Overpopulation is a Dangerous Myth That Threatens Our Future Prosperity

Overpopulation is a myth. Many countries today have aging populations and our economic future is threatened by a lack of people. By the middle of this century, world population will peak and then, instead of leveling off it will start declining dangerously. The basic facts of life are explained in the following video from the Population Research Institute.



This second brief video explains the origins of the overpopulation myth and how it has been disproven over and over again. But because the myth of overpopulation provides a rationale for social control by the "experts" of the bureaucratic class, it continues to be promoted as if it were true.



The world needs more people. Share these videos with your children and with others.

Note: If you wish to learn more about the facts behind the myth of overpopulation, I recommend Philip Longman's The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birth Rates Threaten World Prosperity (and What to Do About It). Or go to the website of The Population Research Institute.

Germany is in Trouble and the Problem is Religious in Nature

At a time when Germany is the most economically powerful nation in Europe and straining to bail out Greece and stabilize the Euro, the economic future of the country looks grim because of the critically low birth rate. Here is an excerpt from Time on why Germans are declining to reproduce themselves.

Germany is shrinking — fast. New figures released on May 17 show the birth rate in Europe's biggest economy has plummeted to a historic low, dropping to a level not seen since 1946. As demographers warn of the consequences of not making enough babies to replace and support an aging population, the latest figures have triggered a bout of national soul-searching and cast a harsh light on Chancellor Angela Merkel's family policies.

According to a preliminary analysis by the Federal Statistics Office, 651,000 children were born in Germany in 2009 — 30,000 fewer than in 2008, a dip of 3.6%. In 1990, German mothers were having on average 1.5 children each; today that average is down to 1.38 children per mother. With a shortfall of 190,000 between the number of people who died and the number of children who were born, Germany's birth rate is well below the level required to keep the population stable. (See why the recession is causing women to have fewer kids.)

"The German birth rate has remained remarkably flat over the past few years while it has increased in other low-fertility countries, like Italy and the Czech Republic," Joshua Goldstein, executive director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, tells TIME. "Women are continuing to postpone motherhood to an older age and this process of postponement is temporarily lowering the birth rate." According to Goldstein's research, Germany has the longest history of low fertility in Europe.

To explain Germany's low reproduction rate, Steffen Kröhnert, a social scientist at the Berlin Institute for Population Development, points to a number of factors. Many German women decide not to have children because of poor state-run child-care facilities. Most schools in Germany finish earlier than in other parts of Europe — some as early as 1 p.m. — leaving parents struggling to find and afford sufficient day care. And often women who take up part-time jobs to try to juggle work and family life end up paying a high financial price. "Many German women have to stop work and end their careers if they want to have kids," says Kröhnert. It doesn't help that German mothers are still often branded Rabenmütter — "raven mothers" — a pejorative label that accuses them of being bad mothers if they decide to put their children in nurseries and continue working.

Read the rest here.

The common mistake being made here is to treat this as an economic and political problem when the real source of the problem is upstream from politics and lies in the realm of culture and religion. The real problem is the culture of death and its anti-humanistic bias. The environmentalist movement sees humans as a cancer on the earth. Materialism views humans as just mouths to feed, not as people with inherent dignity because they are made in God's image. With no belief in a higher purpose in life or a reason to live beyond pleasure, the idea of self-sacrifice seems to be unreasonable. The only solution to this problem is a religious revival of Christianity and it may already be too late for Germany.

Out of Date and Out of Touch: the Anti-Natalist Movement in Liberal Protestantism

Joe Carter at First Thoughts can't understand why Australian Anglicans are calling for Australians to have fewer children at a time when birth rates have been well below replacement levels of over two decades. I sympathize with his confusion. One supposes that the 60s have never ended for the aging hippie Anglican leadership, but wouldn't you think that concern for their pensions might have intruded on their utopian dreams somewhere along the way?

Joe quotes a report in the Sydney Morning Herald which tells us that:

The Anglican Church wants Australians to have fewer children and has urged the federal government to scrap the baby bonus and cut immigration levels.

The General Synod of the Anglican Church has issued a warning that current rates of population growth are unsustainable and potentially out of step with church doctrine - including the eighth commandment "thou shall not steal", Fairfax newspapers say.

In a significant intervention, the Anglican Public Affairs Commission has also warned concerned Christians that remaining silent "is little different from supporting further overpopulation and ecological degradation".

He then cites an Australian government website which discusses the demographic challenges of Australia's ageing population, which informs us that:

In the past Australia was a relatively youthful country. In 1970-71, 31 per cent of the population was aged 15 years or younger, while by 2001-02 this proportion had dropped to 22 per cent. The proportion of Australia’s population aged over 65 years has grown from 8 per cent in 1970-71 to 13 per cent in 2001-02. The IGR projects that over the next 40 years, the proportion of the population over 65 years will almost double to around 25 per cent. At the same time, growth in the population of traditional workforce age is expected to slow to almost zero. This is a permanent change. Barring an unprecedented change in fertility rates, the age structure of the population is likely to stabilise with a far higher proportion of older Australians.

It then goes on to explain that the reason for this change is that the birth rate has fallen well below replacement level (to about 1.7) and states that:

In 2002 there were more than five people of working age to support every person aged over 65. By 2042, there will only be 2.5 people of working age supporting each person aged over 65.

I wonder what the Anglicans advocating lower birth rates would say if they were asked to explain just exactly why the scenario described here would be beneficial and for whom. I wonder it they would care to explain how the welfare state would be sustained in such a scenario. Or are they secretly all devotees of Ayn Rand? Does the worship of Mother Gaia demand more human sacrifices? Or have they just dug themselves into an ideological hole with no way of getting out?

How the Eugenics Movement Morphed Into the Population Control Movement

I'm reading Peoplequake: Mass Migrations, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash by Fred Pearce, a secular, British journalist who believes in global warming. But, unlike many global warming alarmists, he is concerned about the decline in world population forecast to begin around the middle of the twentieth century by the United Nations. He is not an environmentalist fanatic who thinks that anything that reduces human population is automatically good and that less damage to Mother Gaia is infinitely more important than little details like economic depression, the end of the welfare state, war, or the disappearance of entire nations.

