Meet the Racists Who *Love* to Talk About Demographics
Come join JVL’s eternal torment.
On the Secret pod today, Will Saletan sat in for Sarah and we had a high-level conversation about the underlying challenge to liberalism. Is it that people are misguided? Or wicked? Are the problems we’re seeing inherent in democracy, but in the past they have been prevented by strong institutions and civil society?
It’s a pretty good show! You can listen/watch it here.
Also: The final jobs report of the 2024 election cycle is out, and guess what—the Biden-Harris economy added another 254,000 jobs, unemployment is at 4.1 percent, wages are up 4 percent, and inflation is at 2.5 percent.
This seems like a big deal?
One more thing: After a month of trying to find someone in Springfield, Ohio, illegally killing cats, dogs, and/or geese, we finally hit pay dirt.
A 64-year-old white man in Springfield, Ohio, was accused of illegally hunting geese at a golf course pond as former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, were spreading racist lies that Haitian immigrants in the area were eating geese and people’s pets.
Brian Comer was charged with a misdemeanor in connection with the Sept. 10 incident. According to an arrest affidavit obtained by HuffPost, a golfer at Rocky Lakes Golf Course in Springfield reported seeing a Canada goose floating in a pond and Comer using a shotgun to shoot another bird.
Oh. So it was an old white guy who killed a goose. Not a Haitian.
I’m sure that the Great and Good American people will take this news to heart every bit as much as the jobs report and real-wage growth numbers.
1. JDos
My friend Holly Berkley Fletcher wrote a funny post-VP debate essay, the conceit of which was: “I am JD Vance's kindly identical twin and I baked America some cookies.”
Sample awesome:
Good evening, and just to be transparent here, yes, your eyes do deceive you. While I have JD Vance’s ice-blue eyes and follicly-enhanced jawline, it is actually I, Ray D’Ance, JD’s identical twin brother. I took a day off from teaching baby goat-assisted yoga to beautiful special needs preschool children to fill in for JD while he’s summoning a mob to throw uppity women off a bridge to see if they will float.
But let’s not worry about JD right now. For tonight, I would just ask that you look deeply into my hypnotic eyes, rimmed by lashes so thick I don’t even need eyeliner, and notice how concerned my face looks and how I am talking very calmly yet quickly so that it sounds like I am a very reasonable, decent person.
The thing about the JD Vance at the debate is that it wasn’t like he was showing a different side of himself. It was like he was an alien wearing a JD Vance skinsuit. Or a previously unknown identical twin.
Anyway, the real Vance showed up again yesterday to peevishly tell America that yes, Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Duh.
You’ve got to watch the video. He doesn’t even try to hide the extent to which he hates talking to this dude. “I really feel bad for you, man,” he intones in the manner of someone trying to speak Twitter in meatspace.
Anyway, Ray D’Ance is back in the gimp box and JD Vance has returned. Nature has healed itself.
2. Population Bombs
Two pieces of news. The first is that Russia is looking to raise its fertility rate because Vladimir Putin wants to Make the Motherland Great Again or something.
The second is from Elon Musk, who is concerned about declining global fertility rates.
There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s go in order.
This is not the first time Russia has tried to raise its fertility rate. In the middle of WWII, Comrade Stalin created the Order of Maternal Glory. The idea was to give medals to women who had lots of kids. It didn’t work. Russian fertility rates were embarking on a long, slow decline from which they would never recover.
Putin’s latest attempts to goose baby-making aren’t going to work, either. Probably.1
Then there’s Elon Musk’s retweet of Marko Jukic, in which Musk claims that low fertility rates will “lead to mass extinction of entire nations!”
That is not how fertility rates work.
For new readers, let me set the table:
Sub-replacement fertility rates present challenges for societies.
These challenges are serious enough that I wrote an entire book on the subject.
The challenges do not include the mass extinction of entire nations.
Here is the problem with sub-replacement fertility rates: If a country’s total fertility rate (TFR) is below 2.1 for a sustained period, the average age of the population increases.
As populations age, the costs to support old people balloon while the tax base used to pay for their supports shrinks. (There are other problems, too.2)
This may not sound like a big deal, but it is. These are the kinds of tectonic shifts that create stress fractures in society. And if it was just America, or just France, or just Japan experiencing them, we’d be fine. But the challenge of global fertility decline is that nearly every nation will see such fractures at roughly the same time. Which is likely to destabilize the global order.3
Here is what does not happen: There is no mass extinction. Children of Men is not a documentary.
When you get under the hood of TFR numbers, you find that in every society there are some subgroups who have above-replacement fertility rates. In America, for instance, those subgroups include people who attend religious services weekly.4
Every country’s fertility picture is unique, but the point is: Some cohort is going to have a TFR over 2.1, and over time, they inherit the earth become the dominant population group.
There is no apocalypse.
One of the reasons Elon grinds my gears is that when guys like him make up fantasy problems about demographics, it makes it harder to get society to take the real problems seriously.
Actually, that’s not right. Musk is talking about a real problem that he takes very seriously. It’s just that this is a “problem” he doesn’t want to say all the way out loud.
Remember that Musk was retweeting Marko Jukic. Who is Mark Jukic?
Well strap in. Because this story is about to go forking turbo.