Some thoughts

I spotted this meme recently and it sums up pretty well the main problem I have with generations as a demographic group: Simply, a 20-year 'generation' is too long. The idea of a generation is that members have a similar outlook due to their formative experiences. My generation is defined as anyone born between 1981 and 1996, a period of 15 years. Yet someone born at one end will have had very different experiences than one born at the end.  I often find talking to people at the tail end of the cohort don't remember songs, TV shows, etc that I did from my childhood. I can remember some events from the late 80's like The Herald of Free Enterprise and Hillsborough disasters but my brother (3 years younger than me doesn't). I often find more in common with tail-end Boomers (born 1965-80) than them. I'd suggest decades of birth are more useful for defining a cohort. 

While I don't agree with the crux of the headline, this article has some interesting stat:  Why feminists should fear a declining birth rate . This paragraph, in particular, stands out: 'The existential threat to South Korea is more urgent than for most countries. With a total fertility rate of 0.78, South Korea’s current population of 51 million will likely decline to just 15 million by 2100.⁠ Meanwhile the North Korean population of 26 million is expected to drop only slightly to 23 million. In other words, South Korea’s much poorer, much more authoritarian neighbour is currently half its population size — but, within the lifetimes of babies being born in Korea today, that balance will be upturned.' Japan, Taiwan, and the other more developed East Asian nations seem to have the same problem. They don't have the same issues that I feel are a big reason for the West's declining birthrate (the world wars and decline of traditional values and religion), so I suspect a...

 A good article at American Greatness:  The Population Crash 'At a replacement rate of 1.5 per woman, for every 1 million people of childbearing age living in a nation today, there will only be 420,000 great-grandchildren. This means that nation’s population will drop to 42 percent of what it is today in less than a century. And the numbers get worse very fast. South Korea’s current fertility per woman, for example, is a dismal 0.81, and those are extinction-level numbers. At that rate of reproduction, for every 1 million Koreans of childbearing age today, there will only be 66,000 great-grandchildren. South Korea is on track to disappear in less than a century.' and 'There are three choices: Either go extinct within the next century, buy some time by replacing your own citizens with foreigners from poverty-stricken nations, or figure out how to convince women in prosperous societies to have more children.' We desperately need to change to a more pronatalist society.

 Brilliant post by Lionel Shriver at Unherd today:  How we created a self-hating generation . Intro: 'Once upon a time, a fully realised person was something one became. Entailing education, observation, experimentation, and sometimes humiliation, “coming of age” was hard work. When the project succeeded, we developed a gradually richer understanding of what it means to be human and what constitutes a fruitful life. This ongoing project was halted only by death. Maturity was the result of accumulated experience (some of it dire) and much trial and error (both comical and tragic), helping explain why wisdom, as opposed to intelligence, was mostly the preserve of the old.' Changing from this to the modern ideas of identity is a lot of what has gone wrong with the world. 100% agree with this part too: 'Nihilism, an oxymoronic belief in the impossibility of believing anything, can prove literally lethal. Young men who feel no personal sense of purpose are inclined to perceive t...

A good article by the author of Submission at Unherd:  The narcissistic fall of France  He talks a lot of demographics and notes it is just not the West that is in trouble: No, we are not really dealing with a “French suicide” — to evoke the title of Eric Zemmour’s book — but a Western suicide or rather a suicide of modernity, since Asian countries are not spared. What is specifically, authentically French is the awareness of this suicide. But if we consent to set aside for a moment the particular case of France (and really it would be wise to do so), the conclusion becomes crystal clear: the inevitable consequence of what we call progress (at all levels, economic, political, scientific, technological) is self-destruction. I have long thought that the root cause of the West's problems was WW1, I think it was Andrew Roberts who claimed that France's national psyche was shattered by Verdun in particular. After both wars, the intellectuals turned to Marxism for guidance but their...

I've posted a   lot   recently on demographics because I consider it to be one o the most important issues of our time that is rarely commented on by the media in this country, plus as Mark Steyn often says 'The future belongs to those who show up'. I have come to the conclusion that feminism, especially the third and fourth wave varieties, has played a large part in the declining birthrate in developed countries. Case in point, this article:  Baby Bust When a graduate student in a committed relationship asked me for advice about sequencing marriage, children, and career. I gave the advice I always give. “Marry him. Start your family, and keep doing good work, professional or otherwise, monetized or otherwise, when it makes sense for your family.” The student was flummoxed. “But what about graduate school?” she asked. My advice was the same. She protested. “But what if I get married, have a baby, and it is too hard to work at the same time? To travel?” This student has...

