Few suspected it would come to this. Yet in Hampshire alone, the population of under-15s has shrunk by 2%, leading to the closure of two other primary schools and half-a-dozen mergers. Nor is Jane Austen country alone. In the past two years, 40 state-funded primary schools have shut nationwide. The reason is simple: not enough Britons want to have children. For any country’s population to remain stable, its total fertility rate needs to be at or above an average of 2.1 live births per woman. Britain’s fertility rate is 1.39. If this trend continues, our population will peak at 71 million in 2034, before dropping to as low as 48 million by 2100.

This is a global phenomenon. Birth rates are tanking from Australia to India, from the US to Uruguay, while the populations of countries including South Korea and Germany have already started to shrink. This is not a good thing. Your instinct may be that, with fewer people around, there will be less competition for resources and fewer carbon emissions pumped into the atmosphere. This is true, and immaterial: there may be less competition for minerals, say, but also fewer people to mine and process them, and Elon Musk’s Optimus butlers are a bet more than a certainty. Nor is depopulation easy to reverse. From encouraging letters (France) and tax incentives (Hungary) to limits on abortion (Russia), countries have tried everything, to no avail. Immigration doesn’t work either, not when the birth rates of new arrivals slow too.

What, then, will life be like in a world with fewer children? In places like Smannell and Hatherden, Fitchet argues, a feeling of managed decline will only accelerate. In these villages, he explains, primary schools are “the places where the families meet, the places where friendships begin, where generations put down roots” — the last place, in other words, that is likely to attract younger families to these places where the post office and the pub have long since vanished. Something similar will happen to our towns and cities. The daytime squeal of toddlers in trolley seats will diminish in our supermarkets, swimming pools and parkland. Other aspects of our social contract will also begin to fray. Expect emergency service provision in rural areas to experience further cuts, as budgets for ambulances, police and on-call fire stations are reprioritized to areas of greater population density.

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Some big inter-generational resentments are also coming. A declining birth rate means, inevitably, that a diminishing number of young people are paying for the pensions of the old, the fiscal equivalent of a sweaty, inverted human pyramid. Do not expect the triple lock to hold. If current trends continue, the Office for Budget Responsibility said last year, healthcare and pensions spending will push government debt to 270% of GDP by the 2070s (it is currently 93.8%). According to a report by Policy Exchange, budget stabilization under this regime would require income tax to rise between 1.4-7.4% per taxpayer. The recruitment and retention crises currently facing the NHS and the social care sector will worsen. Managers running our old people’s homes will either need to increase the workload of their already-harried nursing staff or embrace the Japanese model of employing more robots (though some have argued this just makes life for caregivers even busier).

The British government should avoid this fiscal disaster, says David Miles, an economist at Imperial College London — provided it is willing to make some hard choices. One is making sure that the retirement age is realistic. “The majority of people, including the over-65s and maybe well into their seventies, are perfectly capable of some work,” Miles continues, arguing that a return to the original idea of the old-age pension as a stipend received in the last decade of life, rather than the last quarter, is logical. Pervasive ageism in the economy, he continues, will disappear once it becomes clear that an oversupply of eager young adults is a thing of the past. This assumes that older citizens can be persuaded to vote for a government that spends radically less on their pensions. That might happen by mid-century, by which time the demise of the Baby Boomers will have resulted in a wealth transfer of an estimated £5.5 trillion to Millennials.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that technology will have saved us by 2050, with robots and AI ensuring we live in a less crowded, less competitive archipelago. Dean Spears and Michael Geruso are skeptical on that point. As they convincingly argue in their depopulation jeremiad, After the Spike, innovation is an incremental byproduct of a growing population: the more people you have around, the more minds capable of conceiving and communicating billions of tiny improvements to our daily lives.

Depopulation kicks the stool from beneath this framework. History begins to slow, then reverse. By the 22nd century, we will probably still know how to deflect an asteroid, but we may not be able to build the rocket to do so in time, much less put our minds together to find the cure to the next pandemic-causing virus. Similar regressions have happened before. Take the development of cement, the recipe for which was perfected under the Roman Empire only to be lost for centuries after the collapse of imperial authority — and its population — in the 5th century. A counterargument to this might be the technological progress Europe ended up making after the Black Death, which culled about half of its population. But one wonders whether the AI-addled mind will cope as well as its medieval antecedents as our towns and cities start to empty.

Why should that be important to anyone living today? Though the decision to have children must always fall to individual couples, the fact that so many are choosing either to wait or skip altogether points to much deeper failings in our society. These are failings we should all care about and try, collectively, to mitigate by acting or voting for change, whether that’s related to global warming and pervasive air pollution, to the deteriorating quality of our food, the cost of living, or the daily horrors meted out to new mothers on maternity wards.

Anastasia Berg suspects it’s deeper than all that. A philosopher at the University of California, Irvine and the co-author of What Are Children For?, Berg points to Norway as an example of a place that has invested significantly in its education, healthcare and childcare systems — and yet still faces a declining birth rate. What’s actually happened, argues Berg and her co-author Rachel Wiseman, is a nigh-on unprecedented shift in attitudes toward parenthood itself in Western culture. Men and women now feel free to prioritize their career, finding the right partner, or simply living a life free of the responsibility of raising a tiny human. “Through all these domains, there are these paradigms that all point away from the possibility of having children,” says Berg. “They conspire to a situation where we kind of tolerate children as a kind of consumer choice, like we tolerate one another ordering from Amazon, even though we know we shouldn’t.”

In some ways, perhaps, this liberation should be celebrated: at no point in history has the individual, man or woman, had so much agency to define the course of their lives. If that course involves couples deciding that having children is not for them, that’s also completely fine. Berg agrees, but also observes that the culmination of this sense of agency is an odd sense of ambivalence in our culture toward parenthood, one amplified by a slew of podcasts, films, novels and television dramas that portray raising children as, at best, something that can wait, and at worst, completely thankless. In the end, all these possibilities crowd out the nuanced arguments that can be made for having children, suggests the philosopher, especially among women. “If feminism is about empowering women and knowledge is power,” Berg says, “then we need to make sure that people have all the knowledge from the start so they can really plan out the course of their lives and not feel like they were hoodwinked.”

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It is impossible to avoid thinking that this is leading to a vast loss for society at large. As a father myself — of a two-year-old daughter, currently gathering shoes by our backdoor in the hope of a trip out, instead of one to her nightly bath — I am biased. Others make the case more eloquently. In his 1994 work The Philosophy of Childhood, Gareth Matthews convincingly argues that the child is much more than an adult-in-waiting, but someone who fundamentally changes the parent and caregiver. Children are irrepressibly curious, bold, unconstrained by the mental shackles imposed by year after year of toil, grief and accumulating responsibilities. They grant us new and bright perspectives about the world around us, pushing us to improve ourselves and our collective circumstances. Absent their plaintive cries and squeals of delight, society can only ossify. The world of adults is the world of compromises, the end of idealism.

I think, here, of Levin’s epiphany in Anna Karenina, his face lit up by summer storms, smiling at the gleaming sense of purpose brought into his life by his infant son. If God were to live anywhere, it would be in the laughter of children. You can hear it anywhere and benefit. Amid so many looming dangers, says Fitchet, “kicking a football around in a field, or going to a park and watching kids run around and scream and play with each other, makes that all disappear for a few minutes, because they’re completely oblivious to all of this.” For them, the world is a marvelous thing — and only just beginning.

This robust approach to criminal justice was duly backed by Lowe: “Now you’re talking”. In truth, though, the broader political currents Hussain represents are likely less pleasing to his fellow backbencher. For in his enthusiastic declaration of Islamic values, especially as a balm for the nation’s woes, he is the avatar for an increasingly prominent kind of British Muslim: educated, self-confident, political. Echoed across the country’s cultural life, and indeed in its birthrates, men like Hussain could soon shape life far beyond the internet, with vast consequences for Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Perhaps the best place to understand the rising power of Britain’s Muslims is not Westminster, or even Hussain’s Blackburn — but my hometown of Luton. It’s safe to say the place that hosted the Islamist “Butchers of Basra” demonstrations, and is the birthplace of the EDL, does not have the finest reputation. Over recent years, in fact, it’s become a kind of negative poster boy for the terminally online Right, what with its Islamic schools, halal butchers and peri-peri chicken joints. Its once-thriving pubs, meanwhile, are becoming a thing of the past, and though there’s a Christian revival of sorts, it’s mostly immigrant-inspired.

That’s hardly the best news for people like Rupert Lowe, anxious over ethnic and racial change. Yet the fact is that where Luton leads, the country is heading. According to the most recent census, after all, 3.8 million Muslims now live in England: a sharp rise from 2.7 million in 2011. From 2001 to 2021, England’s Muslims have risen by nearly 150% in terms of number of people, and grown by 116% as a proportion of the national population. A sharp decline in Christian identification has only hastened these trends, as have Muslim birthrates. Think, again, of Luton. It’s now a majority-nonwhite town where one in three residents are Muslim. More than that, it’s the baby capital of England, with Slough, Oldham and much of East London following closely behind. Judging by the recent data, the demographic trajectory of England will be increasingly shaped by Islamic social conservatism.

Behind the headline growth, however, or the vivid streetscapes of towns like Luton, Britain’s Muslim population remains strangely complex. Studies suggest that the country’s Muslims believe in the richness of Britain’s opportunities — yet aren’t particularly impressed with the society they live in. Once again, the numbers here are telling. Though over 85% think this is a good place to live, over three in five feel that most Britons put themselves over their families or communities. Strikingly, this number rises even higher among British Muslim millennials.

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That last figure strikes at the heart of the so-called “integration paradox”: the idea that as ethnic and religious minorities become more integrated into the economic and social mainstream over the generations, they will do away with their ancestral and faith-based identities. This optimistic theory has been blown to smithereens by the British Muslim experience. Just like Adnan Hussain, a former solicitor born in Burnley, younger Muslims are not only more likely to be born in the UK, educated at British universities, and work as white-collar professionals than their elders — they are also more inclined to identify with their faith.

Compared to their elders, younger conservative Muslims are generally more aware of the excesses of social liberalism in mainstream Britain, even as they fail to share their cultural connections with ancestral homelands. It’s in Islam, not Kashmir or Sylhet, that they find a true sense of belonging, a trend that will only continue as Muslims from different ethnic communities intermarry. All the while, younger Muslims tend to have greater expectations and demands of the nation’s politics, certainly compared to foreign-born elders who were often just grateful to escape conflict or corruption.

That shift, in turn, makes younger British Muslims more prone to disappointment with the nation’s institutions, especially over issues with an implicitly religious character, notably Palestine. There is also the ironic possibility that by being more integrated — economically, educationally — younger socially conservative Muslims are more exposed to secular trends not to their liking. Young Muslim YouTubers shaming the social mainstream over perceived forms of moral degeneracy are hardly in short supply, even as figures like Hussain are tougher on deportations than many white liberals.

All this works to reinforce the religious identity of British Muslims. And if that encourages many to “selectively” integrate — being decent neighbors and working hard without fully immersing themselves in the country’s culture — that still leaves a stark divide with the non-Muslim majority, especially around women’s rights and mixed-sex interaction. Consider the case of Maheen Kamran. An aspiring medical student who won the seat of Burnley Central East in last year’s local elections, she ran on a platform which not only called for an improvement in school standards and public cleanliness — but also encouraged public spaces to prevent “free mixing” between Muslim men and women. More recently, the East London Mosque organized a fun run which barred female participation.

The mosque’s decision caused predictable outrage from liberal politicians. But that still leaves the question of how eager British Muslims are to take advice from the mainstream on matters of gender equality, especially given its struggles over even defining what a woman actually is. That’s broadly been Hussain’s own line. More than that, British Muslim traditionalists, whether in Luton, Blackburn or elsewhere, may well argue that Western-style empowerment has contributed to the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family unit, and has fed the fertility crisis which means Britain now faces an economic timebomb. And all this in a country where a fifth of people routinely report that they have an unfavorable view of Muslims as a group.

These tensions may even get worse, as upwardly mobile British Muslims begin to hold more positions of influence in business, the public sector, and larger civic associations. Indeed, there are growing signs of religious co-ordination across sectors, with the new Muslim Impact Forum (MIF) having a central mission of “uniting Muslim leaders and institutions across politics, charity, and business to move ideas into collective action”. This hints at a broader point. While the ever-growing British Muslim population has been caricatured by some as an undereducated and welfare-dependent monolith, one which has colonized Britain’s social housing stock, the reality is somewhat different.

In truth, it’s a relatively youthful population, one defined by its upward social mobility — and which is increasingly assertive across national life. Young British Muslim sportspeople, notably England’s Pakistani-heritage cricketers Shoaib Bashir and Rehan Ahmed, have not shied away from expressing the centrality of their Islamic faith. Something similar can be said of Tottenham Hotspur’s Djed Spence, who in September became the first recognized Muslim to play international men’s football for England during their 5-0 win in Serbia.

Hussain aside, the most obvious recent example in politics is Shabana Mahmood’s appointment as home secretary. Her arrival in Marsham Street was met with disquiet by some on the Right due to her religious background, and the fact that she was allegedly the first Muslim to take up the post. Not quite: Sajid Javid, who was the first home secretary of Pakistani Muslim origin, appears to have been memory-holed — which tells us much about changing attitudes. It almost feels as if, as a “hyper-integrated” Muslim, one with a white British wife and who once said that Christianity was the only faith practiced in his home, Javid didn’t count as a real Muslim. Yet if Javid was the kind of “sanitized” Muslim more acceptable to the political mainstream, he is far from the norm. Echoing Hussain and other Muslim MPs, Mahmood has told The Times that Islam is the “centerpoint” of her life.

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Faith aside, Mahmood has plenty on her plate. Consider the small-boats crisis, a thoroughgoing national emergency, and one largely down to the unchecked importation of younger males from Muslim-majority countries: exactly the kind of person Hussain and Lowe would like to send back home. At the same time, Labour recently announced a national statutory inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal, with Mahmood finally announcing Baroness Anne Longfield as the chair. That’s a start, but as a minister of Pakistani-Muslim heritage herself, Mahmood will be under pressure to make sure the inquiry thoroughly investigates the cultural and societal drivers behind the abuse, especially when men of her own ethno-religious background are disproportionately involved. Then there’s the looming threat of Islamism, with antisemitism partly promoted by Britain’s segregated Muslim communities.

Whether fair or not, anyway, Mahmood will be under extra pressure to deliver as home secretary because of her ethnic identity and religious affiliation — which exposes the growing tendency to hold British Muslims “collectively responsible” for problems surrounding security and integration. Mahmood, like many of her peers, has another major headache too: the rise of religio-political mobilization within traditionally Labour-voting British Muslim communities. In her seat of Birmingham Ladywood, she was run close in the last general election by pro-Gaza independent candidate Akhmed Yakoob, who also performed well in the last West Midlands mayoral election. British Muslim voters have deserted Labour in droves under Starmer’s leadership; before being elected as an independent, Adnan Hussain was a Labour activist.

Here’s yet another irony: British Muslims have become so socially integrated, and politically disillusioned, that they’re now mobilizing along religious lines, electoral shifts which be devastating for Labour in Muslim-dominant parts of the country. That’s especially if Your Party, the Greens, and George Galloway’s Workers Party for Britain, as well as the wider pro-Palestine independent movement, are all able to organize coordinated electoral pacts. All this varied activity could transform British politics, particularly if backed by traditional ethnic-minority habits that pool resources for community projects.

It’s clear, then, that the country is entering uncharted territory, with several of England’s provincial towns effectively becoming political battlegrounds between traditional British nationalists and Islamic social conservatives, with the only thing they share being a hatred of the so-called “legacy parties”. Some of the results from the local elections earlier this year provide a flavor of what is to come. Despite Reform UK taking control of Lancashire council, its candidates were beaten by independent Muslim candidates across Burnley and Preston. Whatever way you look at it, Britain is changing — and not necessarily in a direction Rupert Lowe will welcome.

