If Demography Is Destiny, Bring on Immigration. We’re Going to Need It.

Inevitably, presidential campaigns focus on immediate domestic difficulties or foreign dangers. Momentous developments — inexorably gathering storms — are unnoticed, until social upheavals upend governments’ assumptions. But Nicholas Eberstadt has noticed.

For the first time since the Black Death in the 1300s, he writes in Foreign Affairs, Earth’s population is going to decline. A lot. This will create social hazards that will challenge political ingenuity. Still, it will be, primarily, a protracted reverberation of a relatively recent, and excellent, event in humanity’s story: the emancipation of women.

Eberstadt, who is incapable of writing an uninteresting paragraph, is an economist and demography-is-destiny savant at the American Enterprise Institute. He says a large excess of deaths over births will be driven not by a brute calamity like the bubonic plague but by choices: those regarding fertility, family structures and living arrangements, all reflecting “a worldwide reduction in the desire for children.”

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It is possible that “the pervasive graying of the population and protracted population decline will hobble economic growth and cripple social welfare systems in rich countries,” Eberstadt writes. Also: “A coming wave of senescence,” smaller family units, fewer people getting married, “high levels of voluntary childlessness,” “dwindling workforces, reduced savings and investment, unsustainable social outlays, and budget deficits” are the fate of developed nations — unless they make “sweeping changes.”

Eberstadt is, however, tentatively cheerful: “Steadily improving living standards and material and technological advances will still be possible.” The Earth “is richer and better fed than ever before — and natural resources are more plentiful and less expensive (after adjusting for inflation), than ever before,” and the global population is more “extensively schooled” than ever. What is required is “a favorable business climate,” which is Eberstadt’s shorthand for allowing market forces to wring maximum efficiency from fewer people: “Prosperity in a depopulating world will also depend on open economies: free trade in goods, services, and finance to counter the constraints that declining populations otherwise engender.”

The “demographic tides” are, Eberstadt writes, running against the quartet of nations (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea) that, oblivious of demography, are exaggerating their future powers. China’s next generation “is on track to be only half as large as the preceding one.”

Furthermore, “demographic trends are on course to augment American power.”

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