At best, all the major institutions of our society will have to be fundamentally reformed to deal with a world in which each new generation is smaller than the last. Refusing to face up to this means rising poverty, increased taxes, depleted savings, lower investment, and a very real risk that excessive government borrowing and pension debt will tank the world economy. All this could happen much sooner than most people realize. Today, for example, the United States has a fairly healthy birthrate compared to the rest of the industrialized world, but it has grown dependent on massive borrowing from rapidly aging nations. Germany, Japan, and China are growing so old that they will soon be drawing down their savings and repatriating their investments in U.S. debt. This implies a complete restructuring of the world economy—one that could well entail a prolonged global recession or depression.
But wait, why is that necessarily bad for liberalism? Doesn't environmental responsibility require having fewer children? Actually no, says Longman:
On all these counts, I believe progressives are in denial. Today in the United States, for example, we have far cleaner air and water than we did in the 1940s, when the population was just half its current size. That's no paradox. Population growth is a spur to more efficient and cleaner use of resources, so our cities are no longer choked with smoke from steam engines and our cars get far better mileage and are far less polluting. Similarly, population growth is what drove us as a society to find far more productive ways to grow food. Thanks to increased crop yields, per capita food production is higher than ever, even as world population surpasses 6 billion. At the same time, there is more forested land in the United States than in the 19th century because so much less acreage is needed for farmland.
Progressives also tend to forget that many of their positions on human reproduction, such as a "woman's right to choose," only won widespread support when fears of overpopulation began to pervade the culture in the 1960s and '70s. Until then, bans on abortion, birth control, and homosexuality, for example, were justified in many people's minds by fears of underpopulation, which left questions of human reproduction too important to be settled by individual "choice." They also forget that if progressives themselves "forget to have children" then the future belongs to people who have opposing values.
Got that last one? Let Longman make it even more clear:
The West's total population may fall or stagnate, perhaps for quite awhile; but those who remain will be disproportionately committed to God and family, whether they be Christians, Muslims, Jews, or members of new pro-natal faiths.
Hmm. Well, on a related note, in this long essay, Philip Augustine Lawler makes the case that the demographic situation coming upon us will force families to re-establish traditional networks of caregiving because we simply won't have the money to care for our elderly in our relatively atomized society.
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Good talking to you, too, cs. I appreciate a good tweak. That was one of the good ones ;)
cs, you make a point that I agree with when you say that people are good and valuable in themselves. But if I might draw an analogy--hopefully without being offensive--I'd point to the cases that come up periodically where some kindly soul has adopted dozens of cats, or dogs, or horses, and these animals are found to be living in misery, sick and starving, infesting the property with parasites and effluvia. Generally, we are shocked and say that if the owner couldn't take proper care of these creatures, s/he shouldn't have collected so many. Or, you could look at cases where a well-intentioned homeowner takes in large numbers of people, until the house is full to bursting, people are living in basements and areas without proper lights and water, not up to safety codes. In these cases, we don't say "Aww, but puppies are CUTE!" Or "If you don't want 37 people living next door, you must hate humans!" We just say that this isn't prudent or considerate, or fair to any of the living beings involved. I'm not equating humans to stray animals. And I'm not implying that you don't care about human welfare, because it is clear that you do. I'm just suggesting that, until we can take better care of the people we already have, maybe we should throttle back on our enthusiasm for having as many of them as possible.
Sure I see your point. Kind of hard to see the current globe as, say, a 2500-foot ranch house with 37 people in it, but I get what you're saying. I don't think we have to worry about too many families have much more than the replacement ratio, especially in contemporary Western culture.
oops, "having."
Yes, my top of the head analogy is quite limited in value! :) And you're right--westerners are pretty much going to do what they're going to do. As are people in other parts of the world. I think that population trends are probably way too big and complex to be much influenced by individual actions. We do seem to spend a lot of time debating this point, though, for some reason. To tell the truth, I was disappointed when this thread turned into another round of debate on population. I thought the topic Rod originally posed--how do we manage to take care of the aging now that our demographics are changing--was more interesting.
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