Dishoom, the restaurant chain founded by the Tilda rice heir Shamil Thakrar, has launched court proceedings against Tariq Aziz, described as a Middlesex businessman, who trademarked “Ruby Murray” in 2019. And this court case encapsulates in microcosm a profound change that’s taken place in the East End over the last century — while shedding light both on some of the factors driving it, and also why the change has become so difficult to discuss.

It’s easy to romanticise the Cockneys, the eponymous London-born working-class demographic associated with rhyming slang. In reality, though, the argot that gave the world “Ruby Murray” originated as a means of confusing the police in the cramped, squalid, and frequently criminal working-class cultures that emerged in the wake of 19th-century urbanisation. The American writer Jack London described this bottom rung of working-class London life in The People of the Abyss (1903), as a kind of ever-hungry meat grinder.

Here, as he put it, “decade after decade, rural England pours in a flood of vigorous strong life, that not only does not renew itself, but perishes by the third generation”. As an admirer of Nietzsche and keen advocate of eugenics as well as an ardent socialist, Jack London doesn’t fit comfortably into modern political categories. But the meat-grinder he described in 1903 is alive and well — and it has long since chewed up and spat out the Cockneys themselves, even as their cultural traces live on in the current court battle.

Between 2001 and 2011, the number of white British Londoners fell by 600,000, almost three times the fall in the previous decade. And this has been especially marked in East London: by 2013, the white British working class, once synonymous with the borough of Newham, had dwindled to 17% of the total population.

Why? In 2013, the BBC’s Mark Easton argued that this was a story of “working-class aspiration and economic success”. Yes, he said, the Ford factory at Dagenham had recently closed its stamping plant at a cost of 1,000 traditional working-class jobs. But the workers had been compensated by winning London’s house price lottery, leaving them “without a job but with a sizeable chunk of capital in their home”. Cue families dispersing into Essex, Kent, and England’s south-East coastal region.

Who now occupies the houses they once inhabited? This is more sensitive. In a 2016 documentary on East London’s shrinking Cockney population, one moustachio’d older man acknowledges that “We’ve always been a country where immigration has played a part”. But he says of the scale of change: “I feel we’ve been ethnically cleansed.”

This is obviously hyperbolic. But from a borough 56% white British in 1991, Newham’s demographic had shifted radically by the 2010s, to 30% white British with some 40% ethnic groups originating on the Indian subcontinent. And a repeated theme, among the Cockneys in the BBC documentary, was unease at perceived closed quality among their new neighbours. Tony, an East End stallholder who views himself as “Cockney” in the sense of working-class East Londoner if not as literally born within earshot of Bow Bells, tells the camera: “You feel alone.” And this is because, as he puts it: “The Muslims stick together.”

His response, along with many others, was to move further out with his girlfriend and new baby. Is this bigotry? In contemporary terms, perhaps; but it wasn’t “white flight” in any classical sense, for Tony describes himself as of mixed Cockney and Jamaican heritage. His girlfriend, meanwhile, is East European. His decision is thus inexplicable from the progressive viewpoint of “multiculturalism”, while his mixed heritage makes it also confusing from the far-Right one of race essentialism.

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The thinker who explains Tony’s perspective best — and especially why discussions about migration are not reducible to crude or hostile fantasies of racial purity — is also, ironically, the one commonly accused of advocating precisely such hostile fantasies. Renaud Camus is a bête noire for the Left and centre-Right, for having coined the phrase “The Great Replacement”. This term has taken on a life of its own, usually framed as an elite conspiracy to replace native European populations with migrants from elsewhere: an obviously absurd idea, not to mention one associated with racially motivated violence. For having coined it, Camus is accused of being a “far-Right white nationalist”, making it risky even to mention his name, for fear of guilt by association.

Camus himself, though, emphatically disavows the conspiracy theory he is now inextricably linked with, calling it a “conspiracy theory theory”. Instead, he makes the more modest (and until recently widely accepted) argument that while each of us is an individual, we also share some common cultural traits as part of a “people”. And, he suggests, peoples are not a narrow genetic category, as some extremists suggest. Rather, a people has some physical commonalities, after the fashion of an extended family — plus history, culture and heritage, all stitched together with “desire, will, love”. It is, in Camus’s words, a “spirit and way of being on the Earth”.

In this sense, Tony is very clearly part of the Cockney people and culture: a people into which his Jamaican father assimilated. But while individuals can join a people, as Tony’s father did, at scale, Camus argues that peoples aren’t interchangeable. On the contrary: “Peoples who remain peoples cannot join other peoples. They can only conquer them, submerge them, replace them.” But, Camus suggests, for complex cultural and economic reasons, a transnational consensus has emerged that disregards this reality, claiming instead that peoples do not exist, and we’re all just individual humans who are interchangeable regardless of culture or origin.

This consensus, he suggests, has served to legitimise a movement of peoples on such a large scale that the end result is not pluralism but replacement. This need not be a conspiracy to be happening: indeed, what the 2016 BBC documentary captured was precisely replacement in this sense. That is, not a plot concocted by sinister elites in a smoke-filled room, or even a phenomenon driven by racial animus. But, nonetheless, an empirical fact visible in a comparison of demographic bar charts over time: one people giving way to another, in a geographic area, as the dominant local culture.

And in this context Tony’s decision to move makes perfect sense. For the story of the Cockneys becomes yet more sensitive, when we consider the possibility that some peoples are more porous than others, in the sense of willingness to welcome or interact with outgroups. This becomes visible if we use endogamy as a proxy: that is, willingness to marry outside one’s own immediate ethnicity, borrowing from a 2016 study on the prevalence of intermarriage among migrants to Britain. The paper shows that those arriving from Europe and (to an extent) from the Caribbean tend to mix and intermarry with local populations over time.

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By contrast, migrants from the subcontinent — and especially from Bangladesh and Pakistan — were described in the paper as “relatively closed groups with few signs of marital assimilation or integration”. Notably, among these demographics, even where people “married out” this tended to be “a union with someone with an ethnic minority background rather than with a native British person”. Nor did this seem to change much between generations. In other words: though crudely put by those the BBC interviewed, the Cockneys’ 21st-century assessment of their new neighbours was not wholly inaccurate. Empirically, among the more recently arrived ethnic and cultural groups in Newham, some in particular did indeed “stick together”.

And in response, the Cockneys simply gave ground: sometimes sorrowfully, sometimes resentfully, for the most part quietly. But it wasn’t just house price arbitrage. It was also a preference for their own people. One 30-something mother, Leanne, stated this explicitly, saying of her move to Rayleigh: “It’s more English in Essex. I think my boys will be mixing more with their own.”

Against this, it’s commonplace now to claim that the English don’t exist, because peoples don’t. That the inhabitants of these isles have too mongrel a genetic heritage to share any commonalities, while every stereotypical English “tradition” in fact comes from elsewhere (including Ruby Murray, in both historic and rhyming slang form). This would doubtless come as news to Leanne, and those other English working-class communities that abandoned London in search (however reprehensible you may think it) of “their own”.

In turn, how reprehensible you find their decision probably depends where you stand in relation to the urban meat-grinder Jack London described: the capital’s ravenous, endless appetite for new arrivals on the bottom rungs, to sink or swim. For today, that grinder has long since exhausted the native supply of peasants described by Jack London, flocking in from the countryside willing to live in squalor and work for a pittance. In their absence, the cold logic of the meat-grinder has demanded fresh supplies from overseas.

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The result has been the emergence of a whole new kind of urban proletariat — and, with it, displacement of the pre-existing one. For boosters of “diversity”, this is self-evidently good. And indeed if (like Shamil Thakrar) you have enough financial and social capital, it really is vibrant, full of opportunity, and genuinely indifferent to your ethnic and cultural origin.

Further down the food chain, though, a more immediate logic applies. The fewer resources you have, the more you need to rely on your neighbours. And, hence, how much you have in common with your neighbours matters a great deal. And because “peoples” in the fuzzy sense of shared heritage really do tend to gravitate toward one another, this means the competition for resources can easily take on an ethnic dimension. Poverty may sometimes be a world of culture-spanning friendships and relationships, forged in hardship; but it’s also, often, a world of ethnic enclaves kept distinct by a preference for focusing on “their own” — or by an inclination to blame every misfortune on the “other”.

Even in 1903, Jack London noted this phenomenon, in which “the men themselves ascribe their homelessness to foreign immigration, especially of Polish and Russian Jews, who take their places at lower wages and establish the sweating system”. London, though, lays most of the blame on the ruthless logic of the market: “Don’t blame the man who offers to work cheaper than you and gets your job.” Either way, whether you prefer to point the finger at ethnic in-group preference, or simply the logic of the meat-grinder, for the Cockneys the reality was the same: a culture forged in London’s meat-grinder was, in time, displaced by it.

They took most of their culture with them. What’s left now is a fight for the right to trademark a lingering trace of their dialect. Under the circumstances, they could have no more ironic memorial.

At 53, I live alone with a dog and sometimes eat dinner over the sink. Aside from the high cost of not splitting living expenses, I consider this arrangement to be optimal. Not having children brings me joy. But I’m an outlier. The majority of women are supposed to want kids and the implicit message even during the sexual revolution was that you would have your Carrie Bradshaw-style fun until the last possible minute, then slide seamlessly into family life with full confidence that you’d “done it all”. And yet by 2030, 45% of women will be single and childless — in most cases not by choice.

The stories we tell about these single, childless women matter. So I was intrigued when I heard about What Happens Later, the new romantic comedy directed by and starring Meg Ryan, whose career has been defined by the promise, and box office success, of Big Romance. Her genre has always been implicitly based on women finding the one well before the age her fertility starts to decline; but in her new film, there’s sexual tension between two attractive, middle-aged people who’ve had interesting, complicated lives.

Bill is an uptight, unhappily married corporate drone. Willa is a messy free spirit who works less-than-ruminatively as a wellness practitioner. She’s travelling from Austin to Boston; he’s travelling from Boston to Austin: they meet in the middle. But Bill and Willa are not strangers; they had a serious relationship 25 years earlier, in college. As such, they are not two older people falling in love but old lovers relitigating the past. Stuck in a regional airport enveloped by the storm of the century, they grouse about bad pop music, before getting to what might be the defining questions of their lives: why did they let their relationship go? Given what they know now, would they have been better off sticking it out?

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The film doesn’t presume to answer that question. Still, its subtext wrestles with the failures of the sexual revolution in a similar way to the new feminist sceptics and, in its own way, takes a page straight out of the neo-trad playbook. It turns out that Bill and Willa broke up not because of some intractable compatibility problem but because they decided to open the relationship to other sexual partners. As he hid his jealousy behind a stoic exterior, she found herself unable to seize the opportunities at hand, even though seeing other people was all her idea, something she thought she was supposed to want. After parting, he went on to have a decent but unremarkable life and she went on to have something a bit worse than that — freedom of the nothing-left-to-lose variety. In short, they are both sad. Her especially.

Billed as a romantic comedy, What Happens Later is in fact a deeply sad movie about loss, regret, missed opportunities and gross miscommunication — a cautionary tale about what happens if you hedge your romantic bets. These two didn’t break up because of some intractable compatibility problem; they just wanted, well, more. Given all the ways in which they annoyed one another, it seemed only right to move on and keep looking for something better. To settle for what they had — a deeply imperfect but (at least according to my reading of the film) deeply connected relationship — would have been a betrayal to not just to their personal happiness but to some larger politics of social progress.

Is there an increasing number of Willas? In 2010, Lori Gottlieb, a single mother in her forties, published Marry Him: The Case For Settling For Mr. Good Enough. A jeremiad against the impossible mating standards imposed upon men by high achieving women — he’s not tall enough, rich enough, smart enough, funny enough, able-to-read-my-mind enough — it pushed hard against generalisations about entitled, marriage-hungry women, but ultimately made a radical point. Women’s rising economic status means there will be fewer men of equal or higher status to pair up with. Therefore, a certain number of women will have to “settle” for something more realistic than Big Romance, at least if marriage and family is what they want.

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Personally, I do not consider the sexual revolution a failure. For all its unintended consequences, women are better off now than we were 50 years ago in too many ways to count. But the fact that those who wish to marry and then devote a significant portion of their lives to raising children are actually embarrassed to say so out loud suggests that this revolution lost the plot even as it won over the masses.

Somehow we find ourselves at a time in history when nature itself is the problem. Biological clocks are sexist by definition, and should be outsmarted through technology. The idea that two parents are better than one is retrograde and discriminatory and, therefore, should not be discussed. As for picking the best person with whom to do that parenting: should young people really be trusted with such decisions? Modern society may say “no, keep looking. You could always do better”. Nature, for better or worse, says “quit while you’re ahead”.

It’s not guaranteed that the two characters in What Happens Later would have been happier if they’d stuck out their relationship rather than looking for more. Maybe they’d have been just as unfulfilled, but in a different way. Still, the movie, whether or not it means to, tells us that these people gave up too easily. It may purport to be a celebration of second chances, or at least the possibility of a do-over. But at its core it’s a reminder, paradoxically, that the best romantic relationship is like the closest exit on an airplane: potentially behind you.

My first impression of Simone and Malcolm is that they have walked straight out of Pattern Recognition. Two slender, voluble, dark-haired, medium-height thirty-somethings, they have slicked-back hair, thick-rimmed spectacles and quirky dark clothing. Their children, Torsten, Octavian, and Titan Invictus, are all IVF-conceived, some gene-selected for traits such as IQ or happiness. Simone is pregnant again, she tells me merrily, with Industry Americus Collins, due in April.

The original “‘elite’ couple breeding to save mankind” of countless memes, I sought them out on a recent London visit in the hope of inducing them to say controversial things about biotech. They’re famous (or notorious if you prefer) for their enthusiastic endorsement of a high-tech Bay Area “pro-natalism” that embraces every available reproductive technology. From IVF, through surrogacy, polygenic embryo screening, to potentially gene-editing future offspring, they are what they call “the most talkative iteration” of a “technophilic” movement dedicated to saving the human species from population crash.

There are plenty of conservatives to whom all such technologies are prima facie off-limits. And I have grave concerns about anything that promises to free us from organismic limits — only to demand, in exchange, new kinds of servitude. I’m far from certain whether technophiles are friends or enemies. But what I heard was a message most relevant to the people currently keenest to dismiss them as “terminally online Redditors” or “hipster eugenicists”, or to link them with the far-Right: that the fertility crash is coming, soonest and hardest and most brutally, for liberals. And the Collinses are, in fact, liberals too: just unusually unfiltered and clear-sighted ones.

The Collinses earn a living in financial services, but their passion is education (they run an Institute for the Gifted) and promoting natalist culture. They use email and WhatsApp accounts seemingly interchangeably, and offer opinions as if they’re two interfaces of the same voluble, intelligent and eccentric hive mind. Malcolm proposed marriage to Simone on Reddit. They plan to have seven children.

In the end, we didn’t discuss gene-editing and fertility tech much at all: we converged, instead, on a deeper and arguably more insoluble fear. That is, that the contours of the fertility crisis mean people like the Collinses — subcultures that value intelligence, openness, and technological sophistication — are a critically endangered species.

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In the Collins worldview, what they call the “global monoculture” is the chief antagonist. They mean the largely homogeneous high-tech norms that have emerged in every major developed city in the modern world: Starbucks, tiny families or solo apartments, long working hours. And everywhere this “monoculture” appears, fertility is falling. Human birth rates are now below replacement almost everywhere in the world.

This global monoculture “believes it has a right to other people’s children, because its fertility rates are so low that the only way it can replenish itself is by just taking the children of nearby healthy cultural groups”. In Simone and Malcolm’s view, this dynamic represents “an existential threat to our species”. And as they see it, the motley coalition of interest groups making up the current “conservative movement” is united by hostility to this urban monoculture, and sometimes little else.