I'm only one third of the way through and I'll try to blog again on this book when I'm finished reading it, but in the meantime I can't resist calling attention to the the clarity with which Pearce connects the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century with the population control movement that developed after the war and continues to this day.

Contrary to popular opinion, the goal of halting the swamping of the white race by the dark hordes that drove the early eugenicists did not dissipate after the Nazis gave racism such a black eye in the Western popular mind; rather it simply morphed into a concern for over-population. After noting that control of soaring populations was rising on the political agenda of the US after WW II, Pearce writes:

If one event put it there, it was a private meeting held in June 1952 in Williamsburg, Virginia, under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences. Caldwell says it was a 'crisis conference', though it was by invitation only and produced no public outcome - not even in the specialist journals. The convener was John D. Rockefeller III, the 46-year old heir to the Rockerfeller family fortune made from Standard Oil. He was an American philanthropist with deeper pockets than any other. Next to him sat Vogt, whose fame from writing Road to Survival had won him the directorship of Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Also at the table were America's two pre-eminent demographers, Frank Norstein and his former protege the Texan Kingsley Davis, along with both the young Osborns, Fairfield and Frederick, the latter an old friend of Rockerfeller's.

These men were not troubled by modesty. They saw clearly their right to pronounce on the world's future. Frederick Osborn said they were part of a tiny intellectual elite 'of three or four hundred people who produce most of the freedoms of the human mind [who] may be engulfed by a great mass of people for whom these conceptions are largely alien.' They say the population problem 'not as a theory, but as a nightmare.' According to notes of the meeting unearthed by historian Matthew Connelly in the Rockerfeller archive, both Vogt and Fairfield Osborn argued that 'industrial development should be withheld' from countries like India, until they adopted population policies.

The three-day meeting decided to set up a Population Council to devise and bring about a global plan to control the world's population growth. Rockerfeller, who personally paid the council's salaries, was its first president. . . The council was soon busy taking in funds from the Ford and Rockerfeller Foundations. . . .

According to its website today, that opening meeting heard from John D. Rockerfeller that 'the reason to care about population was 'to improve the quality of people's lives, to help make it possible for individuals everywhere to develop their full potential.'" That may reflect its instincts today. But back then there was another, more hard-edged and Malthusian agenda.

Davis had told the Williamsburg meeting that food aid was worse than useless. Aid would build up ever larger populations on the basis of charity and it would become every more difficult to remove the prop. . . . Trade with undisciplined breeders was also deemed a bad idea . . . The old pre-war eugenic thinking also remained. The desire to cut population growth was surprisingly selective. Frederick Osborn, who resigned as president of the American Eugenics Society to take up his post at the Population Council . . . writing in 1956 in the Eugenics Review that 'we need the greatest number of births among genetically superior individuals.' (pp. 55-57)

In chapter 7, Pearce describes how what started as private philanthropy morphed into government policy and the role of the US in the forced sterilization campaign in India in the late 1960s. Lyndon B. Johnson became a convert to population control ideas and when India suffered from droughts in 1966 and 1967 and the US shipped a fifth of its wheat to India, he exploded: "Are you out of your f _ _ _ ing mind? I am not going to piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems" (p. 76)

India got the message and in 1967-68 it paid starving, lower-caste people $6 each to have a vasectomy. The report of the Bihar Ministry of Public Health said: "The large number of sterilizations during 1967-68 was due to drought conditions. Tribals and Dalits and other poor outcasts were disproportionately operated on. It was the compulsion of an empty stomach." (p. 77)

By the mid 1970s, voluntary sterilization was declining as most who wanted the operation had already had it. Compulsion was next.

At 3 am one November morning, police south of Delhi surrounded the Muslim village of Uttawar. the villagers were woken by loudspeakers ordering men over 15 years old to assemble at the bus stop. When they obeyed, about 400 were taken away, mostly to the holy Hindu city of Palwal, where they were forcibly sterilized. The village was singled out because it had protested against the sterilization plans. . . .

All over the country, even lowly government officials received targets for the number of 'volunteers' for sterilization that they had to bring to the camps. . . . The carrot had been replaced by the stick. Sterilization had become a condition of receiving everything from rickshaw licences to medical care, from irrigation water to ration cards. All across the country, state governments began jailing people with three or more children who refused sterilization. During the two years of the emergency more than 19 million sterilizations were carried out in India, three quarters of them on men.

As one Indian journalist later reported 'thousands upon thousands of people, mostly poor and illiterate, were herded like cattle to face the butcher's knife and then to become statistics of targets achieved two and three times over . . . Whether the person on whom the knife was wielded was 18 years old or 60, whether he was married or unmarried, whether he had six children or none, became matters of irrelevance since the objective was to tote up awesome figures as proof of loyalty to the powers-that-were in New Dehli.

This racist and imperialistic approach continues below the surface in most population control movements. It is less acceptable to speak today of the white race being swamped due to the defeat of Nazism and the whole over-population leading to massive famine scare has lost steam due to its having been proven false empirically. Now, the excuse for population control and eugenics is global warming and by the time it too has been proven false empirically it will have served its purpose of providing cover for the continuation of an anti-liberal, anti-humanistic, racist, eugenics that seeks to deal with poverty by eliminating the poor.

Pope Benedict XVI is Not Only a Better Theologian Than Hans Kung, He is Also a Better Economist

Samuel Gregg has some enlightening comments on Hans Kung's latest publicity stunt, namely his "open letter" instructing the Pope on how to do his job in "Hans Kung's Malthusian Moment."

In April, the world received yet another global missive from the 82-year-old Swiss theologian, Fr. Hans Küng. Perhaps the world’s most famous Catholic dissenter from Catholic teaching, Fr. Küng’s “open letter” to the world’s Catholic bishops contained his usual critique of the papacy and his now-tediously familiar prescriptions for changing the Catholic Church.

Almost 31 years ago, Rome and Germany’s Catholic bishops stripped Küng of his license to teach as a Catholic theologian because, by Küng’s own admission, he does not believe in some central tenets of the Catholic faith. Some would say Rome’s action was merely an exercise in ensuring truth in advertizing. This has not stopped Küng, however, from continuing to exhort Catholicism to adopt the path followed by many mainline Protestant confessions in the West since the 1960s.

