Your Country Is Dying
Low birthrates and declining poppulations
One thing they don’t teach people enough about is demographic numbers. I’ve tweeted in the past that demographics should be a national security issue for every country. This factor literally makes and breaks societies, let me tell you all about it.
If you’re a hunter you’re familiar with hunting licenses. One of the reasons they’re issued is for regulating and conserving animal populations. If populations get too high they destroy their environment by consuming too many resources and get diseases. If populations get too low they also have domino effects on their environment and risk extinction.
You can look at humans almost the same way (except with more care lol). According to Wikipedia, Demographic Statistics are measures of the characteristics of, or changes to, a population. Records of births, deaths, marriages, immigration and emigration. These are incredibly important things we’ll explore a little bit in this article.
Too Many People?
We humans have all sorts of theories on overpopulation dating back to ancient times. There’s been tons of books and conspiracies on overpopulation and how the “elite” were going to deal with it. Everyone’s perception was a bit off when it came to that, the world population growth rate is actually decreasing, not the other way around.
On this chart, world population growth rate peaked in 1963. Obviously this means fertility rates also peaked in 1963, this means overpopulation theories are wrong and have been wrong for decades now. Sorry to burst you guy’s “New World Order” bubbles.
Demographic Transition
So demographic transition is a theory that describes what happens to a country’s population when they go through industrialization. The theory has different stages:
pre-industrial society, death rates and birth rates are high and roughly in balance.
developing country, the death rates drop quickly due to improvements in food supply and sanitation, which increase life expectancy and reduce disease.
Industrialized country, birth rates fall due to various fertility factors such as access to contraception, increases in wages, urbanization, a reduction in subsistence agriculture, an increase in the status and education of women, a reduction in the value of children's work, an increase requirement in parental investment in the education of children and other social changes. Population growth begins to level off.
During stage four there are both low birth rates and low death rates. Birth rates may drop to well below replacement level
If you look at the bottom of this chart you’ll see population pyramids, let’s dive a bit deeper into those. Population pyramids takes the total population of a country and divides them by age and gender. It allows you to get a good look at what a country’s future looks like. For example a 10 year old child would of had to been born 10 years ago, If no one was born that year there would be no 10 year olds. This seems super obvious when I point it out like this but most people don’t think of it this way. So, sometimes when I point out that a country has a dying population, people often reply with “they can always have more babies”. True in some cases but there is a point of no return. Women have a cut off when it comes to getting pregnant so your current population of 18-35(ish) year old’s really matter. Guess what? It takes 18 years to make an 18 year old, you can’t just conjure them up from thin air.
Types Of Pyramids
Population pyramids are supposed to look like pyramids. Your children are your future, they make up the base. As soon as your “pyramid” starts to become top heavy, your country is in for a ride.
Wut Mean Top heaby?
It means your population is dying and that it’s going to cause you a lot of trouble economically and militarily if you don’t find a solution. Let’s dive into the economic part first, let’s say your country is transitioning from zero growth to negative growth. The main consumers in an economy are people under 40. Obviously if you now have less consumers, businesses make less money selling domestically so they’re forced to be more export oriented. You’re stuck in this period for a while until the majority of your work force hits 60+ and they retire. After that you don’t have enough young people to replace them, so your economy is forced to shrink. Social systems start to get heavy on the economy because of all the elderly people. Infrastructure starts to break down due to lack of skilled labor etc. etc. etc.
Militarily if you have a lot of land and no longer have enough troops to protect it you risk getting invaded and or having rebellions in any territories you control. This means you have to shift your whole military outlook.
Is There No Solution To This?
Well for this we can probably look at Israel, they have one of the highest birthrates of post industrialized countries, around a 2.9 compared to the US’s 1.6 . According to a study this seems to be because of socio-economic, cultural, political and geopolitical reasons:
Policies that support working mothers
Relatively equal gender-role attitudes and household behavior
The continuing importance of family ideology and of marriage as a social institution
Religious society characterized by ethno-national conflict
Discourse which defines women as the biological reproducers of the nation
Maybe a lot of countries can take a few pages off of Israel’s playbook. Cutting down expenses for mothers is probably one of the biggest things I personally believe and promoting having more than 2 kids, after that let the chips fall where they may. Please give suggestions in comment section!
If you’re too late in the cycle and your country is already dying with decades of declining birthrates. You have one last resort to keep your country from crumbling down and that’s immigration. Yes! like magic you can just import people and have them bolster your population! But of course don’t be an idiot about it, you have to prime your population and make sure they’re ready for it. Having let’s say.. a deeply racist population will make immigrants not feel like they’re part of the system. Also on the flip side, you have to make sure immigrants are properly assimilated and they understand your culture and what you value. You can’t just have people running around like headless chickens.
As always, thank you for reading. Remember this is “Geopolitics Made easy”, if you want more detail go read a book mf.
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