And while the Collinses are meticulously Californian in their aversion to offer explicit moral judgement, it would seem that however existential a threat this monoculture is overall, it’s a clear and present danger to people like them. For it poses a long-term threat to intellectual and cultural openness. Malcolm has, Simone tells me, analysed data on the demographic profiles of people having lots of kids — and it turns out that the deciding factor isn’t religiosity at all. It’s the mirror inverse of the high openness exhibited by “terminally online Redditors” and Silicon Valley rationalists.

According to their own studies, Simone tells me, the high-fertility profile comes with “xenophobia and fascism”. That is: people who have lots of kids are authoritarian, hostile to out-groups, and reluctant to consider other viewpoints as valid. And while they assure me, with the typically extravagant tolerance of difference typical of the Bay Area, that they’re “not even antagonistic” to bigotry “so long as they don’t interfere with their neighbours” tacitly the judgement is clear. After all, a defining characteristic of authoritarian outlooks is precisely interfering with your neighbours. Having evidently considered the prognosis for their own way of life, in a future dominated by such cultures, the Collinses show pragmatism and clear-sightedness in doing whatever they can to avert the prospect.

But it’s not just pluralism and openness on the chopping-block if demographic forces continue to select in favour of bigots. It’s also cognitive ability, cultures that value education, and cultures knowledgeable of and engaged with technologies. All these traits are, the Collinses remind me, correlated with low fertility; not that I need reminding, as a bookish, overeducated, and extremely online mother of only one.

Meanwhile, Malcolm continues, the people still having kids are the ones making less money, and wielding less cultural and economic power in the world. In turn, this makes such groups “less good at defending themselves from aggressive forces and less viable as power players on the world stage”. Rather than embracing marginalisation as a condition for survival, the Collinses want to “find and nourish groups that are able to be global economic and technological players while still being high fertility, because that is so rare”.

What’s left unspoken here is that they think failing to support “global economic and technological players” would have very bad effects overall — for it would mean shrugging while the culture selects against clever, bookish, and technologically adept people. They are, in other words, quietly worried that current civilisation is shrinking the future pool of what a Bay Area rationalist is bound to see as the keystone of our genetic heritage: IQ.

They tread carefully around the topic, no doubt mindful of its radioactive connotations. But Malcolm comes close to spelling out the implications when he tells me that, based on research he’s read, “we may see about a one standard deviation drop in IQ in the developed world in the next 75 years, due to genetic reasons”. That is: the smartest people are deleting themselves from the gene pool.

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The Collinses clearly accept that whatever form of human culture makes it to the other side of the current demographic pinch-point will be a brutal survival of the fittest — where “fit” doesn’t necessarily accord with their preferred values. But though they studiously route round any explicit moral statement that might impose coercive obligations on someone else, it’s clear that the Collinses would prefer at least some of the winning demographic subcultures to be high-IQ people with technological capabilities, and a willingness to tolerate different viewpoints. They emphasise that they are firmly against eugenics, where this represents any top-down value-statement about or intervention in the gene pool. But it’s also clear that, albeit in an opt-in, you-do-you Bay Area way, they think there are better and worse ways that gene pool could develop in the future.

To this end, they’re more than happy to collaborate with any group — even those far more authoritarian or anti-tech than they are — if the common goal is reversing what they perceive as the current negative trend. In their view, it’s not for some time — Malcolm suggests, “in 300 or 400 years” — that this coalition might fall to infighting, as pluralistic and technophilic factions such as theirs battle “religious, fundamentalist, xenophobic groups that believe that there can only be one religious group and one ethnic group in the world”. In such a scenario, they accept, “a lot of the conservative pronatalist groups will come into conflict because some are more pluralistic than others”.

In the meantime, though, they see what they’re doing as salvage work, preserving as much of a dying culture as they can. “We have seen this before in the Roman Empire,” they say, “this collapse scenario. Anyone who doesn’t think that we are entering a dark age right now is delusional. We need to begin to round the wagons, to defend as much of our civilisation as we can, so that we can use it going forwards.”

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It’s possible, I put to them, that the rationalistic, high-tech culture they are trying to preserve is too deeply implicated in the “global monoculture” they deplore to be disaggregated — indeed, that it may be driving the problem. Malcolm shrugs. It’s possible, he tells me. But the Collinses are content nonetheless to pursue their bet, and to see who turns out to be right.

Despite our differences on reproductive technologies, I suspect the Collinses and I are more aligned than not — on, if nothing else, devotion to reading the cultural tea-leaves, and extrapolating from the patterns we recognise. Some who do this, such as William Gibson, set out what they see via the written word to sometimes near-prophetic effect. Others, such as the Collinses, work as hard as they can in the real world, to turn the direction of events toward or away from patterns they see on the horizon.

But whatever the longer-term impact of the Collinses’ interventions will be, they’re right to see their beloved culture of logical, rationalistic, high-openness risk-takers as endangered. And there’s a lesson there for liberals of both Right and Left, even a long way from Silicon Valley. For if the traits most immediately at risk are openness, high cognitive ability, and an appreciation for education: those, in a word, commonest in liberals. If the Collinses’ read is right on the larger patterns, and I think it is, those who value intelligence and openness need to be a great deal more deliberate about “rounding the wagons” to protect the values and cultural practices they cherish – including via efforts to inculcate these traits and cultures in the next generation, or indeed to produce a next generation at all.

If this doesn’t happen, all those clever, tolerant, bookish types, many of whom currently leap to denounce voices like the Collinses as at least “far-right” adjacent, may wake up in a generation or so, to find they missed the chance to hand on their own genetic and cultural legacy. And that instead, in a fit of short-sighted self-righteousness, they gifted the world to the only people still having children: their enemies.

This is a mistake. Demography may be destiny, but it is geography that determines its political shape. The greatest division today is to do with place: in particular, three basic terroirs — urban, suburban and rural — which reflect a divergence in economic interest, family structure and basic values, particularly between big city economies and those on the periphery.

This fracture is widening at a time when the demographic balance between these regions is shifting. For much of the past two centuries, the overwhelming inclination was towards urbanisation, with dense cores serving as the prime engines of economic, cultural and social change. Today, however, that pattern is shifting, particularly since the pandemic, which saw two million citizens move out of big US cities. Even in urban-oriented Europe, 63% of cities experienced a population decline during the pandemic.

Does this mean “the era of urban supremacy is over”, as the New York Times put it? Quite possibly. But don’t expect the urban leadership to acknowledge it. Even as they desperately attempt (and largely fail) to lure workers back downtown, urban political interests continue to dominate the national conversation — even amid high levels of crime, street-level disorder and the resulting shuttering of businesses.

Largely ignored by the city-dominated media, the world’s urban core has been losing this battle for generations. This is not only evident in the United States, but also across Europe and Australia. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, little more than 5% of growth from 1966 to 2021 was in the core cities. In Europe, barely 37% of people live in cities, with the rest in fast-growing suburbs, small towns and rural areas.

Of course, many cities have experienced some revival over the past decade, but that “boom” has largely benefited educated newcomers and their wealthy employers. Urban regions became both richer and poorer; according to Pew research, the greatest inequality in America now exists in “superstar cities”, such as San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and San Jose.

These shifts have, unsurprisingly, shaped urban politics. As middle-class families have left, the urban terroir has been gutted of the old urban bulwark of solid middle and working-class families; as Fred Siegel has observed, it is dominated by an “upstairs/downstairs” coalition of the affluent and dependent.

This demographic reality has driven a shift towards a more progressive politics. In 1984, for example, Ronald Reagan won 31% of the vote in San Francisco and 27.4% in Manhattan. In 2016, Donald Trump won only 10% of the vote in each. Between 1998 and 2018, urban counties — which sometimes includes suburbs — went from 55% to 62% Democratic. Today, there is not a single Republican Mayor of a city of more than one million people. Recent victories of progressives in Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, New York and Minneapolis, despite widespread social disorder and economic decline, suggest this pattern may well be inexorable.

The antipode to the urban terroir lies in the countryside and rural hinterlands, which are experiencing a modest revival across the Western world. Yet even as they begin to regain appeal, rural areas are struggling against the dominant urban drive to “net zero”, which threatens economies based on local fossil fuel development, farming and manufacturing. For instance, it was high energy prices brought on by climate policies that sparked the Gilets Jaunes movement in France’s small towns, villages and exurban communities. To meet climate demands and limit their use of chemical fertilisers, Dutch farmers, among the world’s most efficient and ecology minded, have similarly risen up and joined their Spanish, Polish and Italian counterparts.

Even worse, the urban elites propose reaching their net zero fantasies by physically disfiguring rural communities. This offensive is being pushed by oligarchs such as J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, who resents peasants blocking land acquisition for subsidy-driven “green” investments and seeks federal help to secure these lands. But he is just one man of a wider movement, in which rural areas, home to the vast majority of proposed new solar and wind projects, are now asked to fulfil the green dreams of Manhattan, San Francisco and west Los Angeles. In California, the Nature Conservancy estimates that fulfilling the state’s net zero targets would require up to one-tenth of the farming acreage in the coming decades.

People living in the areas have responded as one might expect: between 2015 and 2022, community rejections of such projects in the US grew from 50 to over 500. A similar narrative is playing out throughout the EU and among farmers Australia, who fear transmission lines and windmills will not only make their farms less productive, but destroy the surrounding landscape.

For now, the political revival in small towns and rural areas represents an enormous boost to the Right. The once-strong progressive populism of rural communities has evaporated as more residents now feel more threatened by urban interests than corporate power. As a 2020 study from the Bennett Institute at the University of Cambridge found, there is a “deepening geographical fracture” in European societies reminiscent of “the stark urban-rural political divides of the early 20th century”.

This can be seen most clearly in the United States. In 2008, Barack Obama won nearly one quarter of the country’s non-metro counties. Eight years later, Hillary Clinton won barely 10%. In the past, notes Ernie Goss, professor of economics at Creighton University, the rural states regularly elected Democrats. How will Biden fare? “He couldn’t get a cup of coffee in this part of the country,” he told me. “To say he’s unpopular is an understatement.”

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Caught between these two increasingly extreme polities lies the third terroir, “the middle landscape” of suburban and exurban areas. Although these areas constitute an absolute majority of Americans and two-thirds of Europe’s 99 largest metros, they have little political power. This largely reflects the fact that suburbs tend to be populated by middle and working-class households, often too preoccupied with making a living and raising a family to indulge in political theatre. In other words, the middle landscape has the numbers, but has not found its voice.

Yet ultimately, it is the suburbs that will determine America’s future. They remain, unlike the other terroirs, contestable, home to at least 40% of all US House seats. For almost 20 years, the Republican-leaning suburban voters held steady at around 47%, with Democratic leaders at 45%. In 2016, the suburbs voted 50 to 45 for Trump, but two years later the suburban electorate tilted blue, effectively handing the House back to the Democrats. Then, in 2022, the predicted GOP landslide never developed, in large part because suburbanites split their ballots.

Whether this will be repeated remains unclear. On the one hand, Biden’s embrace of policies that seek to force communities to densify and take in low-income residents are not likely to be widely popular among suburbanites, who, after all, moved there to escape the city. On the other, the suburb’s changing demography could work to the favour of Democrats, as culturally liberal millennials and ethnic minorities join the city exodus.

But none of this represents the politics of choice — a programme suited to the needs and aspirations of this middle terroir. Right now, politics is inflicted on these communities rather than being shaped around them. Until they gain a voice, the West’s geographical cleavage will continue to widen, producing endless conflicts that fail the majority caught in between.

Amid such hysteria it’s unclear whether we should be encouraging the patter of tiny feet or reducing the reproduction of ginormous carbon footprints. What is clear, however, is that none of this hyperbolic claims-making is really about demography — a complicated and specialist discipline based on the statistical study of human populations. It’s more about doomography — a fatalistic cultural trend that relies on elementary maths about big and small numbers to give a clever-looking veneer to sublimated anxieties about social and economic problems.

In my research field of generational conflict, for example, tensions over housing, pensions, cultural values and a range of other issues are routinely treated as problems arising from having more older people than younger people. This evades the nuanced discussions that need to be addressed in their own terms: inciting kids to “mug Grandma” for her pensioner perks will do nothing to help today’s workers gain a better standard of living now.

Worse, the doomographic mindset evades the very question it pretends to focus on: why have we become turned off reproduction? While acknowledging the problem of demographic determinism, it is surely right to think that a slowdown in population growth represents something significant and potentially troubling, and to consider its potential causes. Sociologically, one trend that stands out, certainly in Western societies, is the discomfort we have with the idea of renewing ourselves.

The study of generations involves engaging with reproduction on three levels: biological, social and cultural. Biological reproduction is common to all species, but for humans, having a baby usually involves the prior decision that this is something you want to do. It’s a personal choice, assisted by modern reproductive technologies but not given by these — birth rates tend to fall as societies develop, regardless of access to contraception or abortion. But like all choices, having a baby is framed by prevailing social and cultural dynamics and relationships. At its most basic, if having a child is seen as a key component of a meaningful life, people will couple up and get on with it; if becoming a parent is regarded as a troublesome burden, couples — or one half of a couple — are likely to dither, delay or decide that it’s all too much bother. And they do so in a context where their peers are wrestling with the same anguished choices.

It’s hardly controversial to suggest that the prevailing sentiment of cultural pessimism in Western societies makes the 2020s an inhospitable time for a baby boom. Yet the narrow instrumentalism of doomographic thinking leads to wishful thinking as well as apocalyptic prophesying. For instance, attempts to explain why young people delay, or avoid, having children as a consequence of purely economic factors often lead to reductive claims about the prohibitive cost of housing or childcare. Now, these factors certainly make it more difficult to start and sustain a family, and policy should address them — but our ancestors managed to create us despite having much less wealth. Focusing only on the factors that frame individual decisions also misses the bigger question, of what drives societies to reproduce themselves in the first place.

Into this confused debate, a major report launched last week by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) — 8 Billion Lives: Infinite Possibilities — was breathlessly upbeat. The report notes that while “climate change, pandemics, conflicts, mass displacement, economic uncertainty and other issues fuel concerns about over and under-population”, in reality, “human reproduction is neither the problem nor the solution”. On paper, I agree with every word of the above — except that I’ve followed the work of UNFPA for years, and I’m suspicious.

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The UN’s report seems to mark an abrupt shift in rhetoric from the organisation that, at the turn of the century, was at the forefront of promoting fears about overpopulation (1999: 6 Billion – A Time for Choices) and the impact of population growth on the environment (2001: Footprints and Milestones — Population and Environmental Change). Though UNFPA has long been careful to acknowledge “the violations that can occur when family planning is used as a tool for ‘population control’”, this has gone hand in hand with its own promotion of “empowerment and autonomous family planning” as a way of controlling the size and shape of populations (2022: Seeing the Unseen — The Case for Action in the Neglected Crisis of Unintended Pregnancy).

Look a little closer, and it swiftly becomes clear that many of these sentiments have not simply vanished. Instead, UNFPA’s current foregrounding of gender equality, bodily autonomy, and sexual and reproductive health and rights is both a continuation of the “progressive” language of population control that it has been developing for years and a new twist in the doomographic tale. What matters now, says UNFPA, is that nation states stop worrying about reproducing themselves, and instead open themselves up to the possibilities afforded by open borders and the movement of labour. In other words, we should push forth with “solving” the number problems of richer countries by taking workers from poorer nations, and provide more childcare so that all women can work as well.

When the report was launched in Brussels, at an event organised by Friends of Europe, Dubravka Šuica, Vice-President of the European Commission for Democracy and Demography, spoke of the need to protect the rights of women and girls in a world of eight billion, commenting further that “demography transcends borders”. All of which, again, sounds very lovely. But is declining fertility really something that should merely be shrugged off? Where is the future orientation in a society that doesn’t see the need to reproduce? Demography may “transcend borders”, but a society in which children are conceptualised primarily as future workers of wherever they end up is not one that is conducive to actual people having babies.

