Fertility, Faith, and the Decline of Islam: Strategic Implications
The liberal establishment has finally taken note of the elephant in the Muslim parlor, namely the closing of the Muslim womb. A year after the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt reported the precipitous fall in Muslim fertility in a widely commented paper, and seven years after I reported the trend and its strategic implications at Asia Times, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reports wide-eyed on Eberstadt’s findings:
The Arab world may be experiencing a youth bulge now, fueling popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. But as Eberstadt notes, what’s ahead over the next generation will probably be declines in the number of working-age adults and rapidly aging populations. The Arab countries are now struggling with what Eberstadt calls their “youthquake.” But the coming dilemma, he notes, is “how these societies will meet the needs of their graying populations on relatively low income levels.”
Why does Ignatius suddenly find this important? Perhaps the frustration of the establishment’s hopes for the Arab world in the form of state failure in Syria and Egypt and Libya (and perhaps also Tunisia) has provoked an interest in deeper causes. Both the liberal establishment as well as the Republican mainstream embraced the Arab Spring, but now recoil in horror from the consequences.
The evidence has been there for years in the United Nations database. In September 2006 I warned that the Muslim world was heading towards a demographic catastrophe.
By 2050, elderly dependents will comprise nearly a third of the population of some Muslim nations, notably Iran — converging on America’s dependency ratio at mid-century. But it is one thing to face such a problem with America’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $40,000, and quite another to face it with Iran’s per capita GDP of $7,000 — especially given that Iran will stop exporting oil before the population crisis hits. The industrial nations face the prospective failure of their pension systems. But what will happen to countries that have no pension system, where traditional society assumes the care of the aged and infirm? In these cases it is traditional society that will break down, horribly and irretrievably so.
My 2011 book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too) assembled evidence that the decline of Islam as a religion explained collapsing fertility, just as the decline of Catholicism explained collapsing fertility in lands once blessed by large families — Spain, Italy, Poland, Ireland, and Quebec. Iran’s total fertility rate plunged to an estimated 1.6% in 2010, barely above Europe’s rate of 1.5 children per female. In 1979, when the Islamists took power in Iran, the average woman bore seven children. Nothing like this sudden snapping shut of the national womb has ever happened before in all of history. And the rest of the Muslim world is headed in the same direction.
“Something really big is under way — and practically no one has noticed it, even in the Arab world,” Ignatius quotes an e-mail from Eberstadt, one of the best conservative economists working today. But I don’t think it is quite accurate to say that “practically no one has noticed it.” On the contrary, Islamist leaders like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan have been shouting from the rooftops about the trend for the past five years, as my book reports. Excluding the independence-hungry Kurdish minority, Turkey’s fertility rate is probably around 1.5 children per female, about the same as Iran’s, and a guarantee of national decline.
Faith and fertility are linked inextricably. Liberal demographers like Phillip Longman (in The Empty Cradle, 2004) and Eric Kaufmann (Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth, 2010) made the case forcefully. Sociologist Mary Eberstadt, Nicholas’ wife, wrote a brilliant essay on the subject in 2007 at Policy Review. As noted, I made this argument in 2006. Sociologist Philip Jenkins noticed Iran’s demographic freefall in 2007, but drew the wrong conclusions.
Iran may be one of the world’s most secular countries; some reports put mosque attendance in the Islamic Republic at just 2%, lower than Church of England attendance. When the odious Islamist regime falls at length, we probably will find that there are as few Muslims in Iran as there were Communists in Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like other religions rooted in traditional society, for example the nationalist-Catholic faith that Europeans abandoned after the two world wars, Islam cannot abide the onset of modernity. Some forms of religion can flourish in modernity; Islam is not one of them.
The variable that best predicts fertility across all Muslim countries is education: as soon as women become literate, they stop having children. That is a hallmark of a faith that melts away in the harsh light of modernity.
It is well that David Ignatius has noticed what Phillips, Kaufmann, Eberstadt, and I (not to mention Ahmadinejad and Erdogan) have noticed for years: Muslim civilization is in catastrophic decline. It is passing from infancy to senescence without ever reaching maturity. Iran has one last bulge generation of military age men, born before the fertility collapse got underway. It perceives one last historic opportunity to achieve Shi’ite dominance. It won’t have another.
It is too much to hope that the establishment will draw the appropriate strategic conclusions from this “mysterious” trend, as Ignatius obtusely characterizes it.
The point of my 2006 studies in Iran’s demographics was not academic: I argued that a demographic cataclysm helped explained the apocalyptic mindset of the Iranian leadership, which felt that it had nothing to lose by betting everything on a Shi’ite resurgence under the umbrella of nuclear.
But it does not seem likely that the foreign policy establishment, once having noticed the demographic elephant in the parlor, will draw the obvious inference: a society that suddenly stops having children suffers from cultural despair. The same cultural despair that curtains off the future for families afflicts policymakers. Cultural pessimism is a great motivation for strategic adventures. A nation that fears that it may have no future may be willing to risk everything on the roll of a dice. Iran has one last big generation of military age men, the ones who were born in the early 1980s before the great weapons. Nothing but the use of force would stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, with dreadful consequences. With Iran on the verge of building a nuclear bomb, we have hit crunch-time. Will the foreign policy establishment connect the dots in time?
Now that Ignatius notices will he credit others who noticed much earlier? My guess? No. Because things such as this become real only when articulated and, most importantly, framed by those deemed acceptable.
Actually QED Ignatius believes that HE discovered this suddenly six year old fact is that none of the people he knows had any knowledge of this decline. Therefore, he really has discovered this known fact. After all is said and done, in his world, mebbe they got it wrong and Obama has yet to tell us ….”let me make this perfectly clear….”
David, I’ve been reading you for years, starting when you were only published in the Asia Times. While Muslim birthrates are falling in the Arab world it is my impression that the Muslim birthrates are not seeing anywhere near the same decline in Europe and the U.K., or are they? If that is the case then the war of the wombs has merely migrated. I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts on that.
Oregonjon,
It’s hard to say exactly.
I summarized some of the data regarding your question in my book. Muslim immigrants vary enormously in fertility. The Pakistanis in the UK keep having four children, same as at home, and show little inclination to assimilate. Turks in Germany tend towards much lower fertility (as they do at home). The Senegalese have 8 children at home but after 10 years in France tend to have 3. The argument that higher Muslim fertility rates will swamp Europe is overwrought, but there are reasons for alarm in the UK and a few other places. Germany is not likely to overwhelmed by a high Turkish birth rate.
Mr. Goldman,
Might the Pakistani predilection for consanguinity, and the horrific deformities it leads to, counterbalance their aggressive breeding?
The Pakistani’s have been practising cousin marriage and suffering the resultant genetic problems for several centuries. It seems to have no impact on their fertility rates or any sign of the damaging custom changing.
I am glad to know this information and honestly to me this is one of the best things i have read in a long time. Muslim fertility rates dropping is a WONDERFUL thing. I am not quite sure after reading your article if you think this is a good thing or a bad thing but this gives me some hope for the future of our country. I have been envisioning a country dominated by muslims and shudder at the country my kids or grandkids would have to face with so many of these people in it. Now i can breathe a little easier.
IMO, Muslim birthrates will fall -significantly- because 1) they are being taken in by all of our materialism and 2) are pursuing expensive education for which their government is not paying.
1) I have seen Muslim women lose their garb to simply wear scarves over their hair and stop the dress for pants. I have seen MANY wear traditional garb but splurge on very high-heeled, expensive shoes. It looks ridiculous and some don’t know how to walk in them. Last example of this (I could go on) is that the young ones are delaying children to the chagrin of parents and grandparents who continue to ask them why they remain childless; it’s embarrassing for older generations to see them not having children right after marriage. Reason? Same as for the rest of America- they want careers after the college expenses and they can’t “afford” children (read: I want a bigger bank account so I’ll contracept until we’re ‘ready’).
2) Back in the early ’80s when I was starting college, I met students from Iran and Iraq who had their education paid for by their governments. It was shocking to me at the time how they came here and spoke nothing of hatred for the US. I became a student mentor after many years in the workforce, some students following my day work routines speak of living as cheaply as they can while they pay for college. So they are older when marrying and delaying birth until college/university is accomplished — or even later.
Generational jihadist Islamists looking to take over in England and continental Western Europe are hoping to win by out-breeding and emigrating the local infidels into submission before their comparative demographic “youth bulge” advantage holds out because the next generation’s muslim woman will have 1.6 children and not 5.
Birth rate is not a reliable inddicator. For instance, let’s envision a country who has 100% of its population in the age range where fertility is at its peak (between 20 and 30). Even if people have just one child it will have a very high birth rate just because of so many peole in breeding age. It will also have a very low mortality rate because of the youth of its population. But twenty years later these young people reach the “no-children age” they will will be replaced by breeders half their numbers and birh rate will decline. In a still longer run they will begin to die and will not be replaced by an equivalent number of children.
That s the reason the meaningful indicator is how many girls>/b> will be born to 100 women during their “breeding carreers”: over 100, population will increase under 100 it will decrease. More exactly, after applying mortality rates both to mothers and girls how many girls will make it to fecundity age.
I have some concern here; both the Chinese and the Islamists are lacking millions of women. There is some evidence that the Chinese are kidnapping Asian women, and the horror stories coming out of Pakistan are not reassuring either. (I have quite a few daughters, and they’re all brilliant, talented, healthy, good young women of course…)
Russia has an overabundance of women. The solution seems clear. Maybe you could set up a dating service in Mongolia
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Jeanette what worries me about a sudden abundance of men is that their government just might want to expend them in a war. What better way to unite the country and eliminate a problem. As to the Muslim world they don’t give much of a care for their excess male population either to the point that they culturally won’t let them breed, ie rich man has 40 wives kinda thingy.
At one time, an overabundance of males was a contributing factor in wars. The situation is very different though when that over-abundance of males occurs in countries that used to have lots of children in each family but now have only one child. Politically, it is much harder to persuade those one-child parents of sons to contribute them to a draft of cannon-fodder.
