No Future

From Mark Steyn:

No future   [Mark Steyn]

The "alarmism" of my book seems to be going mainstream. Newsweek's economics editor Daniel Gross belatedly joins the demographic deathwatch on Japan:

Japan's population peaked in 2004 at about 127.8 million and is projected to fall to 89.9 million by 2055. The ratio of working-age to elderly Japanese fell from 8 to 1 in 1975 to 3.3 to 1 in 2005 and may shrivel to 1.3 to 1 in 2055. "In 2055, people will come to work when they have time off from long-term care," said Kiyoaki Fujiwara, director of economic policy at the Japan Business Federation.

Such a decline is cataclysmic for an indebted country that values infrastructure and personal service. (Who is going to maintain the trains, pay for social benefits, slice sushi at the Tsukiji fish market?) The obvious answers—encourage immigration and a higher birthrate—have proved difficult, even impossible, for this conservative society.

Mr Gross isn't quite there yet. One can be pro- or anti-immigration but, either way, it doesn't solve a baby bust as severe as Japan's. Up north, Leonard Stern writes:

A nation that doesn't replace itself becomes an aging nation, and that's why economists are terrified. Old people no longer generate wealth, yet they require huge amounts of state support in the form of health care, pensions and other programs...

If Canada has never really sounded the alarm about the low fertility rate, it's because we had an antidote — immigration...

Now it turns out that the curative power of immigration was vastly overstated. The sobering revelation arrived last month courtesy of the C.D. Howe Institute, the eminent Canadian think tank.

The C.D. Howe folks crunched the numbers, did the modelling and discovered that the current influx of immigrants — about 0.67 per cent of the resident population — barely makes a dent.

The data show that the only way immigration could offset the declining birth rate is if Canada dismantles border controls and floods the country with well over a half million immigrants a year.

Even then, the government would need to impose rigid "age filters" to ensure that only young people are among the new arrivals.

The transformation of developed societies - either into old folks' homes (like Japan) or semi-Islamized dystopias (like Amsterdam, Brussels, etc) - will lead, in fact, to emigration. A young German or Japanese circa 2040 will have no reason whatsoever to stay in his native land and have most of his income confiscated in a vain attempt to prop up an unsustainable geriatric welfare system. So many will leave. Where will they go? At one time the obvious answer would have been America - but Good King Barack seems determined to saddle us with the same unaffordable entitlements that have scuttled the rest of the west.

For much of the developed world, the "credit crunch", the debt burden, and the rest are not part of a cyclical economic downturn but the first manifestations of an existential crisis.