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This is where the problems of cultural and social reproduction reveal themselves. At the heart of the culture wars consuming many Western societies is a conflict over the relationship between the past and the future. One side sees a generational continuity rooted in the norms and values that have grown up over time and looks to reproduce the relationships and institutions that have given life meaning: hence the tendency to focus on attachments to family, community and nation, and the reaction against disruptive globalising trends. The other side sees a future that can only be made possible by “freeing” people from history, often through the aggressive promotion of a “year zero” ideal that imagines we can cauterise our relationship with the past and start all over again. The cultural legacy of modernity is disclaimed as “problematic”, economic development is decried as “destructive”, and even the sexed body is presented as an impediment to individual self-realisation.

The polarised character of this conflict of course hides a more nuanced reality. The generational transaction has never been a pitched battle between the past and the future: those who derive meaning from the past do not actually live there, nations are always changing, and values and attitudes evolve as society moves on. But the very fact that we are engaged in debates about the problem of who we are and were means that the foundation for reproducing ourselves starts to look rather shaky.

All this insecurity has been sharpened and accelerated by the response to the pandemic, where initial, official excitement about the construction of a “new normal” revealed a nose-pinching distaste for the “old normal” that has been shaped over generations. It turned out, of course, that replacing our battered old society with some kind of disembodied techno-utopia was neither possible nor desirable: the “new normal” is a more fragmented, fractious, unstable and expensive version of what we had before.

This development is not exactly a surprise, but it has arrived sooner than expected. Overwhelmingly to blame is the plummeting birth rate — something that, you may point out, the Chinese state would once have celebrated. The nation’s One-Child Policy is the stuff of Geography textbooks everywhere. Whereas the Communist lunacy of the Great Leap Forward was relatively easy to reverse, the One-Child Policy — which cruelly persecuted and hounded people who wanted to have two children, never mind three — casts a long shadow.

But to blame it for China’s current demographic crisis is too easy. Egregious though the One-Child Policy was, it is not at the root of the nation’s current problems; it merely brought them on earlier than would otherwise have been the case. In the Seventies, before the policy was introduced, China’s fertility rate fell precipitously, halving from around six to around three children per woman in the course of a decade. It would have continued to nose-dive even without intervention.

The underlying reason for the lack of births in China is fairly obvious. The nation has developed. And urban, wealthy, educated people do not have large families — often choosing not to have children at all. Economic and cultural factors may differ a little between nations, but this is pretty much true the world over. It’s intriguing, then, that young Chinese people blame a lack of prosperity for their reluctance to have children; the Guardian reports one Weibo user posting, “Now who dares to have children, housing prices are so expensive.”

What has really changed is not economics, but expectations. When prosperous professionals have a sixth of the offspring their penurious peasant grandparents produced, lack of funds cannot be the ultimate explanation. The issue here is not material well-being; it is the matter of how one’s affluence compares to what one’s peers are experiencing. In days of old, people had large families in hovels not knowing where the next meal would come from. Today, quite understandably, the new normal is to want a decent home and a degree of financial security.

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The consequences of this demographic shift are already showing, with Chinese factories already reporting a shortage of labour. But we haven’t seen anything yet. The workforce is in free fall. Back in the mid-Eighties, four or five people entered it for everyone who reached retirement age, but the two groups are now roughly equal. Rust-belt cities are losing their life. Regions like Dongbei, once the beating heart of Maoist industrialisation, are now shadows of their former selves. The ballooning number of elderly rely on thinly-stretched single children to look after them — offspring of the One-Child Policy who have no siblings with whom to share the burden. One typical young adult, trying to juggle caring for her parents and working full-time (so that she can pay their medical bills), laments: “It’s a real struggle. Sometimes I just want to quit my job, but now I need the money more than ever.” In just a few decades, there will likely be two people in their early sixties for every person in their early twenties.

The median citizen of the People’s Republic is already in his or her late thirties — similar to the median American and only slightly younger than the median Brit. But while America and the UK will age only moderately, in a generation or two the average Chinese person will be pushing 50. An ageing China might be relatively peaceable and crime-free, but it will lack the dynamism which has vaulted the country up the economic and political ranks over the past 40 years. The crisis is bad enough for Xi Jingping to have vowed to implement policies to boost the birth rate, in an effort to reverse national ageing.

China is the world’s great population behemoth: what happens to the nation’s demography has significant ramifications for the rest of the world. As Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan pointed out in their book, The Great Demographic Reversal, the tremendous flow of subsistence peasants into the factories of China’s coastal plain not only fuelled the country’s stratospheric economic growth but also provided the developed world with a vast pool of cheap labour. Manufacturing transitioned out of Europe and North America to the PRC, where there was an endless supply of cheap labour. Now this era has ended. As this vast labour reservoir dries up, expect to pay more for everything from toys to tablets.

What can be done? Wealthy Western countries can choose to plug a shortage of workers with immigration, but this is not an option for China — for three reasons. First, as a middle-income country it is relatively unattractive to those seeking brighter lights and pavements paved, if not with gold, then at least with tarmac. Second, China is geographically and culturally distant from the parts of the world whose population is still booming, namely sub-Saharan Africa, where French and English are widely spoken, and Paris and London are easier to reach. And third, whereas a country like the UK can meaningfully top up its population with immigrants to ameliorate pinch-points in the labour market, China, with a population more than 20 times ours, would have to hoover up hundreds of millions to make much of a difference.

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China’s demographic decline will impact geopolitics as well as world economics. True, the nation will still have plenty of young men to fill its army’s ranks, but as it ages its politicians may be less inclined to lose them. Parents who have been forced by the Party to have only one child — and who have traditionally valued sons above daughters — will be doubly reluctant to lose them. In Russia in the Eighties, mothers received coffins containing the bodies of their sons who had died in Afghanistan; their protests have been evoked in the nation’s most recent war. Although worries about maternal discontent were not enough to stop Putin invading Ukraine, the precedent may give Xi Jinping pause for thought before he sets out on any military adventures.

And more significantly, there is a country jostling to fill the void that China will leave at the top of the world’s population ranks — a country that has not, historically, been the PRC’s friend. The global balance of power will of course be shifted by the fact that, for the first time in thousands of years, China is about to be eclipsed as the world’s most populous nation by India. India has a very long way to go before its economy catches up with China, but its demography means that it is almost certain to be the faster growing of the two economies over the next 20 years or so.

India has not suffered such absurd policies as China; when vasectomies were forced on men in the Seventies, there was a furious backlash and the policy was dropped. Though the Indian government has long encouraged smaller families — “Ham Do Hamara Do” (“We Two and Our Two”) was the slogan of the day when I first visited in the Eighties — population control has been more persuasive than coercive. Development has also been slower: less urbanisation, less education, less prosperity. It is no surprise, therefore, that India’s fertility rate has been coming down more slowly than China’s.

But it has been coming down nonetheless, from about six children per woman in the mid-Sixties, to just over two today. Still, the population can sustain itself — and besides, India has years of “demographic momentum” ahead of it: the population will continue to grow simply by dint of the large number of young people starting families, even if those families are fairly small, compared to the small number of older people dying. India can look forward to a couple of decades in which it can reap the so-called demographic dividend, with plenty of young people entering the workforce, relatively few leaving it, and the new workers not burdened by a surfeit of children. These are the circumstances which coincided with fantastic economic booms in places like Korea, in the Seventies, and Indonesia, in more recent times.

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Scratch beneath the surface of the national data in India, however, and all is not well. Fertility is still high in the north’s poor Hindi belt, in places such as Uttar Pradesh (which has a population three times that of Britain’s) and Bihar. In those Indian states where the economy is flourishing, however, like Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, the average woman has a similar number of children to women in the UK. In West Bengal, fertility is closer to the level of Japan. As India plunges headlong into greater prosperity, it is rapidly losing its demographic edge. Indeed, India’s demographic crisis, though a few decades behind China’s, appears to be just as extreme; the first whiff of escaping dire poverty and birth rate seems to collapse. It looks as if India, for reasons that are hard to pin down, having reached replacement level fertility, is going to swiftly plunge below it. Countries such as Indonesia and Sri Lanka, by contrast, have managed to hold steady at around two children per woman for decades. India too will be ageing and waning before long.

Beyond individual nations, if our species is to continue thriving, it must find a way to combine modernity with a pro-natal attitude. And on this front, there’s only so much a government can do. China may be famous for its controversial demographic policy, but the only way to really shape a population’s size is a cultural, rather than a political, shift — a change in attitude such as that witnessed in Georgia when its leading cleric called on its people to procreate. As China’s population starts to decline, and India’s looks set to follow, the question for the whole of humanity is: who, in the long run, is going to be keeping the lights on?

Even if Galip’s funds do dry up, there’s good news for Kristina: a million rubles might be coming her way shortly. President Vladimir Putin recently announced that he would reinstate the Soviet-era Mother Heroine award, which bestows a lump sum to any Russian mother upon her tenth child’s first birthday. It’s not clear whether Kristina will be eligible for another million rubles when her 20th child reaches the age of one, nor is it certain that hers is the kind of motherhood Putin wants to encourage. After all, she has left Mother Russia and married a Turk: she is not boosting the Russian birth rate.

Is it any wonder pro-natalism does not have a good reputation in the West right now? Urgently necessary though some of us believe it to be, the need for more children is a subject which polite politicians and pundits in most democracies steer clear of, leaving the field to autocrats such as Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. But unless politicians — whether on the Left or Right — reclaim pro-natalism, they might doom their societies.

This ought to be particularly easy for the Left, which has a rich tradition of pro-natalism. Marx made a nemesis of the Reverend Malthus, who suggested that there was a natural limit to population, and unless humans controlled their fertility, they would live predominantly in penury and misery. This philosophy led many of Malthus’s followers — some of whom became prominent administrators of Empire — to shrug indifferently at both famine in Ireland and India and hunger at home. Marx and Engels launched fearsome attacks; to them, Malthus was a “lackey of the bourgeoisie” and his philosophy “a libel on the human race”. Misery was not the result of the proletariat breeding but of the elite exploiting them. In the socialist nirvana, once the exploitative land-owning class had been removed, there would be population expansion and plenty for all.

True, the communist autocrats of the 20th century went too far in their pursuit of this nirvana. Stalin, too, believed that “the most precious capital, the most decisive capital is human beings”. While this did not prevent him and his regime from snuffing out millions of such beings, they were eager for their creation too, and disseminated posters of large happy families of proletarians. Soviet womanhood was lauded for its procreativity as well as its labour, and the Mother Heroine award — the one revived by Putin — continued in the USSR into the days of Gorbachev. Mao, meanwhile, was consistently pro-natalist, despite efforts from those below him to keep China’s population in check: “It is a very good thing that China has a big population. Even if China’s population multiplies many times, she is fully capable of finding a solution; the solution is production.”

Today, China has pledged to make fertility treatment more available, while also cracking down on abortion, over concerns about birth rates. Meanwhile, in Cuba, the arrival of Castro was accompanied by a baby boom, in part due to restrictions on abortion. These have long been phased out and Cuba has a very low fertility rate. But the regime in Havana still offers lower tax rates to those with children.

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In short, it’s understandable that pro-natalist policies have become associated with autocracy. Obviously, today’s progressives are better off disavowing Stalin, Mao and Castro. But disavowing pro-natalist policies in general is short-sighted. When I suggested last month that the British government could restructure the tax system to incentivise families to have children, I was met with howls of horror by the progressive crowd and suggestions that I must be somewhere to the Right of Attila the Hun. But while amending the tax system to encourage childbearing and acknowledge its costs seems out of bounds to the Left, it was a Labour government in 1946 which first introduced such a concept into the benefits system, in the form of family allowance.

Today, childbearing has emphatically ceased to be a Leftist cause. At the more extreme end of the spectrum, the understandably distressing news that Roe vs Wade had been overturned in the US was met with a barrage of anti-natalism. The Guardian, for instance, published testimonies by women who bitterly regretted getting pregnant, including those based in nations where abortion rights are not threatened. “Getting pregnant was the worst thing that could have happened to me,” said one interviewee in Mexico. “I hate my reality, the life I didn’t chose,” said a Spanish mother, while another from Germany said: “If I could start over again, I wouldn’t have had any of my children.” It is not that we should never hear such voices, it is simply that their elevation has somewhat precluded the Left’s potential to make a positive case for the continuation of humanity.

There is solid evidence that people in the UK would like on average to have between two and two and half children — but today are having barely one and a half. This is surely an opportunity for Labour to appeal to an electorate of instinctively pro-natal millennials whose circumstances are frustrating them from having larger families.

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What of the Right? For all the policy ground covered in the long Tory leadership race, little has been said on the subject. Liz Truss has suggested tax changes to make it easier for one parent to stay at home, which, worthy or not, is not designed to boost the birth rate. In other words, the Right, too, is failing aspiring parents — and the Left would do well to capitalise on this failure.

For inspiration, Keir Starmer might look to Sweden, a socially liberal nation that touts the second-highest birth rate in Europe. Since the start of the century, the average Swedish woman has around half a child more than the average woman in Greece, a socially conservative nation that has the second-lowest birth rate in Europe. A clue as to why this might be lies in the fact that, when it comes to women’s rights, Sweden and Greece are once again at opposite ends of a European spectrum. Well over 60% of Swedish women participate in the workplace, but only 43% of Greek women do.

In some ways, this is counterintuitive. You might think that where women are staying at home, they are staying at home to take care of children, and that when they are pursuing careers, they are doing so at the expense of having babies. But nothing could be further from the truth. The best way to persuade women who have been given equal rights to bear the next generation is to give them opportunities to partake of those rights in the labour market. This requires finding creative ways — whether through the agency of government or employers or both — of combining work and family. In Sweden, childcare is subsidised and parental leave exceptionally generous.

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This is not just a question of Sweden and Greece; they are merely exemplars of a much wider trend. In countries where female participation in the labour force is low, from Portugal to Japan, so too is the fertility rate. This leaves us in a quandary. Where the progressives set the cultural agenda in places like the UK, any advocacy of motherhood is met with anger and scorn. Where conservative values prevail, in places like Greece and Japan, the limitation of a woman’s right to combine family and career depresses the birth rate.

Despite Putin and Orbán, the time has come to proclaim a new, liberal pro-natalism: one that empowers women and men to have the children the evidence proves they want, allows them to combine parenthood with a career, and which acknowledges that, however the family is defined and redefined in the 21st century, a philosophy which places the individual at the centre cannot exists without individuals.

It all makes for a rather disconcerting narrative. The only problem is that it’s almost certainly wrong. Yes, the Cisco lawsuit is newsworthy, but individual lawsuits do not establish generalised truths.

If you look at the fingerprints on many of these stories, much of the concern over America’s alleged caste system stems from a California-based non-profit called Equality Labs. Its Executive Director, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, is a Berkeley-educated daughter of a physician, who began her Dalit (the lowest caste) activism as a university student. Her 2018 report, and its horrifying findings, remain extensively quoted: for example, 25% of Dalit respondents said they had faced verbal or physical assault based on their caste; 50% of Dalits live in fear of their caste being outed; 67% reported being treated unfairly at their workplace. (The report also talks of “Caste apartheid”.)

The total sample size was 1,500, which is not a small number, and far superior to anecdotes. But the issue with the report has more to do with representativeness. The authors state that it was a “web-based, self-reported, self-administered questionnaire”, and that it was distributed “through direct contacts, community listservs, community organisations, immigrant organisations, South Asian religious, cultural, and linguistic networks, and social media”. The survey was written by “South Asian academics, anti-Caste activists, community members, and policy advocates”, and was endorsed by the Dalit American Coalition, the International Campaign for Dalit Humans Rights, and the Dalit American Women’s Association, among others. It also used “snowball sampling”, where respondents referred other respondents, resulting in a strong skew in demographics and views.

