This is the second part of a thought process that was started with The 80 Year Crisis Cycle of The United States. While the core argument will stand on its own without any need to reference what came before it, there are things taken for granted in this essay that will seem bizarre if you have not read the previous essay.

It would also be helpful if you have read the following essays but all of them will only serve to provide more depth to the below argument and are not strictly necessary.

A Rant On Japan’s Demographics.

Why you should panic about the US Deficit

The Ukraine Conflict And The Coming End Of Pax Americana

Now on to the essay proper…….

An 80 year crisis pattern has been the rule of the United States since it began as a nation. As we start a new year, it has been almost 80 years since the ending of the last crisis that the US faced. If this pattern holds, we should be entering another major crisis any day now. But is there any reason for thinking that American is soon to be faced with another crisis other then superstitious numerology?

If we review the past crisis America has faced, we see that they had demographic and technological antecedents that were observed by contemporaries even prior to the crisis. As a general rule, it was the demographic element that was most evident to those about to go through a major crisis. Long before the American Revolution, it was obvious that American Colonies were growing much faster than the mother country. The rapid growth in slavery and the fact that the population in the North was on track to overwhelm the South was widely known prior to the Civil War. And the rapid urbanization of America prior to Great Depression was known to everyone at the time. In all these cases, the nature of the crisis was a surprise, but the demographic forces leading to them were plain to all.

A common factor in all these crises is that they anticipated a demographic reality whose culmination was long after the time of the crisis. America did not equal the United Kingdoms in terms of population until just before the Civil War even though it was known that this was likely to happen at the time of the American Revolution. The culmination of the demographic submergence of the South into a larger America did not reach its fullest extent until about 80 years after the Civil War. And the widespread destruction of American small family farms did not take place until long after the Great Depression even though it was obvious that America was moving away from small farms long before that. If this pattern holds in the present time, America today should be heading towards another crisis whose demographic culmination we would have reason to believe is still a ways into the future. So does this pattern hold true today?

If we look at the world as whole, the answer to this question is simple. We know the modern world does not have a future.

If we look at projections 80 years into the future more than 20 countries will have lost over 50% of their population. This list includes big names likes Russia, Japan, South Korea, and Italy. Even China is likely to be part of this club although this is a little more controversial as more conventional forecasts have China “only” losing 40% of its population. But as bad as these numbers are, they would not be the end of the world if there was any prospect of populations stabilizing at those levels. However, that is not going to be the case. 151 countries are projected to have a fertility rate below replacement by 2050. That number is projected to rise to 183 by 2100. This will leave only 12 countries that have a mathematically possible future.

The above are only projections. But they are optimistic projections. The reality is likely to be far worse. Modern society is fundamentally incapable of sustaining itself. In the short term fertility rates fluctuate up and down but over the long run the fertility rate in a modern society only goes down. At one time, a fertility rate of 1.5 used to be thought extremely low and something that nations would naturally bounce back from. Now we have major nation with fertility rate below 1 and many others that are flirting with that number.

If you look at the major industrialized nations that are not flirting with a fertility rate of 1, it is almost always because of immigration from countries that are not industrialized. If you take steps to strip out the impact of the higher fertility immigrants, almost all industrialized nations are flirting with a fertility rate of 1.5 or lower. For example, in the US in 2019, the total fertility rate was 1.7. By modern demographic standards that is pretty good for an industrialized nation although still well below replacement rate. But if you look at the fertility rate in the US for woman with associate or bachelor degrees, then the total fertility rate is only 1.3 and that is not much better then Japan or Italy. America’s “good” demographic performance compared to Japan or Italy is overwhelming due to immigrants or their daughters. Recent arrivals to America and their daughters are far less likely than the native born woman to have college education. They are also far more likely to have multiple children and that is why woman without a collage education have a 2.8 total fertility rate in America.

This is not something that is unique to the US. If you see an industrialized nation with a fertility rate above 1.5, you are typically looking at an industrialized nation that has a lot of immigrants counted in their fertility numbers. This explains the difference between the fertility rate of Sweden (1.7) and Norway (1.5). Sweden has been far more willing to let in immigrants (and count them as citizens) then Norway has and it shows in the fertility rates even though the nations are otherwise culturally very similar.

