St. Maximos' Hut

Two very different takes on population growth and the lack thereof.

At WSJ.com, Mark Steyn argues that low birthrates aren't a good thing and pins some of the blame on "post-Christian hyperrationalism":

The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion. The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths--or, at any rate, virtues--and that's why they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.

He concludes:

"What do you leave behind?" asked Tony Blair. There will only be very few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the midpoint of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings? Or will the dying European races understand that the only legacy that matters is whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? It's the demography, stupid. And, if they can't muster the will to change course, then "What do you leave behind?" is the only question that matters.

On the other side of the divide is Victor Mallet at the Financial Times, who thinks declining populations in Japan aren't a bad thing at all:

even when the turning point arrives, a stable or declining population ought to be seen as a welcome change - not merely as a harbinger of temporary fiscal crisis - for individual countries and for the world. You do not have to be a Malthusian worried by what the much-reviled demographer called "the perpetual struggle for room and food" to see that our planet is already overcrowded and its natural resources under intense strain.

The overcrowded bit seems wrong - there's loads of room. Whether there is enough of other stuff is mostly a matter of getting the price right - as demand rises for, say, water, so will the price and new investment will appear to satisfy the demand. (We don't need more water, we just need more clean water in particular places at particular times).

One of the important things about humanity is that people are, as the late Julian Simon termed it, the ultimate resource. We're pretty remarkable creatures (God's image and so on) and we're pretty resourceful. I think He meant it when he said "Be fruitful and multiply."