In short, this survey was likely completed by individuals already conscious of and concerned with prejudice and discrimination against Dalits in America. This does not invalidate the report, but it does suggest that its results may not be a good representation of Indian American experiences and views.

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Several years after the Equality Labs survey, the Carnegie Foundation and YouGov collaborated on a report using a representative sample and came to different conclusions. While the Equality Labs sample was 24% Dalit, the Carnegie report found that 1% of Hindu Indian Americans who identified themselves with a caste were Dalit. This is in line with other private surveys I have seen, as well as the unrepresentative caste demographics of Indian Americans when compared to the subcontinent. While 22% of Hindus in India are “upper caste”, 80% of Hindus in America who identify with a caste — roughly half of all Indian Americans — are upper caste. Moreover, a quick perusal of a The New York Times wedding pages for a common Indian surname like Patel suggests that while 95% of Indian Hindu marriages are intra-caste, closer to 30% of US-born Indian marriages are intra-caste, and the true value is probably lower. In America, the melting pot is still operational.

The issue of endogamy is critical because the genetic data indicates that Indian castes, and in particular, subcastes or jati, have been strongly endogamous for 1,500 years in the subcontinent. While in the US racial differences between blacks and whites are organised around physical appearance, despite some average differences in looks between Indian castes even within a region, they are not striking enough to organise the communities.

Rather, castes operate genealogically as lineage and kinship networks that regulate marriage, uphold collective honour and distribute and control power and resources. There are Indian political parties whose vote banks are specific castes, and though there are some rarefied urban professional milieus where caste is marginal to their experience, it pervades the occupational, social and personal lives of the rural majority. Upper-caste groups tend to control disproportionate wealth and power, while lower-caste groups must make do with affirmative programs that reserve government jobs for their communities.

These inequalities in the subcontinent explain the demographics of Indian Americans, who are the most well-educated and wealthiest ethnic group in the US. Overwhelmingly still an immigrant community, Indian Americans have been able to migrate primarily due to their educational and professional qualifications, which means they will be drawn from the upper-caste elites of the subcontinent. Though fewer than 5% of Indians are Brahmin, private surveys indicate that 25% of Indian Americans are Brahmin. Dalits are 15% of India’s population, but they are no more than 1% of Indian Americans.

There are three different dynamics to consider when evaluating all these facts. First, it is possible and perhaps even likely that the small number of Dalits in the US experience some level of prejudice and discrimination. Second, Indian Americans belong to an overwhelmingly privileged caste in the subcontinent, but are still a racial minority in the US. They are 1.4% of the American population, of whom only 50% are Hindu. Dalits are 0.014% of the American population (1 out of 7,200).

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Third, whereas in India it is possible that one’s friendship network could be limited to one’s subcaste, the Carnegie report finds that only 43% of immigrant Indian Americans even have mostly or all Indian friends, with the figure being 25% for those born in the US. 28% of US-born Indian Americans have almost no Indian friends, while 17% of foreign-born Indian Americans are in this category. Of those Indian Americans who are Hindu, 50% have almost no friends from the same caste as themselves. The fact that they can make this assessment indicates that caste is salient to them (most are immigrants), but their revealed preferences in friendship networks indicate that they do not self-segregate by caste.

America, then, is not India, and, contrary to some paranoid conspiracy theories, upper-caste Hindus do not call the shots in the US (no, Kamala Harris, whose mother is a Tamil Brahmin, is not very influential). Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella are both upper-caste South Indians, but the workforce of Google and Microsoft are 50% non-Hispanic white. Though there are exceptions in Silicon Valley and at a few family-owned businesses (those glamorous motels!), Indian Americans’ workplaces are mostly dominated by non-Hispanic whites or are multiracial.

Since more than half of Indian Americans arrived after the turn of the millennium, they have brought many aspects of their culture to the US, some of which likely do include unpleasant attitudes around caste and jati that were nurtured on the subcontinent. But the social context of the US is entirely different to India; the reality is that the Indian communal dynamics do not and cannot apply.

Does this mean that Dalit Americans experience no discrimination or prejudice? Of course not. But there is a huge difference between India and the US in the pervasiveness of caste-based discrimination. America undoubtedly has many social ills relating to class and ethnicity, but this isn’t because India is importing its own problems to the US. The vast majority of Indians come to the US for a simple reason: to get rich, not to maintain caste hierarchy.

Instead, it was extreme privilege that defined royals back then. Today a very large part of the public can afford fancy dining, expensive hotels, and foreign travel — at least from time to time — and most can expect to retire to a comfortable bed in a pleasantly ambient temperature. But not so long ago these were the prerogatives of only a small share of the population, at the top of which sat royalty.

Yet despite their elite lifestyles, monarchs and their consorts can tell us a surprising amount about how life in Britain has changed over the past 300 years, and in no department more than that of demography. In fact, the whole demographic story of Britain since the early 18th century can be told through the reproductive history of four queens.

Let’s start with Queen Anne who came to the throne in 1702. Her sister Mary had died childless in her early thirties — a death immortalised by the funeral music of Henry Purcell, who followed her to the graveyard within less than a year. Mary’s husband William III — first cousin of Mary and Anne as well as Mary’s fellow monarch — died some years later in his early fifties with no heir, so the throne passed to Anne. By the time Anne died, just short of 50 years of age, she had apparently had 18 pregnancies, and although one of her offspring did make it past infancy, he did not survive his mother. And so, with Anne’s Catholic half-brother excluded for religious reasons, the call went out to distant — Protestant — relations in Hanover.

The reason that Anne’s reproductive failures are of interest is that they stand as an extreme but not atypical example of the sad human condition for most of history, during which not even royalty could shield an individual from the cruelty of nature. This was the unchanging world which the Reverend Thomas Malthus described a century later, in which humans bred like rabbits and died like flies. Populations pressed forwards like Europe’s in the Middle Ages, only to be pushed back by plague or war. Ultimately humans stretched the limits of the planet’s carrying capacity at a time when crop yields were still very meagre and hunger never far off for most of the population.

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But the world which Malthus described as eternal was coming to an end. Already in Malthus’s day, death rates were plunging, life expectancies extending and the population growing rapidly. A few years after his death the young Victoria came to the throne: her reign would redefine population patterns in the British Isles and set a precedent which was to spread well beyond it. Victoria had nine children and each of them outlived her, even though she managed to live a good three decades longer than Anne. Again, this is exemplary of trends at the time but a rather extreme example; infant mortality remained very high and only began falling towards the end of Victoria’s reign. To be survived by nine out of nine children was indeed a feat, but far less miraculously atypical than it would have been a century or two earlier.

Britain’s population explosion under Queen Victoria was one of the most significant events of the 19th century. As well as providing a ready labour force to transform the country into the workshop of the world, it supplied a huge excess population that settled in colonies from Vancouver to Tasmania. The Anglosphere as we know it today could not have come into existence without the millions who left the British Isles and settled new lands, creating Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And until the latter years of the 19th century — when other European countries started to follow suit and export their surplus citizens — the people of the United Kingdom provided the bulk of the inflow that turned the United States from a handful of colonies hugging the Atlantic in 1800 to the behemoth it was becoming a century later.

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Just as Queen Anne and Queen Victoria represented the demography of their ages, so too did Elizabeth the Queen Mother. A Scottish aristocrat and one of ten, she married the future George VI, one of six. But, typical of a generation which came to reproductive maturity in the inter-war years, Elizabeth and her husband did not follow in the fertile footsteps of their parents but limited their progeny to two. Already before the First World War family sizes were shrinking, with a fertility rate in 1914 in the UK of about three children per woman. By 1939, it was down to two. This was the next phase in what we now call the demographic transition, a change which happened first in the UK then spread to the rest of Europe and to North America and in more recent decades to the rest of the world. After a period of falling death rates, a more urban and educated population produces fewer children, as they have more hope of their survival.

But demography would not be so interesting if it did not have twists and kinks. The Princess Elizabeth, our present Queen, defied the demographic trend of low birth rates and small families by marrying younger than her mother and having twice as many children. And again, she was typical of her generation. After the Second World War there was a perhaps inevitable baby boom as the men returned home and a certain amount of catching up took place in terms of family formation. But with some ups and down, the baby boom went on for the best part of two decades, creating the baby boomers of whom those of us born in 1964 (including Prince Edward) represent a final hurrah.

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After Elizabeth II’s final child was born, the country’s fertility rate again began to tumble. Each of her children has produced just two, representative of the country as a whole. And although the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have bucked the national trend by having three, Meghan and Harry certainly represent a large swathe of their generation by not only stopping at two but making an environmental virtue of the fact.

Perhaps it is surprising that so much of our demographic history can be seen through the lives of four women who were so exceptional in terms of their social status. But maybe we should not be shocked that, as well as being heirs to the throne, each royal generation also exists in its own time, influencing and being influenced by the wider trends around them.

He told me how the Unionist authorities had tried to counter that higher birth rate by encouraging Catholic emigration through discriminatory housing and employment policies. Generally, those authorities were successful: Catholics disproportionately left Ulster and thus their share of the population held stable, with higher arrivals of babies being offset by higher departures of working-age people looking for opportunities on the British mainland and the US. But sometimes these policies backfired.

“One friend of ours went to the housing office to ask for a bigger house,” my Sinn Féin interlocutor remembered. “They said: ‘Come back when you have eight children.’ So he did.”

Once civil rights improved the lot of Catholics in Northern Ireland, their disproportionate departure from the Province ended. But their birth rate remained significantly higher than that of Protestants for a few decades more, laying the foundations for a growing share of the population. 

A roughly 2:1 Protestant advantage was baked into the Partition — indeed, Cabinet papers make it clear that this was the basis on which the border between Northern Ireland and the Free State was drawn. But in the closing third of the 20th century, that Protestant advantage began to erode, and a rough parity of numbers between the two communities came into sight.

Numbers matter in ethnic conflict. As long ago as Biblical times, the Pharaoh of Egypt fretted about the number of Israelites in his realm. In an era of democracy, those who wield the greater number of boots on the ground also wield the greater number of crosses on ballot papers. One way or another, power tends to derive from numeric predominance.

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But how to establish numeric predominance? Broadly, it can be undertaken through what experts have named “demographic engineering” — that is, changing the demographic facts to suit one side or another in a conflict. This can be done the “hard” or “soft” route. Hard demographic engineering means causing people to be born, or to die, or to move. History is replete with examples of these practices,  and so is the contemporary world. Higher Catholic birth rates on the one hand, and the encouragement of higher Catholic emigration in Northern Ireland is just one example. In Ceausescu’s Romania, an ethno-nationalist regime with a merely superficially Communist-internationalist veneer, ethnic Romanians were deprived of access to contraception in order to boost their numbers, while ethnic Hungarians found it easier to get hold of family planning devices. Ethnic Romanians were not permitted to leave, while Jews and ethnic Germans were traded for hard currency. The result was a more homogeneously Romanian Romania.

Subtler ways to tilt the scales of ethnic composition exist. This is soft demographic engineering — like the drawing of the Irish border to exclude three traditionally Ulster but too-Catholic counties from the northern state. The population balance in Northern Ireland was arranged without moving or massacring anyone, and without encouraging one group to have larger families than the other. 

Elsewhere, the very borders of the United States were shaped by demographic considerations. After victory over Mexico in 1848, the US decided to annex the northern portion of the country — today’s California, New Mexico, Arizona and the rest of the south west — and not the rest of the country precisely because in this large part of Mexico, there were hardly any Mexicans. The administered territories were not admitted as full states until they had reliably “Anglo” majorities — New Mexico not until 1912.

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If the boundaries of a map can be manipulated for demographic purposes, so can the boundaries of identity. At one stage the Turks tried to persuade the world that the people living in the east of the country were not Kurds but “Mountain Turks”. Austria-Hungary was keen to stress the Ukrainian identity, serving as a thorn in the side of the Russians. The Russians meanwhile, along with their Balkan allies, were busy trying to persuade Croats, once loyal to the Habsburgs, that they were really “South Slavs” (or Yugo-Slavs) who should throw their lot in with the Serbs, religious differences notwithstanding. The Tsarist authorities preferred that Ukrainians thought of themselves as “little Russians”, a theme Putin himself has echoed.

In Northern Ireland there has been little effort to persuade Nationalists that they are really British, or Unionists that they are really Irish, but there is a fair amount of this sentiment in both communities. Soft demographic engineering has occurred regardless. Undoubtedly conversion and assimilation on both sides is what explains Republican and Nationalist leaders with names like Wilson and Hume, and Loyalist terrorists with names like Murphy. 

However the two sides have played their demographic hands in the numbers game, there is no doubt that they are closely watching the results. Catholics have been making headway; although their fertility rate is now not much higher than that of Protestants, the historic gap is still delivering them a growing share of the population. Sinn Féin certainly has high hopes that, in Gerry Adams’s words. “demographic dynamics… make Irish reunification a realistic objective within a reasonable time scale”. Earlier this year, one commentator suggested demography as the leading reason why Irish unity was “inevitable”. But Adams and the inevitabilists may turn out to be disappointed.

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The great Catholic advantage in fertility has decreased significantly. Recent censuses have shown a declining Catholic share of younger cohorts. And a great many Catholics who feel part of the Nationalist community and probably vote for Nationalist parties are quite content in the UK and — or at least until Brexit — would not have voted for unification in a border poll. 

There is evidence that the binary nature of Northern Irish society is breaking down. Despite the persistence of inner-city sectarian citadels, more people are ceasing to define themselves as members of one tribe or the other, either because they have lost the strong sense of identity with which they may have been brought up, or because they hail from outside the Province. All this plays to unionism with a small if not a large ‘U’, because few such people are eager for a change to the status quo. One prominent Unionist politician told me that he would love a few thousand Hong Kong Chinese to emigrate to Ulster for that very reason. Note how the rise of the Alliance party has meant that, at these elections, parties committed to Irish unity actually lost four seats.

Brexit did complicate Northern Irish politics, but even its effect is waning; one recent poll showed only 30% in favour of unification. There is no doubt that support for unity is much stronger among the young than the old. But just as with radical change in the socio-economic order, changes to the constitutional order are likely to get less appealing as people age, and the support of youth today does not necessarily translate into support for it among the middle-aged tomorrow. Scottish independence, like Brexit, may change the equation, but not necessarily decisively. More than twice as many Catholics as Protestants admit to having changed their minds on the issue of Irish unification.

Sinn Féin’s electoral triumph changes none of this. There is a long precedent of nationalist or separatist parties holding local power over a long time but failing to achieve their break-away ambitions and in some cases even abandoning them; examples include places as diverse as Scotland, Quebec and Tamil Nadu. 

There can be no doubt that the rise of the Catholic share of the population has assisted in the growth of Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland and – alongside Unionist divisions – accounts for the party’s success in becoming the largest party in the Province. But demography is not always destiny. The IRA could not deliver Irish unity through the gun. Sinn Féin will be disappointed if they believe they can deliver it instead through the womb. 

The French are decreasingly guarded about exposing their dislike of the emerging demography of France — where a large and growing North African population inhabits suburban rings around the tiny cores of many historic cities from the Mediterranean to the Channel. I thought of my hostess from 40 years ago when travelling with my wife near Rheims last year. Our hotelier, a woman with an elegant home and her own family mark of champagne, told us enthusiastically about the wonderful Monsieur Zemmour, an intellectual writer and broadcaster who had not at that stage declared himself as a presidential candidate but who she thought might just save France.

Arriving in the village in the Pyrenees Orientales where we spend much of our time, we heard the same from our elderly, highly cultivated neighbour and an artisan friend of hers. Of course, neither would actually vote for Zemmour if he stood, they assured us (not entirely convincingly), but he was very impressive. And had we noticed the first veils arriving in the nearest town and occasionally in the village itself?

