The "underpopulation crisis," part 2
Mar. 17th, 2007 04:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
openspace4lifeLink to part 1
"When you don’t have young workers to replace the older ones, you have to import them. The European countries are currently importing Moslems. Today, the Moslems comprise 10 percent of France and Germany, and the percentage is rising rapidly because they have higher birthrates. However, the Moslem populations are not being integrated into the cultures of their host countries, which is a political catastrophe. . . .
"The huge design flaw in the post-modern secular state is that you need a traditional religious society birth rate to sustain it. . . . By 2020, one out of every five Japanese will be at least 70 years old. Nobody has any idea about how to run an economy with those demographics. . . .
"If we give up our Judeo-Christian culture, we become just like the Europeans. The culture war is the whole ballgame. If we lose it, there isn’t another America to pull us out."
- a much-posted essay by Herb Meyer, former intelligence official under Reagan
I finally figured out what bothers me about this kind of analysis: Meyer is assuming our situation is analogous to that of the Colonial Fleet on Battlestar Galactica, which consists of less than 50,000 refugees from the destruction of humanity. In an episode called "The Captain's Hand" late in season 2, we learned that people in the Fleet are having so few children that the population will collapse entirely within decades, unless the President enacts an abortion ban.
Listen: America's population recently passed the 300 million mark. If we fail to outlaw abortion and homosexuality and take other religiously-motivated steps to keep the middle class breeding, it's not going to be the end of America any time soon. And while it may be reasonable to panic about Islamic unrest in Europe or the potential cultural battle between traditional Moslem societal models and European democracy, it's much harder to find a good reason to be really afraid of the growing Latino population in the US, a country that used to pride itself on being forged by immigrants.
Even for countries that are shrinking, I have to believe there are solutions, particularly in this day and age. With improvements in medical care, the productive portion of an average European or Japanese citizen's life is getting longer. And with the increasing use of computers and other automation to reduce the physical effort required for many kinds of work, there's quite possibly an easy way to raise the retirement age for countries that need the economic support. After all, the population was going to age anyway, due to those same medical advances; if conservatives don't think human ingenuity can handle that challenge, they're a lot less optimistic about the future than I thought.
"When you don’t have young workers to replace the older ones, you have to import them. The European countries are currently importing Moslems. Today, the Moslems comprise 10 percent of France and Germany, and the percentage is rising rapidly because they have higher birthrates. However, the Moslem populations are not being integrated into the cultures of their host countries, which is a political catastrophe. . . .
"The huge design flaw in the post-modern secular state is that you need a traditional religious society birth rate to sustain it. . . . By 2020, one out of every five Japanese will be at least 70 years old. Nobody has any idea about how to run an economy with those demographics. . . .
"If we give up our Judeo-Christian culture, we become just like the Europeans. The culture war is the whole ballgame. If we lose it, there isn’t another America to pull us out."
- a much-posted essay by Herb Meyer, former intelligence official under Reagan
I finally figured out what bothers me about this kind of analysis: Meyer is assuming our situation is analogous to that of the Colonial Fleet on Battlestar Galactica, which consists of less than 50,000 refugees from the destruction of humanity. In an episode called "The Captain's Hand" late in season 2, we learned that people in the Fleet are having so few children that the population will collapse entirely within decades, unless the President enacts an abortion ban.
Listen: America's population recently passed the 300 million mark. If we fail to outlaw abortion and homosexuality and take other religiously-motivated steps to keep the middle class breeding, it's not going to be the end of America any time soon. And while it may be reasonable to panic about Islamic unrest in Europe or the potential cultural battle between traditional Moslem societal models and European democracy, it's much harder to find a good reason to be really afraid of the growing Latino population in the US, a country that used to pride itself on being forged by immigrants.
Even for countries that are shrinking, I have to believe there are solutions, particularly in this day and age. With improvements in medical care, the productive portion of an average European or Japanese citizen's life is getting longer. And with the increasing use of computers and other automation to reduce the physical effort required for many kinds of work, there's quite possibly an easy way to raise the retirement age for countries that need the economic support. After all, the population was going to age anyway, due to those same medical advances; if conservatives don't think human ingenuity can handle that challenge, they're a lot less optimistic about the future than I thought.
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no subject
Date: 2007-03-18 07:05 am (UTC)I approve of crazy hill people, on the whole. They tend to be fun people and useful (if slightly strange) members of society, and are probably the people who will survive the apocalypse without batting an eye. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, are likely to cause said disaster through the mismanagement of the environment and/or Very Dangerous Weaponry.
Americans aren't really in a population crisis. Democrats and other liberal groups are.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-22 04:25 am (UTC)