These facts are widely known but most people either don’t understand what they mean or are in denial. Some people think that these numbers is nothing more than a change in the numbers of people on the earth. Often people who think in those terms see this as a good thing as “the world is overpopulated.” Others focus changing demographic structures and the economic burdens imposed when more of a nation’s population is elderly. Such people fret about things like economic growth and living standards. But these are both false framings of the problem.

Even in pure economic terms, less people in the abstract is not likely to be a problem. A large portion of the world’s population is eking out a living from the land and is not tied into the world’s economic systems. If these people could be brought into the worldwide economic system, a drop in the overall population would likely not even be noticed in economic terms. And while having a larger population of elderly people is not ideal from an economic perspective, it is not the end of the world if it stabilizes at some point. The real problem is that there is no stabilization point. There is no level of depopulation at which one can credibly say that modern society will start producing children at a replacement rate.

The reason most people miss the real problem is that biologically speaking, the modern world does not need to end. There are plenty of resources and still many young women capable of having many children. No physical reason yet exists to stop the modern world from having a future. And yet, the cultural reasons preventing the modern world from having a future are so strong that either modern worlds marches itself into oblivion or it changes so completely as to be unrecognizable. In short, the modern world will end in either oblivion or revolution.

The following quote from Doctor Christopher Murray is a good illustration of why the modern world cannot solve its fertility issues……

“In the face of declining population, there is a very real danger that some countries might consider policies that restrict access to reproductive health services, with potentially devastating consequences,” Murray cautioned.

“It is imperative that women’s freedom and rights are at the top of every government’s development agenda.”

Taken on face value, this is nothing more than a typical expression of modern values. But Professor Christopher Murray is not an ordinary man. He is a famous and well resourced researcher who has done more than almost anyone else to rigorously demonstrate that the modern world has no demographic future. Dr. Murray’s educational background is a doctorate in International Health Economics and a medical doctorate. He has used these twin doctorates to make a career of performing rigorous fact based measurements of health and health outcomes. In the process of doing these studies he came to the attention of Bill Gates. As his Wikipedia article states…..

In 2007, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, along with the state of Washington, established IHME and selected Murray as its leader. As head of IHME, Murray greatly expanded on his earlier research, leading an effort by 486 researchers from 302 institutions in 50 countries to produce Global Burden of Disease reports.

In short, Doctor Murray is a well regarded researcher with a lot of resources behind him. Having built up a well regarded team and having plenty of funding, he turned his attention to the world’s demographics. As a result, in July of 2020, he and his team published a study called “Fertility, mortality, migration, and population scenarios for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100.” It is this study that lies behind claim that “151 countries are projected to have a fertility rate below replacement by 2050”.

In mathematical terms (i.e. he would not frame it this way but it is what his math shows) the basic thrust of Dr. Murray’s research into worldwide fertility is that the core values of a modern western society are what are driving the extinction of the modern world. While this is not Dr. Murray’s preferred framing of his math, his intellectual honesty compels him to come pretty close. In the interpretation paragraph for his demographic study mentioned above, he and his team state…..

Our findings suggest that continued trends in female educational attainment and access to contraception will hasten declines in fertility and slow population growth. A sustained TFR lower than the replacement level in many countries, including China and India, would have economic, social, environmental, and geopolitical consequences. Policy options to adapt to continued low fertility, while sustaining and enhancing female reproductive health, will be crucial in the years to come.

The key question that Dr. Murray studiously avoids addressing is at what point in human history is female education and access to contraception suddenly going to result in above replacement fertility? If you define a modern society as one in which woman have higher education and are employed in positions in accordance with their education then there is no reason to think that a modern society will ever have above replacement levels of fertility. And there are very good reasons for this ranging from how much a woman’s possible fertility time is taken up pursuing higher education and establishing a career to status competitions within a given demographic a cohort. Perhaps the biggest reason modern societies will not see replacement level fertility is that costs (whether to society or the individuals) of having children are immediate where as rewards to having children are far in the future. For this reason, there are no feedback loops to stop the ever relentless march towards lower fertility.