As George Weigel has noted, Küng’s letter is full of misrepresentations and shoddy logic. Moreover, Küng seems oblivious to the sociological fact that those Christian communities which have embraced paths similar to that which he advocates for Catholicism are in a state of terminal collapse.

- - - snip - - -

There was, however, one claim in Küng’s letter worth further scrutiny. This was his assertion that Africa – and, by extension, the developing world – is suffering from an “over-population” problem, and that, by implication, Catholicism’s 2,000 years of unbroken teaching on the subject of contraception is dooming millions to poverty and starvation.

It’s hardly a secret that many people disagree with Catholicism’s position on contraception. But Küng’s claim of an “overpopulation” problem in the developing world shows just how much he remains an unreconstructed creature of the 1960s.

Theories concerning a correlation between rapid population growth, poverty, and strains on existing resources have been around since the time of the economist Thomas Malthus (incidentally, an Anglican cleric).

Since Malthus’ death in 1834, his theories have metastasized. In the 1960s, neo-Malthusian ideas achieved new prominence, thanks to the writings of scientists such as Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb, predicted that the world’s population growth would lead to mass starvation for millions, famines sweeping the globe, skyrocketing commodity-prices, and the dawn of an insurmountable scarcity of resources.

None of these predictions came true.

What Ehrlich and others who have imbibed the “overpopulation” Kool-Aid perennially discount is humanity’s entrepreneurial genius. The economist who did the most to highlight this point and discredit Ehrlich’s thesis was the late Julian Simon. In his book, The Ultimate Resource (1981/1996), Simon illustrates that the price-rises associated with increasing scarcity of a desirable resource generate incentives for entrepreneurs to discover more quantities of that resource, more efficient uses of that resource, and, eventually, substitutes for that same resource.

In short, given the right institutional conditions and incentives, humans are remarkably good at creating more than enough wealth to feed, cloth, and house increasing populations far beyond basic subsistence levels with enormous surpluses of capital left over for reinvestment – and all without ruthlessly plundering the natural environment. From this perspective, an increasing population can be seen as beneficial: the more people, the more potential creativity and entrepreneurship.

The problem with neo-Malthusians like Ehrlich and Küng is that they see humans primarily as economic consumers rather than economic creators. This is precisely the mentality that helped facilitate Western Europe’s coming demographic winter – a prospect that has caused Sweden (yes, that’s right, über-progressivist hyper-secularist Sweden) to create all sorts of financial incentives for Swedes to have more children.

- - - snip - - -

In his 2009 social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, Benedict XVI – the primary target of Küng’s most recent public venting – spelled out the economic logic of a declining birth-rate. “The decline in births,” the pope wrote, “falling at times beneath the so-called ‘replacement level,’ also puts a strain on social welfare systems, increases their cost, eats into savings and hence the financial resources needed for investment, reduces the availability of qualified labourers, and narrows the ‘brain pool’ upon which nations can draw for their needs” (CV 44).

In this regard, Pope Benedict shows himself as not only more prescient than Hans Küng in terms of helping Catholicism avoid the fate of those Christian communities that have embraced the vacuity and incoherence of liberal Christianity. He’s also a better economist.

The whole over-populations scare is an excuse for those who want big government to control our lives to justify ever-increasingly intrusive laws and exorbitant taxation. It is also a justification for the culture of death and abortion, euthanasia, eugenics and coercive population control measures such as those practiced by China's Communist thuggish regime. It It is the theology of a gloomy, nihilistic and anti-humanistic pagan religion that is best stamped out as the light of the Gospel dawns.

Gendercide in China: the Grief and the Sadness

Peter Hitchens has a fascinating and thought-provoking article in The Daily Mail entitled: "Gendercide: China's shameful massacre of unborn girls means there will soon be 30m more men than women." In the society Thomas Friedman admires so much, hatred of girls is widespread, state sanctioned and acted on with deadly ferocity. I guess that is why he is a feminist.

A few snippets follow. But read it all for yourself. It is well-worth while.

In the cruel old China, baby girls were often left to die in the gutters. In the cruel modern China, they are aborted by the tens of millions, using all the latest technology. [Aren't you glad they have modern, scientific socialism now?]

There is an ugly new word for this mass slaughter: gendercide. [Which no major feminist groups is willing to fight. How do they hold on to that name, I wonder?]

Thanks to a state policy which has limited many families to one child since 1979, combined with an ancient and ruthless prejudice in favour of sons, the world's new superpower is beginning the century of its supremacy with an alarming surplus of males.

By the year 2020, there will be 30 million more men than women of marriageable age in this giant empire, so large and so different (its current population is 1,336,410,000) that it often feels more like a separate planet than just another country. Nothing like this has ever happened to any civilisation before. [Did you catch that? Nothing like this has ever happened before, ever.]

The nearest we can come to it is the sad shortage of men after the First World War in Britain, France, Russia and Germany, and the many women denied the chance of family life and motherhood as a result.

It is possible that the effects of that imbalance are still with us, in the shape of the radical feminist movement which found ready recruits among the husbandless teachers and other professionals of the Twenties and Thirties.

But men without women are altogether more troublesome than women without men, especially when they are young.

All kinds of speculation is now seething about what might happen; a war to cull the surplus males, a rise in crime, a huge expansion in the prostitution that is already a major industry in every Chinese city, a rise in homosexuality.

Three things are for sure. It cannot now be prevented, and it is already beginning to be obvious in the schools. It is also stimulating a miserable trade in stolen children. [Government policies that mess with human reproduction do not produce disaster right away; it can take a generation.]

All over this district, the evidence of government concern is on display. A 20-yard-long propaganda poster in one tiny hamlet dwells sternly and very frankly on the problem, declaring: 'Our current family planning policy is this, "Pay attention to the issue of gender imbalance."' [How lame! They obviously have no clue what to do now.]

It quotes a recent national census showing a growing imbalance and predicts: 'In 2040 there will be 300million men and 250 million women under 40. At least 30million men will have difficulty getting married.

This will cause "elements of instability" and hinder economic growth. The harm caused by this imbalance could include disintegration of families, high divorce rates, "sex offences" and distortion of the birth rate.'

