The Stork Now Delivers a Stark Reality
What will the new year be like? If it’s risky to predict the future a year at a time, it’s still possible to make some projections for the coming century. The overall U.S. population will boom, but the demographic subsets of the population with the highest incomes and educations will suffer a reproductive bust. That strange form of human de-evolution was predicted half a century ago by a man named Charles Darwin, grandson of the Darwin.
The United States grew by more than 33 million people in the last decade, to 281,421,906, according to the Census Bureau. The same agency forecasts that the population will swell to 571 million in the next 100 years.
Of those 22nd century Americans, about 60% will be “minority,” many of them born on foreign soil. Only a racist would worry about the skin color of upcoming Americans, but if demographics is destiny, then the future will be determined by those who have children, and not those that don’t.
Consider: The Total Fertility Rate, defined as the average number of babies born to women during their reproductive years, is 1.8 for native-born Americans, well below the replacement rate of 2.1; the rate for foreign-born women in the U.S. is 2.2.
Moreover, statistical data prove what anecdotal observation has long suggested: Fertility falls as social status rises. Nationwide, about 44% of women aged 15-44 are childless, but those childlessness numbers skew above average in high-income, high-tech states such as Massachusetts, Vermont and Colorado. By contrast, the lowest percentages of childless women are in downscale states such as Alaska, Mississippi and Wyoming. Call it the post-industrial paradox: Those who have the most financial and intellectual capital to offer to a child are the least interested in having children.
This phenomenon--yuppie singles and couples walking down what is literally a demographic dead end--is repeated across the Western world. As of 1998, the total fertility rate for women in Britain was 1.6, for Germany 1.3 and for Italy 1.2. And so Italy could be the first country to face a demographic wipeout; its population today is 57 million, but it is likely to fall to 41 million in 2050 and perhaps to 20 million in 2100. By that distant year, most Italians will be childless and gray.
So will these countries just be empty? Probably not. Most likely, the lands of Western Europe, having been depopulated through plunging birthrates, will be repopulated with immigrants from high-birthrate countries in the Middle East and Africa. Is this bad? Not if you’re an upwardly mobile striver from Algeria or Nigeria. But, of course, there’s not much chance that Italian language and culture will survive such an ethnic occupation.
One who saw all this coming was Charles Galton Darwin. His 1952 book, “The Next Million Years,” argued that human history is about populations. As he wrote, “The fundamental quality pertaining to man is not that he should be good or bad, wise or stupid, but merely that he should be alive and not dead.” That is, underneath all the concern about the pursuit of happiness and the promotion of the general welfare is one unyielding bottom line: Either the population reproduces itself, or it doesn’t.
Echoing the survival-of-the-fittest themes of his grandfather, Darwin added: “Any country which limits its population becomes therefore less numerous than one which refuses to do so, and so the first will be sooner or later crowded out of existence by the second.”
Of course, any discussion of human fertility quickly gets tangled up in controversies over the role of women in modern society. Shouldn’t women be free to have children or not, as they please? And for that matter, shouldn’t men have freedom of choice in their lifestyle? Of course. But Darwin’s point is that those cultures that cherish human fulfillment more than procreating future humans must, over the long demographic run, lose out to those cultures that make the opposite calculation.
That’s why Darwin forecast that the next million years of human history would see the disappearance of the modern values that de-emphasize large families. That’s the bitter irony of modernity: Those who emancipate themselves from the baby-making ways of the past eliminate themselves and their ideas from the future. So Darwin’s bleak forecast is on track. Indeed, his scenario is unfolding even faster than he imagined.