In face of this knowledge, Dr. Murray can only throw up his hands and say “It is imperative that women’s freedom and rights are at the top of every government’s development agenda.” In pure mathematical terms, Dr. Murray sees no future for the modern world but it is unthinkable to him that modern society change the core values that his own studies suggest are creating this lack of a future. The best hope he holds out is that modern countries might be able to import people from such countries that don’t have modern values themselves. But even here, Dr. Murray’s studies hold out scant hope as his own review of the trends suggest that very few countries in the world will have above replacement levels of fertility 80 years from now.

Dr. Murray is hardly alone in insisting on what he knows to be unsustainable. The main difference between him and most people with modern values is that your average person can take comfort in ideas that studies like Dr. Murray’s have shown to be false. Some people comfort themselves by imagining that as population density goes up, fertility goes down and so as the population falls fertility will naturally increase. Others think that lack of fertility is caused because people can’t afford to have children and so they want to focus on economic issues which they care about for other reasons anyway. Neither of these ideas have any basis in fact but they are remarkably persistent in everyday discourse on this topic even so.

This habit of wishing away demographic realities with delusions has a long history in American history. It was the denial of demographic reality that caused the Southern Slave holders to mistake the nature of the crisis that overtook them. It was also the reason that post Civil War industrial barons failed to anticipate the political changes that came upon them all of the sudden. These groups lived in denial of the demographic realities that were right in front of their eyes because they did not like the implications of what those demographic realties meant. To avoid being like those groups, one must take a hard look at why modern society can’t maintain replacement rate fertility.

The first problem and perhaps the most fundamental problem preventing replacement level fertility is people don’t want enough children to sustain society. The ideal family size according to most Americans (and in most industrialized countries) is two children. Even a lot of the families who had more than two kids tell pollsters that two children is the ideal family size. The problem is that in the real world it is almost impossible to have replacement level fertility if most women who have children only have two kids.

Even though this is a simple point, it is remarkably hard for most people to grasp. Intuitively most people think of woman who has had two kids as having hit replacement rate. But replacement rate is measured at the society level and not at an individual level. It only takes 10% of the woman in given cohort having no children and 10% woman in that same cohort only having one child for the rest of the women to need to average 3 children in order for society to hit replacement rate. And while the percentages of woman having no children or only one will vary, it will never be the case that all women are able or want to have children. That means it is almost impossible for any society to hit replacement rate unless the women who have children average at least three children.

Even though this is a simple point, it is remarkably hard for most people to grasp. Intuitively most people think of woman who has had two kids as having hit replacement rate. But replacement rate is measured at the society level and not at an individual level. It only takes 10% of the woman in given cohort having no children and 10% woman in that same cohort only having one child for the rest of the women to need to average 3 children in order for society to hit replacement rate. And while the percentages of woman having no children or only one will vary, it will never be the case that all women are able or want to have children. That means it is almost impossible for any society to hit replacement rate unless the women who have children average at least three children.

If we stop talking theory and look at reality, the problem becomes even worse. In America in 1980 21% of females never had a child. By 2020 that number had climbed to 34%. While some of this is due to women who wanted to have children but could not for some reason or other, survey after survey has shown that the number of women who don’t want to have any children regardless of circumstances is climbing all the time. Since most woman in America who chose to have children only have one (20% of all woman) or two (25% of all woman) it falls to the 20% of women who are left to bring the average up to replacement. And while this group as some overachievers in it (close to 3% of woman have more than 5 kids) the bulk of this group is made up of women who intended to only have two but had a third one by accident. As birth control improves, this group has been getting steadily smaller. As bad as these numbers are for the United States, they are in aggregate better then a lot of industrialized nations for reasons we have already covered. But mathematically, it does not really matter in the long run if total fertility is 1.8 or 1.3. The end result is still extinction even if the cohort that is at 1.8 fertility takes a little longer to get to the end.

But if you ignore the negative impacts on society at large, on the individual level there are a number of reasons why two children are considered ideal even among women who want children. For one thing, there is the question of how much of her life a woman wants to be pregnant. This is especially true of women who live up to modern ideals. For woman striving for this ideal, they must complete at least four years of higher education, establish a career, and find a good mate before they think about having children. Earliest this can realistically happen is at 25. Fertility starts to drop off at 35. So a college educated woman who has 2.5 years between kids (enough time to get the first one potty trained before starting on the second one) is going to spend 50% of her peak years either being pregnant or dealing with small children who need diaper changes.