I thought muslims were bragging about how they would overwhelm the West with their wombs. It may sound like a bad movie, but if civilized countries were forward thinking they would put some kind of fertility-killing substance in middle eastern drinking water systems.
According to the Taliban and the Nigerian Boko Haram, the West has already found the anti-fertility agent, and it is called “polio vaccine.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/world/africa/in-nigeria-polio-vaccine-workers-are-killed-by-gunmen.html?_r=0
Salk and Sabin were both Jewish. Case Closed.
Do you honestly think that they new it would affect fertility- if so you are ine sicko individual.
To Mombser2: Do you honestly believe what I wrote was meant to be taken seriously? If so …
OregonJon…”War of the Wombs”. Well said.
Of note as well, is what low fertility rate does to the left wing of politics here at home. Self styled intellectuals, feminists, abrosexualists, greeners, pro-choicers, etc. even today rely on recruitment, usually via the school system, to fill their ranks.
Yesterday, in my Orthodox Presbyterian Church, a career Marine Officer announced the ninth pregnancy in his growing household. All eight children are there every Sunday… as are the families with 3, 4 and 5 each. Large home school participation, run by trained ex-public school teachers and administrators with a college acceptance rate over 90%. Plus not less than 6 children adopted from harsh circumstances and various races.
Our congregation is over 80% professionally educated… MD’s, LLD’s, MBA’s, MS Engineering etc. Oh, yes, the congregation is not of single color…(though our Presbyterian roots generate a lot of red hair, lol)
We are growing, slowly, steadily. We are not alone.
I give the left 10 years.
If only we can survive that long
ta
Leftists make up for their own lack of fertility by simply importing more to their ranks. Amnesty for illegals leading to citizenship (as opposed to residency) will result in millions of additional votes for Democrats.
Agreed.
These illegals you mention are, right now, the downfall of our Republican party as we know it today. Muslims notwithstanding.
I’ve posted elsewhere that we’re [Americans] in the midst of a demographic/social revolution expressed by the majority voting power of this new uneducatable movement resulting from “affirmative-actioned’ mediocrities. And, they’ve RE-elected Obama. This new “entitlement acclimated” majority is beyond, or trans, religion and crass “race”.
So, while Mr Goldman’s article here reassures us of the ultimate decline of our enemy Muslims, they will be replaced by waves of anchor-babies fertilized by Christian Latins from across the Rio Grande, then, their extended families arrive, on and on and on. So, the gradual decline of Muslims’ numbers immigrating to our fair land will be supplemented by another entitlement-hungry group. We’re merely substituting threats.
The Republican’s major problem is just how to appeal to this new fertility/faith reality, which is inclusive of more than the declining Muslims….. without becoming hypocrites and sacrificing their values.
If you read Spengler’s articles and books, as well as some of the ones he cites here, you’ll see that Latin birth rates are also dropping like a stone and for the same reasons.
They have an issue with importation because latin american economies are improving and their birth rates are dropping too. Waves of entrants from Mexico are not going to resume absent a major downgrade in their economic growth pattern. They have a secondary problem in that they are making the US an unattractive destination, also depressing future arrivals. I think it will work out in the end, but only because the right gets smart about defining the kind of immigrants it wants and acculturating them so that they do not end up in the left’s dependency pit.
….the sooner that becomes our reality, the better…..however, the creeping mindset of this “Benefits” availability is already well entrenched…”word of mouth” is still a fierce force.
> I think it will work out in the end, but only because the right gets smart
The right won’t get smart. They’ll go out of their way to sabotage anything that breaks their way.
They don’t need the illegals to bulster their numbers. They make up their lack of birthrate by indoctrinating the children of conservatives in their corrupt school system.
As a former public high school teacher, I can offer you some reassurance that conservative kids (in particular religious kids), are remarkably resistant to liberalism.
Of course, there aren’t so many of those left anymore. So teach your children well.
You don’t need to convert the religious or conservative kids just sway the middle undecideds through liberal K-12 liberal indoctrination to gain a majority.
Don’t forget the brainwashing of ‘red-state’ children in our public schools. The Left doesn’t have to breed, they just recruit from those who do. That’s why all this hopeful talk about the Left or Islam dying though demographic decline is nonsense. Just because you’re born to conservative parents doesn’t mean you won’t be affected by the Leftist influences all around you. That’s why it’s the culture you have to change no matter the demographics.
Oops, lolly beat me to it.
Left wingers who rely on recruitment instead of reproduction remind me of the Shakers who grew for a time by recruitment but had a no children policy. They met a need at the time. As someone said, the first rule of life is to show up.
From Wikipedia: “Strict believers in celibacy, Shakers acquired their members through conversion, indenturing children, and adoption of orphans.”
The Left does not reproduce biologically.
They reproduce ideologically.
Who runs the schools and the universities? Who runs the media and entertainment?
You do all the work. You pay all the bills. You put up with all the bullshit.
And while you are at work earning a living, they are indoctrinating your kids.
You think that we’re winning?
Think again.
The Roman Empire had the same experience with Romans. Although statistics are lacking I suspect the birth rate took a dive about the time of Commodus.
Earlier, Augustus had to enact a special tax on batchelors to encourage marriage but that didn’t seem to help.
Whitehall, your intuition is dead on. Here is a short essay on the topic. Author: Emmet Scott, Title: The Role of Infanticide and Abortion in Pagan Rome’s Decline.
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/123665/sec_id/123665
The author is an historian and the focus of the essay is the population decline that took place in the first few centuries AD in the Roman Empire. I think you’ll find interesting his observations about how the Jewish and Christian rejections of these pagan practices played out in the population demographics of that time.
Because not only did Christians reject birth control, abortion and infanticide, we also adopted babies that were left to die by their pagan parents, and continued to convert pagans. When one group recruits and reproduces, while another does neither, the former thrives and the later dies.
Gasp!…a TAX on bachelors?
Another great column from David Goldman.
I wonder when our policy makers and pundits will begin to state that containment of Iran is not a realistic option. They are going to do whatever it takes to develop deliverable nuclear weapons. Once they have them, they have a tremendous incentive to try to redraw the boundaries in the Middle East so that Iran controls all of the major oil and gas fields around the Persian Gulf. It’s a “use it or lose it” situation in terms of their military-age male population.
Our strategic analysts rely on a combination of game theory and recent geo-political history to make their recommendations. Unfortunately, both game theory and recent history don’t apply well to nations and civilizations that are in demographic decline and believe in divine intervention.
The strategic implications are limited to the conflict with Iran, I guess. The mentioned countries here and in your book – Turkey, Algeria, etc have recently no real record of troublemaking.
The countries which are unstable by Islamist uprising – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq, the Russian Caucasus – still show high birthrates will continue to destabilize. Arabic will continue to be in high demand among intelligence agencies and law enforcement.
I would think that game theory could model Iranian intentions reasonably well: The country cannot possibly afford to support its burgeoning elderly population unless, of course, it annexes the Eastern Province of KSA, Basra province of Iraq, and so on.
They cannot be playing the game with a full deck. It seems to me that if that was a long term strategy they would play nice for now. WIthout sanctions they would have plenty of cash to purchase a modern air force and conventional military. Missiles and mini subs are not going to be much use.
They may be playing for indigenous revolution and the accession to an expansionistic Iran.
What if they don’t annex those provinces, but just kill off a third of that would be elderly population?
Or what if they just kill off selected (non-Farsi) segments of that would be elderly population?
They certainly managed some demographics shifting suicide waves during the Iran-Irag War; what if they just repeat that?
Mr. Goldman,
Price point economics has always made hash of those who bet on mineral exhaustion. That especially includes the Iranian Mullahs and Obama Administration EPA officials.
Market incentives in terms of oil prices have always called forth technological innovations that add to known reserves at whatever the going prices is. Then further capital investments in that technology and techniques using it drop the price over time.
Political risk is part of that mineral price and the fracking technological revolution is moving oil production into areas of _minimal_ long term geo-political risk.
Why put all that fracking capital equipment in Russia, the Arab world, Iran or Latin America when you know the locals will expropriate it via nationalization?
Canada and the USA are better bets, with Canada being the better bet for the duration of the Obama Administration.
See:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18828714
Total American energy production has been up the last few years, while energy production from Federal Lands is way down.
That says a great deal about the fracking revolution. This is why the Obama Administration EPA officials are trying to use the EPA endangered species act to block further fracking on private land, which is 95% of the land in the state of Texas state for reasons of local history and culture. That was why that recent 9-0 SCOTUS verdict against the EPA for its lack of due process for private land owners was so important.
We are seeing a hydrocarbon fuel price ceiling being installed by Fracking and a series of other related energy developments. For instance, the cost of liquifying coal and natural gas had been equivalent to about $10 a gallon of gasoline (current price equivalent) since about the 1930′s.
This is no longer true.
Coal and natural gas can be liquified into oil today at a price equivalent to about $4 a gallon of gasoline, and there are at least two plants doing that right now, both overseas (one is in Malaya). Lots more are being built with some in the USA.
(See: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304072004577323770856080102.html)
This is a development about five years old. The Saudis are, rightly, terrified.
Roughly 8-to-12 years of a Republican controlled EPA will see the USA completely independent of foreign energy sources to include Mexico and Canada.
The implications for American foreign policy in places like the Middle East, Central Asia, Mexico and the rest of Latin America is left to the reader with the following hint…with so much of world energy production moving into politically stable regions, the ability of the oil ticks of the Arab & Russian sort to disrupt the world economy via energy price shocks drops to zero.
IMO, America can and will get by with both a smaller Army _AND_ a smaller Navy, particularly of the amphibious sort.
China has more shale gas than the US and Russia combined. That’s why it bought Nexen — it wanted the toy in the box, not the Crackerjacks. And why Russia? It’s cheaper to ship to Europe from Russia than from the US.