The poster, astonishingly candid in a country where critical journalism and dissent are still suppressed with all the force of the state, is sadly lame when it comes to suggesting what to do.

It calls for 'action to care for girls' and then sets out four vague and wordy slogans which can be summed up as 'girls are good'. And so they keep saying. - - snip - -

She asked the abortionist if he ever aborted boys. He gaped. 'Are you mad?' he almost shouted, 'Nobody aborts boys unless they are deformed. Girls are what we abort.' [Think about this the next time you hear about "a woman's right to choose."]

This cheap and squalid storefront business offers abortions from around £10. Scans, which reveal a baby's sex, cost a fiver. True, this is a rough neighbourhood, but similar businesses flourish in more respectable districts as well.

They usually start from £20, while supposedly painless procedures can go up to about £200.

The authorities, who have no moral objection to abortion itself, have been known to force women to have abortions in their ninth month of pregnancy to keep to the one-child policy. [They have no moral authority left.]

They cannot really complain about the huge numbers of legal, commercial abortionists. Nor can they do much to ban the cheap portable scanning machines which detect the sex of the baby and condemn so many unborn girls to death. - - snip - -

In Kunming I saw another of China's harsh faces. You may have seen pictures of children in cages, or tethered to posts, and gasped at the cruelty. But you did not know the half of it.

Their seemingly brutal parents are in fact trying to prevent their children from being stolen. [!]

Boys are kidnapped by families who want a male heir and do not care where they get him. Girls are taken to be brought up as child brides for cherished, spoiled boys, who will not have to worry about the increasing shortage of girls. - - snip - -

On June 1 last year, International Children's Day, dozens of Kunming parents held up posters in a central square, advertising their missing children. City officials told them to take down the posters and disperse because they were 'defacing the city with unsightly material'.

Here are the stories of the parents who talked to me. Xiong Fu Ping, (like all the men I spoke to, he is 36) lost his son Xiong Ting-Lei when the boy was 16 months old: 'One minute he was playing outside our house and the next he was gone.' [Every parent's nightmare.]

Neighbours said a woman had driven the child away in her car. Xiong Fu Ping has already spent nearly half the family's income, which is just £80 a month, on posters and advertisements for the missing boy. - - snip - -

What lingers in the mind, in the midst of this surging economic and political titan with its dozens of vast, ultra-modern cities, its advanced plans to land men on the Moon, its utopian schemes to control population [let this phrase roll around in your mind for a while; this is pure evil] and its unstoppable power over the rest of the world, is the inconsolable misery of the bereft parents, the pinched squalor of the places where they must try to live a happy life, the jaunty wickedness of the cheap abortion clinics and the classrooms full of the ghosts of all those girls who were never born.

Whatever we have been used to and thought of as normal is coming to an end.

Read it all here. Word don't seem to be enough to express the grief.

HT: ProWoman Prolife

Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?

A while ago on this blog I discussed Philip Longman's excellent book on demographics, The Empty Cradle, which shows that world population is below replacement level in 59 countries (according to UN data) and will level off and begin to decline by the mid-twentieth century. By then it may be too late to reverse economically disastrous populations decline. It may even be too late now. A less central conclusion of that book was that the world is likely to become more conservative and more religious because secular liberals just can't be bothered to reproduce much.

Now, a new book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? by secular, liberal Eric Kaufmann, has come out (although Amazon.ca does not have it yet for some reason), which confirms the conclusions of the Longman book and exhibits some serious angst about the earth belonging to the religious conservatives of all religions in the future.

Casper Melville at the UK's The New Humanist has an interview with Kaufmann and it is an interesting read. I can't help but think that the ground is being prepared for an aggressive liberal offensive aimed at defusing this ticking demographic time bomb. The exact shape that will take is not yet clear, but it could involve the secular state assuming a more aggressive posture with regard to the inculcation of values in children even against the wishes of parents. Anyway, here are some excerpts.

"Whenever demography is the subject a panicky headline usually follows. Generally these take the form of anxieties about overpopulation. “Are there just too many people in the world?” asks Johann Hari in the Independent. “The World’s population is still exploding,” confirms the Optimum Population Trust (patron David Attenborough). Though equally they could be about the opposite. “Is Europe Dying?” queries Catholic apologist George Weigel (before answering his own question: “The brute fact is that Europe is depopulating itself”). “Falling birth rate is killing Europe says Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks” is the Guardian’s offering. To these hysterical headlines let’s add another, especially for you secular folk: with birth rates of seven babies per women fundamentalists will take over the world. And here is the kicker: it’s all secularism’s fault.

This grim prognostication comes courtesy of political scientist Eric Kaufmann, a reader in politics at London’s Birkbeck College, and the author of the new book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, out in March from Profile Books. . . .

What Kaufmann is arguing is that the secularisation thesis, the assumption that modernity leads inexorably to a lessening of religious belief and a day when we are all rational humanists, is wrong – at one point Kaufmann approvingly quotes Rodney Stark and Roger Finke’s view that this is “a failed prophecy”. Further he is saying that there is something about our current form of liberal secularism that contains (here’s another headline) the seeds of its own destruction. Since the birth rate of individualistic secular people the world over is way below replacement level (2.1 in the West), and the birth rate of religious fundamentalists is way above (between 5 and 7.5 depending on sect), then through the sheer force of demography religious fundamentalism is going to become a much bigger force in the world and gain considerable political muscle. Literalist religious conservatism is being reborn and we secular liberals are the midwives.

But what kind of fundamentalism is he talking about? The book covers a wide array of sects from Haredis in Jerusalem to Hutterites in Montana and Salifis in Manchester. Some of the American and Jewish sects are hundreds of years old, but others – like Quiverfull and Salifism – are relatively new. What do they have in common?

“I call them ‘endogenous growth sects’. The defining features are that they have strong boundaries to the outside, they try to live segregated from the rest of society, they practice ‘in’ marriage, they have high fertility rates and high retention of members – it’s grow-your-own-fundamentalism. The irony is that in terms of growth this is the most successful model for religion in Western secular societies. This is not true for the developing world, or for the Muslim world, but it is for the West.” The reason why Kaufmann covers both older forms of fundamentalism like the Amish and Hutterites, sects that are not likely to put the fear of God into secularists because they seem so passive, so withdrawn and uninterested in imposing their worldview on the rest of us, alongside more aggressive and self-consciously power-hungry forms of evangelical Christianity and Islamism is because, in his argument, the older sects provide the model of success that is now being followed by the newer ones. To understand them, Kaufmann argues, we need to look at the older forms they are self-consciously aping.