Following on from yesterday's post, a look at Jewish demographics:  Israel's population time bomb . This passage struck me; Secular Jews and those from moderate branches have historically made up Israel’s elite, but are losing population share due to their relatively low fertility. Instead, the Jewish fertility rise is largely due to the growth in highly religious Jews, especially the Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox. The latter have   doubled   their share of the adult Jewish population in Israel since 2000, and are extremely young, forming a third of Jewish first-graders — up from a few percentage points in 1960. Though they currently only make up 10% of the American and British diaspora, they are expected to form a   majority   of observant American and British Jews by 2050. As with Christians, it seems the more traditionalist you are the more kids you have. It's almost as if they take the 'go forth and multiply' idea seriously! Whereas the secular seem not to bot...

 One topic that has interested me has been how traditional religious groups have avoided the collapse in birthrates in secular societies. From this Unherd piece-  Why utopias always fail -  we hear of the Amish: The Amish arrived in Pennsylvania in the 1730s to create their own heaven on earth. In 1900, there were around 5,000 Amish; and yet despite holding themselves radically apart from mainstream America, famously by rejecting most modern technology, the sect has around 350,000 members in North America today. And that figure is only set grow: the Old Order Amish double their numbers every 20 years. and  The Amish are ideologically committed. They are not atomised, individual actors responding to civilisational malaise like the hippies. They are connected families, connected through marriage, buying connected land and lots of it. Having a pro-growth and family ideology leads to an expansive, optimistic society. Who'd thought it?

I used to like the term 'Humanism'. Now I'm not so sure, for reasons outlined here: The decline of the humanist movement . Key quote: Freedom to practice religion and freedom from religion is a laudable principle. In the Western world, it has largely been achieved. With little left to complain about, Humanists crusade against vague public references to religion. And Efforts to cleanse “In God We Trust” from all public buildings and the dollar encapsulate just how ridiculous the movement is. How does puritanical secularism represent superior/scientific morality? Related,  The great American birth dearth has arrived . The UK isn't doing much better either . This is very true: We are not a civilization confident in its own continuity, which is why more and more Americans are choosing not to bring more children into it. This slow dying can be attributed to countless signs of ill health, our faltering faith and our increasingly atomized families and communities, the latter o...

Kury Schlicher makes some good points in this column:  Conservatives Need To Get It On 'we need to make the having of children the center of our policies.' Yes, this is where my thoughts have been heading. 'We need a change in mindset as a country that holds that family is key, and that the making of babies is the highest and most important purpose of families. We need to reject the neo-pagan nonsense of the weather cultists that reproduction is a crime against Gaia. We need to be firmly in favor of large and young families.' *applauds* Read the whole thing. Related,  Hungary shows what effective family policy can look like

 Yesterday I went to the funeral of my uncle. Despite the current restrictions, there was a good turnout and it was a lovely service.  One thought that struck me though was the 'winnowing' of families, a point made by Ross Douthat in his book The Decadent Society which I read recently. In the section on demographics, he mentions how his generation has had fewer kids compared to his parents and grandparents. This applies too to my family. For example, my mother had two siblings. They all married and had two children each, replacing themselves and their partners. However, of their six offspring that form my generation, to date we have only had six, of which four were had by my two oldest cousins (two each).  This winnowing seems to be a fairly common trend, as seen by the overall decline in the fertility rate of Western countries. The big question is why has this happened? This is one of the questions that I constantly grapple with, and will form a key theme in my writings....

'Ultimately this is a choice we need to make. We could choose to create a kind of woke utopia, where children and families are rare, upward mobility is constrained, and society ruled by a kind of collective welfare system that rewards inactivity and stagnation. But to those who value the permanence of our society, and the remarkable importance of children, this is something close to a dystopia.' -  How Declining Fertility Rates May Deliver Us Into Oblivion Read the whole thing. I've long suspected woke/SJW politics, extreme environmentalism, trans/alternative sexualities, etc are linked to the belief that there are too many people. At some point (probably in the 60's or 70's) the cultural and political 'elite' became convinced of a Malthusian view that overpopulation needed to be countered, and so began pushing this stuff to crash the birthrates. Notice how the celebs and pols are still breeding. The desired result is a neo-feudal order where a few million v...

 A few articles I found interesting this past week: The woke have no vision of the future Charting the decline of the American Republic A positive deal overall – but problems lurk round the corner The year the ruling class got woke A United Europe Aligning With China Would Be A Disaster For The United States The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real It’s time to start wasting solar energy No Families, No Children, No Future Give this woke nonsense the red card On a lighter note: A multibillion-dollar f-you Why is Japan obsessed with KFC on Christmas? 2020 Rated Worst Year Ever, Provided You Never Lived At Any Other Time In History And finally,  15 Economic, Historical, and Health Facts About Bacon !