To be sure, lots of woman can and do have children after 35 but by the same token few college educated woman have it all together by 25. In fact, 40% of all women in America with a 4 year degree who have children don’t have their first child until after 30. If you look at woman with a master’s degree, the majority of them don’t have a child until after 30. Fundamentally, it is hard to have an education, a career, and more than two children just from a time available stand point and without even considering the economics of it.

But economics do matter when mothers compare themselves to other in their economic circle. Families with children have less money available then those who don’t. And so people feel the need to have “enough” money before they have children. But what is often forgotten is that people judge what is “enough” money relative to their peer group and not to some abstract standard. Thus, a blue collar couple will likely feel that less money is “enough” to start a family then a professional couple. What this means in practice is that all income groups struggle to get to place where they feel they have enough money to have a family because they are always judging what is “enough” by what their peers have. This makes it difficult for any couple to feel that they have “enough” money for a large family regardless of how well off they are in the abstract especially if their peers have no children.

That said, woman who have choose to have children will often reconciled themselves to having less deposable income then the much despised “double income no kids” couples. But these mothers have more difficulty reconciling themselves to their children having a lower standard of living then other children. And if your income is more or less the same as your peers, then each child you have will lower overall standard of living for the children you already have compared to your peers. Now a lot of mothers can deal with this when it comes to comparing having two children to only having one by saying “Timmy might have less stuff then Johnny, but at least Timmy has a sister.” But after they have two children, this argument has no force for most mothers. According to pollsters, most Americans believe that it less than ideal to grow up as only child but they see no benefit to having more siblings then one. In other words, saying “Timmy has less stuff then Johnny but at least he has two sisters and Johnny only has one” provides no conform to most woman. Thus, concern for their existing children’s wellbeing will limit most women who chose to have children in a modern culture to two or less.

The above concerns are largely independent of larger economic concerns. It does not matter if a woman wins the lottery; the odds of her wanting to spend most of her life pregnant are not likely to change. It does not matter if a woman makes six figures or sixty grand; she is still going to measure her child’s well being by her economic peers. And no matter what, women who think that having more children is going to degrade the level of care they can give their existing children will stop having children. Add in the number of women who find lots of more fulfilling options in modern culture then having children and you have an ironclad recipe for demographic doom. People who think that modern society will pull out of this mathematically certain doom and still retain core modern values need to explain how and why they think these things will change.

In spite of the points laid out above, many people still persist in thinking that this is an economic problem with an economic solution. The mere fact that immigrants from cultures that have not yet fully adopted modern values manage to have plenty of children in the exact same economic environment that woman with “modern” values don’t have children would seem to prove that the problem is primarily one of values and culture. Nonetheless, the idea that modern societies can resolve this problem by offering more support for women who have children is remarkably persistent. In the abstract it is easy to imagine that this idea might be true. Most people will do things that they don’t want to do otherwise if offered enough money. But in the real world, such ideas invariably ignore the actual costs of having children and cultural issues that prevent real money from being spent on increasing fertility.

The first point that needs to be understood is that it costs a lot of money to raise children, especially if they are raised to modern standards. In American, it now costs the middle class more than 300,000 dollars to raise a kid to age 18. This figure does not include “free” things like public education or the time that parents have to spend taking care of children. That 300 grand has to be paid by someone if you are going to raise the fertility rate without changing what middle class American thinks that a child “should” be provided with. To put it in concrete terms, if you want a million more kids at American middle class costs (and that is drop in the bucket compared to how many additional children most large nations need to meet replacement rate) you are going to have to come up with 300 billion dollars over a period of 18 years. If you think about it in these terms, you will understand that most proposals to use monetary incentives or changing the laws to make it easier to have children come nowhere near addressing the actual costs involved in raising a child. The reason for this is that modern governments are in the same boat as families. Given their values and needs, they don’t feel they can afford what it costs to raise children.

