the "oh my God, will there be enough natural resources for everybody" way, and there are people who are worried about declining birthrates of the Western countries (usually separately in every particular Western country) in the "oh my God, we are dying out" way. Being worried about both at the same time is generally frowned upon in the "oh my God, this evil person wants white people to breed and brown people to stop breeding" way, so I am not even going there.

The birth rates are very low all over the civilized world and are below replacement levels in almost all the Western countries. If this continues that way, eventually we will die out. If they are very much below replacement levels, we will die out pretty fast. Fast dying out causes a number of problems, such as having too few working people to support all the retired folk, and undesirable neighbors moving in and replacing the locals by breeding faster than them.

I recognize the problem, but am obviously not about to lecture people to have more children. I mean, I am part of the problem: I don't like children, don't have any, am not going to have any, and, much as I love the Western civilization, am not about to save it with my own pussy. Besides, I would not take it well if somebody tried to make me to, to put it mildly.

Immigration can be a solution, but obviously only if you get the right kind of immigrants. Otherwise they will fall into the category "undesirable neighbors moving in", see above, and will be part of the problem rather than of the solution. Immigrants should be fairly easily assimilable, otherwise they will make your neighborhood so vibrant and multicultural that eventually even the police will be afraid to go in.

Acquisition of easily assimilable immigrants is politically difficult, because it would entail a public debate about which groups are more easily assimilable and which are less so. Nowadays in Finland and in the US one can oppose immigration or support it, but supporting immigration by some groups while opposing it by others is still considered bad. Although in countries whose culture has been recently enriched in more aggressive ways, such as France and the Netherlands, the debate seems to be starting.

The actual supply of easily assimilable immigrants is in fact pretty good. There is Russia and China and India and South America and Eastern Europe. We'd need an infinite supply, too, because any group that will successfully assimilate into Western society will likely also have a very low birthrate.

Anyway, all of the above is stuff that most people already know anyway. But there is one thing that people who write about low birth rates never mention: how permanent is this phenomenon?

The numbers of the childfree have been rising steadily for many years now, and are still. However, there have been now only a couple of generations during which easy birth control have been available to most of the population in the West, and therefore only a couple of generations during which the extent to which a person likes children has had a very strong influence over how many children a person has. What I am wondering about is how strong is the genetic component in people's personal dislike of children, and how fast will the childfree people breed (heh) themselves out of existence? (Or rather, not out of existence but back to being a fairly small percentage of the population, sort of like gay people.) And if they will, what exactly will that mean for the demographics of the Western world? Will it be enough to rise the birth rates to the replacement rates?

Another thing that can help is technology. How hard and how expensive would it be to gestate fetuses by some technological means? I mean, the current method is complicated and painful and who the hell would want to have something the size of a watermelon up her pussy anyway? (OK, OK, a lot of people do, I just don't understand, etc., but I wonder how many would choose to have their fetuses mechanically gestated if they easily could and what effect that would have on the birth rates.) Anyway, this is probably not going to happen tomorrow but might not be a bad idea.

Also the social policies: wouldn't it be wise to limit child subsidies to the first three children if what we want is for the people with two children to have the third, rather than for the people with ten children to have eleventh?

Finally, after a trip to Southern Italy I realized that the reason every family down there has one child is that there is no way you can fit the whole family on one motorcycle if you have two children. italian government could probably greatly influence theit extremely-low birth rates by buying very big motorcycles and selling them to the population.

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