Demographic Winter Is Coming

One more thing to worry about.

Chrildren walk under fluttering carp streamers at a free market in a park in Tokyo, 01 May 2005, as part of an annual event for Japan's national holiday, Children's Day, 05 May. 'Koinobori' (carp streamers) for Children's Day reflect the parents' wishes for boys to grow up as strong as the carp. (Photo credit: KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP via Getty Images)

Had some trouble settling on a topic today.

There’s the Michael Cohen testimony, which is depressing because Cohen is basically Sammy Gravano. No good guys in that story. And worse: Trump is obviously guilty. No one is even pretending he’s not.

There’s the NYT poll, which is dark af. Yesterday A.B. and I talked about it on our show. You can’s just dismiss these numbers. Not great.

I’m moving so deep into bear territory that later this week I’m going to write up a best-case scenario for what a second Trump term will look like. You guys are going to love that one. 🙄

And then there’s Ukraine. I want you to consider the following: If Donald Trump wins, then Vladimir Putin will have executed one of the greatest geostrategic coups of the last century. He will have pushed all of his chips into the center of the table and, through a combination of soft and hard power, defeated and broken NATO purely because he understood the character of the American voter better than anyone in the West.

That won’t be a fun newsletter, either.

So instead I settled on writing about demographics. This stuff is dark, too. But it’s like writing about the heat death of the universe: It’s sad and depressing, but also far enough removed that most people won’t have to worry about it themselves. Enjoy?

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1. Children of Men

Here’s the Wall Street Journal, yesterday:

This is an excellent piece but my one quibble is that none of this is “sudden.” Eleven years ago I wrote a book about demographics called What to Expect When No One’s Expecting. The subject was the decline in fertility rates across the world and the problems it would cause and even then I was plowing soil that others had been working since the 1970s.

Let me give you the shortest of possible version of the fertility story:

• Fertility rates began falling in the late 1960s, first in Europe, Asia, and North America.

• That pattern has been replicated in nearly every country. The global average is now below replacement level.

• If this trend persists, eventually global population numbers will contract.

• The problem with population contraction is not the total number of people, but rather the age structure created by contracting populations.

• Simply put: When fertility rates are below replacement and population begins to shrink, societies wind up with more old people than young people. Which is a recipe for economic stagnation, geopolitical destabilization, and humanitarian tragedy.

None of this is new. Demographers have been studying declining fertility rates for half a century and academics and policymakers across the globe—from Sweden to Singapore, from Russia to Japan, from France to China—have been worried about it for two generations. The conclusion is as close to universal as it gets: declining fertility rates present a danger to stable societies.

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People get caught up in the absolute numbers. Every time I write about demographics, someone in the comments says some version of:

What? You want the earth’s population to increase to infinity? We’re destroying the planet!

My answer is always the same: No, I do not want global population to increase asymptotically. But it would be great if global population existed at a steady-state. Because declining population creates a number of challenges for society.

Most of those challenges stem from the age structure of the population. Here’s what the age structure looks like for a rapid-growth population, a conventional growth population, a steady-state population, and a declining population:

Now let me show you the age structure of Japan, right now:

Tell me how that under-30 group is supposed to financially support an over-65 group that’s close to double its size?

That’s the problem.¹ Industrialized nations have created social safety nets to provide for older citizens as they age out of the workforce. Those social safety nets are not sustainable in a sub-replacement environment.²

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If fertility were only declining in a few wealthy countries, it would be okay. If it was just the United States, Japan, Sweden, and France, we’d muddle through.

The impacted countries would increase taxes on workers and shave benefits for retirees. They’d bring in more immigrants to patch over the demographic hole. There’d be some hardship and some social strain, but mostly everything would be fine.

What has freaked out demographers for fifty years is that the phenomenon of declining fertility is hitting more or less everywhere and at basically the same time.

Which means that:

• Nearly all countries will experience the strain of an inverted age profile; and

• Immigration will not be available as a Band-Aid for everyone.

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But the story gets worse.

It is one thing for Japan and the United States to encounter a demographic crisis because they are wealthy, liberal societies.

What happens when China hits its crisis? China is still a poor country and it is governed by an illiberal autocracy. Crises tend to destabilize societies and a destabilized China is not going to be a lot of fun for anyone.

Not to mention the humanitarian aspect: In America we can raise taxes and means-test Social Security. We can form a blue-ribbon commission to figure things out.

In China, they might send 300 million old people into the countryside to die. That is a policy choice that will be available to the ruling regime.

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There’s one more problem: Throughout the whole of recorded history, we have seen many examples of governments succeeding in suppressing fertility. Both China and India did this within living memory.

But no society has demonstrated the ability to intentionally raise fertility rates over the long term.

Meaning: There may not be a policy fix for this problem.

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We’re in relatively good shape here in America. We’ve got robust immigration from Central and South America to make up for our fertility declines. (At least for the moment.) And we’re a rich country. It’s always better to be rich than poor.

But we’re also the hegemon in a global economic order that relies on stability.

And over the long term, stability ain’t in the cards.

That’s why, all things being equal, it would be good if the American government pursued family-friendly policies designed to help people achieve their fertility goals.

But that ain’t in the cards, either: Right now we’re barely holding our democracy together.³

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Come ride with us. You won’t be sorry.

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2. It’s Always the Ones You Most Expect

Two items from social media.

First: We have a MAGA Trump-lover from Florida who discovered, to his horror, that he’s not actually a citizen and has been fraudulently voting for his entire life.