Japan is a good example of this problem. In January of 2023, the Prime Minister of Japan said that his country was “on the brink of not being able to function as a society because of its falling birth rate.” That sounds pretty serious. So what would Japan have to spend to have enough children to stabilize its population? If for the sake of argument we say that it only cost a third as much to raise a kid in Japan as it does the US (although most sources say it actually costs more to raise a kid in Japan then the US) it would cost 300 billion dollars a year to stabilize Japan’s population from its current free fall. This is figuring on 60 million additional children and only counting the costs that parents would have to pay to have the additional children and not things like the cost to provided public education. If the government took this fiscal burden upon itself, this would be about a third of the annual total spending of the Japanese government (depending what the current exchange rate is between dollars and yen).

The above costs have been deliberately understated to avoid quibbling about the true nature of the costs. A fair minded analysis that factored in the real typical costs of raising a child in Japan and the cost of “free” things like public education and loss of female productivity while pregnant would likely find those costs to be a lot higher on a society wide basis then what has been presented above. But the point is that even a deliberately low balled figure is far above the figure that the Japanese government is promising to spend to reverse the falling birth rate. The same Prime Minister that proclaimed that the low birth rate is threatening the functioning of Japan’s society is only planning on spending 25 billion dollars a year to reverse this problem. And that figure of 25 billion is controversial because there are questions about how Japan is going to pay for it over the long term.

The point is not that Japan cannot afford to stabilize its population. If Japan was locked in a war with China it would likely come up with 300 billon dollars a year with no question and make whatever sacrifices were necessary to come up with that figure. As it is, Japan’s government is spending far more on its military then it is on boosting its birth rate notwithstanding the claim of Japan’s own government that its low birth rate is bringing Japan to the brink of not being able to function as a society. And even aside from the question of if Japan could afford it to come up with 300 billion, there remains the fact that Japan could always lower their living standards and reduce what they think children “should have” so as to be able to afford more children. However, even in country where the top government official claims that low birth rates are an existential issue, coming up with realistic sums of money or advocating lower standards of care are both too radical to even suggest much less implement. And this reluctance to seriously address the issue is found in a country where the problem of low birth rates is broadly recognized throughout all of society which is still not the case in many Western countries.

The fundamental problem to an economic solution to low birth rates is that the costs of having children for both individual woman and society at large are immediate and substantial. The costs of not having children take a long time to kick in but once they do they are also substantial. It is only when the substantial costs of not having children start to kick in that nations start worrying about the “birth rate.” But at that point they are already dealing with the substantial costs of having a large elderly population and a declining working age population. The costs of having large numbers of children and a larger amount of elderly people relative to small work force seem insurmountable. So nations caught in this trap run around talking about the need to raise birth rates but do little to actually accomplish that. If they actually really tried to raise the birth rate it would make everything worse in the short run in economic terms for both individuals and society at large. And politicians live and die by the short term.

To make matters worse from a political perspective, young people all over the world are bitter that they don’t have the same living standards that their parents had. But regardless of economic system or what the government does they are not going to experience the same living standards of their parents. Their parents were by and large beneficiaries of the so called “demographic dividend” that occurs when a nation first cuts back on having children. At that time a country experiences the benefits of not having to pay for children without the corresponding costs of increasing numbers of elderly retires relative to the working age population. No matter what the politicians do to try to pander to these bitter generations, they can’t fix the fact generations who grow up without the demographic dividend will be worse off than the generation that benefited from it.

But this issue compounds the difficulty of fixing the demographic short fall. It means that the generation that fixes the issue will have to pay for more elder care and more for child care at the same time even though this generation is already bitter about being worse off than their parents. And since it takes about twenty years for a child to become economically productive in a modern economic system, it will take twenty years of suffering costs that the previous generation did not have to pay before any economic benefits are seen from the extra children. At what point in history has a democracy ever succeed in asking its people to suffer for twenty years in return for promised future benefits? How much more unthinkable is it to ask this from a generation already angry that they are not as well off as their parents.