This is a region that Pepin and his son Charlemagne captured from the Moors in the late ninth century, a fact attested to by a series of local Romanesque chapels dating from the following two centuries. Our neighbour and her friend felt they were witnessing a reversal of the Carolingian handiwork: an area once wrested from the Muslims by the Christians was being wrested back, not through warfare but through migration and a higher birth rate.

The French have long been obsessed by demography — and with good reason. When Napoleon dominated the continent early in the nineteenth century, his population was at least half as large as Britain’s — even including Ireland — and also half as large again as what was to become Germany. In its glory — in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — France was Europe’s population behemoth.

But whereas in the century before the outbreak of the First World War, France’s population grew from around 30 to around 40 million, Britain’s rose from around 25 million to around 45 million, despite the massive emigration by which people of British origin had settled vast swathes of the globe, from California to Tasmania. Over the same period, not only was Germany unified, but its population rose from a little over 20 million to around 65 million. Industrialisation was also slower in France than in Britain or Germany, in part due to the lack of raw materials; the best iron deposits were lost to the Germans with Lorraine. But it was a lack of manpower which proved decisive, whether in the factories or at the front.

It was clear long before the bloodiest battles on the western front that France was a second-rate power dependent on British and Russian allies just to hold its own. The defeat of 1870 at the hands of the Prussians and their allies was a national trauma; the ignominy of the lost lands beyond the ligne bleu of Alsace and Lorraine were deeply etched on French consciousness. And population — or lack of it — was blamed. As early as 1849, a French parliamentary deputy saw national decline as rooted in demography: “The first element of power is population, and on this point … France is in full decay.” By the time of the outbreak of war in 1914, more than half of French parliamentarians were members of the Parliamentary Group for the Protection of Natality. French family sizes had shrunk long before those of other European powers, for reasons till not entirely clear. We know enough to understand that the cause was a comparatively low birth rate, though, rather than a high death rate: perhaps the French peasants figured out how to limit their procreation earlier than people elsewhere.

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But if defeat in the Franco-Prussian war excited a demographic alarm, the travails of 1914-1918 turned the problem into a source of despair. French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau may have got a lot of what he wanted in the Treaty of Versailles in terms of punishing Germany, but he declared: “The treaty does not say that France must undertake to have children but it is the first clause which should have been included in it … One can take all of Germany’s guns, one can do whatever one likes, France will be lost because there is no more Frenchman.”

Inter-war, the French made efforts to boost their numbers. Prolific mothers were offered medals. The Alliance pour l’Accroissement de la Population française advocated larger families. It also supported immigration of Europeans, ideally Catholics, who could be absorbed into the French nation. Hundreds of thousands of Poles, Belgians and Italian came to live in France between the wars; France had a foreign-born population three times as large as the UK’s in the 1930s (almost six times if the Irish are excluded from the UK figure).

And yet, in 1937 Paul Reynaud, a minister and later prime minister, still lamented: “There is a single factor which dominates everything: the demographic factor. Forty-one million Frenchmen face sixty-seven million Germans and forty-three million Italians, these last two countries linked by the Berlin-Rome axis.… As far as numbers are concerned, we are beaten.” Germany’s fertility rate had plummeted as well, but the enemy over the Rhine was still far too numerous for France to compete. Population pessimism was a critical component in the general atmosphere which led to the collapse of 1940.

After the Second World War, things looked up — demographically and in every other way. France had its own baby boom, moderate though it was, and although fertility rates have fallen in recent decades, they are still higher than in most other European countries, not least Germany. A residue of Catholicism as well as an atmosphere conducive to women combining parenthood with a career seem to have helped.

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The French population also swelled with the arrival of people from the former colonies, first the pieds noirs fleeing the conflict in Algeria, then Algerian Muslims and migrants from the once vast French Empire south of the Sahara. But here lay the rub. Earlier migrant groups had been quite easily absorbed. In the Pyrenees Orientales, for example, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards fled Franco’s advance in 1939, and today their descendants have completely merged with the locals who share their Catalan identity. But although France’s republican and secular ideology demurs from formally categorising citizens, those from more distant cultures have not integrated to the same extent.

That’s not to say that France completely failed in its efforts to absorb this new wave of immigrants. A survey from, admittedly 17 years ago, showed Muslims in France much more likely to identify primarily with their nation than with their religion — when compared with those in Germany, Spain and the UK — and more likely to hold favourable views of Christians and Jews.

But, since then, France has suffered particularly acutely from Islamist terrorism. The attacks on the Bataclan and the Charlie Hebdo offices are just the most notorious examples; similar incidents in a Jewish school and a supermarket, as well as the murder of a teacher offending Islamic sensibilities, have angered and stirred up the country. Around half of French Muslims report experiencing discrimination and two thirds believe their religion is negatively perceived by their fellow citizens.

Moreover, though the French state avoids and in some cases bans the collection of data by religion or ethnicity, there is plenty of evidence — both anecdotal and statistical — that French Muslims are more prone to deprivation and unemployment than their non-Muslim fellow citizens.

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Now, the political rhetoric around French demography is as charged as it was 100 years ago. Today the worry comes not from across the Rhine but from over the Mediterranean. A demographic pessimism hangs over France much as it did back when Reynaud despaired in the face of a larger German population. More than 60% of French people believe that white Christians will be rendered extinct by Muslims. There is talk of lost suburbs where women and men are increasingly separated in public. A French journalist who worked on a story of no-go Islamic zones recently received death threats and is under police protection. Around 20 retired generals have warned that Islam is taking over parts of the country and have raised the possibility of a racially-driven civil war.

In this febrile atmosphere, it is small wonder that two of the leading candidates in the fast-approaching presidential election are explicitly anti-Islam. Zemmour has said he is standing “to save France from Islam” and has called on Muslims to abandon their religion. Marine Le Pen has proposed a headscarf ban and compared Muslims praying in the street with the Nazi occupation. Not to be outdone, the centre has followed the lead of the Right: President Macron has vowed to fight “Islamic separatism” and his interior minister has taken an activist line in controlling Muslim political associations. Although the Left is generally more sympathetic to minorities, it has a strong tradition of secularism (laïcité) which often rubs up against Muslim practice.

The consensus is that Macron and his associates will succeed in stealing the thunder of the two far-Right candidates and that he will emerge as the clear winner. Despite the enthusiasm of my interlocutors last year, Zemmour seems to be sinking while Le Pen rises. She will have to do much better in debates with Macron than she did in 2017 if she is to stand a chance of not being trounced; Macron’s superior intellect counts a lot with the French, who are unapologetic about their respect for brain power.

But bear this in mind: when Le Pen’s father faced Jacques Chirac in the second round in 2002, the far-Right candidate received just 18% of the vote; 15 years later, his daughter got almost 34%. In a France once more obsessed by its own demographic decline, the unthinkable is increasingly becoming thinkable; the unsayable becoming sayable. Nothing can be discounted.

The new American Dream has its heart in the states of the old Confederacy. But its allure does not merely lie in a conservative embrace of lower taxes, less regulation and greater self-reliance, although these surely matter. More important are the opportunities that come from building businesses and owning new homes, not for the privileged few but for an increasingly diverse, and growing, populace.

As Marianne Pina, who came to Dallas as a young adult before founding a five-million-dollar business specialising in minority recruitment and job placement, told me: “The American Dream stereotype still exists here. If you work hard, you can make it. It’s still up to you as an individual.”

But lurking in the background, the South’s rebirth remains threatened by its historical demons: racism, white nationalism and overzealous religious fervour. This is partly because, as the political scientist V.O. Key noted, the South remains the only region of America that has been conquered and subjugated. It is, he wrote in 1949, a prisoner of its racial legacy in its politics and social structure; only when that problem has been addressed can the region ascend to its potential.[1. O. Key, Southern Politics, (New York: Vintage,1949), pp.3-18; p.674-5] Indeed, the economic consequences of slavery persisted well into the 1960s.[2. Gavin Wright, Old South, New South, (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), pp.10-15, p.18,p. 25, p.80, p.240]

Even today, despite its ascendance, the South still lags somewhat behind the nation both in income and education levels. It is still castigated by progressive academics (increasingly a redundant concept) for being wedded to “racial conservatism”. It was only in 2013 that liberal chief justice Steve Breyer compared the region’s racial climate to “a plant disease”.

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Anyone who has spent time outside academia knows this is increasingly no longer the case. Ever since the 1960s, business leaders in the South have worked overtime to embrace racial diversity, if not for moral reasons, but economic ones.[3. Wright, p.265-268] Perhaps that explains why people from outside the region are pouring in: the Southern states account for six of the top ten gainers in interstate migration, led by Texas and Florida. In contrast, the biggest losers are the progressive strongholds of New York, Illinois, and California.

Significantly, while the African-American population has declined in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago, it is expanding in cities such as Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW), Atlanta, Houston, and Nashville. Immigrants, mostly from developing countries and Asia, are also moving in. According to research by demographer Wendell Cox, the fastest growth in a city’s foreign-born population over the past decade was in Nashville, where it exceeded 40%, while those in DFW, Houston and Austin increased by more than 25%. Once seen as a dominant immigrant melting pot, Los Angeles, by contrast, saw their foreign-born populations shrink.

“In the past, you would go to New York, but people have found life was very challenging there,” developer La Lou Davies, who moved to Houston from Nigeria, explains. “It’s hard to find a place to live. By the 1990s, people started going to places like Houston, which have lower entry costs for housing and better business environments. Getting that first apartment, or a lease for a business, is so much easier.”

And so it is economic opportunity, rather than reactionary politics, that has fuelled the South’s renewal. Most southern states — even Texas, which is suffering a contraction in its energy industry — have lower unemployment rates than California and those in the Northeast. Overall, southern states have also enjoyed far more robust job growth over the past decade than most of the country, accounting for six of the eleven fastest growing states.

Some progressives have dismissed this growth, suggesting that the South is where capital goes to “slum”, citing low wages, anti-union laws and housing costs. Paul Krugman, for example, ascribes Texas’s success to low wages and better weather, suggesting that he hasn’t visited the state during the impossibly miserable summers.

Certainly, the region’s growth in the post-war era rested largely on low-paying industries such as textile and food processing. Today, however, DFW is home to 24 Fortune 500 company headquarters, ranking behind only New York and Chicago. Even NASDAQ is reportedly considering a move to Dallas-Fort Worth from the New York area.

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Tech employment has also been on the rise. Over the last five years, the South accounted for four of the top eleven tech growth regions: Austin, Orlando, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham all greatly outperformed the glamorous hubs of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Perhaps more important still, the South has become the epicentre for new job creation in professional and business services, the largest well-paying job classification. It also has held on to more manufacturing, and is now emerging as both the industrial, construction and energy capital of the country. For higher paying blue-collar jobs, southern regions account for a majority of the 15 strongest performers, while places like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago continue to languish.

Of course, construction plays a huge role. The South — as is evident everywhere from west Houston and north Dallas to the exurbs of Charlotte, Nashville, and Atlanta — is building far more new houses than their counterparts on either coast. Texas, with one-quarter fewer residents than California, has permitted more than twice as many new housing units this year, and has no housing crisis. Tennessee, now one of the 10 most popular destinations for immigrants from California, last year issued half as many housing units as California, despite having about one-sixth the population.

This is one reason why housing costs, even in the South’s hottest markets, tend to be as low as one-third, when adjusted by income, of places such as coastal California. Indeed, it is the opportunity to own a home that has likely made the South — which accounted for 43% of all sales in July — the predominant place for young families.

Yet the resurgence of America’s South still remains vulnerable. Yes, companies continue to move from the Northeast and California to Texas, Tennessee and other Southern states. But a number of corporate executives, particularly in the tech sector, have responded with horror to their socially conservative legislation. Texas’s recent abortion ban, for example, generated a strong set of counter-measures among tech firms: they blacklisted anti-abortion websites and offered protections for their own employees, including Uber and Lyft drivers who might be liable for transporting women to clinics.

Simply put, laws such the abortion bill, with could be enforced by state-sanctioned vigilantes, are unlikely to be a pull-factor for many would-be Southerners. Recent polls have found the majority of Americans disapprove of the bill, while at least one survey found that tough abortion laws would lead a majority of college-educated workers to move elsewhere.

The future of the South, then, depends on how it negotiates the rise of progressive politics — and its success will depend on how it negotiates their rise. Bills passed to restrict transgender rights, regulate voting or abolish critical race theory may have broader support than restrictions on abortion, but they have still led to boycotts, costing state economies millions of dollars.

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The South’s biggest enemy, however, remains its own troubled historic legacy on race. All too often Southern conservatives allow racism to slip through the cracks. Just last year, for example, several Republican County Chairs in Texas tweeted openly racist memes; one of the offenders was from Harris County, where non-Hispanic whites make up less than one-third of the population. This behaviour, combined with draconian measures such as the abortion bill, could ultimately hand Texas to the Democrats — whose calls for a ban on fracking would, according to a US Chamber of Commerce report, would cost more jobs than those lost in the Great Recession.

And then there’s Covid-19, which, given the region’s low vaccination rates, also presents a serious danger to the prosperity of the South. Southern conservatives such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis may be rightfully critical of extreme lockdowns and school closings, but opening up too quickly has had dire consequences in a region that suffers higher obesity and diabetes rates than the rest of the country.

For the South to thrive, then, it needs to find a programme that both respects its traditions and embraces a more pragmatic, economics-oriented focus. It needs to overcome the ghosts of its tragic past and avoid the pitfalls of progressivism. The South, in effect, faces a balancing act. And if it succeeds, it will be the states of the late Confederacy could shape the future of their one-time conquerors.

In 1979, they imposed a one-child policy on their citizens. It was brutally implemented. There were forced sterilisations, forced abortions and crippling financial penalties on families with unauthorised children. In some areas, family planning officials — effectively a secret police force — punished non-complying parents by demolishing homes and kidnapping excess children.

It was all for nothing. The long-term population trends would have been similar without Beijing’s campaign of anti-natal terror. Birth rates across East Asia have plummeted, despite the fact that only China had a one-child policy. 

Furthermore, Chinese birth rates have stayed low despite the end of the policy. Worryingly low, in fact. In recent years, the Government hasn’t just eased up on population control, but now wants families to have more children. There was the shift to a two-child policy in 2015 and, earlier this year, to a three-child policy. 

But the biggest sign of panic came this week, when the State Council announced a ban on abortions for non-medical purposes. It was the clearest proof yet that China is hurtling towards a demographic disaster that the Government is desperate to stop.

We can tell that they’re worried because the official figures are so misleading. This is what usually happens when a communist regime has something it wants to hide: whether it’s a poor harvest, inadequate production or mass murder.

Based on government statistics, the World Bank puts the Chinese total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to each woman over her lifetime — at 1.7. The rate required to maintain population stability is 2 (plus a bit more to compensate for child mortality).

So a TFR of 1.7 is well below the “replacement rate”. However, according to demographers like Lyman Stone, China’s real fertility rate is probably much lower — perhaps as low as 1.1. This matters, because the mathematics of demographics are merciless. 

To see how important these numbers are, think about a sequence of three generations. If the TFR falls below replacement, then each new generation will be smaller than its predecessor. For instance, a constant TFR of 1.7 means that your children’s generation will be only 85% as big as your own, and your grandkid’s generation 72%. That’s a significant decline, but manageable. 

Now try a TFR of 1.4 — this brings down the generation size to 70% of the starting point within just one generation and to less than 50% within two generations. We’re talking about proper depopulation here: schools closing down; businesses struggling to find workers; villages and towns inhabited by no one but the elderly — and, in time, only by ghosts. 

It’s already happening in some places. The village of Nagoro in Japan is famous not because its population decline is unique (sadly, it isn’t), but because its departed residents have been replaced by life-sized dolls. Created by Tsukimi Ayano, the effigies work in fields, wait at bus stops and fill the classroom of a school that closed a decade ago. Whether one finds the display poignant or eerie, it’s a haunting reminder of what’s happening right now in left-behind communities across the developed world — and what might happen to the rest of us in the decades ahead.

