Category Archives: Demographics

Inside Russia’s Looming Demographics Crisis

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Like most academic types, Mr. Spaneiel has a poor understanding of the roots of the demographic crisis (poorer populations in Russia have more children for example) and he does not go into the differences between populations groups in Russia which make the issue even worse. Those caveats aside, it is a good visual presentation for those who might have had trouble understanding my retirement related arguments in “Russia’s twenty years until collapse.”

The Problem With Most Demographic Doomers

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In 1930 there were a lot of people who would have predicted that communism would be a major threat to the western way of life (including the communist themselves who had this as an openly avowed goal). The first “red scares” date to shortly after World War I and never went away as a concern for the religious, the small farmers, and the business elite. This fear of the communists would lead many to embrace or at least tolerate fascism on the grounds that it was a useful counterweight to the communists. No one up to the time that World War II started would have thought that next world war would have been fought against the fascists by both communists and the Anglo-Saxon world. Such an alliance would have been inconceivable to those who knew the level of hate and distrust between the ruling classes in the Anglo-Saxon World and the Soviet Union.

The people who predicted that communism would be a major threat to the Anglo-Saxon world were right. But those who sole matrix for looking at the world was communism and the huge threat it presented were often the most blind to dangers posed by the Nazis. Churchill was a famous exception this rule, but even he did not start warning about the rise of Germany until 1933. And his supposed fellow conservative Neville Chamberlain would write “The real danger to this country is Winston. He is the warmonger, not Hitler.” What is often forgotten is that Chamberlain way of looking at the world was the rule on the right and Churchill was exception. Conservatives by and large were blind to the threat posed by the Nazis because they feared communism so much.

Fast forward to today and many are obsessed with demographics and with good reason. There is no more sure guide to the future available to mankind then the study of demographics. We might not know how many people will die in the next 20 years, but we can say with a high degree of confidence what the maximum number of 20 year old can exist in 20 years time because those people will have been born today. And those numbers are so horrific for many countries that those who are aware of the numbers can’t stop thinking about them or interpreting everything they see in the light of those numbers. But there are more things that can profoundly change our world then just a free fall in the numbers of babies being born as bad as that can be over the long term.

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A Reminder

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As Keynes observed, in the long run, we are all dead. This uniformity in long term results tends to focus our minds on the short term. But that does not change the fact that most of the news stories that we pay attention to will be hardly matter in 10 years. Meanwhile, things that we ignore will have profound impact on the world for a long time to come. What follows is a few things that caught my attention over the last week that did not make the headlines but that I think will matter for a long time to come.

1. Roughly 2.7 million children were born in the US in 2023 compared to roughly 1.7 million children being born in Egypt. Population of the US in 20230 was 339,996,563. Population of Egypt in 2023 is 112,716, 598. With about a third the population of the US, Egypt is producing almost two thirds the amount of babies. This is to a certain extent offset higher child mortally in Egypt but not enough to make a significant difference in the long term outcomes.

2. In Latin America, for instance, fertility rates are coming in much lower than had been expected. Uruguay, Costa Rica, Chile, Jamaica and Cuba all have fertility rates of about 1.3. In one decade, Mexico had a 24% drop in births. Brazil, by far the region’s most populous nation, has a fertility rate of about 1.65, and those are likely to fall further. The UN had predicted Brazil’s population to be 216 million this year, but it turns out to be only 203 million. Over time, most Latin American countries can expect shrinking populations.

3. Official figures released Wednesday showed that China had fewer than half the number of births in 2023 than the country did in 2016. The latest number points to a fertility rate that is close to 1.0.

In the short run these things mean nothing. In the long run though, these figures will change the world.

Egypt is continuing its trend of being one of the world’s biggest time bombs. The idea that Latin America will continue to supply an endless supply of young people to America is one of the biggest fears of American nationalist and the biggest comfort for those who see a bright future for American demographically. Yet the data from the sending countries does not support the idea that this tread will last for very much longer. And China is continuing to track the worst case scenarios of its demographic decline. If this continues much longer, the formally pessimistic forecasts of China’s demographic future will turn into an optimistic pipe dream. A fertility rate of 1 becomes devastating very quickly.