In theory there is a solution for this problem that helps to address these seemingly insurmountable issues. A nation can import immigrants to keep the number of the working age population up while at the same time increasing the birth rate to bring the system back into equilibrium. The problem with this is that people have shown over and over again that they don’t want to pay for people who are different from them to have children. Nationalist don’t want to pay for the children from other ethnicities. Secularists don’t want to pay for religious fundamentalists to have lots of children. Married middle class families with jobs don’t want to pay more in taxes so that single mothers on welfare can have more kids. A surprising number of childless individuals don’t want to pay any costs related to raising children (“I don’t have children, why should I have to pay school taxes?” is an often stated emotion of the determinedly childless property owners). When you add all these objections to the fact that immigrants come with their own extra costs and are rarely a direct substitute for working age natives and you are left with a real world were immigration offers no long term cure for the modern world’s unsustainable demographics.

To the extent that countries try to use the breathing room provided by immigration to raise birth rates they limit themselves to to silly things like 500 dollar tax credits and mandates to employers to give generous maternity leave. These things all have the befits of obscuring costs (tax cuts don’t look like extra spending to the average voter and mandating an employer to do something seems “free” to most voters) and being structured so that the right people can take advantage of them (working woman and middle class people who make enough money to pay taxes). But in practice, neither of these things comes close to addressing the real costs in both time and money that a child represents. They certainly do nothing to cause modern collage educated woman to want to spend significant parts of their best years pregnant or taking care of small children.

The bottom line is that most people who claim that they want to raise the birth rate only want to raise the birth rate of the middle class. They don’t want poor people having more children or people with values outside the norm because those result in children who are raised with a lower standard of care then is seen as ideal. But it is very expensive to raise a middle class child to modern standards and nobody in leadership positions are even doing realistic math on what it would take moneywise for the middle class to have more children much less actually advocating for that money to be spent.

But what if the modern world can exist as a parasitical culture that is continually converting children from other cultures to its values to make up for the children that the modern world will not have? To put it another way, what if there is an endless supply of woman from third world countries that are willing to have children so that modern women don’t have to? On a purely theoretical level, there are two problems with this idea. The first problem comes if these third world populations are willing to modernize and the second problem is if they are not willing to modernize.

To state the first problem crudely, why should third world women want to have children if first world women don’t? What is to stop the entire world from adopting modern values and reproductive habits? If you look at real world date, the evidence shows that most of the world wants to adopt modern values at least when it comes to children. Based on current trends, within a human lifespan, almost all countries in the world are projected to be below replacement levels of fertility. In such a world, where are the immigrants to come from?

The second problem is the reverse of the first. If a subculture does not adopt modern values on such things as contraceptives or female education, then there is a likely a reason that will bring them into conflict with the modern world. Otherwise, why would they not adopt the modern way of life? When we look at the real world, trends show that the only sub-groups that will soon be above replacement will be those cultures that are virulently opposed to modern values. Some of those cultures might not be much of a problem for modern people (like the Amish) but others are likely to be a major problem (like the Pashtuns).

Simply put, the effects of modern culture on the human race are like an antibiotic effect on bacteria. After exposure to the benefits of modern life, only the resistant will still be having children in sufficient numbers to sustain a society. And the resistant will be those who hate the modern world for one reason or another. These resistant cultures that are sustainable are unlikely to be moral societies in any sense that a modern person would recognize. Almost no modern person regardless of political persuasion would want to live in the few cultures that are expected to sustain themselves over the long term. Almost all such cultures are widely regarded as being extremely backward and medieval. But that will not stop those cultures from becoming an ever increasing share of the world’s young people.

Afghanistan and Yemen provided an example of how this works as they are parts of the world that are not projected to fall below replacement level. In 1992, Afghanistan’s population was about 12 million but that figure had increased to 42 million in 2023. In 1992 Yemen had a population that was about 14 million and that figure increase to 31 million by 2021 (war made getting good figures after that hard). These countries show that cultures that virulently reject modernity can grow quite quickly regardless of war and famine and an otherwise poor state of health. If they are contained, Malthusian logic will likely take over. But can a world that is depopulating contain those cultures that are that growing at exponential rates?

It is this question that brings us back to the present time. The devastation that relentless depopulation alone will bring is far in future for America. But modern society is unlikely to die from depopulation. In the same way that Alzheimer’s leads invariably to death but is rarely the cause of death (pneumonia being the most common way for people with Alzheimer’s to die), modern society’s demographic problems merely set the stage for a crisis. It is the lack of resilience brought about by demographic issues that is the immediate problem facing the modern world. Vanishing off the face of the earth is a ways out yet but being unable to cope with crises that naturally arrive is at hand.