At a TFR of close to 1 — the goal of the one-child policy — we enter into the realm of country-wide demographic collapse. Each generation is roughly half the size of its predecessor. Over several generations, a nation basically disappears. If you want to know what that future would be like, don’t read Nineteen Eighty-Four or Brave New World, but P.D. James’s The Children of Men.  

And this is a prospect that is already hitting some countries. According to the latest figures, the TFR in Singapore is 1.14, in Hong Kong it is 1.07 and in South Korea a terrifying 0.86. North Korea doesn’t have to nuke its southern rival — just wait for it to empty out. 

If China’s real TFR is in this ballpark, then the apparent panic of its government is no surprise. Xi, after all, will be well aware of what happened to Japan thirty years ago. In the 1980s, the Land of the Rising Sun was where China is now — the emerging economic superpower and number one threat to America’s pre-eminence. Back then, Japan was at the cutting edge of modernity — a neon-lit vision of the future that the West could only aspire to. 

The buzz — or, more accurately, the hype — was reflected in Japanese share and property prices. By 1989, the Japanese stock market accounted for over 40% of all the stock market values in the world. The country’s real estate was worth more than all the land in the US (despite America being 26 times bigger). 

Then there was the most mind-blowing statistic of them all. The Imperial Palace in Tokyo sits on a plot less than one square mile in area. Yet, at the peak of the property bubble, the grounds were valued at more than the entire US state of California. 

Of course, it couldn’t last — and it didn’t. In the early 1990s, land and share values collapsed, plunging Japan into its “Lost Decade” (more like two or three decades) of economic stagnation. 

It’s significant that the peak of the bubble — 1989 — coincided with the “1.57 shock“. This wasn’t an earthquake, at least not literally, but the news that Japan’s total fertility rate had declined to a record low of 1.57. By today’s standards, that’s really not that low; but at the time it caused national dismay. Might it also have contributed to the bursting of Japan’s economic bubble?

The decision to have children is an expression of faith in the future. Without that faith — and certainly without a rising generation of producers and consumers — it’s hard for a country to sustain a rapid rate of economic growth. It’s even harder to sustain a bubble economy, especially one based on a property boom. What is the point of building all those new homes if there aren’t enough people to live in them? Sooner or later, investors look beyond the hype and ask the obvious question.

It’s the question that Xi Jinping will be fretting about right now. The immediate worry is Evergrande, China’s second biggest property developer, which is teetering on the edge of collapse. But it’s not just one company in peril, but the entire economy. Over the last decade, Chinese property prices have doubled. The country is building five times as many new homes each year as in Europe and America combined. And despite China’s prowess in manufacturing, the real estate sector now accounts for more than a quarter of the country’s GDP. The whole thing is built on a mountain of debt — including the $300 billion borrowed by Evergrande. 

Xi will be pulling on every lever to stabilise the situation, but what he really needs is for his people to go forth and multiply — and fill all those empty homes. 

Can he persuade them to do so? Other countries, including Japan, have tried to reverse declining birth rates — offering parents tax breaks, benefits and other forms of support. But, at best, these pro-natal inducements have had limited success.   

Of course, Japan is a democracy. China is not. Where he sees fit, Xi Jinping has no trouble interfering in the private lives of his citizens. His party once compelled Chinese families to have fewer children, so might it now compel them to have more? In place of forced sterilisation, could we see the state pursue a policy of forced fertilisation? 

If its survival depended upon it, this is a regime that would bring back its two-child policy — only this time as a minimum. 

The article stated that the results of last year’s census marked “the first time the absolute number of people who identify as White alone has shrunk since a census started being taken in 1790”. Similar refrains rang out across numerous other news outlets: “America’s white population set to shrink”; “America’s White Population Shrank for the First Time”; “Vast Stretches of America Are Shrinking. Almost All of Them Voted for Trump”.

There was jubilation among the Left. Michael Moore called the announcement “the best day ever in US history”. For cultural radicals such as he, the census marked the end of “white supremacy” and the start of a millennium of progressive dominance and racial equity. Similarly, Neocon-turned-Never-Trumper Jennifer Rubin gushed that “this is fabulous news — now we need to prevent minority White rule”.

Meanwhile, on the Right, Tucker Carlson, while condemning the Left’s gloating, went on to claim, without evidence, that the opioid crisis in white communities explained the decline. Likewise, the news will only confirm views held by the far-Right, whereby white nationalists have warned that white decline is being orchestrated by globalist elites and minorities, and which will lead to dire consequences for white people and their children.

However, despite the charged rhetoric doing the rounds, the number of people American society considers to be white has almost certainly increased since 2010. White America is not shrinking, and whites are not being racially supplanted. It’s a false narrative with serious political repercussions: study after study has found that reminding white Americans about their impending minority status shifts their policy attitudes in a conservative direction and increases support for Right-wing populism. So while this announcement may make the cultural Left feel good, it largely benefits the Trumpist Right.

But what do the actual findings indicate? Isn’t the census reporting the facts as they stand, that the number of white people in the country is declining? Well, it’s certainly true 5.1 million fewer non-Hispanic Americans ticked their race as “white alone” in 2020 compared to 2010. But to take this number out of context is to paint a misleading picture of social reality.

Any quantitative social science student knows that when you change the wording of a survey question, you can alter — often substantially — the pattern of responses. The 2010 census questionnaire offered single tick boxes for “white” and “black”. The 2020 version was changed so that people were not only asked to tick a box but also prompted to write their ethnic group in a text box below. Research from Pew shows that around 15% of black and white respondents did not write anything in the text box, or they wrote something that doesn’t make sense. Hispanic Americans were also told, for the first time, that Hispanic is not a race[1.  For this survey, Hispanic origins are not races”, was the wording alongside the What is your race? question.] when asked to define theirs. It is likely this prompted people to question their choice of which box to mark, opting for a multiple race or “other race” category instead. This would depress the number ticking the “white alone” box.

In addition to the change in census wording, the politicisation of white identity in the Trump era may also have led liberals to distance themselves from the category. The 2010s bore witness to a sharp rise in cultural progressivism. During this decade, the share of liberal Democratic white citizens, saying they felt “cold” towards white people increased by roughly 10%.

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There’s also the fact that many WASP Americans, such as Elizabeth Warren, have some Native American ancestry and some, such as Brad Pitt, believe they do even when such claims cannot be substantiated. Similarly, since 8 in 10 black Americans have white or other racial backgrounds in their family history, and 1 in 10 white southerners has African ancestry, the scope for expansion in the mixed or other race categories is potentially enormous.

So did these changes affect what people wrote on the 2020 census? Much of this depends on three things: whether their answers reflect a) their own identity, b) how they think others see them, or c) some judgement about the preponderance of pan-ethnic origins in their background.

Figure 1 (below) shows that the number of Americans ticking “white alone” as their race dropped by 19.3 million between 2010 and 2020, while the number ticking “white” alongside some other category increased by 23.6 million. Much of this shifting took place within the Hispanic population, but even among non-Hispanics, “white alone” declined by 5.1 million.

At the same time, the census recorded a rise of 24.8 million in the “two or more races” group and a jump of 28.1 million in “some other race”. The increase of 3.6 million in the population of those with mixed “American Indian and Alaska Native” and other racial background is also noteworthy given that this group numbered just 2.3 million in the 2010 census. Hardly any of this shift can be explained by aboriginal birth or death rates.

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Indeed, it's striking that most biracial white and Native Indian Americans are effectively considered white and view themselves as such. Meanwhile, the assimilation process means that with each generation, fewer descendants of Hispanic and Asian immigrants, especially those of mixed background, identify with their origins. It is, therefore, difficult to conceive that the number of Americans considered white is in decline.

Yet none of this means there is nothing happening with the nation’s ethnic demography. The balance between white births and deaths, taking into account the small flow of some 200,000 white immigrants a year, is nearly equal. The non-Hispanic white population, using the old question, was essentially flatlining between 2010 and 2019. White Americans have maintained a North European fertility pattern, with a total fertility rate between 1.5 and 2, since the Seventies.

Though relatively high for the developed world, this is still below the magic 2.1 replacement level. The “unmixed” white American population, along with white ethnic majorities in the rest of the developed world, will start to gradually decline in the decades ahead. But the big demographic story of the 2010s wasn’t about White Americans, but the big drop in Hispanic fertility, which is rapidly converging with the more stable white rate. So even while the share of “unmixed” whites will probably dip below 50% by 2050, the share who are considered socially white is likely to be a majority into the foreseeable future.

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Either way, to be more informative, the US census needs an update. Social scientists and pundits are interested in people’s subjective racial identity, but we also want to know about the balance of “objective” racial categories. The latter shapes people’s decisions about where to live, who to marry, who to vote for and can affect their life chances. One option might be to ask people how others perceive their race. In Northern Ireland, people’s growing tendency to state their religion as “none” or “not stated” led census takers in 2011 to add a question asking about the religion people were brought up in.

Ultimately, though, until the results of such a question show a real decline in those considered to be "white", the zeal to foreground the Great Replacement tells us more about ideological hopes and fears than any emerging social reality. One of the few seeking to dispel such illusions is leading American sociologist of ethnicity, Richard Alba. However, his important book The Great Demographic Illusion failed to garner reviews because it doesn’t fit the prevailing narrative. Instead, the media are attracted to demographic stories which heighten white threat perceptions, gratifying progressives while increasing support for Trumpism.

So while the definition of white may be blurring at the edges, the white American majority isn’t going anywhere.

In August 1991, while the USSR’s reforming General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev holidayed in his Ukrainian dacha, a group of hard-liners seized power. Gorbachev, under house arrest, turned to the BBC to find out what was going on, since in the Soviet Union nothing the media said was true unless the party said so. He learned that, in the centre of Moscow, Russian Federation president Boris Yeltsin courageously stood in front of the city’s White House in defiance of the plotters, surrounded by supporters brandishing the old Russian flag.

Perhaps what wasn’t clear to everyone was that Yeltsin was drunk for much of it. The true extent of his alcoholism became more apparent in the years after he dissolved the communist state a few months later and became president of an independent Russia, although he already had a colourful reputation for drink-related antics.

The plotters, it turned out, were also mostly legless. Having began a cack-handed coup that they weren’t prepared to kill for, the ringleaders appeared on television looking ashen-faced, some shaking nervously, their insides rotting from vodka. Most of all, though, they just appeared old, old and old beyond their years, the face of a fading empire based on a faith no one really believed in anymore.

By this stage, the Soviet Union was itself dying of alcohol, and attempts to treat it proved fruitless. One of the biggest mistakes made by Gorbachev — a very moderate drinker, which is why he’s alive and his rival Yeltsin is long dead — was to raise the tax on vodka, as part of a drive to tackle the country’s catastrophic problem with drink. Russian humour is famously bleak and sharp, and this led to a joke in which a boy asks, “Papa, and this means that you shall drink less?” “No, son, this means that you shall eat less”.

Alcohol played a central part in the demographic collapse that pre-empted the political fall of the USSR. It was back in the Seventies that people first noticed that in the Soviet Union people were starting to die younger. The decline in life expectancy affected not only the old, but the middle-aged. There was no famine, no foreign invasion, no natural disaster; instead people were drinking themselves to death out of despair. A country in which life is getting shorter — and worse — for its citizens has no future.

Russia’s birth rate had long collapsed, too. Two things drive higher fertility in wealthy countries — religion and affordability. All the major religions promote childbearing, give prestige and status to women who have children, and men who stick around; on top of that, attending a church, mosque or synagogue is associated with a number of measures of wellbeing that breed optimism.

The second factor is money. If both partners in a couple must work in order to survive, fertility is going to be severely depressed. The Soviet Union had extensive day care provision for mothers, but it was nowhere near enough to make up for the shortfall caused by mediocre wages. Back in the 1970s, Russian women marvelled at how their American equivalents could afford to leave work while they had children. As the New York Times reported, they “express astonishment when they learn that an American father can support a family of two, three or four children without his wife’s working. Many are also surprised that American women would willingly have more than one child.” For them, it was a huge struggle to raise just one.

The Soviet Union’s main adversary in the Cold War was also defined by ideology, to some extent. Many western nations had embraced liberalism, but no other was created with the words of John Locke enshrined in its foundation. Yet liberalism, too, faced its challenges in the late 20th century, not from the obviously failing Soviet Communism, but from rival ideas within the democratic tradition. Starting in the 1960s, a new way of thinking began to predominate in the US that was not really liberal, although its opponents confusingly still referred to it as such.

This new way of thinking was more hostile to freedom of speech, and its adherents began the process of chasing deviant thinkers out of academia that began in the late 1960s and would massively reduce political diversity by the 21st century; it supported not just personal sexual freedom, as did liberalism, but radical ideas about sex, including hostility to the family; it was anti-religion and would become more so when religion clashed with sexual rights. As for freedom of association, the “master freedom” in Christopher Caldwell’s words, this was also incompatible with a worldview that prioritised equality over liberty.

This new way of thinking — progressivism is probably the fairest term — is far less tolerant than liberalism. Indeed, in its hostility to freedom of speech, its Manichean worldview, its suspicion that its opponents are fascists, and the belief that politics should be inserted into everything — from science to children’s books — it is closer to the totalitarian tradition. American progressivism is not communism, obviously, anymore than its opponents are Nazis; the market is perfectly capable of achieving most progressive goals, and America has become more culturally Left-wing as Right-wing economic policies have dominated, globalisation being the common theme that links the two.

But globalisation came with a price, with millions of jobs lost after the 2001 trade deal with China, made two months after George W. Bush had followed the Soviet example by invading Afghanistan. It was in those former industrial heartlands where people first began to notice an epidemic of drug-related deaths that now constitutes one of the greatest social disasters in history.

Four decades on from its superpower rival, the United States had now become a country in which people were dying younger, driven by overdoses and suicides. That this epidemic took so long to register may have been the solitary and often legal nature of the drug problem; unlike Aids, it did not affect too many celebrities, Prince being the exception. But it could also be who the victims were — predominantly rural white Americans, neither powerful themselves nor championed by powerful supporters.

Like the Soviet Union, the United States has developed a system in which some social classes and races are officially favoured, and some are disfavoured, reflected in post-war legal innovations like affirmative action.

Affirmative action was originally introduced as a counter-measure to segregation, either of the official or unofficial variety, but as with many things its purpose evolved as bureaucracies grew. Today, government interference in private institutions is aimed at the goal of equality — not the liberal concept of equality of opportunity, but the more ambitious equality of outcomes, or “equity”.

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Under this theory, each racial group should have equal representation in elite institutions, which means that, depending on their race, Americans must achieve different scores to attend certain colleges. Equality is achieved through inequality. If this sounds illiberal, indeed un-American, that is because it is not unlike the “nationalities policies” created by communist revolutionaries, and under which the Russian majority were officially discriminated against in certain positions.

The Soviet nationalities policies allowed minority groups a certain degree of self-rule and recognition, while also ensuring that their elites remained utterly under the control of the party. Sometimes other nationalities would be disfavoured because they were seen as too anti-communist or otherwise disloyal, as happened to Ukrainians, Tartars and Jews at different times, but only Russian identity was actively discouraged. Stalin condemned the “Great Russian chauvinist spirit” and the Soviet Union saw majority nationalism as by far the greater evil.

This did not lead to a brotherhood of man, amazingly. The ethnic spoils system benefited the party, and minority members within it especially, but it is also a zero-sum game. The benefits of diversity, like the benefits of liberalism and capitalism, are supposed to be non-zero-sum, and often are: migrants benefit from moving to a richer or safer country, but the host population gains from their skills or cultural niches. When your migrant neighbour gets rich — and even richer than you — not only will it not harm you but you may well benefit.

Equity is similarly a zero-sum game: someone has to lose, and if one group is feted, in some cases even sacrilised, then others have to suffer, whether with tangible matters like college places or simply status and prestige.

