… reliant on continued population growth in order to sustain itself.
Put simply, our age pyramid no longer looks like a pyramid. An ageing population depends on working-age adults to fund the welfare system. An economic system dependent on high levels of debt also depends on above-replacement birth rates.
So says the Spectator in their article, Modernity is making you sterile.
They’re hardly the first to notice, even as a few people continue to shriek, Malthus-like, about our still-growing global population, now expected to hit 9 billion around 2050 or so – after which its going to decline, perhaps quite rapidly.
But then those types never did take any notice of the other number that underpins population, the birth rate. It’s decline, starting in the West in the late 1960’s and spreading across most of the rest of the globe starting in the 1970’s, had already destroyed the arguments of the likes of Paul Erlich and Population Bomb thesis at the precise moment he was pushing it so hard.
And while people often refer to the widespread adoption of The Pill, there are other factors that were likely more important, if seemingly vague:
The key features of modernity – urbanism, affluence, secularism, the blurring of gender distinctions, and more time spent with strangers than with kin – all of these factors in combination shred fertility. Which means that progressivism, the political ideology that urges on the acceleration of modernisation, can best be understood as a sterility meme. When people first become modern, they have fewer children; when they adopt progressive ideology, they accelerate the process of modernisation and so have even fewer. Britain was the first country to experience an industrial revolution, meaning that Britain started hurtling towards modernity faster than anyone else. Today, only 3 per cent of the world’s population lives in a country whose fertility rate is not declining.
For the capitalists of the West this means that immigration becomes essential to fill all those jobs they’re creating. But…
Immigration can offset the problem. It cannot solve it. If the birth rate continues to collapse, then so too will the welfare state. A ‘hard landing’ to demographic imbalance looks like economic depression, empty and derelict cities, collapsed public services, and millions of poor and childless elderly people ending their lives in loneliness, squalor, and pain. As the American economist Nicolas Eberstadt has put it, ‘we don’t know how to be a country without population growth’. The great well of economic theory that we are familiar with was all written during times of population growth. We are about to enter uncharted territory.
Japan has been in this territory for twenty years now and is experiencing some of these negative factors, to which it has answered with robots, including those helping to care for their elderly. But the worst of what is described in the passage above likely lies 20-30 years in Japan’s future and we’ll have to draw our lessons from that time period, if there are any to be drawn:
But even if the government succeeds in goosing the birth rate, the effects will be felt decades from now. Japan has an immediate problem that dates back to policies adopted in 1948. People over 75 now make up 15 percent of the population, and they don’t have a lot of kids to take care of them. Japan’s postwar baby boom lasted only about two years. By contrast, the U.S. experienced high birth rates from 1946 to 1964.
In 1948, the Diet passed the Eugenic Protection Law. It made abortions legal and cheap, about $10. “Critics assert that it is easier for a woman to avoid an unwanted child in this way than to have her tonsils removed,” The New York Times reported in 1964. “One result of the practice has been the virtual elimination of illegitimate births.”
The bill also promoted contraception, establishing “eugenic protection consultation offices” throughout the country. They provided marriage counseling and gave couples “guidance in adequate methods of contraception.” Local governments trained midwives and nurses to encourage family planning. Employers, unions, and nonprofits pushed the idea of smaller families and helped spread information about how to achieve them.
It may be that reducing the cost of housing will encourage higher rates of marriage formation, and perhaps things like greater financial support for babies and children with the likes of tax credits. But that article also points to how lonely motherhood is nowadays, which is yet another example of our atomisation. How you solve that I don’t know. And it should be noted that South Korea spent literally hundreds of billions of dollars over a period of some twenty years to boost their birth rate – only to see it fall further.
No Minister 
The birth rate itself is only a comparatively minor consideration as far as a population supporting itself.
Far more important is the age of productivity.
If modern society can get people to continue to be productive until, say, 80 instead of the recent norm of 60, the replacement needed is reduced accordingly and the immigrants will want to move to such a place.
In the current world where population distribution is inconsistent this will be a serious consideration.
Unfortunately currently most immigration is being driven by a “something for nothing” motive and that needs to be stopped before the redistribution of the populace can be efficiently achieved.