A historical example of how this works can be found in comparing Republican Rome to Sparta at the height of its power. Both nations were militaristic city states that had ambitions to take on the wider world. Sparta was working towards leading a campaign against Persia like the one that Alexander eventually did lead and Rome’s ambitions are better known because they were realized. The difference is that Sparta’s ambitions were permanently ended by losing the battle of Leuctra to the military genius Epaminondas. By contrast Republican Rome lost multiple devastating battles to the military genius Hannibal but that was barely a speed bump on their way to total victory.

This difference in outcomes was largely demographic. The Sparta military relied on Spartiates. These were elite men who could only come from set demographic lineages and devoted their lives to the military skills that maintained Sparta’s power. The irony of Sparta is that even as its power grew, the number of Spartiates that they could muster shrank. This was due to the expense of producing the Spartiates and the reluctance of the elite females of Sparta (who were famously independent compared to other woman of antiquity and typically controlled the money of elite families) to have many children. Thus the loss of one major battle cut their military power in a way that was hard for them to recover from due to demographic issues.

By contrast, the core Republican Roman soldier was a middle class male. The Roman Republican conception of what a woman could be doing or should be doing was extremely strict compared to Sparta or even other cultures around them. They considered it a core part of their values that that their women should never leave the home or do much else other then keep house and have children. The result was a vigorous demographic growth of the Roman military class that sustained it through even devastating military defeats. It was only when the Republican soldiers began to be permanently stationed abroad away from their families that the Roman Republican military system began to have demographic issues sustaining their core warrior economic class.

Setbacks are a fact of life for both individuals and society. And for both the individuals and society, it is far easier to deal with setbacks if you are younger. Demographic resiliency is still the key to national resiliency in the face of a crisis just as it was for Sparta and Rome. A society weighted towards young people is a society that is weighted towards getting things done and trying new things. A society that is weighted towards old people is weighted towards taking care of old people and maintaining the status quo. A modern example of what happens to cultures abilities to deal with crisis as they age can be seen in Europe.

At one time almost any major European country acting alone could act with almost impunity anywhere in the world they choose to unless stopped by another European power. If you look solely at GDP figures, Europe should still be a major power on the world stage. After all, Germany, The United Kingdom, France, and Italy each have a GDP greater than Russia and Russia is thought of being one of the great military powers of the world. Looking solely at their wealth, one would think that the European great powers alone or collectively should be able to handle any security problem that comes their way short of having problems with the US or China.

But anyone familiar with recent history will know that this is not true. Europe was unable to deal with the problems in the Balkans without begging for US assistance. Europe was unable to deal with Libya without begging for US assistance. Europe is unable to assist Ukraine against Russia without US assistance. Why is Europe so weak when in theory they are so wealthy?

The reason for this is readily apparent to anyone digs into European GDP figures. Significant portions of European GDP are devoted to pensions and health care costs. They don’t spend much on military power because in order to do so they would have to cut the living standards of the elderly voters who are the most important voting group in most wealthy democracies. European power is an illusion propped up by America. And America is becoming more like Europe with every passing year in terms of the percentage of its economy devoted to health care and pensions. Soon, America will have to cut its military spending to European levels in order to afford its commitments to its growing elderly population. What will become of the modern world then when it is faced with a crisis?

More precisely what will become of America when this happens? The starting point for this essay was America’s 80 year crisis cycle and whether another crisis coming soon as the historical patter suggests. It is critical that everyone understand the modern world that seems so dominant now is mathematically doomed. But demographics alone do not tell the entire story. It was not just the growing population that drove America into the revolution. It was also how that growing population had divergent economic interests from the mother country. Likewise, it was not just the larger population of the North that led to the union being preserved. It was also the North industrialization.

In the same way, the demographic march towards oblivion is only the background force that is driving America towards a crisis. That force is interacting with (and in some cases causing) ideological, economic, and technologic realities to cause pressure points that will impact America in the near term. But exploration of those issues will have to wait for another essay.