A World Without A Future

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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. Continue reading →

The Ukraine Conflict And The Coming End Of Pax Americana

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Slovakia has a government that no longer supports giving aid to Ukraine. The largest party in the Dutch parliament does not support funding Ukraine. Significant portions of the Republican Party don’t want to give any more money to Ukraine and the support that is slipping away from the Democrats (largely African Americans and Hispanics) is composed of people who have no interest in Ukraine. There is increasing talk about how Ukraine needs to negotiate.

These things are not definitive. This trend towards looking for a way out of the Ukraine conflict was going strong on the part of Western Powers until the Kharkiv counteroffensive and subsequent taking back of Kherson city. These events gave the allies of Ukraine hope that just a little more military aid and Ukraine could win this thing. Perhaps a sudden Ukrainian victory will appear out of nowhere and once more the Western Powers will think that if they give the Ukraine just a little more money, this thing could be all over.

But the history of the West post World War II has been a history of half measures and perpetually frozen conflicts that never end. Korea is still sore spot ever since UN forces accepted a draw with the Chinese. Vietnam is resolved but only because the US decisively lost and Vietnam is too worried by China to hold a grudge. The former Yugoslavia is a powder keg held together by the threat of US air power. Iraq still has US troops in it and they are still conducting strikes in country. Syria has US troops in it who are still doing things that occasionally make for small articles hidden away from the front page. Libya is a frozen mess that nobody wants to put back together nor do they want to the wrong people to put it back together and so it is preserved in perpetual disastrous state.

The point is that only a fool would bet on the West having the staying power to see Ukraine through to the end. Ukraine’s only hope is that Russia is such a mess of demographic disaster and institutional dysfunction that maybe they will fail before the West does. But Ukraine’s own demographic disaster and institutional issues prevent them from having much agency in how this plays out. Their only card was that significant amounts of people were willing to fight for a Ukraine that was not under the thumb of Russia. But those people are a finite resource and there are indications that they are running out.

This realization is starting to creep into some Ukrainian channels. Continue reading →

China has a College Problem

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If you read certain conservative sources, you will often read allegations that China is secretly supporting this or that ideology in order to weaken America. But there is one idea that is as American as apple pie that is doing its bit to destroy China. And that is the idea that every good little boy or girl will go to college and get a white collar job. This insidious American idea (you could argue it is more an Anglo-Saxon one but I think America should take credit) is making China’s demographic problems a lot worse.

The basic demographic problem that China faces is that its working age population is dropping like a rock while the number of retirees soars. China’s work force has shrunk by 40 million in the last 3 years. That is like losing the entire population of Canada if Canada was solely populated by people 16 to 59 years old.

With people falling out of the work force at an accelerating rate, you would think that it would be a great time to be a young person in China looking for a job. But you would be wrong. In June of this year, the youth unemployment rate in China hit a record high of 21.3%. China promptly fixed this problem by no longer reporting this number so we have no idea how bad it is now.

How is it that China can have a demographic crisis that is crashing their working age population while at the same time having a high youth unemployment rate? The answer is simple. All those only children born as result of the one child policy were pushed to go to college by the same government that mandated that parents only have one child.

From the Council On Foreign Relations…….

For decades now, the Chinese government has encouraged university enrollment, pushing the number of students in higher education from 22 million in 1990 to 383 million in 2021. During the pandemic, it pressed even harder, expanding graduate-school capacity. Master’s-degree candidates rose by 25 percent in 2021. China’s Ministry of Education estimated that 10.76 million college students would graduate in 2022, 1.67 million more than in 2021—and it expects a further large rise in 2023.

383 million collage students currently enrolled in higher education is greater than entire population of the United States. Even for a nation as big as China, that is massive share of its young people to push through higher education. And for what? Do you need a collage degree to work on factory floor? Do you need a college degree to build a building? The point is, China is not producing near enough jobs that need college degrees (even taking an American HR departments view of what jobs “need” a college degree) to absorb all those college graduates.

The result is predicable. As the South China Morning Post delicately puts it….

Manufacturers and others are pointing to a growing mismatch between the jobs young people are looking for and the jobs that are in dire demand.

So the bottom line is that people with skills that China desperately needs can’t be found while at the same time a bunch of young people educated to sit at a desk can’t find a desk to sit at.

Anecdotally this problem is made worse by China’s culture. In America, it is common for young people to get a worthless degree and then go get a job in something that has nothing to do with that degree. They are not happy about it, but that is what they do. But in China it seems that going to school and being the first one in your family line to get a college degree makes it very shameful to then go work in a factory. So China’s collage graduates (often with the support of their families) seem very reluctant to face the fact that the degrees they got have no economic value and they have to look at jobs that they thought would be “beneath” them.

