Losing the human race
If you have children, your posterity is potentially infinite. Play your cards right, and, as God said to Abraham, your descendants may be as numerous as “the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore.” If you do not have children, your posterity is three days long. That is the time it will take for your cats to realize that they cannot open tinned food and that your corpse is the nearest source of protein. They will start by eating your eyes, as the gelatinous matter is highly nutritious, and then chew your face off.
If you are living alone and find yourself alive but incapacitated, the cats will eat your eyes while you are still alive. If you thought that cats were a serious alternative to children, permit yourself an ironic chuckle as they tuck in. If you thought you could cheat mortality by freezing your eggs or sperm, you were sold a pup. Your genetic inheritance, the unique result of millennia of struggle, scheming, and casual sex, will be thrown away when your credit card expires.
They aren’t making people like they used to. Not long ago, this would have been considered good news. I’m now so old in cat years that I can remember when global cooling was going to freeze the planet and detonate the “population bomb.” There would be mass famine by 1980. Today, we are told that global warming will fry us alive and that famine by overpopulation is still imminent. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Since 1980, the increase in global population from 4.5 billion to 8 billion has been accompanied by the most extensive improvement in material conditions in human history. According to the World Bank, the rate of “extreme poverty” has fallen from 35% in 1990 to 10% now.
The experts continue to panic about overpopulation even as they reduce their predictions for population growth. The U.N. predicts a peak of 10.4 billion and decline from 2080. The World Economic Forum predicts a peak of 9.7 billion in 2064. The Club of Rome, which hyped the overpopulation panic in its 1973 report “The Limits to Growth,” now leads the field in underpopulation predictions, with a peak of 9 billion in 2046. That’s only 23 years from now: less than the time it takes to conceive and raise a whitecollar worker with an advanced degree.
Our leaders spew out hot air about climate change, but climate change has little to do with any of this. The problem is our material success, not our failure to propitiate the climate goddess. When China’s workingage population peaked in 2015, the one-child policy was not the only cause. If education and income levels rise, women have fewer children. As societies cross the “demographic transition,” the birthrate drops below replacement rate (2.1 births per woman). Without immigrants to make up the deficit, the workforce, economic capacity, and the tax base all shrink. Family networks atrophy, and the nuclear family falters, but the government struggles to fund healthcare and pensions commitments. When the math that underpins the social contract no longer makes sense, a complex society disintegrates. See: France.
The depopulation dynamic is already here in the advanced economies. South Korea (0.84 births per woman and minimal immigration) is doomed. The prospects for Spain (1.23) and Italy (1.24), states with growing rates of immigration, are little better than those of zero-immigration China (1.28) and Japan (1.34). Hungary’s anti-immigrant, pronatalist policies may not be enough to lift it from a feeble 1.56, a figure Britain matches through immigration and drunkenness alone.
Americans crossed the demographic transition around the time they won their independence. Until recently, they cheated the odds through immigration. No longer. After a five-decade fall, the current birthrate is 1.64. Everything the China hawks say about China’s imminent decrepitude will happen to the U.S. after the working-age population peaks in 2034. The 52% of women who have no children should teach their cats to open the tins.
With India’s population growth slowing, the U.N. predicts that twothirds of future growth will come from Africa. This may be overly optimistic. The government in sub-Saharan Africa is incompetent and corrupt. It’s more likely that population pressure will lead to war, famine, disease, and an increase in the exodus of able-bodied young men to Europe. The future belongs to those who show up, including on other people’s shores.
The exception among Westernstyle liberal states is Israel (3.1, the highest in the OECD). This is not just because of high fertility among Arabs and Orthodox Jews. Even secular Israeli women pop out an above-replacement average of 2.2 children. An unfashionable belief in family aside, necessity is the mother of invention. As God tells Abraham, one of the benefits of having children is that “thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies.” This is why they call it the human race. If you take yourself out of the running, goodbye. ★