Sunday, July 26, 2020

Misunderstanding demographics

The professor returns for a discussion on demographics.

One of the most common features of social science is completely misunderstanding the topic of demographics. Indeed, we ought to note that nearly all demographic predictions are wrong in retrospect.

One thing we might start off with is something we noted long ago in our first law of history, which holds:
This was presented, of course, in terms of the historical past, but it's also true of the present.  We might, in fact, need to present another rule, which would be:
By the time media picks up on a story, it's already well advanced.
Such is certainly the case here.

Pop social scientists have been worried about the "population bomb" since at least the 1960s, or even much earlier if you go back to Malthusian angst. But the truth of the matter is that professional demographers have known for decades that the predicted population curve will start to decline this century.  Usually they run populations through the end of the century and no further, for good reason. Demographic predictions, as noted, are notoriously inaccurate. But the ultimate decline in the human population is an established scientific probability that's so well established its not worth debating.

Indeed, from a scientific perspective, the predictions that the population is going to keep growing and growing all over the globe which has been popular in apocalyptic books has been known to be flat out wrong for at least two decades if not longer.  Demographers began to revise their downward population trend predictions well over a decade ago to take into account the much more rapid decline, that's right decline, in population that was already beginning to become a feature across the globe. Apparently nobody really took note, however, until sometime a couple of weeks ago when they did it again as the well established trend is accelerating and therefore global population decline will set in much more quickly than we had originally thought.

Indeed, in spite of the "what we're doing now to ourselves" concerns, some of which are indeed very valid, this is something that's been occurring since the turn of the prior century and was a matter of angst then.  Observers in the United States, for example, worried as far ago as the early 20th Century that the white, or rather the White Anglo Saxon Protestant, demographic birth rate was dropping off so fast that it meant demographic death, while they also worried about the black birth rate (and the Catholic one) which was not, at that time.  Such concerns ultimately gave rise to the likes of people like Margaret Sanger who called blacks "weeds" and promoted abortion as as a well of arresting their population increase.  Only this past week did Planned Parenthood, the organization that she founded, change the name of one of their installations once it became too politically imprudent to continue an honor a woman who was a racist promoting abortion to keep black numbers down.

In Germany there was such a concern about the drop off in the birth rate that the Nazi Party went to extreme rates, icky propaganda, and icky programs to try to reverse the decline.  Ultimately, they even took to kidnapping children who they felt could pass for German, handing them out to German families.  Most never made it back to their original parents.  More than one country in that time frame boosted programs to try to increase the number of children that women were having, all to no effect.

The reason that we note all of this is that the decline is a demographic fact that pre dates pharmaceuticals to prevent or abort birth.

It's closely tied to economics, something that's well known in one way, and the source of misplaced concern in another.  Simply put, and dating back prior to the real incorporation of women into the workplace, as advanced economies managed to raise the bulk of their populations into the middle class, birth rates fell.  As this is happening all over the world, and quickly, birth rates are accordingly falling quickly.

Indeed, poor societies tend to have high birth rates, although this isn't always true. The classic reason for this is that the poor have tended to depend on their children for support in old age, although in the United States, where most of the poor actually are at an economic level that would have been regarded as lower middle class a century ago, this isn't the reason.  In that case the law of unintended consequences has operated to incentive child birth economically while simultaneously operating to destroy marital bonds in the same demographic.

Which takes us to our next point, which perhaps should be a law as well, that being
Old understandings of conditions continue to be believed well after they are no longer correct.
Here that old understanding is the same one that operates classically to produce high birth rates in poor demographics, but with a societal application.

That is, it's widely believed that a declining birth rate is a societal disaster as large numbers, indeed an ever increasing number, of new workers is necessary to support an old retiring populations.

That's complete nonsense.

It's nonsense as it doesn't contemplate the fact of ever increasing societal wealth, which has been a decade by decade feature of economies ever since the beginning of the Renaissance.  It also doesn't take into account the advance of technology.

In fact, it's interesting to note that the very same societies and journals that are now worried about the human population now decreasing are also proposing a Universal Basic Income because technology is, they assert (probably correctly) going to put so many people out of work.  So we're simultaneously worrying that a decrease in the population means that there are fewer workers to support an aging population while we are also worrying that entering generations of workers are going to be put out of work by technology.