. . .

This is the heart of the American case. While secularism will grow, a bit, and moderate religions lose out a lot, it is fundamentalism that flourishes. There is a polarisation taking place where the outer reaches – irreligion and fundamentalism – grow and moderate religion is squeezed out. The consequences will be, in Kaufmann’s view, to increase the friction between the two groups. . . . .

However the success-through-fertility of these groups has served as a powerful model for newer variants of fundamentalism with a far more sinister agenda. One such is the Quiverfull movement (The name derives from Psalm 127: “Children are a heritage from the Lord/ Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them”). Kaufmann describes Quiverfull as “backward engineered religion”, an attempt to replicate the successful growth of these historic sects, combined with an ambitious agenda for political power. Under the leadership of the infamous religious conservative Doug Phillips, son of Howard, who was instrumental in the early stirrings of the Religious Right, Quiverfull, a coalition of neo-fundamentalist protestant denominations and communities, dedicated to biblical literalism, deeply patriarchal and morally conservative and separatist in mindset, has a 200-year plan, a “self-conscious strategy for victory through fertility”, as Kaufmann calls it. “They look around and see the low birth rate amongst the secular population, and the success of the sects, and they say, ‘Hey, we can take over here and quickly.’
. . .

I ask him what he thinks we should be doing about it. Should we, for example, all be shagging for secularism?

“Well, I don’t think we want to get in a population footrace. It may be necessary for secular people to have slightly more children but it would be nicer if we could get fundamentalists to have fewer children.” A strangely authoritarian notion to fall from the lips of a self-confessed liberal. “Yes,” he admits, “imposing restrictions would be condemned as discriminatory. But there are carrots as well as sticks. . . .

Another scenario he imagines in his conclusion is that secularism might start to do a better job of winning over the children of religious fundamentalism. But at the moment he sees no statistical sign of this, and he seems gloomy about the prospect. Why? “Part of my argument is that religion does provide that enchantment, that meaning and emotion, and in our current moment we lack that. . . .

What Kaufmann and Malik are certainly in accord on is the need to displace the multicultural “celebration of difference” model of toleration with one that contains a far more robust sense of common values and a far more stringent rejection of reactionary fundamentalism. “We need a stronger sense of liberal values,” Kaufmann told me. “We should answer back to all fundamentalisms.”

I think it may be dawning on liberals that if they do not do something to coerce conservatives, or at least conservative children, to embrace liberal values, then liberal values may not triumph. But to embrace this level of social engineering is to abandon all vestiges of liberalism and become statist fascists. Will this split the liberal movement itself and create more conservatives?

Secularism is Doomed to Die Out: Conservative Will Inherit the Earth

Ed West has an intriguing story in the Daily Telegraph about yet another reason why the secularization thesis, so popular in sociology and political science a couple of decades ago, is wrong. He claims that the future belongs to religious conservatives of all religions and that atheism and secularism will die out because atheism and secularism do not provide sufficient reasons for people to procreate. He says:

"The 1960s counterculture slogan “make love, not war” could have been invented for the Hutterites, a conservative, pacifist Anabaptist community in the US and Canada. Numbering 400 at the end of the 19th century, when they moved to Dakota on the point of extinction, there are almost 50,000 Hutterites today, despite conversion being extremely rare (they speak an archaic form of High German and live in the middle of nowhere, which makes it unlikely they’ll turn up at your doorstep with a funny grin).

They are not alone. The Mormons continue to grow by 40 per cent every decade, largely thanks to a high birth rate, so much so that by 2080 there will be anywhere between 63 and 267 million Mormons, depending on whether that figure falls to 30 per cent or 50 per cent.

And Evangelical Christians now account for two thirds of white American Protestants, while the ultra-Orthodox account for 17 per cent of British Jewry, but 75 per cent of children.

Across the western world the fertility rate of religious conservatives far outstrips that of non-believers, so much so that modern liberal secularism is endangered. That, anyway, is the thesis of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, a fascinating new book by Eric Kaufmann of Birkbeck University, which is published later this month. It may well be one of the most significant books of our era."

Read the rest here.

The take away point here is not Evangelical Christian triumphalism. In fact, Mormans and Muslims may grow faster than Evangelicals during the next century. The point is that we need to know who our true rivals are - and the serious threat to Christianity is not secularism except insofar as we allow ourselves to become accommodated to secular ways of thinking and living.

There is no compelling reason to imitate the Darwinian, materialistic, secular atheists. They are doomed to a long slow decline into cultural isolation and irrelevance. We don't have to convert them (although it would be great if we do), we just need to avoid being converted to their pessimistic, hedonistic, individualistic, anti-family lifestyle. That is the main task and the better we do at that task the more feasible and successful our evangelistic efforts will become.

The main task of the Church is first to be a sufficiently counter-cultural community that converts have a place to go where they can be trained in a new, specifically Christian way of life.

We should not be surprised that atheism leads to the culture of death and eventually to extinction. Even if some sort of evolution turns out to be true, it may well be that Darwinists like Richard Dawkins will die out because they fail to meet basic evolutionary criteria for survival. As one website puts it in its slogan: "Because most philosophies that frown on reproduction don't survive."

European Parliament Hears Warning of "Demographic Winter"

Zenit new agency reports that the Institue for Family Policies has presented an alarming report on Europe's future to the European Parliament. Here is a snippet:

"The data shows how the indicators of population, birthrate, marriages, family and home breakups have worsened over the last 28 years.

People who are older than 65 already outnumber by more than 6.5 million children under age 14, and every year fewer children are born.

Moreover, according to the IFP, there is "a collapse of marriages, with
increasingly fewer marriages and more broken ones -- one million divorces a year -- and with homes being emptied; two out of every three European homes have
no children.""

So-called private morality issues - sexual promiscuity, abortion, divorce etc. - turn out to have widespread social, political and economic implications:

"The president of the IFP affirmed that this "is causing evident effects, both in the economic as well as the social dimension."