“A year after the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt reported the precipitous fall in Muslim fertility in a widely commented paper…” Eberstadt has also had to quietly amend his conclusions in ‘Drunken Nation’, an AEI article from 2005, to admit Russia isn’t dying out and isn’t going away as a significant power on the world stage anytime soon. That’s not the same thing as ever saying it will be as important militarily or diplomatically as the old USSR.
Putin has already put his chips on Rosneft as Gazprom continues to lose its grip on the EU market, even before cheap LNG from Qatar or the U.S. starts getting imported in larger quantities (see today’s deal inked between Exxon – thanks to XOM Rosneft will have the technology to frack big time and will probably shelve the Artic offshore drilling just as Gazprom has put off Shtokman in the Barents Sea thanks to competition from Norway).
Why is the XOM-Rosneft deal strategic (besides the Chinese once again ponying up the cash?). Because XOM will help Rosneft develop the motherload of all shale oil plays — the Bazhenov which covers an area one and a half times the size of Alaska or three times the size of France in western Siberia. Russia’s going to be pumping so much Bazhenov crude in ten years they won’t even need the Arctic or even deepwater Sakhalin/Far East anymore. Meanwhile China will have problems bringing their own shale gas online, not only due to the different geology but also the water intesivness of fracking at a time when China is already running dry. Water and the fact the China’s shales are more gas than oil rich (outside of Xinjiang), will hinder the Chinese domestic development.
Besides the Chinese problems, Gazprom’s dwindling empire has one more thing going for them: piped gas remains cheaper though once the construction costs are sunk, and the fact that most of the euros and rubles have already been spent for the Russian pipelines makes the Nabucco boondoggle a kind of anti-Russia lobby windmill to obsess over. It’s a project that was ALWAYS more about geopolitics and pushing out Russia while bringing the Iranians in via Azerbaijan than any actual profitability (here’s looking at you, Heritage and your Jamestown Foundation buddies). Nabucco was the physical embodiment of the discredited Z. Bzrezinski obsession with keeping the Russians down permanently, and where the West stays allied with Muslims against Moscow as in the Crimean War for all eternity. Furthermore, it will be richly ironic to see Berlin continue to pivot towards Moscow and Beijing in the years to come despite all of the frantic anti-Russia lobby and Bzrezinskiite efforts, if for no other reason than the dollar’s death spiral which the neocons hastened with their wars will force a kind of ruble/euromark condominum in Eurasia with the yuan joining the basket.
Sorry for the grammatical mistakes above but just for emphasis, Bloomberg reports Russia has now bought enough gold since Putin initiated the gold-buying program to stack a statue of Liberty’s worth of bulleon. Meanwhile the ninnying fiat worshippers on Twitter tell us gold is for losers and the stock market has had wonderful gains, even as the Federal Reserve can’t cough up Germany’s reserves to repatriate them for seven years.
The French took possession of their gold under De Gaulle over one day in 1965 and floated it back to Le France via battleship (one wonders if the movie “Goldfinger” was predictive programming the public to accept Nixon and the powers behind him taking the U.S. off the gold peg).
The Germans, Chinese, Russians and Indians all want to head for the exits quietly without yelling fire in the crowded fiat theater.
Fascinating, Mr. X, but I wouldn’t write off Chinese shale so easily.
Mr Goldman,
Neither China nor Russia can be considered “politically stable”, given the endemic corruption crippling both nations.
The availability of fracking technology does not provide the dynamic entrepreneurial oil sector that rapidly creates fuel supplies as is happening in the USA and particularly Canada today.
That new domestic energy supplies will grow in both China and Russia is certain.
Whether they will grow faster than corruption ruins old sources and new fracked sources is open to question.
Mr.Hoskins,
You are wrong about the liberals,they will not survive the imminent collapse of the global credit based economy.The leftists are not soft,trendy adherents of Marx & Lenin.They are the philosophical followers of the Fabian Socialist John Maynard Keynes.The Liberals are primarily graduates of Liberal Arts schools & their degrees will lose much of their value in a new economic regime.These people are an elite class born & nurtured in a society based on Keynesian Economics & Central Banking.The liberals will suffer the same fate as the Russian nobility after 1917 & the Southern Plantation aristocracy after 1865.
As for the Moslem world,they will not last long enough to fall prey to a shrinking population.The Central Banks around the world are determined to monetize their way out of debt.This is called Financial Repression.Uncontrolled creation of fiat paper money “created out of thin air” will cause price inflation to surge on food around the world.3RD world Moslem countries will be on starvation rations long before long term fertility rates matter!
P.S.Lack of potable water will also soon become a major concern in the semi-arid regions of the Middle-East.
Israel overcame its water deficit with desalination, massive use of recycled water, drip irrigation, plant breeding and advanced agricultural technique. They now have enough for industry, for agriculture, and for a growing population -including a million Arabs who are probably the most water secure Arabs in the Middle East. The water problem is one of the more manageable of all the problems in the middle east because all of the technology to solve it has already been developed. That is not to say the crisis will be managed – for that you need long term planners, scientists, agronomists. You do not need Koran memorizers and reciters. But it could be managed.
As an aside, it’s may be interesting to point out that after seven years of water shortage in Israel, the rains have been spectacular this season and the Kinnaret (Sea of Galilee), from which we draw most of our fresh, non-desalinated, water, is nearly at the high level mark beyond which we will have to open the dam gates. Given that the winter has a ways to go yet, it’s altogether possible that this will occur. will we have “seven fat years” after the proverbial “seven lean ones?”
Verily it is written, “A denarius for a loaf of bread; a denarius for three loaves of barley!” The Lord has decreed it, and He will not revoke His word. A great famine shall come, and that shall be but the beginning of the sorrows.
@8, Mr. Weiner. You are not wrong. Nor, I think, am I. It seems that the hounds are gathering around the failed cult of the progressive left. It seems to be a foot race as to which finally does them in.
Water is, as you say, an Elephant in the Corner.
Mr. Hoskins,
From your keyboard to God’s eyes.
“Few have noticed the collapsing birthrate in Islamic countries has reached levels guaranteeing state decline.”
I first heard about this a few years ago, but am still waiting for the joyous results. In the meantime remember that old story about the two hikers and the bear. “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you”. Outrun or out reproduce in this case.
I find this whole line of thought mind-boggling. We have a world that has expanded from 3 billion to 7 billion people in only 40 years, and there’s worry about the opposite? Egypt was certainly better off with 40 million people at the time. Now they’re pushing 85 and they still have the same old river. Was Egypt smarter in 1965, or was there just more room? And what happened to their economy when Nasser kicked out ethnic Italians and Greeks? This is just a little more complex.
How did the world survive with only 3 billion people? Or is it like a drug addiction, where once you reach a certain level you can never go back?
And success and failure is accidental? Depending on population growth? India was big, even in the 16th century. So what? Certainly there is a blithe and natural correlation in the West between growth and economy but without exceptionalism we’re just 16th century India. To suggest Catholicism is dying because of population without taking into account value systems and the staggering changes across the West in those value systems since 1960 is naive – big families or no those values would’ve changed. In fact the whole world has grown and become more secular. Islam will die or transform to secularism with more or less babies? Which? And educated women stop having babies. Do they become more secular? Less?
I don’t for one minute believe Iran has centered their thought around one last gasp considering their population is at an all-time high – it’s 4 times what it was in the ’50s. There’s your disaster. So Iran’s population is slowing; where’s the big deal and panic? They might have 100 million by 2050 – that in itself could be a disaster until this other phony disaster that’ll happen… when? In 2100? Same with Egypt. They might have 120 million by 2050 and find disaster somewhere in between as a result.
Population growth has never been policy other than China. We are still in the final throes of a country, America, and a world, that has simply let populations grow as they will. In such a scenario, moderate growth within the abilities of a country, like America, can work. Illegal immigration, unconstrained, as in America, can wreck the place, since that growth is artificial, outside the natural constraints of a healthy economy. Entitlements are outstripping job growth 10 to 1. That should be a clue. Babies with nowhere to go, outstripping the ability of the country to create jobs can be disaster, like India is approaching, and Nigeria, and Central America. A megalopolis like Mumbai, Sao Paolo or Mexico City is a disaster waiting to happen. And those people, surprise, are coming here.
This entire concept is lunacy and I don’t know why anyone in their right mind would flog it. America has 8% unemployment. Ask yourself what it would be without 15 million illegal aliens. Answer: better. And the disaster that is only being postponed due to population growth back in the Third World would be closer.
We are approaching unknown territory with our growth. But we know, or should have the brains to know, that population growth at some point undercuts success. In the case of the Third World, it exacerbates failure. Our only hope for survival in the West, and this world, is to create policy – one centered around stabilizing and then shrinking our population. The U.S. has an insane immigration policy that will wreck this country. Go on youtube and look at the artificial mountain of garbage outside of Los Angeles. Multiply that by water, wood, food and air and then keep multiplying across our country and this world. It is finite.
As for cultural despair, that depends on the culture doesn’t it. Idle hands are the devil’s tool. If you’re a poor couple in India with only each other to look at, that’s one thing – maybe that’s despair. A successful childless couple in Minneapolis with busy and full intellectual and professional lives is another.
People have smaller families because complex civilizations and healthy economies provides alternatives to simply pooping out babies, for both men and women. If you live in a village of 1,000 people with only gossip and fields, what are you going to do at night: give lectures and build a model of a DNA structure or jump on your wife? There is a correlation between education and the activity within that paradigm and families, not religion. Religion falls by the wayside in favor of other forms of enlightenment in an expanded mind, not because religion isn’t worthy, but because it vies for attention, and conflicts with the science that heats a home and makes water safe to drink because science conspicuously and immediately delivers real benefits one can touch. Pray as your daughter lies dying of dehydration but an saline IV will do the trick. That’s tough to fight. This isn’t because of more people but because of an educated people with more choices.
I believe if Europe stopped allowing immigrants in, and let their birth rate shrink their populations, they’d learn to deal with it, stop sucking at the fake teat of population growth defining productivity, and have a new golden age. As is, they are going to be screwed, blued and tattoed – and so will we. Unless you have a terra-compatible planet I don’t know about. Economic growth based on population growth is eventual suicide.
