Mark Steyn paints a very pessimistic picture of the developed world’s future in his recent article, “It’s the Demography, Stupid.” Steyn points out that the replacement fertility rate is an average of 2.1 live births per woman. The United States’ birth rate is practically equal to this replacement value at about 2.08 live births per woman.
I’m doing my part.
The population of most of the rest of the developed world is not holding up as well. Japan’s birth rate is 1.39. The European average is very close at about 1.40. This means that both Japan and Europe are losing about a third of their population every generation.
Steyn points out that this is a problem because the typical modern democracy tends to be a welfare state. The only demographic that’s growing – old people – depend on the diminishing young population to pay for their pensions, medicine, and health care.
So Europe has found that it must open its gates to immigration. The problem, for anyone who’s watched what’s going on in France, is that some of these immigrants don’t share a belief in “liberal pluralist democracy.”
I would guess that Japan, with it’s comparably low birthrate, will fare much better in the coming years than Europe. Japan has a stronger tradition of accepting personal sacrifice for the sake of the greater good than socialized Europe. If the population is told that certain welfare programs will have to be cut back, they are likely to accept this quicker and respond faster than Europe.
Also, there’s the issue of robots. The Economist had an interesting article late last month about how the Japanese are very accepting of robots.
[T]he consensus among Japanese is that visions of a future in which immigrant workers live harmoniously and unobtrusively in Japan are pure fancy. Making humanoid robots is clearly the simple and practical way to go…
In western popular culture, robots are often a threat, either because they are manipulated by sinister forces or because something goes horribly wrong with them. By contrast, most Japanese view robots as friendly and benign.
As robots and other AI’s become smarter and more capable every year, this cultural acceptance of robots will become more and more important to Japan. Perhaps Europe will see Japan’s success and adopt robots as well.
How will this affect the United States? We don’t have the same depopulation problem that Europe and Japan have, but we do have the Western distrust for robots. So we don’t need them like Europe or want them like Japan. This probably means we’ll be late adopters, and that could become a major problem for our country. We might learn to upgrade humans to compete with super-efficient robots, but robots will be easier to upgrade or replace as new technology becomes available.
Time will tell.