He explained: "In the economic dimension, there is an increase in public spending because of the aging population, with an increase in investments dedicated to pensions and health expenses. Expenses that, added to the effects caused by the fall in public earnings due to the deficit of the birthrate can end by causing the reduction/elimination of social loans and, in the end, the bankruptcy of the welfare state.""

No matter how committed one is to the welfare state, one would nonetheless think that its looming bankruptcy would be a cause for concern.

"If the tendency is not halted, by 2050 the European population will have lost 27.3 million people, one out of every three persons will be older than 65 and only one out of every eight persons will be younger than 15, while the average age will be 46.7.

In regard to abortion, the IFP spoke of an "explosion" -- 28 million abortions in the EU since 1990, making it the first cause of mortality in Europe."

This is a picture of the culture of death in action. The most depressing thought that occurs to me reading this data is that the solution that will undoubtedly be brought forward is - you guessed it - more killing. Euthanasia for the lonely elderly who have no one to speak up for them will lengthen out the time it will take for the economy to crash and staving off the inevitable is apparently all the contemporary European mind is capable of engaging with any more.

Read it all here.

Running Out of People

Gently, indirectly and without any panic even liberal news media are beginning to pick up on the "one little problem" (as Columbo might say) with the modern world, namely, that we are running out of people. In two recent columns, Carol Goar, Toronto Star columnist has had the temerity to mention that the birth rate in Canada is way below replacement level. Here she wonders why Canada is one of the few countries that hasn't bottomed out yet on the birth rate. And here she includes the low fertility rate as one of four challenges we need to think about. She points out that in two years the growth of our labour force will be entirely dependent on immigrants and that in six years seniors will outnumber children.

Now, it is true that her first instinct is to use the low birth rate as a chance to expand government hegemony over our lives by calling for the creation of a free public day care system for all. And it is annoying that she presumes to label that a "family-friendly" policy - as if the government raising children was her idea of enhancing the family. And as if people will be encouraged to have more children by the thought that they can turn them over to Leviathan to raise.

But to look on the bright side, even to have a liberal slanted paper like the Star so much as admit that the population "explosion" is not our biggest problem any more is progress. At least, when the facts are admitted, a discussion can at least begin about the solution.

The Economic Implications of an Aging Population

Here is a story from today's The Globe and Mail, that recognizes the problem faced by a country that refuses to have enough babies to maintain the population level. The "demographic winter" we actually face is downplayed in the article, probably so as not to alarm the population unduly. (BTW, note that this article comes from a newspaper that was literally screaming hysterically for the government to run up the deficit in order to fight the recession just 3 or 4 months ago. The sky was falling then because the government was not spending enough. Now it seems it is about to fall because the government is spending too much.)

"Persistent deficits – if Ottawa cannot slay them in the next short while – will dog the federal government as it grapples with a looming demographic shift that will drive up the costs of care for Canada's soaring elderly population.

The population of Canadians aged 65 and over has been growing at about 2.5 per cent annually. But this rate will climb to between 3 per cent and 4 per cent starting in 2011, when the first in the massive baby boom generation celebrate their 65th birthdays.

2011 is the beginning of what has been called a “demographic time bomb” for Canada: an explosion of the 65-plus population over two decades coupled with a sharply declining proportion of Canadians in the work force as boomers retire.

It also threatens to be a drag on economic growth just as an aging population of voters is expected to be pressing the provinces – and ultimately, Ottawa – for more health-care dollars. “This is a tsunami we're facing in terms of change,” Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page said. “The repercussions are going to hit us hard.”

It's not the situation Canada wants to find itself in as the work force shrinks in proportion to retirees. “If you're running large structural deficits now when you're about to see labour supply growth fall dramatically, that's not a good place to be,” Mr. Page said.

The number of workers supporting each elderly Canadian is expected to dwindle to 2.5 to 1 in 2030 from 5 to 1 today because of this country's low birth rate, rising life expectancy and aging boomers.

This carries a fiscal cost. As the federal Finance Department warned in the 2005 budget, this looming demographic shift could sap economic growth each year over the 2010-30 period by half a percentage point."

Of course, there is no attention drawn to the fact that the millions of aborted babies we have allowed to be killed over the past 40 years would now be working to support the retiring boomers if said boomers had not chosen to kill them. And there is no reference to the fact that 20% of the boomers had no children (many by choice) and yet expect other people's kids to pay for their retirement (through much higher payroll taxes than the boomers paid during their working careers). And, of course, there is no mention yet of the nearly-inevitable solution on the horizon: euthanasia. The build-up of the economic disaster is starting, but euthanasia won't be mentioned until everyone is much more frightened by looming economic meltdown. Then the situation will be ripe for politicians to start talking about the "duty to die."

Contraception increases abortion, which leads to euthanasia. In a desperate struggle to prevent economic collapse, governments will be drawn further and further into playing God and deciding who may be killed, who may live and for how long. That is how the culture of death works; humans take over the role of deciding about life and death from God. But, of course, not all of us get to play God; only the social engineers and the "experts" designated by society to manage population levels. So ordinary folks like you and I will not be the ones playing God. Others will be playing God on us.

The secularist dismissal of the position of the Roman Catholic Church's position on contraception, abortion and euthanasia looks more and more like a package deal. And it looks more and more like a mistake.

More on Why the US is Still Trying to Reduce the Population When We Are Running Out of Babies

Daniel Patrick Moloney has two of a projected three part series posted on Public Discourse. If you are interested in the topic of the Philip Longman book I discussed yesterday (The Empty Cradle: How World Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity) and wonder why public policy is still acting as if overpopulation was the problem when it clearly is not, then you might find these articles interesting. The titles of the first two articles are:

1. Forcing the Poor to Stop Having Children
2. The Racist Origins of US Family Planning Policy

By the way, every US administration since Nixon has been in on this approach. Just something to think about.

Thoughts on Longman's Thesis and the Need for Overturning Much Current Conventional Wisdom

[See previous two posts for the background to this one.]

In the light of the reality of world depopulation and the serious implications it has for the future of the West (the secular liberal ideology of which is largely responsible for exacerbating this crisis) and the entire world, I want to offer a few thoughts here as reflections on Longman's thesis.