Fail Burton – always a blast of conventional if lopsided wisdom signifying nothing.
Disagree.
Please re-ead Mr Burton’s post…..especially:
“Illegal immigration, unconstrained, as in America, can wreck the place, since that growth is artificial, outside the natural constraints of a healthy economy. Entitlements are outstripping job growth 10 to 1. That should be a clue. Babies with nowhere to go, outstripping the ability of the country to create jobs…..”
Also see my…..Linus Adenoids reply to #3…..
“Agreed.
These illegals you mention are, right now, the downfall of our Republican party as we know it today. Muslims notwithstanding.
I’ve posted elsewhere that we’re [Americans] in the midst of a demographic/social revolution expressed by the majority voting power of this new uneducatable movement resulting from “affirmative-actioned’ mediocrities. And, they’ve RE-elected Obama. This new “entitlement acclimated” majority is beyond, or trans, religion and crass “race”.
…as our Muslim enemy gradually declines in numbers, we face another, albeit less militant throat slitting, entitlement-seeking majority.
I think you are missing one important fact, the illegals are here as a direct result of abortion policy. Haven’t you ever noticed that the number of illegals is roughly equal to the number abortions since RvW?
Well, that’s the key isn’t it: conventional wisdom. In the face of a West being politically subverted by unprecedented mass movements of people from the Third World, that’s too obvious. So, let’s go against the grain.
The idea Iran, which will go from 75 million to 100 million in the next 40 years, cleverly perceives this shrinkage and will make a last ditch offensive while their armies are still full of young men is absurd.
Look at a map. Where will this army march off to? Perhaps in boats to Bahrain and our Fifth Fleet.
burton fail
Five percent of the population can master organic chemistry or quantum physics or thermodynamics or electrical engineering, etc. If society is contracting, then the number of people who can master these subjects are contracting as well, perhaps faster than the general population decline, since they have no time or interest or skills to raise families. Let us breed ourselves like farmers do their cattle or not be surprised that we will one day look at old textbooks and say, “Gee, what were they bothering their heads about!” We live off that five percent!
I have to agree with Mr Burton. Culture plays a greater role than simple numbers. However, when the barbarians outnumber the civilized, demography becomes important. Curtailing illegal immigration, being very selective to whom we grant citizenship, eliminating citizenship from just being born in the US (anchor babies {European, Asian or Hispanic}) are important to restoring the culture of innovation that allowed the US to succeed in the first place.
I am beginning to think that Fred Reed is right: We may not like the continued immigration of Mexicans across our southern border, but with something like eleven to thirteen million of them already here we are past the point of being able to do anything about it.
Indeed. How can all these countries be in “catastrophic decline” if they used to manage just fine with a lot less people? Sure, there may be some social discomfort when the old can’t live at the expense of the less numerous young, but I can’t see why that should portend doom for an entire civilization.
Because though the population was smaller, it was still young. They were not filled with old people taxing the young with a terrible burden. You want to retire? You better have some kids. I, for one, feel no obligation to pay exorbitant taxes to support old people who couldn’t be bothered to have kids of their own, nor to save appropriately for their own retirement. I’ll support my own parents and grandparents should they fall into need. I don’t owe anybody else anything. Can’t afford to retire? Sucks to be you.
If your point is that birth rates are only one of many factors, you are correct.
If your point is that birth rates don’t matter, you are profoundly wrong.
FWIW?
World population was expected to be higher than 7 billion, based on population rates of, yes, 40 years ago. The rate of population growth is declining. The latest speculation is that world population may start declining, and assumes that 7 billion is a maximum. Of course the problem with the latter assumption is that it suffers from the same conceit about birthrates as the first one — just in reverse.
Having said all that, how significant is all this, really, for the near future? And by “near” I mean a couple of decades? Not much, I think. While we wait for the Muslim world to “die off/implode,” they will be a source of great misery and violence. Someone once blogged that “terrorists will never achieve their aims of a world caliphate,” and then went on to cite very believable reasons. But that’s not the issue. In the process of trying to create their caliphate, Islamofascists will do a lot of damage and carnage. Latin American birthrates have also dropped noticeably, and yet we are about to create 11 million or so new Democrats.
7 billion max? Hahahah. Brother, I can guarantee you we’ll be looking at 15 billion people before we know it, a billion of them in America, clawing and voting and scraping according to entitlements, last name and race. Diversity: a Tower of Babel.
This argument has at its core a purely utilitarian aspect that must be rejected.
God likes creating new people. God loves life. God hates life-supression. Technocratic population engineering is evil. We are enjoined to “be fruitful and multiply,” not to refuse to procreate.
Man is not smart enough to engineer the future population landscape, as if it were akin to a farmer using his land, or a utility building an electrical grid infrastructure. Doing so is called hubris, and it will always end badly.
China intentionally stopped producing a new generation, and now they have hundreds of millions of young only child men who have no prospect of ever getting married. Mark Steyn said, in his inimitable style, that unless China intends to become the only gay superpower since Sparta, they are going to have a massive sex slavery problem in the near future. I wonder if Mao, in his brilliant planning, foresaw that result of his social engineering?
David Goldman has stood largely alone in his continuous reporting on the demographic catastrophe looming in our era for years now (along with Steyn, one must allow). Who, he asks, will take care of the financial needs of the vast numbers of old people in all these countries where young paychecks finance old pensions, as the kids thin out and the oldsters expand in numbers?
In the US, if we are to believe Lawrence Kotlikoff, as of 1012 the federal government has promises over the next 75 years that to be kept would take $222 trillion, fully invested, today, yielding 5% every year. Of course, that’s not remotely the case, and there are fewer and fewer young suckers to keep up the pretense those promises will be kept. More kids being born would hold off the day of reckoning. And who knows, if we had not sanctioned the murder of 55 million kids over the last 40 years, their kids would already be ensuring that nightmare would never have come to loom on our horizon?
So, we chose our fate. We chose abortion, contraception, and homosexuality even as we remained a largely God-believing country; we have tried to have it both ways, and find that to be impossible. Europe, not so much: they lost their faith, invited their worst sworn enemies to replace their never-born children, and now prostrate themselves before Allah. They are pathetic.
Moslem countries, of course, are mystified as to the cause of their sudden infecundity. They didn’t lose their faith; indeed, the drop off of their fertility coincides with a dramatic resurgence in rededication to the desert tribal belief system that had long languished in the modern era. Yet it does not inspire child-production. Goldman, seemingly alone, points out that it is because they suffer a deeper, civilizational despair.
I don’t know how Burton thinks the ranks of the old will be wiped away, so that his dream of a smaller population can flourish. I don’t even wand to think about it.
Instead of a point-by-point rebuttal, it is suffice to note that the world, in total and per capita is richer and more peaceful than it has ever been. This includes the poorest of the poor countries. Easy to corroborate with a quick search. Declining population and what to do about it will be the major problem of this century.
That’s because of a Pax Americana paid for by us. The entirety of South America has been freed from the machinations of the CIA to keep it destabilzed so they couldn’t compete with us economically. That stopped. Surprise, that hotel in Brazil that cost $3.50 a night when the dictatorship ended in the early ’80s is now 60 American dollars.
Brazil didn’t do that with productivity, they did it with babies and the freedom to not spend money on an army. We are that army.
Europe, Canada and Australia all benefit from not spending militarily. We do that for them. Countries aren’t nicer – they disappear if they rattle sabers too much. Where is Saddam Hussein? Invaded Kuwait, we stationed troops in S. Arabia, bin Laden gets angry and slams planes into us. Cause and effect – no more Hussein.
The world doesn’t make war because they can’t. They are checkmated at every turn by wondering what we would do. The Chinese in Asia, Russia, Brazil, everyone. Guatemala would like to take back what they think is there’s: Belize, Iran, Bahrain. Not going to happen. Multiply that by the world.
Well, the cost of Pax Americana is pretty modest. The US currently spends about 4.3% of GDP on defense and that will probably decline to 3 or even less in the next 10 years.
In contrast, we spent more than 6% in the mid-1980s, more than 10% in the 1950s and early 1960s and 45% during WWII.
Sounds like a good deal.
If the US turns de facto isolationist all those places you mentioned could turn hot. Given how well we do keeping out relatively peaceful economic illegal migrants, how well do you thinkk we’ll do keeping out panicky violent desperate refugees?
As for those claiming that countries did fairly well with lower populations, I remind you that they had socieites that were fairly ossified by social strata and frontiers to send their few malcontents.
There are 1.4 billion people in China, 1.2 billion people in India and 1.2 billion muslims from Northern Africa to Indonesia. Where are the other population centers on the planet? The US? Canada? Mexico? Brazil? Australia? I have heard estimates of 7 billion to 9 billion in recent months. I don’t see it. Perhaps the estimates are coming from the proponents of cAGW who are trying to convince us that the declining trend, of the last sixteen years, is actually up.
7 billion-plus is an official figure. The 9 billion — which I’ve seen on “green” propaganda posters, is a total lie with no basis in fact.
David Goldman’s understanding of population trends is correct – unless things change. As people stop having children, those few who continue to raise families will become more numerous compared to those who have stopped or slowed to senescence. Then things turn around and start again. Yes, society will be different, but foundational beliefs will always control behavior, no matter what those behaviors are. It is really hard for humans (perhaps impossible) to say, “Well, we don’t know why we are doing these things; we just do it that way!”
“Some forms of religion can flourish in modernity; Islam is not one of them.”
Interesting. Recently Gamal Al-Banna, younger brother of the creator of the Muslim Brotherhood, passed away. In his obituary there appeared this quote:
““no religion or political system has yet been able to unify the entire world. The forces of religion, language, heritage and other culturally specific properties will resist the flood of globalisation. This will never take possession of African or Asian people, and for the Muslim, Islam offers the greatest immunity against assimilation.”