As was noted in the beginning, a lot of people focus on the bad things being imported from China to America. But it is a two way street and lot of bad ideas in America work their way into China and it seems like ideas that are bad in American seem to have an even worse impact in other countries. Overinvestment in higher education certainly seems to be an example of this. It is a big problem in America but it seems like an even worse problem in China.

But the more you look at China, the more this seems to be the rule rather than the exception. A lot of China’s problems stem from looking at what “success” looks like in other countries and deciding to copy that at an insanely rapid pace. They are now reaping the results of that in everything from demographics to skills gaps to overinvestment in real estate.

Why you should panic about the US Deficit

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*Note: This is an informal note that is not directly related to my last essay. The second part of that is still to come.*

Notwithstanding the headline, I don’t really think that panic accomplishes anything useful. But I am amazed that we are looking at a catastrophe and hardly anyone is talking about it. The current situation is the opposite of the “food crisis” that I addressed last year. At the time I talked about how even though there were a lot of bad headlines when you looked into the actual numbers there was no crisis in the immediate near term (it might be different now at least in terms of rice, but I have not really dug into the numbers yet for this year). But in terms of the US deficit, very few people seem to be panicking and yet when you dig into the numbers they are really bad.

So I thought I would write a short informal piece to break down the headlines that I have been linking to and explain why they represent a catastrophe in the making that will directly impact your life. Let us start with a recent CNN story titled “Federal budget deficit expected to nearly double to around $2 trillion.”

Now, if you are a typical American redneck, you will see a head line like that and sagely tell whoever is next to you “the politicians are going to bankrupt this country” and then go on with your business without giving the headline another thought. And who can really blame the typical redneck for reacting like that? In 2020 the Federal Government ran 3.1 trillion dollar deficit and in 2021 the feds ran a 2.8 trillion dollar deficit. It is true that in 2022 the deficit was just over a trillion dollars but if the world did not come to end back in 2020 or 2021 then, why should a mere 2 trillion dollar deficit be a cause of panic today?

Continue reading →

The 80 Year Crisis Cycle of The United States

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Life in the United States has changed dramatically every 80 years since the country’s founding. There was about 80 years from the end of the Revolutionary War to the end of the Civil War (81 years 3 months and 25 days if you want to be autistic about it). It was about 80 years from the end of the Civil War until the end of World War II (80 years 3 months and 24 days from the end of the Civil War if you want to be precise). And it has been exactly 78 years (and one day, this essay was supposed to go up yesterday for cool points but I failed) between the end of World War II until the date of this essay going on line. If the 80 year pattern holds, we are on the cusp of a profound change in America.

In the context of this pattern, the profound change is the appearance of something brand new and never experienced before by Americans. Superficially, these changes are obvious. In the case of the Revolutionary War, the brand new thing was the creation of a new country. In the case of the Civil War, there was suddenly no slavery in the United States whereas before it had been a major economic force. And after World War II, America went from being a country that had no “entangling alliances” and a small federal government to being a nation that was embedded in a worldwide network of alliances with a massive federal government. But the superficially obvious changes conceal deeper changes that lay the ground work for the next crisis and attendant profound change.

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What a demographic disaster looks like

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I have to admit up front that the title might be unfair. I am sure that to a certain extent the vast preponderance of old people simply reflects those who are willing to be on camera and who needed help. And I also need to warn that from my perspective the videos are on the cringe side but that is more a reflection of me then any great truth.

All those caveats aside, I can’t but help suspect that the below videos show the struggles that an aging society has in dealing with natural disaster. I suspect that the fact that the mountain communities were snowed in like what is shown in the video for over two weeks is as much due to the fact that they have the demographic profile of retirement communities then it has to do with unusual weather (as one old lady notes in one of the below videos, this has happened before in her lifetime). I can’t but help suspect that the fact that a bunch of Mormons from Utah (the stars of this U-tube channel I know for a fact are Mormon, not sure if all there crew is but a lot of them do come from Utah….) have to go rescue people in California deal with snow says something about where America is experiencing demographic decline and where it is still experiencing some growth. When I think about my neighborhood and community at large, I don’t think we are too different although I suspect that the people who would come to the rescue in this area are more likely to be Amish and Mennonite (or ex-Mennonite) then Mormon. But watch the videos below and see what you think.