His thesis was that falling population rates is now an established certainty, not a mere projection depending on future events, and that it will make the world less populated, poorer, and more religious. I think we need to turn much current conventional wisdom, which is based in an out-dated worldview derived from the 1960's, upside down.

1. Conservative Christians who believe in God's plan for the family and the importance of marriage, children and faith should not be discouraged. Why? Because the culture of death that is all around us is indeed evil, but we must remember that evil destroys itself eventually. Every evil, maruading, oppressive empire in history so far has fallen -from ancient Assyria to the USSR. Christianity has a way of outliving its persecutors. So rather than being tempted to conform to the culture around us, we should regard non-conformity and being persecuted as the best way to survive. After all, it is not called the culture of death for nothing. It is going to die - by suicide.

2. Having more babies is good; childlessness by choice is selfish. We must celebrate the birth of children and give honour to those parents who choose to nurture, raise and educate children for the benefit of society as a whole. This is one reason I love our church; we have the announcement of a new born almost every other week. Our pastor frequently declares "Kids are us" and our children's ministry is characterized (let me say with the disclaimer that I don't work in children's ministry) by excellence and dedication.

The economic truth is that adults who deliberateley choose not to reproduce are parasites on society and depend on those of us who make extensive economic sacrifices to raise children in order to subsidize their lavish lifestyles.

In the name of both economic justice and pragmatism, society should help couples raise children in a number of ways. For one thing, the entry of so many women into the workforce has practically relieved capitalist business enterprises of paying anyone a "family wage." This is wrong. Also, given that every future worker is a tremendous benefit to society, married parents should receive a tax break to help them pay the cost of child-rearing and the significant opportunity cost losses of mothers not working full-time. If we are going to subsidize child-less couples with public services provided by those who are here because parents sacrificed to raise them, then this is only fair.

3. Of course, nothing I have said should be taken in such a way as to blame couples plagued by infertility. Their pain is often great and they deserve sympathy and support. I'm only talking about couples who would rather drive luxury cars and vacation in the south, rather than have children. Our main problem is that we have structured our society in such a way as to discourage procreation and undermine families. If we remove obstacles, most poeple will do what comes naturally and form loving families.

4. Also, nothing I have said implies that we should not be concerned about the pollution of our environment or that we should relax environmental protection laws. My point is simply that we should not make a falling population the solution to the problem of pollution. Population decline, because it will lower standards of living and increase poverty, will likely result in more, not less pollution simply because we will not be able to afford to clean the mess already made and prevent further pollution.

The environmental movement is right to be concerned about the need to care about our world and keep it clean. But it is mis-guided to try to reduce the world population as a means to that goal. Christians need to launch their own environmental movement that is not characterized by an anti-life agenda. Maintaining a stable population and age-distribution in society should be seen as a goal of the environmental movement.

5. Old-style inter-faith dialogue must give way to new forms of inter-faith dialogue, particularly between Christians and Muslims. Since the future belongs to religious, as opposed to secular, people, the urgent priority is for people of various religions, especially today Muslims and Christians, to come together in dialogue. But the nature of inter-faith dialogue must change radically from the model promoted by liberal Christians for the past half-century.

Instead of working from a Western, liberal, secularist model which presupposed that there is a common core of religion that can be distilled from every particular faith and expressed in the language of Western "values language," we must recognize the historical and theological particularity of each faith and expect each faith to remain faithful to its own core convictions. Rather than a search for a common essence of "religion" supposed contained in each faith, (which turns out to look suspiciously like a re-hash of Western, liberal values), we should engage each other on the basis of practical common interests like peace, prosperity and threats to global stability.

In other words, I am advocating a shift from a search for a common religious essence to a search for a common moral framework. When serious believers from the various faiths speak directly to each other, rather than through the mediation of secular liberalism, much common ground should be evident. For example, Islam and Christianity both emphasize strong families. How can we agree on economic policies that will not undermine the family? We also have many moral positions in common such as the rejection of abortion and euthanasia and the sanctity of marriage. Liberals will, of course, find this threatening to their hegemony, but that is no reason to allow them to dictate what kind of dialogue should occur between religions.

The goal of inter-faith dialogue should be to find commonly agreed on solutions to the problems we share in common in an increasingly interdependant global village.

Implications of World Population Decline

Philip Longman, in his book, The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Propserity and What to Do About It, (Basic Books, 2004), mounts a convincing case that predictions of a "population explosion" and "overpopulation" are not true. Paul R. Ehrlich, in an enormously influential 1968 bestseller proclaimed "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's the world will undergo famine - hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." (The Population Bomb, 1968) But his predictions did not come true. The price of food, according to the World Bank, adjusted for inflation, declined by 53% between 1980 and 2001. Famine today is caused by politics and greed, but not by overpopulation.

What will be the implications of long-term, widespread population decline? For many people, this idea is a marvelous one; with less population there will be less pollution, more wealth, less crowding and more opportunities. This kind of thinking, however, flies in face of history, logic and economics.

1. An aging population means fewer workers to support retirees. This has several implications. Payroll taxes and other taxes for entitlement programs like pensions will have to increase dramatically. Fewer workers per retiree mean each worker must contribute an increasingly higher percentage of his income in the form of taxes to support retired people. At some point, there will need to be a reduction of benefits to the elderly or a cut back in the welfare state in general. In reality, we must expect two things to happen simultaneously: just at the moment that the welfare state becomes unaffordable, the family structures that took care of people before the rise of the welfare state will have crumbled.


The fact that a country has a high population to begin with is no help when demographic decline begins. There is no absolute "right" number regardless of age ranges for a given country. The country that begins to shrink experiences an imbalance between working-age people and retired people that leads to social breakdown regardless of whether the new population figure is closer to someone's "ideal number."

As family size decreases, the many elderly who are still today cared for in families will need to be cared for in government funded institutions. In China, today there is the 4-2-1 phenomenon in which a grown child is responsible for two parents and four aging grandparents as a result of the one child policy. There are no siblings to spread the work around. Europe is fast becoming a society in which people have no biological relatives (eg. aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins) only parents and grandparents. By mid-century, 60% of Italy's children will have no siblings, cousins, aunts or uncles. An increase in isolation and loneliness will be the inevitable result.