If you consider that both things may be operating at one time, what it should lead you to believe is that; 1) a declining population of workers is a good thing as work is also declining; and 2) advances in technology are making society wealthier and that's a good thing as it supports everyone, including the old.

Of course, that ought to also lead you to question the American policy of massive immigration rates, which are designed to offset our population decline, which otherwise set in during the 1970s.  We frankly aren't going to have a place for the workers we're bringing in, if technologist are correct, so what we're doing is importing future unemployment.  Indeed, as those same entrants come from less technologically advanced nations, the argument can be made that their future labor, which they depend on for a livelihood, will shortly be needed more where they are, than where they are going to.

All of which means:

1.  This isn't a future economic problem of any sort.
2.  It doesn't mean that future generations of elderly will be without economic support.
3.  It's actually good for the environment and the standard of living in every sense.

That doesn't mean, however that there aren't some things worth considering and perhaps being a bit worried about.

In that context, while take a look at bits of an essay by Fr. David Longnecker.  Fr. Longnecker is more classically concerned about this, and I've discounted those concerns above, but that doesn't mean that there aren't societal things that shouldn't be considered, with some rejected, nonetheless.

Well start with his essay, which was titled:

THE ABOLITION OF MAN…LITERALLY
First of all, that's dramatic, but that' isn't occurring.  People aren't going away.  There are a lot of us, and a long term decline in population will have to go on for at least two centuries before there's a real problem.  The BBC article that Fr. Longnecker linked in noted that Japan and Spain could see a 50% reduction in their populations by 2100, but if we consider that Japan's population is 126,500,000, nearly as high as Russia's, that would hardly amount to a disaster.  That would place Japan's population at around 60,000,000 which is still far too high to make Japan a really nice place to live.  Added to that, on the human understanding of population, Japan's pre World War Two population was 90,000,000 which the Japanese regarded as so dense that it required, in their view, starting colonies in Asia in order to export its population.

Spain's population is about 47,000,000, about the same as pre World War Two Germany's.  Spain isn't big.  If it had 23,000,000 it's still be pretty darned crowded.

You get the point.

The US, I'd note, hasn't. Our population is predicted to be higher than it current is in 2100, although not enormously so, as we keep importing a population.  The US is already so densely populated in some areas that regions that were once regarded as really idyllic are horrifying crapholes, Los Angeles being a prime example, followed by the rest of California.  We keep doing that for the reasons noted above, and also because we find it convenient to engage in a version of slavery light, in which we import the poor so that we don't have to pay our own poor a living wage.

Okay, so that only reinforces what I've already said.  So nothing to worry about, right?

Well, societally there is, which is mostly not what we're doing.  And here's where Longnecker, first among the really erudite critics, points out, succinctly, things that are problematic.

We first note:

What else is driving the lower birth rate? Young people are not choosing to marry and have children. Not only that, an increasing number are choosing not to make love. They can’t be bothered.
Is that really correct?

Well, part of it is, and part of it isn't. 

We've noted already that the widely held perception that people are marrying later and later isn't really true.  The young marriage ages that people generally are considering are actually usually demographic flukes that apply to unique economic conditions. 

Indeed, we've analyzed that all here in depth, and shown that marriage ages have remained remarkably stable since the Middle Ages:

Shockingly young! Surprisingly old! Too young, too old! Well, nothing much actually changing at all. . . Marriage ages then. . . and now. . and what does it all mean?

Added to this is the statistical problem of how couples that "cohabitate" or "live together" are regarded and counted.  Throughout the Christian era, until very recently, this was strongly frowned upon culturally, but at the same time occured much more often than might be supposed.  If examples given, for instance, in such well researched works as Kristin Lavransdatter are considered, they were fairly common among the gentry, if again strongly disapproved of, although they usually didn't have an illegitimate status endlessly. They broke up or resulted in marriage.  They were extremely common among British minor nobility in the 18th Century and early 19th.  They'd become so common among the British industrial working class that the concept of Common Law Marriage was introduced in order to deal with the situation in a formal way.

When no fault divorce spread through the English world and then around the world, the common law marriage died off. But the behavior remains.  This causes a statistical problem here as if these same couples were regarded as they once were, marriage in fact would be much more common.  The interesting thing is that with the death of the common law marriage a certain elevation in concept of formal marriages occurred, although divorce, which was once fairly uncommon, remains very very common.