The decline of Islam? A Muslim population implosion? If only that were the case; but I’m afraid that’s not so.
The world’s Muslim population is expected to increase by about 35% in the next 20 years, rising from 1.6 billion in 2010 to 2.2 billion by 2030 — from 23.4% of the estimated 2010 world population of 6.9 billion to 26.4% of the world’s total projected population of 8.3 billion in 2030.
The real demographic revolutions taking place are in America, Europe and Israel. In America, Americans of European ancestry are declining at an astonishing rate, as a share of the population, and will be a minority by 2043. In the Old Continent, the native Europeans are aging, shrinking and dying, and are being inundated by an Islamic-Arab-African invasion. And Israel’s future, too, appears grim. In a generation Israel will be majority-Arab-Haredi — and this is without taking into account the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza!
“This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper,” wrote T.S. Eliot in the closing couplet of “The Hollow Men.”
Hopefully, the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, who are about to inherit the earth as we pass away, will treat us better than our ancestors treated them in the five centuries that Western Man ruled the world.
Otherwise, we all go out with a bang.
Actually from what I have seen the Israel demographics are not all that dire. The Arab growth rate is close to the Jewish one now. I have seen 3.8 and 3.0 per female respectively in 2012. Haredi birth rate is higher than secular but reports are they are trending closer to even. The birth rate among secular Israeli Jews is still higher than average American birth rate and very high for any developed country.
This is why it is important for Israel to bring the Haredi more into the workforce and military. A key political debate is going on now about that.
It is American Jews, aside from the Orthodox, who are becoming an endangered species. Soon there will be only one Jewish population of any importance.
In a generation Israel will be half Arab-Haredi — and this is without even taking into account the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza (whom number 2.6 million + 1.7 million = 4.3 million)!
In 2008, 48% of primary school pupils were ultra-Orthodox or Israeli Arabs.
In 2040, 78% of Israel’s primary school students will be Haredi or Arabs, and only 14% will be in the non-religious State school system – if current trends continue.
A demographic look ahead at Israel
http://taubcenter.org.il/index.php/e-bulletin/a-demographic-look-ahead-at-israel/lang/en/
Now let’s include the West Bank and Gaza in our calculations: By 2050 Palestinians west of the Jordan river will out-number Jews 2-1. Add Palestinians in Jordan, it is 3-1. Is time on Israel’s side?
Reality,
Your fears are well grounded, but you should also take a deep breath and realize that predicting future trends beyond a few years is always tenuous because all it takes is one unforeseen event to completely change the picture. Who in 1970 predicted that a million Soviet Jews would move to Israel and remake the the demographic landscape there?
I also suspect that Palestinian population figures have been cooked and exaggerated for a long time. There is no reason that the Palestinians should have defied the fertility decline that set in elsewhere in the region two decades ago. In all of the Muslim countries seeing birth declines, girls increasingly attend school until adulthood and are less likely to be forced into marriage at very young ages and then live in a submissive and perpetual childbearing role. Those factors are the driving force behind fertility declines in all societies. In order to reverse the trends, they would have to stop education for girls and force women back into submissive roles. That, of course, is exactly what the Taliban and like minded Islamists are trying to do. That is why girls who attend school in Afghanistan are killed.
When making all these demographics projections we must recall that those things that cannot go on…will not. Russia’s collapse stopped because a leader arose out of the ‘Time of Troubles’ determined to take the oil revenue back and turn some of it into baby making again. The Western elites and media lackeys have never forgiven Putin for succeeding, at least in that respect. Russian live births exceeded deaths in 2012 for the first time since 1992. And contrary to the lies of mainstream media Putin didn’t even need Boys to Men to do it.
The Haredi birth rate cannot continue at its present rate because Israel will run out of non-Haredi who work to pay the Haredi to study Torah and make babies — even as innovative as the Israeli economy has become. And eventually even if Congress deems the 2-3 billion the U.S. spends on weapons subsidies for Israel sacrosanct that 3 billion won’t buy what it used to…hence Lieberman’s overtures to Russia and the Israeli central bank’s quiet diversification of its holdings. Israel will never have another friend like America, with a large Evangelical Gentile grouping that cares about Israel’s existence, but she can make alternate arrangements should the Pax Americana collapse at home with the dollar. And the strategy of trying to outbreed the other tribe with claims to that patch of real estate known variously as Judea and Samaria or Canaan will be exposed as a winner take very little to nothing proposition.
Something similar is about to happen in California with that state’s now majority population — to the point that I suspect even native born Latinos will start resenting the indocumentadas, as some do I know in the Red States (Mexican fertility at any rate has been much higher north of the border than south of the border for years, not surprising since Mexico’s own welfare system is so pitiful, but diabetese and obesity are about to ravage Mexican populations in middle age).
Someone in the above comments lumped in the Russians with the Arabs as ‘oil ticks’. Ahem, Russia combined with Ukraine and Kazahkstan is now third only behind Canada and the U.S. for the amount of grain it exports…with much of that grain untainted by Monsanto’s GMO machinations and seeding, hence Russian bez GMO would be preferred by discriminating Asian guts over American GMO/hormone laced garbage. If you doubt that something has happened to American food in the past twenty years since GMOs were introduced, spend some time at your local Wal-Mart and then compare the specimens you may see at Ashans or Perekrostiks in Moscow instead. The women at least are still recognizable as women not hildabeasts. Not that you won’t see obese Russians too, but invariably they will be obese babushkas and men at 40 to 60 not 15 to 30. America is about to have a reckoning with all the Corporatist/Globalist forces the mainline conservatives told us wouldn’t matter or it would be political suicide to resist, from bad food to open borders.
Even if oil prices collapsed tomorrow there probably would be a change in the Kremlin, but Russia as a nation state within its present borders (sans for greater lawlessness within Dagestan and Chechyna) would survive. Saudi Arabia and Qatar would not.
You’re sounding kind of Pat Buchanan/Know Nothing Party here. White Americans of European descent intermarry quite a lot now, and there’s a “one drop rule” not unlike that of antebellum Nawlins; my kids are 1/4 Filipino, and are considered nonwhite. Actually, 13 of my (white) parents’ 17 biological grandchildren are considered nonwhite. So I don’t know that the percentage of Americans with some European ancestry has declined, if that’s what bothers you? Or maybe it’s that my horde of beige Papist German/Swiss/Asian kids are totally messing up the curve in your one kid’s math and science classes?
Mass media access will also hurt islam a lot. Most people don’t want to live in chains. Islam is bondage and a free media can help show muslims how much their lives suck. It can show them alternatives.
I wish we had a free media. Ours is no better than the old Soviet era Pravda and maybe worse because they promulgate the Leftist propaganda willingly.
So, Pravda promulgated the Leftist propaganda unwillingly? No, I do not understand what you meant. As I see it, Pravda was patriotic in promulgating the Leftist propaganda, while the Lame Scream Media is treasonous.
David,
Are there any studies on the effects of sex selective abortion and infanticide on your thesis? I have read that there may be profound implications in the future for China’s “one child policy” which leads to a preference for male children at the expense of females. India and some other countries also have cultures where male children are prefered over females and the resulting sex ratio imbalances could lead to problems. Is there any similar development in the Islamic countries? Your thoughts?
I don’t know of a big change in the male/female ratio in any Muslim countries (this usually requires availability of ultrasound).
Not in their case. They can “abort” female post-birth fetuses (babies), with no legal consequences, at least in the KSA. When lots of baby girls end up down the well, you can easily get a substantial imbalance with no ultrasound machines. Look at the CIA data on sex ratios in “the Kingdom”.
Or, make it fun and play the game! http://www.sporcle.com/games/slicingbike/sexratio SPOILER ALERT: female-dominated countries are the former Soviet republics (due to brutal Soviet policies?) and male-dominated countries are in the ME. Of course, that probably takes into account the foreign workers.
Always appreciate your insights Mr. Goldman. Just like to add here what is a rather bitter irony: in the Muslim ghettos of the West, they are procreating like rabbits as the carrots (generous welfare/hotel/accommodation benefits)are plentiful. The battle is in the West, where the Muslim womb is a weapons production factory for the stealth jihad.
See my answer to another comment above. That seems to be the case in England with the Pakistanis, but it’s not the case in Germany. The West is pretty good at corrupting Muslim immigrants from some countries whose birthrates fall to local levels fairly quickly.
Yup…the Paks and the Saudis and Gazans (even the Afghans) are still procreating like rabbits. Pakistan, and to a lesser degree Afghanistan, are destined to implosion because of the demographic impetus towards procreation and that too with mostly first or second cousins.
Pardon me for being so cynical, but I have about as much concern for the “population bomb elephant-in-the-room theory” as I have for the fact that the earth’s orbit is in a state of decay.
Very likely within months, and certainly no more than a very few years, America’s fiscal house of cards will collapse. A very large segment of our population, both legal and illegal, can’t survive except at the government teat and, for icing on the cake, Iran will go nuclear. And I am supposed to be concerned where the Muslim population will be in 2050?
Yooper’s cynicism is exactly what I was thinking, i.e., who cares about 2050?
Insert a few Water Wars (Kashmir), and a few pandemics, or some other dystopic scenario, and the earth will once again be populated by beetles, and maybe a few birds.
I am seeing reports that North Korea just tested a nuclear device (confirmed by both NK and SK).
Just thought I’d throw that in.
I’m probably not the only Catholic who’s been muttering “..in the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph” in order to stave off despair lately.
“The variable that best predicts fertility across all Muslim countries is education: as soon as women become literate, they stop having children.”
But most of the Muslim world isn’t Iran or Turkey, or even Morocco. Egypt, as you rightly point out, has an adult illiteracy rate of some 40%. Its population was 40 million or so back in 1970, today it’s over 80. Muslim countries along the 10th parallel still have low levels of education and high fertility rates. Even countries like Bangladesh, which are showing declining birth rates, are still showing fertility rates well above replacement. Muslim countries, it should also be noted, continue to send a portion of their surplus population to non-Muslim countries, and their fertility rates remain above those of the native population. It’s not just the absolute rates that matter; it’s the relative rates.