Parents and grandparents will soon become economic liabilities in the same way that children have become economic liabilities. If contraception and abortion was answer to the latter problem, can we doubt that euthanasia will be the solution to the former? Longman does not discuss euthanasia and he is not writing from a Christian perspective. But it is the 800 pound gorilla in the room all through the book.

2. We should be wary of putting our hope in rising productivity to solve the problem of too few workers for too many retirees because rising productivity is dependent on stable or rising population levels. Rising productivity depends on growth in the number, as well as the efficiency, of workers. The hope held out by many today is that fewer workers will be able to support more retirees without being taxed to death is that they will be able to do so because of increasing productivity. This is simply the hope that something will happen because we need it to happen.

But all major productivity increases in the past have happened as a result of a combination of a rising population creating demand for more goods and services plus a real increase in the numbers of workers plus the entrepreneurship and risk-taking inventiveness of mainly younger persons. In an aging, shrinking population there will be still be some inventions and some increase in productivity, but not likely enough.

3. Without an adequate labor supply of working-age people, wealth will be less useful to us in our retirement years. Money is only useful if it can buy the food, clothes, transportion and other goods and services we need. Many people are convinced that as long as they save a lot for retirement, they can enjoy a high standard of living no matter how much the population declines or how much lower the number of workers in the next generation is compared to our generation. But this assumption is flawed.

The purchasing power of our money depends on prices remaining low and stable. But if there are not enough workers, the price of labour goes up. So people who have no children of their own are really counting on other people having lots of children so that there will be people to keep society running at stable costs in the future. The basic problem identified in this book is that our economic system, as it is, rewards people who do not have children and penalizes those who do. The result is going to be disaster for all of us. Any one individual who declines to reproduce is an anomaly. But demgoraphic trends of this sort constitute disaster.

4. Getting more women into the workforce is not the answer for two reasons. First, this is a strategy with a high payoff initially, but with severely dimishing returns as the total number of women in the workforce comes to equal the total number of women in society. Second, the more women in the workforce (especially full-time in the child-bearing years) the few children will be produced. So, while this seems like a helpful short term strategy, it makes the long term situation even worse.

A similar dynamic can be observed in raising the retirement age. The political cost of doing it may be prohibitive for any politican wishing to be re-elected, given the electoral "grey-power" out there. But even if such reform were accomplished, there would be a diminishing rate of return because many people get too sick too work long before they die.

5. We can expect whole countries to disappear as the population ages, declines and eventually is absorbed into other ethnic groups of immigrant or invaders. Longman is not optimistic for the survival of Europe as we know it. This leads me to mention the real fear expressed by Longman in the book that the future belongs to Fundamentalist of all religions. By "Fundamentalists" he appears to mean anyone who takes the teachings of his religion (Islam, Christianity, whatever) seriously, as opposed to someone who accommodates the teachings of his religion to the dictates of liberal modernity. Religious people have more children than secular liberals in every religion. So we can expect that the world will get more, not less, religious in future as secular liberals breed themselves out of existence.

In sum, based on recent demographic history, Longman expects the world of the late 21st and 22nd century to be poorer, more religious and less populated. If this is your idea of utopia, then keep up the pressure for contraception, abortion and population reduction programs and support economic policies that penalize child rearing and reward childlessness. This puts the Obama administration recent decision to fund agencies that do abortion in third world countries in a curious light; as the triumph of ideology over reason.

The Coming World Population Decline

The book, The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperty and What to Do About It by Philip Longman is a visionary book with a serious message that needs to be heard and acted on immediately.

World population is set to deline drastically in the next century and this is a serious economic and social problem that is not even on the radar screen of most people. For example, when asked how long it will take for world population to double most Americans say 20 years or less. The propoganda put about by environmental groups is having its effect and most people are convinced that the world needs less people in order to survive. The truth, however, is quite different.

Forecasts by the UN show that the world population rate could turn negative during the lifetime of people in their 40's and 50's. There has been an unprecedented fall in fertility rates over the last generation. Before reading this book, I thought that this fall in birth rates was a Western phenonenon, but it is actually a world-wide phenomenon. What has already happened, not somebody's projections based on assumptions, will cause population rates to fall at first slowley and then, inevitably unless something changes, precipitiously.

Women must bear, on average, 2.1 children to replace the population. But today 59 countries, comprising 44% of the world's population are below this rate and this phenomenon continues to spread. By 2050, the UN projects that 75% of all countries will be below replacement rates.

Russia's population is already decreasing by 750,000 per year. Japan's population is expected to fall by one third - the rate of death caused by the Black Death in medieval Europe. Germany will lose the equivalent of the population of the former East Germany in the next half century. Westerners assume that the failure to maintain the population will be fixed by immigration. But immigrants will not be as plentiful in the future as in the past. In the Middle East, for example, falling fertility rates are everywhere. Turkey's fertility rate is declining and is now 2.32 children per woman, barely ahead of replacement level. Iran's fertility is below replacement level, as is the Middle East's as a whole.

China is facing crisis. By mid-century China could easily be losing 20-30% of its population per generation. Because of abortion for sex-selection, the ration of male to female births is now 117-100, which means that 17% of the next generation of Chinese men will not be able to marry. India's fertility rate has dropped a fifth since the first half of the 90's and its population will be aging at three times the rate of the US during the next half century.

African fertility rates are also falling and the HIV/AIDS pandemic is reducing life expectancy - a potent demographic combination. UN projections for Africa as a whole show fertility declining to 2.4 chlidren per woman, which may well be below replacement levels, given the shorter life expectancy in Africa (eg. 32 in Zambia and 58 in South Africa, compared with 80.5 in Japan).

The message of this book is counter-intuitive, but the logic is compelling. The effects of lower fertility rates are hidden at first and then become obvious only when it is too late to do anything about the problem. The baby boom of the post-war US resulted in the population increasing both in that generation and in the next because even though fertility rates were lower, the sheer number of women in that "boomer" generation produced high real numbers. But in the next generation the real effect of lower fertility rates will begin to be evident. All over the world, the story is similar. Once the absolute number of people begins to decline, a modest increase in the fertility rate will not compensate and decline snowballs.

In the next post, we will look at the implications of population decline.