Number Games
Is the Wests luck about to run out?
Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor
October 9, 2001 10:20 a.m.
n chapter 9 of his book The Birth of the Modern, the historian Paul
Johnson notes the following feature of British life in the early 19th
century:
Half the population were aged 15 or under. There had been, by the
1820s, a revolution in infant mortality of a kind never before
experienced by any society.... The painter William Daniell's friend Mr.
Wilkins, Sr., had 30 children, all living. The great financier Sir Robert
Wigram had 15 sons and 5 daughters. The Rt. Rev. Henry Bathurst,
Bishop of Norwich, was one of 36 children his father had by different
wives. Maria Edgeworth was one of her father's 22 children by four
wives... John Gulley, the prizefighter-turned-gentleman, had 24
children, 12 each by two different wives... A study of 50 [aristocratic]
women shows that they tended to marry at age 21 and have an average
of eight children, the last at age 39. Working-class women were even
more productive, since they were less likely to practice birth control or
deny their husbands.
Scholars of the future, looking back on our age with the long
perspective of historical hindsight, may marvel at the tremendous stroke
of good luck the human race enjoyed in the 19th and 20th centuries. It
so happened that the first nation to conquer infant mortality, and so to
generate the resulting demographic tsunami, was Britain a nation
with a long, strong tradition of law, rights, justice, and liberty. That
tremendous surge of population gave Victorian Britain the manpower,
and the energy, to dominate the world for decades. Other nations
followed with demographic transformations of their own, of course
(America's was swallowed up in settling this huge land), but sometimes
just getting there first counts for everything. We are still living in the
aftermath of that demographic royal flush.
In determining the course of large historical events, hardly anything is
more important than demography. Who's got the people? Who will have
the people a generation from now? Numbers, as the late Enoch Powell
used to say, are of the essence. Thinking about the matter a little
deeper, in fact, it is not so much the numbers as the rate of increase
the "first derivative," for those readers with a little calculus. In sheer
numbers, China in 1820 was way ahead of Britain: around 320m versus
28m. In demographic dynamism, though, there was no comparison:
China was stagnant, Britain surging. This was, as I said, a huge stroke
of luck for the world, or at any rate for those of the world's people who
like an open society under the rule of law. The Pax Britannica had its
problems and its dark spots, there is no denying, but a Pax Sinica
doesn't bear thinking about.
And so to our own time. What does demography tell us about the world
our children and grandchildren will inherit? Will they enjoy another,
similar stroke of good luck? Whose populations are surging right now,
and whose are stagnant? I'm afraid genuinely afraid, speaking as a
doting father that the news is not good.
For a sample of what's in store, take a look at the Middle East, a part of
the world where democracy, liberty, and the rule of law are pretty much
unknown. Back in January 1998, the Center for Strategic and
International Studies published a report with the title Demographics and
the Coming Youth Explosion in the Gulf. If you open the report (you
need that Acrobat thingy, which you can download free from the web)
you will see that it is done like a business proposal: no big blocks of
text, just some colorful graphs and bar charts and a few pages of
bulleted key points. Page 9, for example, has a bar chart showing how
long it takes for a region's population to double at 1998 growth rates.
For the "advanced developed nations" it takes 162 years; for MENA
(i.e. the Middle East plus North Africa) the number is a mere 26 years.
Page 22 has a 3-D bar chart showing anticipated population growth in
some MENA regions and nations over the period 1990-2030. Arab
North Africa is a huge red slab, rising from less than 150m to almost
300m. The Arab Middle East is a lesser slab, but rising faster, almost
tripling across the period. Below that is Iran, impressive considering it's
just one country, coming up over 100m some time in the next decade.
Cruelly, the analysts have added a slab for Israel...except that it isn't a
slab, more like a trifling sliver, barely visible and hardly rising at all. It is
tempting to conclude that everything you need to know about the future
course of events in the Middle East is right there on page 22 of the
CSIS report though, of course, history is never quite as neat as that.
One of the more surprising features of the report is that it declares the
"conservative" Muslim states of the Islamic heartland to be the ones for
which the prognosis is most dire. "Oman is a demographic nightmare
case... Saudi Arabia faces growing problems... Oil wealth cannot offset
a steady drop in per capita income... Nearly 40 percent of the
population is under 14 [sound familiar?]... Education is breaking down
and often irrelevant... Direct and disguised unemployment of youth
averages 25 to 40 percent, with little improvement in sight..."
Page 53 is a series of bullet points headed: "Destroying the Future:
Other Problems Affecting Youth in the Middle East." Some of the points:
· Lack of effort to educate population in need for family planning; official
denial of the seriousness of the problem.
· Failure to perceive that the Middle East must train its youth to be
globally competitive with youth in lead developing countries such as
those in East Asia.
· Shift to Islamic education in some states without regard to lack of
relevance to real-world economic needs.
· Systematic lack of economic rewards for productivity and efficiency...
You get the picture: it shows a huge and fast-swelling pool of young
people with no marketable skills, no rational economy to practice them
in even if they had them, and their heads full of visions of a worldwide
Islamic nation vanquishing the infidel. Meanwhile, in the nations of the
West, populations are static, or in some cases (notably Italy and
Russia) actually declining.
Predicting the future is a fool's game, of course. All sorts of unknown
quantities are involved: sudden technological breakthroughs,
unexpected plagues or natural disasters, the introduction of energizing
messianic faiths or ideologies (who, in 600 A.D., could have foreseen
the rise of Islam?) Inasmuch as there are any reliable predictors at all,
though, demography supplies by far the best we have. You count the
current generation, look at its age structure and procreative habits, and
make reasonable assumptions. If the number of 5-year-olds is currently
N, then ten years from now the number of 15-year-olds will be pretty
much N, too, barring catastrophes. There are very few things about the
future that can be said with such a high probability of being true. It's just
basic math.
This present, er, engagement with the world of Islam will, I am sure, end
with a victory for the West over those who wish us harm. Looking past
it, though, into the middle years of this new century, it's hard to avoid
the impression that, demographically speaking, the West's luck has
pretty much run out. Numbers are of the essence.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sun Sep 22 2002 - 05:06:15 MDT