There is, I should note, one notable exception to the inverse correlation of education and fertility: Palestinian Arabs. Literacy in the territories shot up in the first decades of Israeli rule after 1967, and continues more generally thanks to UNRWA schools. But their fertility, though declining, is still higher than their Arab counterparts with similar education. The notion of the Palestinian womb as a strategic weapon (a favorite of Arafat’s) no doubt plays a role. And the fact that basic needs are funded by others means they can “afford” larger families.
UNRWA is a destructive destabilizing force. It has immunized the Palestinian Arabs against reality. In Gaza instead of worrying how to work, and how to get along with their powerful neighbor (the only way to develop themselves) they are freed to produce large families whose sons have nothing to do except think of ways to kill Jews and each other. The West is paying to produce large youth populations who are aggressive and hate filled. If you really wanted peace in Palestine/Israel you would cut off funding to the UNRWA.
The Taub Center report from 2010 was out of date when it was published, and tendentious. There is a surge in fertility from non-Haredi Israelis, and no likely change in Jewish-Arab population ratios as far as the eye can see. The demographic time bomb is a canard of the peace camp. There may or may not be reasons to make peace (I like Ann Marlowe’s tag line “peace later”), but they have nothing to do with demographics.
See
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/72679/time-out
In 1995, Arab-Israelis comprised 21% of primary school pupils in Israel’s education system; by 2010 that number had shot up to 28%.
In 2010, the distribution of primary school pupils (1st thru 8th grades) in the Israeli education system breaks down as follows:
State (secular) – 38%
Arab-Israeli – 28%
Ultra-Orthodox (haredi) – 20%
State (National) Religious – 14%
This is Israel’s demographic future. In a generation, Israel will be 48% Arab-Haredi — and rising rapidly. The children have already been born… All statistics are from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics.
The numbers don’t lie. It is what it is.
Arabs in Israel have a net emigration rate, Jews have a net immigration rate. One million Jews came to Israel from the Soviet Union, how many went to primary school? What matters is the voting age population and those numbers do not add up to 28% of the vote. The Haredi issue is solvable – they can work, they are intelligent – that will simply take political will and compromise.
There are apparently two of us Steves who have a similar view on this.
Reality, I appreciate and respect your reliance on statistics from good sources. However, you put too much faith in the predictability of things. Step back 20 or 30 years and ask yourself how much of the world today could have been predicted.
As the Haredi become an increasingly larger portion of Israeli society, things will have to change. The working population of Israel can support an unproductive 10 percent but it cannot keep supporting an unproductive 20 or 30 percent. They will go to work because they will have no choice. Even religious people have to eat. As Mr. Goldman points out that is what the Muslim Brotherhood has to contend with in Egypt.
Since then Israeli fertility (including “secular”) has jumped and Arab fertility has declined. This is incompetent bloviating.
You might include Yoram Ettinger’s work, Mr. Goldman. He has a very different perspective than you on the question of Israeli demographics. For one thing, Arab demographic figures appear to be hugely over because they count Arabs twice, onece for Israeli Arabs and then for Westbank Arabs. Further, Arab figures within the two main enclaves, the Westbank and Gaza, are falsified to the upside in order to make propaganda look like they are growing at a much faster rate than is accurate. Demographic predictions are very unpredictable anyway. In Israel, the growing religious Zionist population, especially in the Yishuveem (Judea and Samaria) is all about having offspring (babies). In addition, the emergence of anti-Semitism in Europe is increasing exponetially while emigration to Israel by European Jews is vastly increasing and at much higher rates than previously predicted. the latter could not have been predicted a decade ago. Seen from this perspective, the demographic profile in this region is significantly different than what you characterize as “bloviating”.
The Hareidi birthrates are not the calamity that people are posting. The calamity is their lack of participation in the national life. This is what needs to be corrected. there is already a push in Israel for hareidi school reform to give themn the skills to work. If Bibi can herd cats ( Lapid and Bennet) they will join the army soon as well. The key is convincing the Rebbes that the trough is emptying and that they can’t rely on it for much longer. The rebbes will then make the push in their communities to start working.
A lot of groups have called for the revenge/ conquest through the cradle and these usually fail (Rene Levesque of the Parti Quebequois comes to mind). Why should we expect the Muslims to be more successful with a consitently failing tactic?
Minor point, traditional societies are probably better able to take care of their old than societies that rely on pensions. The family takes over the responsibilities of the state which took over the responsibilities of the family when it comes to caring for the elderly.
About six months ago, I read an article on pjmedia (might have been an Instalink) pointing out that Social Security carries with it the seeds of its own destruction, in that when responsibility of care for the elderly transferred from one’s own children to “other people’s children”, people stopped having their own children so that other people’s “other people’s children” declined all around. And now we’re seeing Lady Thatcher’s prediction come true, because the sooner you run out of “other people”, the sooner you run out of their money.
I also think that if people had to rely on their own children for their old-age well-being, we wouldn’t see as many kids so poorly raised that they become Occupoopers.
The Jewish birthrate in Israel is indeed rising — but this is (mainly) due to the contribution of the Haredim, who make up an ever-increasing share of Israeli Jews.
Due to rapid population growth, the Haredi population skews young. The median age is between 15 and 18. (I’ve seen different numbers given.) This means that Haredi women will come to make up an ever-increasing share of women in child-bearing years — so the Israeli Jewish birthrate in Israel will necessarily rise.
Any increase in the secular Israeli birthrate is fairly marginal and statistically insignificant. The Israeli Jewish birthrate will continue to rise as the Haredim make up an ever-increasing share of the population. By 2030, there’s no telling what Israel’s birthrate could be; it could very well rise to 4-5 children per women. But will Israel be in good shape in 2030? Will Israel even survive to 2030? They won’t; not if they don’t get their act together.
As far as the problem of 65% of haredi men not working, and living off the welfare system. This is a modern aberration. This can be traced back to 1977, when in order to put together his coalition, Menachem Begin (Likud) removed the existing cap of 800, and gave deferments or exemptions from military service to all haredi men. The results? In 1979, just 20.9% of haredi men did not work, compared to 65% today. The solution? Abolish the draft & let them join the workforce. Then you gradually cut off all welfare and subsidies over a period of say 5 years. End of problem.
It will be interesting to see what happens to Japan in the next decade or two, since to my knowledge they are the first country that will really experience an absolute drop in population. So they should be a good test case.
My question is what happens to the financial system, when on average all investments lose money? When asset prices, such as real estate continue to fall? How does that affect banks?
An academic economist could probably model this. Something tells me you can handle this if productivity grows faster than the loss of population, but how fast can productivity grow, when so many people are senior citizens?
Surely population can decline or even stagnate. It has in the past. But this will be the first time that it has done so in the context of a modern capitalist society.
So maybe it’s not war that is the right prism to look at these issues through. Maybe it’s economy.
?
It was the Japanese who became famous for stating that Economics was War.
For the demographic imbalance, I predict euthanasia. The Dutch are leading the way already and I assume the EU will follow. That will restore the demographic balance for them. As for a declining population, we have built our economies to some degree around a mild level of inflation but I am sure it is possible to build one around a mild level of deflation. Has anyone done such a study?
Productivity == Robots, not people. It’s possible, although not assured, that Japan will pull this one off.
The real-estate question is a good one. As is the stock market: Is stock going to be sellable when all the baby boomers are liquidating their portfolios in retirement? Who will buy it?
The low fertility rate is directly link to industrialization, improvement on quality of life, and decline in infant morality. Take Turkey for example, during the 1960′s when Turkey started to industrialized the rural fertility rate was much much higher than big city dwellers. Now that people are moving from rural areas into industrialized mega cities they are having smaller families. On the contrary the Kurds in Turkey who are much less prosperous still having large families. This trend in Turkey is not something new. After 1960 coup d’etat natialist party leader Turkeş publicly warned the incoming Kurdish population explosion. If the trend continues The Kurdsish population in Turkey will be in parity with Turks. This is one of Erdoğan’s nightmares that keeps him awake at night. And the other is the disintegration of Syria. He knows If Syria breaks apart his country is next. The internal Muslim turmoil is just started.
Funny there’s always too many of somebody for political thinkers. Conservatives love to tell the young the old are a burden. Women are not baby factories. The planet will continue to turn after your dead, or it won’t.
Fertility rate compared to what ? Mr Goldman you take one set of numbers and you align them together to draw an outstretched conclusion; I live in France; overall muslim population is 13 %, with a fertility rate of 3,5 children per women, compared to 1,1 with french of european descent.So in 30 years , the muslim population will be around 35% of France, in 2050 they will be the majority.Even if their fertility slightly decline, the French state subsidy and the massive import of muslim population from North Africa, will make france a muslim country in 40 years from now.Do you imagine the french nuclear warheads into a muslim minister of defence ? The Brussels executive commission of the European Union just crave for more muslims, they call for more every year.Heavy loads of cash are payed to these high-ranking administrations , by the OCI ( organisation de la Conference Islamique seated in Djeddah ) to support more muslim immigration; If the heart of Europe becomes muslim, the fertility decline in Iran, Egypt, Turkey is irrelevant.
The issue of the safety and use of the British and French nuclear arsenals, over the long term, as those countries become more and more Islamic, is not one that has received sufficient study.
I would worry more about Russia, as Islam is making huge inroads there. It could be a muslim majority country well before Britain or France.
Putin and the Orthodox Church seem to be aware of the problem. The abortion rate in Russia remains horrific however. Over time Russia is bound to improve economically and hopefully that will restore some balance. I believe that there is considerable conversion to Orthodox Christianity as well – at least this was reported in the Caucus after the Beslan massacre.
When people discuss Haredim as a percentage of the Israeli population one factor to consider is the drop-out rate. I’m going on memory here, I haven’t seen a study on this issue in decades. I think the common rule of thumb used to be that about a third of Haredim drop out of the home group and become secular. If not a third, a big number. Does anyone have more recent data?