Fr. Longnecker wouldn't want to be seen to be endorsing common law marriage and is really dealing with a social issue in advance of dealing with it from the Catholic and Christian prospective, but its important to note there that our concept of what's occurring may be inaccurate.  Having said that, the second part and third parts of his observation is correct.

Young people are not choosing to marry and have children. Not only that, an increasing number are choosing not to make love. They can’t be bothered.
People remaining childless has become quite common, although in recent years, at least by informal observation, that trend is reversing. Even where it is reversing, however, it isn't as if couples are normally choosing to have large numbers of children.  And while Catholics would generally regard it as a good development, the epidemic of sex outside of marriage that dropped down into the teens and twenties in the 70s, 80s, and 90s has really reversed.  Not only are married couples not having as many children, unmarried people aren't engaging in sex as often as they were in spite of the constant entertainment industry and societal pressure that urges them too.

Indeed, on the last item things are really thick with irony.

There's been a lot of questions about all of this in recent years, with theories ranging from the sociological to the biological.  

Sociologically, the impact of work seems to be a definite factor in some societies, particularly the United States and Japan.  The US has become as obsessed with careerism as Japan has and the emphasis in the US has really shifted since World War Two from finding a good job or career, to support a family, to a career being the end all and be all of everything.  This has been something that's impacted both men and women.  

Fr. Longnecker notes:
The reasons are complicated but among them are the aggressiveness of the modern feminist. High powered career focussed women are not interested in marriage and babies and many young men are not interested in this type of woman so the guys just opt out.
And he may in fact be right, but only in part.  Its not only because the feminist ethos has become hostile to men, which in some instances it is, and always has been, but the emphasis on careers and work in Western society have spread to women when originally it only pertained to men, and not in the same way.

This can sound like we're saying something we're not.  We're not saying women shouldn't work.  Rather, what we're saying is that there came a shift over time in which both men and women were sold a line of propaganda that held real worldly fulfillment came through careers.  That was always baloney.  

Indeed, people have always normally taken up whatever work they take up in order to get by in life, which for most people meant providing for their family  The thought of a spouse interfering with a career was really foreign to most people. Rather, the opposite, often applying only to men in earlier times, was that a career became a necessary burden and even a sacrifice to support a family The family came first in the equation.  Now a lot of people simply forgo families as its hindrance to a career, the irony being that careers are just jobs and it turns out that the majority of people don't like their jobs.

Indeed, before we move on, one thing that all of this raises is the topic of "temporary marriages", something that now exist throughout Western society but which is basically only acknowledged, oddly enough, in Iran.

Islam has a religious institution of temporary marriages, although it's really rare in almost every Islamic society save for Iran.  In Iran, which retains a fairly advanced Western economy, it's not and its even somewhat encouraged.

The Islamic institution of the temporary marriage acknowledged that humans have a sex drive while, at the same time, young people often have goals which are contrary to contracting a marriage.  In Christian cultures divorce was traditionally disallowed, which obviously isn't the case in Western cultures now, but in both Islamic and Judaic societies it isn't.  Sex outside of marriage is frowned upon in nearly every culture and religion and very much so in the Abrahamic religions.  Temporary marriages made temporary couples' actions licit.  They can have sex and not stray from morality, even though they're likely to split up later.

Following the sexual revolution the cultural leaders in the Western world encouraged and nearly demanded that everyone engage in premarital sex and only those with strong religious feelings will openly regard it as wrong now in spite of the social devastation that the change has brought about.  What's been missed is that as this has occurred, a lot of Westerners basically engage in something equivalent to temporary marriages.  No formal marriage is (usually) contracted, but people cohabitate in conditions in which its nearly acknowledged that it's all just temporary and has at least a partial goal of satisfying urges.  Obviously, a child is permanent, and therefore they're creation is diligently avoided in those arrangements.  

But is is more than that.  The heavy emphasis on work has been shown, in Japan, to cause such a level of fatigue that people are just not interested.

The example of Japan gives us another factor as well, although our own culture also does.

Pornography is a huge Japanese industry. There's something really odd here in that Japan produces a massive amount of pornography of all types, right down to the cartoon level.  That stuff is being used for something.

