Sorry for the Current Demographics Overload
[This is part of my series on Thomas Malthus’ “Essay on the Principle of Population,” first published in 1798. You can find an overview of all my posts here that I will keep updated: “Synopsis: What’s Wrong with the Malthusian Argument?”]
Maybe this is surprising: In a deeper sense I am totally not interested in demographics.
I would say it is an entertaining topic like many others, and so there is nothing wrong with thinking about it. There are certainly many decent motivations for research in demographics. However, my suspicion is that those who obsess about it often have some deeper problem that drives them forward. That may be pretty personal: You don’t have as many children as you want. Or you are annoyed by others who have too many in your view, and those are the “wrong” people. I just find it distasteful when people make judgments about whether other people have too many or too few children, and pity them when they judge themselves by such a standard.
However, often it is also on a higher level: Then it is about whether the “right” people have too few and the “wrong” people have too many children, but on a gigantic scale: How can our nation/race play a larger role in power politics or avoid extinction in a “struggle for existence?” Will “dysgenics” bring the nation/race down or can we breed it upwards? Especially from a German perspective, this is not far-fetched. It often not just reeks of the Third Reich, but it stinks.
Yet, that is not the only association I have. There is also the decade-long handwringing over human “overpopulation,” which is popular on the left end of the political spectrum, too. And then demographics seems to attract social engineers of all stripes, very ironically also libertarian social engineers. Even worse, I would say it is the perfect platform for charlatans, people who in scientific garb want to make a career as political entrepreneurs.
All this is certainly very unfair to many people who work on demographic topics or are interested in them. My apologies, I am sure there are lots of other motivations that I can appreciate, but then this is what comes to my mind first. For that reason, “I made a big arch” around the topic for a long time as one would say in German (einen großen Bogen darum machen). But then it is somewhat like with Trotsky’s quip: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Some things don’t just go away because you ignore them.
As I see it at the moment, demographics should be a very low-pressure topic. Humans have it as a part of their nature to handle population growth in a very reasonable way. You can leave it as it is. There is neither a reason to worry about population sizes going to infinity nor to zero. Thomas Malthus has messed this up with his obsession about the exponential function. There is hence also no reason to deviate from the liberal maxim: Live and let live. People will get this right. There is no need for social engineering in either direction. And I am also not surprised that such attempts despite their overbearing approach never work even on their own terms.
Unfortunately, though, it is certainly true that “demographics is interested in you.” I cannot skim through like 100 tweets on Twitter, read more than a dozen blog posts, articles in the press, and there it is. I wish I could get a Euro for every time someone writes about how Germany will die out and is doomed. Or Japan or South Korea. And another Euro for every time someone does an extrapolation that there will be one trillion people in Africa soon. Or how Muslims conquer other countries with their fertility. Bla bla bla. This is all over the place, it is a part of our culture, and it is built into our worldviews.
And that has consequences. Some amount of social engineering may only be obnoxious. But it can make a whole society miserable. People find it polite to put others on notice that they have too few or too many children, not just as a personal statement, but as a moral judgment and an exhortation. A Russian newspaper wondered whether the soccer world cup might lead to a “baby boom” with all those fans coming to the country and whether that would help turn the demographic trend around. Russian women are treated as a quantity in a plan.
But this whole demographic panic has also driven so many far more evil things: Campaigns of forced sterilization in less developed countries, total disregard for human suffering already with famines in the 19th century as in Ireland and India because as a Malthusian you see the bright side of it. And then there were the Nazis who subscribed to both panics at the same time: Jews were engineering the demise of the “Aryan race” by promoting low fertility. However, since the Nazis would make things “natural” again, you needed to conquer vast territories for the exponentially overflowing population and, of course, exterminate those who lived there. Getting these things wrong is not an academic question.
What I hope to do is drive a stake through the vampire’s heart (as a mathematician, I am a huge fan of the Count von Count and so I mean that only metaphorically). If you get rid of the Malthusian argument, demographics will turn from a very high-pressure into a very low-pressure topic. Then there will still be many entertaining questions that deserve attention and research. Great if demographers look into them, But maybe I will then move on because I find other things more interesting.
The reason I currently focus on demographic topics is an accidental outcome of this quest. It just so happens that a lot of things currently fall into place for me. And I want to write them up. At some point, this will be exhausted, and then, or hopefully already long before that, I will return to more balanced blogging that encompasses the whole range of topics that I find truly interesting.
Bear with me, more demographic stuff to come over the short run. Sorry.
