Ultimately, it comes down to our view of humanity. We must, Austin Williams has suggested, decide whether humanity represents “the biggest problem on the planet” or the “creators of a better future.” We still have the ability to raise living standards, encourage economic growth, and restore housing affordability and upward mobility, all of which are critical to family formation. It’s really a question of whether we build a sustainable economic and social environment or regress to the demographic and economic torpor of the Dark Ages.
Joel Kotkin
The bright and productive populations of Europe, East Asia, and the Anglosphere are shrinking. The dull and indolent populations of sub Saharan Africa and other tribal regions are growing. Humans need their best minds to solve the problems of the future — but the best minds are not reproducing. They are wallowing in a groupthink delusion and are dying off. What kind of future will be left for the tribal peoples who look to inherit the Earth?
As labor forces decline in the high-income countries, the developing world’s “youth bulge” is expected to peak in this decade. For these workers, the demographic slowdown in high-income economies could prove devastating. The very things places like sub-Saharan Africa need—new energy sources, growing export markets, and capital—will not be easy to procure from stagnant economies concerned largely with satisfying their pensioners. The key potential markets for Africa’s exports, besides some rare metals, will be shrinking while Western countries automate and could impose carbon taxes on imports. __ Joel Kotkin in Quillette “The Unexpected Future”
Russia is in the middle of its own demographic collapse, losing about 1 million in population per year. This population crisis led Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, with the goal of making Ukraine’s 45 million people into “instant Russians.” Putin’s war of conquest and re-population is not going as he had planned.
China’s working population is in decline. China is slowly sinking under the weight of its old people, and China has no meaningful retirement system or social safety net. But of more immediate concern is that the one thing that has been supporting Chinese economic growth since 2008 — the building and real estate boom — is crashing, leading to growing social unrest.
“The real estate industry in China is in a vicious cycle—defaults have severely dampened the confidence of investors and home buyers, resulting in limited external funding and plummeting sales,” Katherine Jiang, a Hong Kong-based financial analyst, told The Epoch Times.
“Falling sales drive down developers’ operating cash flows and dent the market sentiment, jeopardizing property developers’ ability to access the debt and banking market and significantly affecting their financing cash flow. Home buyers would also delay their purchase and opt for a wait-and-see approach. As a result, property sales will fall further, and [property] prices will also drop.”
China’s Main Economic Prop is Failing
We know what happens when the Chinese people lose confidence in their government. It has happened countless times throughout history.
“The empire long united must divide, long divided must unite; this is how it has always been.”
― Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Vol. 1 of 2 (Source)
Meanwhile in the countries that actually created the modern world, a groupthink malady has taken over:
In the advanced countries in North America, Europe, Australia/NZ, etc., a groupthink delusion has settled in like a mind-fog over universities, governments, large media conglomerates, and popular culture. The new elites and overlords are making plans to downsize populations, economies, energy production and to eliminate any possibility of a coming resurgence in favor of an expansive and abundant human future. Of course this has been the plan of these people since the 1960’s when the overpopulation theme was dominant.
As the collective west attempts to, using their words, “manage the transition,” they do not have mechanisms to control an outcome of this magnitude. It is simply too big a situation to manage. Where the rubber meets the road, the think-tanks and high-minded climate change ideologues do not have the ability to manage a transition and still meet the needs of people. Beyond the esoteric thinking, there are real consequences from these actions.
Many people have discussed the potential for longer-term food shortages and recently, shorter-term winter heating. However, beyond that, the downstream geopolitical consequences are seemingly being ignored. Instead, what we see is an effort to keep pretending the climate change ends will justify the means (disruption of energy production).
In this connected world, when the western nations stop buying things, we find ourselves domestically with economic trouble. Businesses fail, unemployment rises, financial stress ripples throughout the economy, dependency on government subsidy increases and real pain is felt. However, beyond the domestic issues the supplier nations run into even bigger problems.
Unemployment in Malaysia, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and even China, creates an entirely different set of regional stability issues on a geopolitical level.
There is no precedent for this. Never before in the history of industrialized nations has any government intentionally tried to lower its economic activity. It has never been done with intent before because within the contraction nations get more poor, people suffer.