Outside Jimmy Klass’s mobile home in Clearwater, symbols of American pride hang not just front and center but also on the side and back of his home. America is, after all, the only home this 66-year-old has ever known.

“I moved to the US in 1959. I’ve been here for 64 years,” he recently told us.

But after more than half a century in the U.S., where he’s lived, worked, gone to school, got married, had kids, paid his taxes, and even voted, Klass said in 2020 he discovered he’s not a U.S. citizen.

“I just was, like, blindsided,” he said about the revelation.

Klass said it all came to light after he applied for the Social Security retirement benefits he had paid into his entire working life.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said. “One month, they told me I should expect my first check on the second Wednesday of 2020. But instead, I get a letter stating that I haven’t proven to them that I’m here legally,” he said.

I’m not here to dunk on Mr. Klass. I have a lot of sympathy for him, actually. The bureaucracy is so massive and incomprehensible that it’s easy to see how a mixup like this could happen—especially from a time when records were kept on paper. The entire situation stinks and I hope the government can make it right.

When I look at a guy like Jimmy Klass I think, “There but by the grace of God.”

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Second: Here’s Trump golden boy Johnny McEntee who made himself a video to entertain the internet. It’s about how he likes to keep a stack of fake money in his car so that whenever he encounters a homeless person, he can pawn the fake dollars off on them.

Ha ha. Isn’t that a riot? The rich guy did a funny by making the homeless people think they might have $5 to get a sandwich but the joke’s on them.

It gets worse.

McEntee then explains that it’s his hope that when the homeless people try to use the counterfeit money, they’ll get arrested. He explains that this is his way of “helping clean up the community.”

This might be the most vile thing I’ve seen during the metastasis of Trumpism.

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The proper response to suffering is empathy.

Whether you’re looking at a Palestinian child’s death, or a homeless man in Miami, or Trump supporter who suddenly finds out that he’s a man without a country, we should not be able to look at suffering without feeling empathy. Without a sense that there by the grace of God go all of us.

You, me, Jimmy Klass, Johnny McEntee—we are all blessed to live in a country that is not an active war zone. And even so, we are all one diagnosis, or one bad day, away from catastrophe. You slip down the stairs. You fuck up at work. You feel a lump in your abdomen. You get in a car crash. After that? Maybe things work out.

Or maybe they don’t and you’re the one on the side of the road asking for help.

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I don’t want to walk too far down this road but I’ll say this: One of the marks of fascism—real-deal, capital-F fascism—is the propensity to view the less fortunate not as fellow sufferers in the journey of life, but as Untermenschen. Vermin to be removed. Or, as Johnny McEntee might put it, cleansed.

This is what America is in the process of choosing. And we’re not being hoodwinked. None of this stuff is being hidden behind a façade of civility and normalcy. This cruelty is the selling point.

I know I’m not saying anything we haven’t said a hundred times. But by God, it’s awful.

One last thing: George Floyd encountered Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020 because someone gave him a fake $20 bill.

I doubt this fact would make Johnny McEntee do anything but laugh.

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3. Colleen Hoover

Another great piece from Texas Monthly:

Her books have sold more than 50 million copies globally, and some have been translated into 45 languages. Of the 24 titles she has published in the past twelve years, 17 have been New York Times best-sellers. In 2022 alone she sold 14.3 million copies, as tracked by Circana BookScan. . . .

Hoover’s fans, who call her CoHo and refer to themselves as CoHorts, have catapulted the 44-year-old writer from a job in social work in East Texas to an echelon of genre-fiction success enjoyed by very few—a lofty plane populated by Dan Brown, of The Da Vinci Code; and E L James, of Fifty Shades of Grey. She is likely to find an even broader audience this summer, when a film adaptation of It Ends with Us starring Blake Lively is released on August 9. . . .

She moved into this house in April 2023, she says, and she has not written a single word since before then. I gawp at her: she has produced two books a year since she started publishing in 2012, and I had assumed she worked with machinelike regularity, probably writing 1,500 words a day like Stephen King.

“I read about these writers who have a routine, and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, why can’t I be that person?’ ” she says. Instead, she waits to be inspired and then slogs through the first 20,000 words of the story, writing and rewriting the opening chapters until she gets into a groove. “That’s when I have to have complete solitude. I will lock myself up in a hotel room. I just will hole myself up for weeks at a time. I can’t have anything on my schedule, anything that gets in the way of my creativity.”

But she tells me she hasn’t experienced a bout like that in about a year and a half. I ask whether this time off was a decision—whether, after publishing so many titles in such a compressed period, she chose to pause to avoid burnout. No, she says. She has been ritually telling her editors she’ll get them something “in three months.” She is egregiously behind on every deadline. Her editors are being kind about the delays, but Hoover is terrified.

Read the whole thing.

1. There are other problems—lots of them. Again, I wrote a whole book on this. But we’re going to focus on social safety nets today.

2. You might even say that the “problem” is that we have made big gains in fighting the death rate even as the birth rate declined.

3. If you wanted to get really dark you’d say that one silver lining in America moving toward illiberal democracy is that soft authoritarians often care quite a lot about raising fertility rates. And it’s true that lots of people in the Christian nationalist space are into demographics and natalism.

But America is already so racially and ethnically diverse that any pro-natalist policies would necessarily benefit black and brown people, along with white Christians. And I suspect that a Trumpist regime would find that untenable.