As everyone knows, the transition from traditional society to industrial society involves a fertility transition; the question is whether the transition is to 1 child per family or 2 or more. At 2 we survive, at 1 we die out. Faith remains the best predictor of this post-transition difference in industrial societies.
I think you’re right; I was a mathematician before I became a housewife, so I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but: what I see as a traditional-minded Catholic is that most European-descent Catholic women are well-educated but that those who follow Church teaching on contraceptives have a bunch more children. It’s obvious when you think of it, and of course Catholics have “no contraceptives” as a teaching while other denominations don’t, but most of the big Catholic families I see are 1) intact (NFP couples have a divorce rate around 4%, while Catholics who don’t recognize Humanae Vitae, divorce at a higher rate than the rest of the population) and 2) the wife is college-educated. Probably has to do with the (military) settings we’ve lived in also, of course.
And fewer conservative children are being indoctrinated all the time: homeschool rates double about every ten years or so, iirc; it’s up to about 4%. Still, at the end of day, the biggest effect each of us can have is to have a bunch of children, and raise them the way we think children ought to be raised. (btw, I wouldn’t mind AT ALL if liberals read this and decided to stop aborting their kids so that there are a bunch more little liberals in ten years.
)
They’d darn well better have fewer children — there’s only so many people you can support on a given level of oil revenue. When families have only two or three children instead of a dozen, they may find it difficult to recruit a sufficient number of suicide bombers. They may start to worry more about the economy than about destroying distant enemies.
Islam may be declining, but I worry they aim to take us with them.
That is why I don’t want to take any chances on Iran getting nuclear weapons.
The counter-argument being that the further down the road we can kick the can, the better the picture looks for the good guys, Iranian AND Western.
I don’t think we can wait until 2050 to see if the sanctions have worked nor for the demographics play out.
“Down the road” … Iran acquires the capability to rapidly assemble two dozen nuclear weapons at dispersed and hardened locations. How is that “better” for the US?
Your warnings are well advised. As I have written before, Nazi Germany arose out of a World War I induced German fertility decline. In fact the Nazis were quite obsessed about this fertility decline. Iran is not Nazi Germany, of course and fortunately. Its relative capabilities compared to other powers of its day are much inferior. But, the extreme ideology of its leadership has some similarities. Enough to make one worried about what they might do.
Second Steve here (or maybe first): The Nazis actually managed to reverse the decline in the German birth rate in the 1930s. They did it primarily by banning abortion but also by paying (Aryan) mothers to have more children whether in or out of wedlock and with a general pro-natal propaganda campaign, especially for members of elite Aryan institutions like the SS. However they did it, they did prove it is possible.
Mr Goldman writes that “the decline of Catholicism explained collapsing fertility in lands once blessed by large families — Spain, …”. I do not dispute that claim, mind you, as long as the verb — explained – is in the past tense.
Religion’s decline may explain historical fertility trends in Spain, but that explanatory variable has long been superseded by a completely different one, namely unemployment rates.
The larger the difference between male and female unemployment rates, the fewer Spaniards are born. Apparently that is because pregnant women are unemployable. I forget the exact chain of causality involved.
Carl Stoll
Well, this isn’t the whole picture. Black african muslims for example have the highest fertility rates in the world. There is population explosion in the Sahel, Nigeria, Somalia, etc.
Perhaps, but Christianity is growing faster than Islam in central Africa. Christian Africans have as high a fertility rate as their Muslim neighbors.
And where it’s allowed, Muslims convert to Christianity in huge numbers in Africa.
Although never granted citizenship, lots of maids and slaves in some ME countries do have babies.
Also not to be underestimated is the whole kidnapping/raping/forcibly converting & maybe even marrying women who were not Muslims.
I also read how some Christian children have been abducted to be forced into a suicide belt by Muslims.
Seems that very few ”Islamists” can force many passive Muslim-born populace into their mold or at least into silence.
And excess males make excellent cannon fodder.
Islam is a failure as a self-contained system of governance….to much of it relies on plundering and looting for it to succeed.
But, as long as there are either non-Muslims to loot or even fellow Muslims to call ”apostates,” and therefore also loot Islam will continue as a viable-ish system.
Just my opinion.
So *that*’s why there are no Muslims on the original Star Trek.
Ambassador Ettinger and I have cited each others’ work numerous times, and covered a lot of the same ground.
Palestinians (gaza & west bank) like in a welfare state.
Welfare states lead to underemployed males that women do not want to have kids with.
Detroit much? Baltimore? DC? Any large city?
If you like talking about Egypt, Muslims, birthrates and strategic implications, here’s a much more likely scenario:
1. Today Egypt is at a break even point with their supply of water from the Nile.
2. For 50 years they have told nations to their south that any attempt to divert the Nile’s flow would be an act of war.
3. Populations to the south of Egypt are exploding.
4. They need food, and water to grow that food.
5. They will build dams.
6. War.
Ask yourself if Israeli intelligence is making friends and influencing people in the new South Sudan right now. I know I would.
Water on, water off, and Egypt, with an American-equipped army they can’t use except in joint operations with America against, say, Iran, is helpless. We did that on purpose – Egypt has an army with systems which dovetail with our own. And Egypt can only be resupplied by us during conflict.
Egypt has been effectively neutered. Their population has no more water or land.
Of course if they had any brains they’d invest in simple tech to make sea-water potable and take out those WW II mines and resurrect their farms around Marsa Metrouh. Read “Dune” Egyptians. You won’t regret it. You can be real Freman.
Of course they could build desalination plants, they could invest in drip technology, they could recycle sewage water – there are so many things they could do which are absolutely proven. Look at the Aravah valley in Israel. As per my comment above, the water problem is very solvable (I have an interest in an irrigation technology/water company in Israel). But Islam does not mandate that they do those things. It mandates that they ban alcohol, that they ban interest, that they ban blasphemy, that they memorize the Koran, that they oppress Christians. Their culture of believing themselves superior and wanting to dominate others demands investment in weapons. So that is exactly what they are going to do. That is their imperative. Northeast Sinai in Israeli hands would be filled with farms. In Egyptian hands? Bedouins, smugglers, plant destroying sheep – lone and level sands – utter waste.
For me the interesting question is why the US national security community (senior bureaucrats, academia and media) has been so committed over the past 20 years to stridently attacking and marginalizing those who make the case for decisive action against the Khomenist government of Iran.
Another question is how it’s possible at this late date to ignore the emperor’s nakedness and maintain that BHO is really committed to in preventing Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons, post-Hagel nomination, post reduction of CVNs on station in the PG and Indian Ocean to one from two, etc. … Sadly, the late Mayor Koch demonstrated with his last public act that Jews have a talent for this sort of ostrich thinking.
The Nobelist William Shockley (1910-1989) was widely execrated at the time, especially by our Marxist-dominated academics and media outlets, but he genuinely tried to raise a serious point with his theory of retrogressive evolution. When government subsidizes the disproportionate reproduction of the genetically disadvantaged, you get — guess what! — a genetically disadvantaged population.
It would be nice if we could have a civilized public discussion about population policy and what population changes portend for the planet. It is much more important than siphoning off billions of taxpayer dollars to pay Al Gore and his crony hucksters to jet around the world peddling their mysterious green bottles of environmental snake-oil.
Watch Idiocracy. Great movie
I refuse to entertain a conversation about Shockley on this site. It is inflammatory, speculative, and prejudicial. The Arabs who go to Israeli universities are just as smart as the Jews, one for one — after you extract them from an oppressive culture. The first people to tell you this are the settlers in Ariel, whose university attracts a lot of Arab kids from Judea and Samaria. You see lots of girls in headscarves there. Take your business somewhere else.
Having said that, is this a dream or reality?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1394119/Its-time-confront-taboo-First-cousin-marriages-Muslim-communities-putting-hundreds-children-risk.html
For obvious reasons, they don’t get into intelligence. But all things being equal, there must be an effect. Unless one presumes a mutant genius, it is a troubling paradigm in certain Muslim cultures.
Oddly enough, up to 100 years ago, Ashkenazi Jews engaged in cousin marriage. Laws in several states were specifically passed to allow this practice – just for Jews (it was a different Constitutional era then). And it did not cause the horrific rates of birth defects and retardation seen in the Pakistani community. Just the opposite. That generation produced an over abundance of scholars etc. I do not know the reason why – it is very clear that muslim cousin marriage is causing horrible problems in the UK. But Ashkenazi Jews share so much genetic material already, being closely in bred for 1000 years, maybe it did not make a difference. I would be very curious if anyone has any thought on this.
It also lead to tay-sachs, Canavan’s, gaucher’s 1&2 and a whole host of mucopolysaccaridoses that lead to neurodegeneration and early death. There are some that speculate heterozygotes for these conditions have improved neurobranching and higher intellects but this has not been conclusively demonstrated.
In this context Ben Wattenberg deserves an honorable mention at least, for The Birth Dearth (1987). I don’t recall if he extended the thesis to the middle east, but he argued forcefully that modern societies are breeding below the replacement rate. It doesn’t seem that the problem is a failure of religion so much as greater opportunity for women. Today’s woman has many choices of career besides “mother”, along with cheap technology to prevent conception, and it shouldn’t be surprising that many delay or forgo that choice altogether.
Absolutely. Wattenberg was the first conservative writer to draw attention to the problem. The Middle East wasn’t on the radar screen at the time he wrote.
Hahaha. There were 5 billion people on Earth in 1987. 243 million in America.
Result of dearth: 7 billion and 310 million respectively.
I guess margin for error means 19 kazillion people first.
Reminds me of a Monty Python sketch where a man crosses the Atlantic “on a tricycle. His tricycle, specially adapted for the crossing, was ninety feet long, with a protective steel hull, three funnels, seventeen first-class cabins and a radar scanner.”