When the word was first coined over a hundred years ago the world "homosexual" pertained to men whose sexual impulses were self directed.  The word's meaning has changed, rather obviously, over the years, but at that time it was believed that the other meaning, the one it now has, flowed naturally from the first meaning to the practice of the second. That may sound odd, but it's not completely illogical as it is in fact the case that some people become so focused on the first that all conventional impulses are overridden, and for others it leads them into really odd acts.  There would be few (although there are some) who would maintain that this is the case today, but the mental pathway for those assumptions weren't completely illogical.

Part of the reason that they weren't completely illogical is that by and large people's impulses had to be conventionally directed by nature.  Pornography was in printed form up until introduced into film, and in both instances obtaining it had to be done at least somewhat publicly, and often illegally in earlier eras.  We've already dealt with how that changed after the introduction of Playboy magazine, which introduced a really skewed version of femininity,and we've traced that history and its interactions with pharmaceuticals and the sexual revolution already.  Indeed, we have multiple posts on it.  What the Internet has done is to make pornography free. 

And what that has done has turned a lot of men, more or less, into the original definition of homosexuals. Rather than have to deal with woman who is a person, will have moods, problems, get sick, get mad, have expectations, and the like, they just opt for a photographed (or cartoon) harem that doesn't do any of those things and is only interested in sex whenever men are.

And men will be more interested as a rule than women.  And like the old knowledge that we're no longer supposed to acknowledge holds, women are much more moodier, and perhaps simply have much keener and sharper feelings, than men do.  Nearly any married man has had to learn, or at least to learn, how to deal with feelings and reactions that he can't really fathom.  Simply electing to turn on the desktop and opt for photos of a series of massive boobed prostitutes (as that's really what they are) is easier.  At some point, it becomes not only easier, but a habit, and then some cross over into what the original definition of homosexuality was.  Most will not, but all will suffer some decay because of it and indeed nearly our entire society has.  Frustrated men who would have made decent husbands and fathers in earlier eras become loners who really have only the companionship of their workmates in fairly large numbers.  Fr. Longnekcer briefly addresses this in his comment here:
Another contributing factor to the falling birth rate is the twisted approach to sex caused by pornography. An article in London’s Daily Mail explains the research done on the effect porn and masturbation have on male libido. The short version is, guys find porn more stimulating than the real thing and self abuse easier than building a real relationship.
Finally, it can't help be noted that part of the explanation, but not all of it, for the decline in population is pharmacological and that the law of unintended consequences applies to that.  We've addressed that before a couple of times here:

The Chemical News: "New Study Links Birth Control Pill to Brain Differences, but Don't Panic", "Breast Cancer Warning Tied To Hair Dye", "Hair Dyes and Straighteners May Raise Breast Cancer Risk for Black Women". Go ahead and panic.


And here:

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.


Truth be known, if the "pill" were introduced today, it's unlikely that it would be around long.  Lawyers would drive it out of existence through lawsuits if government regulators didn't.  But now we're fully used to it and it's not going away.  But its impacts aren't.

It's been repeatedly more or less maintained that this set of drugs is "safe" and that there's no overall impact on the human biome in any significant way. But we know that some of this isn't true, as the first item noted above notes.  Birth control pills are known to cause disruption in female thinking, alter brains, and cause cancer.  What the do to men isn't known, but the routine assertion that they do nothing is at least questionable.

Something is causing an increase in male sterility.  We don't know what it is. And while it may simply be a reflection of the Strauss-Howe generational theory at work (men become what women want them to be), it might not be.  Scientifically its been shown that younger generations of men are weaker than currently older ones.  And a lot, but certainly not all, of younger men now are much more lighter and, dare we say it, effeminate than their predecessors.  It's currently popular to speak of "Toxic Masculinity", but much of that was simply masculinity and, in an era not all that long ago, what women sought out.

That latter fact may be, as noted, an example of the Strauss Howe factors at work.  But it might also be the influences of chemicals in our environment as well.  And those chemicals may be having long term effects on both men and women in unnatural ways.

Well, does it matter?

It does, therefore, but not for the reasons that people are worried about.  It matters because families are the root of any decent society where as the individual and the individuals whims aren't.  People aren't made to live the lives of rootless economic samurai and they aren't happy doing so.  If we're altering ourselves chemically that's definitely a bad thing.

So once again, we should at least pause and think.
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