Birth rates are falling below replacement levels all over the world. --Kevin Dolan of Natalism.
Find Tom Woods' show notes here.
So we are really talking about a no babies crisis, a lack of babies in huge portions of the world, and I think we've all kind of had a sense that this was a problem because, of course, we've heard things about social security becoming a problem, Medicare becoming a problem, that there are going to be huge expenses and bills coming due. But the reason these programs are not sustainable is not just that they're going to be big bills, it's that they're going to be fewer people to pay the bills. That's the real issue. I realize that the numbers are different in different parts of the world, but try to give us a sense of the scope of the problem, because I think qualitatively people understand maybe there's been some kind of demographic shift in terms of births but they may not know exactly the full scope of what we're looking at here.
DOLAN. Yeah, I just . . . in terms of the raw numbers and the consequences, it's going to have on demographics, Korea right now has a 0.78 total fertility rate, meaning that under current conditions, if those conditions were to hold throughout a woman's lifetime, the number of kids that she would end up having is 0.78, so less than one child per woman. And the way that cashes out from a generational perspective is that for every 100 living Koreans, there will be 6 great-grandchildren, which is . . . I mean, that's not comparable to the smallpox epidemics in the New World; it's not comparable to the black death; it's the most dramatic and drastic population collapse maybe in human history, and it's going to happen over three generations. That's Korea.
Japan is a little bit ahead of them I think their fertility rate is like 1 point something it's very very low and so that means maybe 9 or 10 great-grandchildren per 100 Japanese. Europe and the U.S. are very similar in terms of their native-born population they are helped economically and in terms of the statistics by migration, so we are all in this situation. It's worldwide, and in the west it's the most mature, the most intense at this moment, but if you look at the drift of fertility rates across the world, including Africa, including Latin America, including India, and Pakistan, all these places that we think of as like very, very populous very fertile, all of their TFRs, their fertility rates, are dropping like a rock to the point that by 2030 the only region of the world that will have positive population growth on earth is sub-Saharan Africa. And by the end of this century they will have fallen below replacement for fertility rate as well.
So you can look at it from the cultural and personal perspective it's just millions and millions of people who will be deprived of this very fundamental human experience. But from an economic perspective, the consequences are going to be absolutely devastating. I mean you look at Detroit and what essentially happened to Detroit, you can talk about the reasons why everybody abandoned Detroit, that's a broader sort of policy conversation, but like ultimately the way Detroit collapsed was the tax base abandoned it. The tax base left and so you have just, tens of thousands of vacant homes that had been abandoned. You had people scattered across this sort of wasteland. And like abandoned homes don't keep; they fall apart, they get mold, and they get stripped for the copper and the aluminum. And so even the people who chose to stay the value of their homes collapsed partly because they were surrounded by urban and suburban blight but also because all of our homes and our 401ks and social security, and Medicare, all of the models that give us a sense of like what your home is worth, what your 401k is worth, those are all predicated on reliable economic growth, including population growth. There's only two ways an economy can grow right you can get more efficient more productive for worker or you can get more workers and currently we're in a situation where productivity per worker is growing it's sort of leveling off tapering stagnating but the number of workers about to drop like a rock and so if these circumstances continue if this demographic collapse transpires away it looks like it's going to you will not be able to count on reliable economic growth anywhere in the western world which means that the way people invest their money sort of what the currency does from an inflationary deflationary perspective all of these assumptions will be up ended and as far as I can tell and from the people that I've talked to who look at these things none of that is priced in none of that is being accounted for by policy leaders by investment leaders Mike is just not no one has taken a serious look at this and it's incredibly and I would say it's the biggest problem of our time of the next century.