You need to look a median ages. In 1970, the median age in the US was 24 and in China 19. Today it is 37 for the US and 38 for China. People are living longer; they are far more elderly in the world proportionally speaking than 40 years ago. In short, people are leaving the world at a slower rate than entering it. Check back in 20 years. You won’t be laughing then.
Technology has increased the maximum age of fertility for women. With stem cells the age of infertility might be postponed forever. The median age is higher and the average age at death is higher, people can work productively for more years. It is impossible to know how all of this will come out. In 1945, the Jews were at an absolute low ebb, having just been “terciated”. Less than 70 years later, they have a state with the highest birth rate in the Western world.
While demographic collapse may come to pass it is not about to happen soon. The cause of that collapse may or may not be the education of females. There are some significant crisis-es going on as we write. Has anyone noticed that famine seems endemic in the “Muslim World”? I remember when I was a teen, before JFK was elected, the church I attended was collecting food and money to “Save The Children” in Somalia. Many of the places that had starving children back then have even more starving children now. How things do change.
I don’t remember where I read (I believe it was in pjmedia) that several countries including Indonesia, and Pakistan have gone from net exporters of food to net importers. Such a development does not bode well for these countries now or in the future.
Let’s think about the reasons why women all over the world are having so few children. There’s growing medical evidence that The Pill reduces women’s sexual desire and ability to bond with their husbands. The pro-life movement has been aware of this research for years. Abortion is another obvious reason, as abortion technology and ultra-sound equipment become available in all but the most backward areas. Another reason is urbanization: it’s difficult to have a large family in a small apartment. Another reason is the cost of educating children. All over the world, middle class families and upwardly mobile working class families want to invest in their children’s education. More expense leads to fewer births. Women also feel vulnerable when marriages are not stable or fulfilling, and the more children, the more vulnerable she is. The obnoxious interpretations of Islam that treat women like chattels (while pretending that they’re “protected”)probably make a huge contribution to the fertility strike in the Muslim world. Why endure many pregnancies if your husband can divorce you on a whim, or take other wives, and send you back to your father in disgrace while keeping custody of the children?
“David, I’ve been reading you for years, starting when you were only published in the Asia Times. While Muslim birthrates are falling in the Arab world it is my impression that the Muslim birthrates are not seeing anywhere near the same decline in Europe and the U.K., or are they?”
Oregon Jon,
The facts speak for themselves. Take the most populous Muslim nation – Indonesia. In 1970, its TFR (Total Fertility Rate) was 6.5 births/female. For almost a decade it’s been 1.8 (2.1 being the TFR that allows a nation a stable population, barring immigration. Egypt, in 1970 had a TFR of 6.2. Today, it is 1.7. Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Syria have birthrates below replacement levels. Thailand and the Philippines, nations with growing Muslim minority populations have seen their birthrates plunge from more than 5.0 in 1985 to below 2.5 in 2010. The trend everywhere in Muslim land is down, way down. So, yes in comparison to Europe and North America (and most of Asia), Muslim nations are in “good shape”. But, their race to the bottom is not far behind the rest of the world. Demographic momentum works both ways. What began a generation ago cannot be turned around overnight – or even within a generation.
My concerns are these. Are muslim populations growing in NON-muslim countries?
Putting aside the birthrate as the only parameter, is the muslim population growing in the U.S.? Is it growing in Canada and Mexico?
Someone mentioned the joke about outrunning the bear. The punchline says it all as regards islam. I’m unaware of either a birthrate decline of muslims in the U.S. or a decline in total numbers here. Au contraire…
If fertility in women declines when they become literate, why does my college-educated, once-married wife have 5 children (plus 2miscarriages)? Oh – it’s because we actually believe in that “traditional” religion, Christianity, which paradoxically we follow more closely the more we exert our literacy upon its sacred text. The only thing that’s keeping US births above the replacement rate is the followers of that ole traditional religion: evangelicals, conservative Catholics, and Hispanic immigrants.
Muslim fertility declines in a nearly straight-line relationship with education, that is to say, as Muslims exit traditional society. Other religions survive the demise of traditional society. Educated evangelicals and Orthodox Jews have plenty of children, for example.
The issue is this – What are American interests in the Mideast? The issue isn’t how many people are there. If this author thinks the Mullahs will stop or become less influential and powerful because there are fewer people he is wrong.
Even if it is true that the more people the more powerful they are, and with fewer people they are less powerful, neither case will replace them or their power and neither case will change them in any way.
What this article does as normal and good punditry is to puncture claims made by anti Western and anti American advocates re the inevitability of the decline of the West.
That debate is old one and the author is right it is a phony one. I wish he linked tit to other thoughts the population freaks spook themselves with and use them to advocate population control in various guises – abortions, sterilizations, their welfare as opposed to welfare, their Obamacare opposed to medical services supply, etc etc etc.
The issue is this – What are American interests in the Mideast? The issue isn’t how many people are there. If this author thinks the Mullahs will stop or become less influential and powerful because there are fewer people he is wrong.
Even if it is true that the more people the more powerful they are, and with fewer people they are less powerful, neither case will replace them or their power and neither case will change them in any way.
What this article does as normal and good punditry is to puncture claims made by anti Western and anti American advocates re the inevitability of the decline of the West.
That debate is old one and the author is right it is a phony one. I wish he linked it to other thoughts the population freaks spook themselves with and use them to advocate population control in various guises – abortions, sterilizations, their welfare as opposed to welfare, their Obamacare opposed to medical services supply, etc etc etc.
Mr. Miller, what difference does David’s Jewishness make to his argument?
Either he’s right about the Persian civilizational nightmare, or he’s not. If Iran in fact won’t have another chance to survive after this soldier-aged generation passes, does not his reasoning make sense? Not only are they Shiites, they are Persians. We have every reason to expect Shia Islam to seize this opportunity to get a leg up, and Persia is soon to be a remembrance of things past, if action is not taken soon. David says we should believe that these motivations are likely to lead to desperation. What does that have to do with his being a Jew? I believe his argument, and I am not a Jew.
This is, as they call it, game theory. Mises’ masterwork on economics is called Human Action. His theory of economics stems from what people do, using their reason, in the marketplace. Well, this applies to civilizations, and races, and apocalyptic religious sects as well. And Iran represents all three. Human Action. People change their economic behavior in what they perceive to be their their best interests when conditions change. Why would not you expect a uniquely challenged country like Iran to do the same?
Mr. Miller,
Since when does a religious Jew have to apologize for making observations about the foreign policy interests of the United States? Get off my site and stay away. Any further entries will be treated as spam.
Mr. Goldman doesn’t make any secret of where he’s coming from. Why act like you had to scour some secret place on the internet? Projection is an inadvisable state of mind. That’s how liberals come to the conclusion that the Trail of Tears is a state secret they must reveal each month. If you want to test open secrets, go to a liberal site and start talking about Africans who enslaved other Africans and sold them to Europeans on the coast. A true partnership. Don’t forget to turn the other cheek when you’re slapped.
What difference does it make??! His religious outlook is hugely important and a major factor why I almost always read his posts.
Your direct reply to “Henry Miller” was noted, absolutely justified and,in addition, quite refreshing. Thanks!
Is there a handbook on “how to discredit truthtellers”? Because that’s exactly the kind of comment I used to get when I was helping shut down a pervert-worshipping cult that’s been masquerading as a Catholic order for 70 years (LC). “You should know that this person has _a different opinion than I do (hisssssss)_ and therefore what he writes is NOT objective”. lol
I’d like you to read my comments again. I love David’e Jewishness, but it’s quite irrelevant to the question at hand, and only an antisemite would try to shoehorn it into the conversation, and condemn his conclusions because of it. His argument would be equally valid if he were a certified Lama of Tibet, or a shaman from the deep amazon jungle.
Jeannette, if I’m reading you correctly, the logical result of your argument is as follows: If Mr. Goldman were not Jewish, then you would alter your opinion of his articles, perspectives and points of view. And if you did not know anything at all about Mr. Goldman’s biographical data, you would further alter your opinions. By illustration, let’s take William Shakespeare. Many scholars indicate that he did not, in fact, craft the plays which have been published in his name. Would the fact that someone other than William Shakespeare be the author of the plays he is alleged to have written alter the significance, value and beauty of these works? Would they then attain a higher value in your mind? A lower value? Suppose the writer was anonymous? Suppose the writer was a convicted felon? A pedophile even? Given that you were a mathematician or taught mathematics before becoming a housewife and mother, would the Pythagorean Theorem be different, have an altered quality, if the discovery by Pythagoras have been a myth handed down generation to generation? I’ll let you answer that.
Furthermore, is there something which you can typify as “Jewish scholarship” amongst the thousands and thousands of Jewish scholars throughout history? Can you actually make a case that Carolyn Glick and Martin Sherman, for instance, have something very tangible in terms of a scholarly approach to questions concerning Israel and Jewish identity in common with, say, Noam Chomsky and Shlomo Sand, which non-Jewish scholars or Jews of mixed origin do not possess? Can you typify and meaningfully characterize what comes under the heading of what you may term “Jewish scholarship” no matter how many differences in scholarly approaches and perspectives and opinions and conclusions are found amongst them even about any one subject such as Israel, the nation and its import? Because if you can’t, then it makes no difference whatsoever, at least from the perspective of our understanding Israel and its import, to know whether David Goldman is Jewish or not. On the other hand, if your answer to my question is that there is a secular “Jewish” approach to scholarship which differentiates it from a non-Jewish approach, then I would like to know what it is. In fact, I’m sure the entire PJ readership would be interested in being informed about your scholarly analysis and now, currently, would be a wonderful opportunity to explicate it.
“Miller” didn’t take the hint, and has been put in the Spam bin.
Not his “Jewishness” specifically; I like to read other people who aren’t afraid to write from a Judeo-Christian moral stance. I consider men like him to be my ally against evil (Islam, Communism, Pistons fans, etc), so I want to know how our opinions are alike, and how they differ.
Oops, that reply was to Raymond. Looks like comment reply placement is a little quirky now that Miller is gone