ZeroHedge from The Last Refuge
Demographics Sets the Stage, Various Disasters Ensue
It is important to realize that the doom that gets you will not be demographics. It will be something else that was made possible by the demographic implosion that shook the ground from beneath your feet, somewhat unexpectedly.
When elites are tangled up in ideology at the expense of reality, bad things are likely to happen.
In Russia, a corrupt Putin and his pals are caught up in the “Great Russian Empire” delusion which they cannot let go of. Unable to accept the reality that Russia is just a mid-level economy based upon its primary role as an oil/gas producer and not a superpower, Putin felt compelled to invade Ukraine in order to maintain his delusions.
In China, a megalomaniacal Xi is convinced that it is his destiny to lead China to its rightful place as the global hegemon. But Xi did not see that the props were falling out from under China’s rise to economic and political dominance. If Xi makes the mistake of invading Taiwan, it will be out of Xi’s misguided sense of “manifest destiny.” But it will be the failing demographics of China that sets the stage for his failure.
In Europe, a delusional commitment to the ideology of apocalyptic climate change led countries like Germany to abandon workable forms of electric power and heat, in favor of unworkable unreliable intermittent forms of junk energy, such as wind and solar. Coal may be dirty, but it works! And that is why even an idiotic green-tinged government such as Germany’s can be forced to revert to coal, when winter is coming. Remember, if not for demographic implosion, Germany would have a lot more bright people who would not so easily have fallen for the con-game of greens and wokesters.
In North America, the woke delusion is running rampant over universities, media sources, governments, popular culture, and a neighborhood near you. Due to the fact that intelligent women are not having babies anymore, the average IQ of North America’s youth is falling. And when these less bright youth go to university, they are being taught by radical left professors who have signed on to the plan to degrade populations, degrade education, degrade culture, degrade energy, degrade media, and degrade government at all levels. Thanks to demographic collapse, it becomes a lot easier to indoctrinate kids into crap ideology.
Australia/NZ are just microcosms of what is happening in North America, UK, and Europe.
We are also experiencing something of a kulturkampf, in which singleness increasingly prevails as sex roles shift from the 1950s model of the single earner to more flexible and less well-defined archetypes. Since 1960, the percentage of single person households in the United States living alone has grown from 13 percent to 27 percent (2019). In the European Union (post-Brexit), 35 percent of households consist of a single person, while in Finland they constitute 45 percent of households.
In rapidly urbanizing China, traditionally a bastion of familialism, there are now 200 million unmarried adults, including 58 million single people between 20 and 40 years of age. The proportion of people living alone in China, once a virtually unimaginable situation, has risen to 15 percent. China’s young men are so disconnected socially that the Communist Party and some private firms are teaching them how to “act masculine.”
In Japan, the harbinger of modern Asian demographics, single-person households are expected to reach 40 percent by 2040. Roughly a third of men enter their 30s as virgins, and a quarter of men are not married at 50. This sex recession even affects places like Hong Kong’s famous Wan Chai “red light” district, which is now being remade into an upscale hipster area as the sex trade plummets.
Unexpected Future
If the future belongs to those who reproduce — and if the main reproducers are descendants of less intelligent evolutionary populations — we are not likely to see much of the “Gee Whiz!” future that is being predicted by the most enthusiastic futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, or even by somewhat less enthusiastic futurists such as Yuval Noah Harari.
In fact, if we are stuck with the future of a few competent and intelligent people who are swamped beneath the large numbers of unintelligent and incompetent people, the best we may achieve — if we are lucky enough to avoid a large scale nuclear war — is a sea of deep and broad stupidity dotted with small islands of competence. That is why I created both the Society for Creative Apocalyptology and the Dangerous Child Institutes. The goal is to build islands of competence that are capable of communicating and working together in emergencies.
Sometimes the tsunamis of stupidity, incompetence, and ideological delusion are too overpowering to oppose directly. Sometimes, regretfully, they must be allowed to sweep over the landscape until they subside naturally, leaving the high ground of islands of competency to begin the long process of recovering a once brilliant human future.
The leftist nightmare sweeping over many western nations is meant to be a death blow to the rational world view. But the top-down authoritarian leftist dream is diametrically opposed to human nature, which is recapitulated with every new human birth. The left can only win by bringing the human race to extinction — that is their ultimate goal. Anything less will eventually be overthrown by a human nature that the left cannot overcome.
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