The problem with not having kids

I don’t think of the globe as a single zip code. It’s striking that, no matter how many British women think globally and sterilize locally, the population of the United Kingdom keeps rising: those London ladies assume they’re saving the planet for Al Gore’s polar bears, and the spotted owl, and the three-toed tree sloth, and the green-cheeked parrot. In fact, they’re saving it for the cultures whose womenfolk don’t get themselves sterilized. Forty per cent of children in London primary schools now speak a language other than English at home. The Muslim population of the United Kingdom is growing 10 times faster than the rest of the population. No matter how frantically the ecochondriacs tie their tubes, their country grows ever more crowded. This is a story not of “overpopulation,” but of population transformation.

I said in my book (don’t worry, I’m not going to plug the title—I don’t want a new “human rights” complaint until at least my third week back) that Europe’s demographically shrivelled liberal progressives had in effect adopted the same strategy as the 19th-century Shakers, who were forbidden to reproduce and so could increase their numbers only by conversion. Result: there aren’t a lot of Shakers around today. At the time, it was just the usual cheap metaphorical crack. But with these tube-tied earth-mothers it’s literally true.

Which brings us back to the economy. Many of the questions re the Jonestown phase of Western civilization are long-term and complex and require addressing socio-cultural issues from which multiculti man instinctively recoils. So be it. But the economy confronts us with the contradictions here and now. The basic assumption behind the multi-trillion-dollar deficits in the U.S. is that there will be a permanently growing population to cover it, eventually. Pace Mr. Kotler, Americans still have kids and grandkids to stick it to. Europeans don’t. Yet Big Government presupposes population growth—that there will be a new generation of workers to keep France’s fiftysomething retirees in the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed.

And, in a more basic sense, why did the developed world get clobbered by “toxic assets” in the first place? Well, if you lend beyond the capacity of your economic growth, sooner or later it catches up with you. As the old joke has it, if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem. But what happens if thousands of banks are owed bazillions of dollars and there’s no one to shovel the problem on to? Banking is really a kind of demographic shorthand—a means by which old people with capital can lend to young people with energy and ideas. It’s no coincidence that in Japan— the oldest society on earth—the banking sector nosedived just as the demographics headed irreversibly south. Who do you lend to in Germany? Or Scotland? Traditional risk assessment is simply not possible in such circumstances. And what of your “assets”? The value of commercial real estate in, say, Madrid or Hamburg or Milan also presupposed a traditional growth rate that cannot apply when you have a fertility rate of 1.2.

The U.S. and other governments are now trying to re-inflate the global “credit bubble.” I don’t think it can be done. The crisis we face is not “sustainable growth” but sustainable lack of growth. And no society in history has ever pulled that off.