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What toffs and plebs share

By Ed West

Today America’s thought-leaders are obsessed with white nationalism and regularly denounce white supremacy as a lethal danger to the nation, in what is probably history’s least ever white supremacist country; a country in which the majority  is officially discriminated against by certain institutions, and where membership of the group is considered so tainted and wicked that the media has regular denunciations of whiteness, and where numerous people avoid this taint by faking their ethnic origins.

There are other resemblances to the older empire. At the heart of Soviet thinking was the blank slate, the idea that life outcomes are determined entirely, or almost entirely, by social forces rather than genes. As Mao said of the peasantry, “a clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it”.

Likewise, American progressivism today is entirely built on the blank slate, and as in the USSR, where belief in Mendelian genetics led to internal exile, American social scientists offering any sort of genetic explanation for outcomes face ostracism. Privately, lots of people will agree, but they’ll lose their job if they speak out, or their publisher will drop them, or it will only embolden the party’s enemies and harm the noble goals of progressivism.

Communists saw their political beliefs as so all-encompassing that even science was political: if science contradicted the goals of communism, it wasn’t science. In today’s United States the slow death of liberalism has resulted in the blatant politicisation of science, to the extent that as in Russia, scientists teach things which are obviously untrue because it supports the prevailing ideology. Then there is the media, much of which parrots the party line with almost embarrassing, “Comrade Stalin has driven pig iron to record production” levels of conformity. Once again, if you want to hear the truth, go to the BBC (until the young people who run the website take over).

Suggested reading

Teach our kids about communism

By Daniel Kalder

America, once the most trusting of societies, is heading in the direction of Russia, one of the least trusting. Most disturbing of all is that, formerly the most demographically vibrant of western countries, today the United States has suffered a spectacular collapse in fertility. This is mostly down to stagnant wages among the middle class, who can no longer afford a family with one breadwinner, and a rapid decline of religious faith. But maybe people have also lost belief in themselves, and the ideals of their country.

The Soviet Union broke into 15 different pieces, and the transition was, as CNN might put it, mostly peaceful — although Gorbachev’s old dacha is now in Russia once again after some local unpleasantness.

Today it is the United States where people talk of secession, escaping a crumbling superpower ruled by geriatrics. This seems very unlikely to happen, more clickbait than reality, because why would you leave what has been for more than two centuries the richest, most impressive state on earth? But then a generation ago few would have foreseen the Soviet Union crumbling in a haze of alcoholic despair.

I use that quote from Pascal (Pensées, 229) because I am not setting out to assert positive truths nor to defend opinions. I see a situation which — as Pascal writes in his next sentence — “offers nothing but cause for doubt and anxiety”.

In asking me to give an opinion on the now celebrated “Letter of the Generals,” UnHerd‘s Will Lloyd rightly notes: “What seems most extraordinary about the furore that followed is that so few people questioned the premise of the letter — that France is on the point of collapse.”

This is indeed surprising. Why France? Why France rather than any other European country when the others seem to be in a more or less similar situation and sometimes worse off?

I might as well admit from the beginning that I have no solution to this mystery (even though I know France well and I am a Frenchman). I will try to avoid straying into confused notions of the “psychology of nations” kind; but it will be difficult.

From the point of view of Islamist terrorism, it is true that, for a time, France was especially targeted by Isis, the latter believing (not without reason) that France had attacked them by intervening in Syria and Iraq. But those days are behind us, and if one considers the last decades, we see that Great Britain, Spain, Belgium and, to a lesser extent, Germany have also suffered murderous terrorist attacks. What would be difficult, in fact, is to find a country in the world that has been spared Islamist violence.

Are crime and violence, whether or not linked to drugs, really wreaking more havoc in France than in other European countries? I have no idea, but it would surprise me a little; if this were the case, French journalists would not have failed to emphasise it.

More from this author

How France lost her dignity

By Michel Houellebecq

There is in France a vague and widespread ambiance of self-flagellation — something that hangs in the air like a gas. Anyone visiting France and watching television cannot help being struck by the obsession of its presenters, journalists, economists, sociologists and assorted specialists: they spend the greater part of their time on air comparing France to other European countries, invariably, with the goal of belittling France.

In general, it is sufficient to point to Germany; but sometimes Germany does not have such a good record so they refer to Scandinavia, the Netherlands and, more rarely, Britain. Whatever the subject may be, it is of course always possible to discover a country that is superior to us; but such an extreme delight in masochism is surprising.

This is just a detail. By far a more important subject, since it is not only a symptom of decline but decline itself — decline in its very essence — is of course demography. Recently, politicians and commentators were disturbed to learn that the “synthetic index of fertility” (that is, the number of children per woman) has fallen in France to 1.8.[1. The United States and Russia are both at 1.8; China is at 1.7.]

Such a figure would be a dream come true for the countries of Southern Europe: for Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece, where the rate is 1.3.[2. These figures from 2019 come from an informational bulletin, Population et sociétés, published by the Institut National d’Études Démographiques; their data come in turn from a report published by the UN’s population division. This bulletin also engages in projections of countries’ populations by 2050. They are probably banking on a certain percentage of immigration, which would explain the differences with what follows from fertility rates. As such, the population of the United States increases significantly (that of France as well, though much less), whereas that of Russia and China decrease slowly; in 2050, the most populated country in the world should be, by a wide margin, India.] It is worse still in Asia, in parts of the world that are as technologically advanced as they are far away but generally admired. The rate in Singapore and Taiwan is 1.2.

South Korea is only 1.1. This country risks losing a tenth of its population by 2050; if that continues it will only have one chance of survival: to annex North Korea, which is at 1.9. I’m joking, but only just.

Suggested reading

The death of the French intellectual

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

With a rate of 1.4, the Japanese are almost muddling through, which is surprising, since the most amusing news on declining birth-rates typically comes from Japan. These news items are so crazy that I hesitate to repeat them (but the improbable is sometimes true):

• Old men are apparently so numerous in Japan that they can no longer be housed, so they have to find a way of breaking the law to find lodgings in prison.
• The Japanese government is reported to have to broadcast pornographic videos in primetime on public television, in order to stimulate the sexual appetites of Japanese couples. After all, screwing does end up producing a few children.

In France, it is clear that we have not quite sunk to his level, at least not entirely. The truth is that French obsession with the idea of decline is far from new. Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserts somewhere (or is it Voltaire? I’m too lazy to check; these authors are tedious to read. Anyway, it is one of the two), that sooner or later — “the thing is certain”: we will be enslaved by the Chinese.

France sometimes reminds me of one of those hypochondriac old men who never stops complaining about their health; the kind who are constantly saying that this time they really do have one foot in the grave. People usually respond sarcastically: “You watch, he’ll end up burying all of us.”

Suggested reading

Macron, the failed Machiavelli

By John Lichfield

The United States of America seems, on the other hand, to have erected optimism into a principle of existence. One can doubt the soundness of this attitude. When Joe Biden claims that “America is once again ready to lead the world” (here again, I am too lazy to find the exact quotation; Biden is even more tedious than Voltaire), I immediately interpret this as:

• America will not be long in embarking on a new war;
• As always, she will wind up conducting herself like a piece of shit;
• She will waste a lot of money, while reinforcing up the near-universal loathing of which she is the target; this will allow China to strengthen its position.

No, we are not really dealing with a “French suicide” — to evoke the title of Eric Zemmour’s book — but a Western suicide or rather a suicide of modernity, since Asian countries are not spared. What is specifically, authentically French is the awareness of this suicide. But if we consent to set aside for a moment the particular case of France (and really it would be wise to do so), the conclusion becomes crystal clear: the inevitable consequence of what we call progress (at all levels, economic, political, scientific, technological) is self-destruction.

By refusing all forms of immigration, Asian countries have opted for a simple suicide, without complications or disturbances. The countries of Southern Europe are in the same situation, although one wonders if they have consciously chosen it. Migrants do land in Italy, in Spain and in Greece — but they only pass through, without helping to sort out the demographic balance, although the women of these countries are often highly desirable. No, the migrants are drawn irresistibly to the biggest and fattest cheeses, the countries of Northern Europe.

Suggested reading

Why we love to hate the French

By Ed West

I should mention in passing the Leftist/progressivist/humanist opinion: we are not dealing with a suicide but with a regeneration. Ethnic composition is, admittedly, being modified, but in the essentials everything else remains unchanged: our republic (or rather in Europe, mostly our monarchy) our culture, our values, our “Rule of Law,” all that stuff. I sometimes hear this opinion being defended (though more and more rarely).

The 45% of French people who believe, on the other hand, in impending civil war help to show (and it is almost sweet) that France remains a nation of braggarts.

It takes two to wage war. Are the French going to take up arms to defend their religion? They haven’t had any religion for quite some time; and in any case, their former religion is the sort where you offer your throat to the butcher’s blade.

Would it then be a war to defend their culture, their way of life, their system of values? What exactly are we talking about? And supposing it does exist, is it worth fighting for? Does our “civilisation” really still have something to be proud of?

Europe seems to me to be at a crossroads. Reading Pascal helps me a lot: but, like him, I see “nothing but cause for doubt and anxiety”.

Translated by Dr Louis Betty. 

© Michel Houellebecq c/o Agence Intertalent info@intertalent.fr

Israel-Palestine is a distinctive region because it combines low infant mortality and high female education with high birth rates. As Paul Morland has pointed out, Jews and Arabs in the region have much higher birth rates than their “co-ethnics” outside it. For instance, Arab women in Jordan bear 2.69 children, while those in Palestine have 3.49; Jewish women in Israel average 3.17 children each, compared to 1.5 in the US and Britain.

Why is this? One explanation seems to be that birth rates are higher in regions of religious conflict — a hypothesis that also seems to map on to areas inside Israel-Palestine. For example, Arab women in relatively conflict-prone Gaza average 3.64 kids compared to 3.07 in the more peaceful West Bank. Jewish women in tense, religious Jerusalem average 4.27 compared to a national average of 3.17.

What’s particularly concerning, though, is how these high fertility rates further increase the risk of violence, producing a dangerous, combustible spiral. How so?

First of all, political demographers have long identified a relationship between population composition, politics and violence. Young men, due in part to testosterone, commit a vastly disproportionate share of murders in all societies. Indeed, statistical models show that the higher the share of a nation’s population made up of 15-30 year olds, the greater the risk of a violent conflict.

In Sons and World Power, Gunnar Heinsohn analysed this trend throughout history, arguing that surplus males have always played an important part in spurring conquest and aggression. When only the eldest son inherited land, those with the bad luck to be his siblings had to fend for themselves. And so, he explained, during periods when population growth exceeded peaceful economic opportunities, war, banditry and risk-taking became more attractive.

Suggested reading

Incels could become the new Vikings

By Mary Harrington

That’s why the ranks of invaders, from the Vikings to Conquistadors, have disproportionately featured men such as Pedro de Alvarado, a younger son from a lesser-noble background who had no inheritance and thus decided, in 1510, to seek his fortune in the New World.

By contrast, as the population of the rich world ages, nations such as China, Russia and the United States will become increasingly unwilling to sacrifice their only sons on the battlefield, producing what Mark Haas has called “geriatric peace”. Indeed, Heinsohn argued that a major reason Lebanon did not descend into full-scale war in 2006, but did so in 1975, was age structure: by 2006, its fertility rate had plummeted and its average age had matured considerably compared to 1975.

Back in Israel, the issue of population has always commanded a central role in the nation’s psyche. First, Zionists worked hard to entice and sponsor European Jews to settle in the Holy Land, with the number of Jews swelling from 60,000 in 1918 to 600,000 in 1948. After the creation of Israel in 1948, waves of immigrants arrived, first from Displaced Persons camps in Europe, then from Morocco and, after 1989, from the former Soviet Union. Without immigration, as Paul Morland notes, there would be 250,000 Jews in Israel instead of 6 million.

Suggested reading

Why the Left gave up on Israel

By Ed West

And these ethno-demographic considerations are woven into national policy; they shaped Israel’s border wall and helped convince Ariel Sharon to withdraw from Gaza in 2005, which contains just 1% of the territory of Israel-Palestine but over one million Palestinians.

At one time, Israeli planners became concerned that Jews would be steadily outnumbered because of the Arabs’ fertility advantage — a prospect celebrated by Palestinian leaders. In the immortal words of the PLO’s Yasser Arafat, “the womb of the Arab woman is my strongest weapon”. For American political scientist Monica Toft, the two sides were engaged in “wombfare” for control of territory and power.

But while demographers once thought that Palestinian fertility would diverge from the Jewish fertility rate, Palestinian women have been affected by the worldwide slide in Arab birth rates of the past few decades. Meanwhile, Figure 1 (below) shows that while Jewish fertility was trending downward from the 1960s to the mid-1990s, it has since defied the supposedly iron laws of demography, going into reverse to the point that the Jewish fertility rate has now overtaken the falling Palestinian one.

Yet the rise in Jewish fertility has come at a price. Secular Jews and those from moderate branches have historically made up Israel’s elite, but are losing population share due to their relatively low fertility. Instead, the Jewish fertility rise is largely due to the growth in highly religious Jews, especially the Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox. The latter have doubled their share of the adult Jewish population in Israel since 2000, and are extremely young, forming a third of Jewish first-graders — up from a few percentage points in 1960. Though they currently only make up 10% of the American and British diaspora, they are expected to form a majority of observant American and British Jews by 2050.

Within Israel, this demographic shift is already starting to cause tensions. Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men generally avoid full-time jobs and the military, and are instead encouraged to study the Torah at Yeshivas to fulfil the ideal of a “scholar society”. The Israeli Central Bank, as a result, fears that their growth will ultimately bankrupt the Israeli state.

Modern Orthodox Jews are, by contrast, successful and serve enthusiastically in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). While the ultra-Orthodox are reluctant or pragmatic Zionists, the modern Orthodox are often passionately so, making up an increasing share of IDF officers and serving as shock troops of the Religious Zionist and Settler movements.

Suggested reading

Why Israel erupted

By Shany Mor

But while ultra-Orthodox Jews rear between 6 and 7 children, modern Orthodox women have 3 or 4 — higher than the secular Jews, who have 2.2. This dynamic is having a number of consequences. First, the relatively poor ultra-Orthodox population is spilling out from concentrated areas such as Meah Shearim, near Jerusalem. A relatively inexpensive option is to move across the Green Line into East Jerusalem or to the Settlements in the occupied territories.

There are political repercussions, too. With their increased vote-share, the Ultra-Orthodox have shifted Israel in a more Right-wing and religious direction, generating increased support for Haredi and pro-Settler parties. This, in turn, makes it more difficult for the Government to trade occupied land — and the settlements of religious Jews which now stand on it — for peace.

Meanwhile, the still-healthy Palestinian fertility rate has resulted in a young and fast-growing population in the West Bank, where the median age is 22, and Gaza, where it is just 18. Indeed, Gaza is the 13^th fastest growing political unit in the world, with a population density of over 5,000 people per square kilometre.

As Figure 2 (above) shows, this, together with Jewish fertility, has resulted in a soaring population in Israel-Palestine. While it is far too crude to describe the region as a ticking time bomb, it’s equally difficult to see how this population boom can continue without resulting in increased pressure on land, as well as producing a surplus of young men willing to join militant groups.

How will this all end? In the long run, it seems possible that the ultra-Orthodox could bankrupt Israel, while Palestine may have to send its excess population to work abroad if Arab countries in the Persian Gulf once again become willing to accept large numbers of Palestinians. The region’s demographic struggle for power is heating up — and, despite yesterday’s ceasefire, it doesn’t look like it will be brought to an end anytime soon.

When I started on this course, I was seldom challenged. I was asked to make a radio programme about the changing face of ethnic minority politics in 2011 and no one then thought to question my right to do so because of my colour.

For better or worse, this would be far less likely to happen today. I have just been appointed to an official body concerned with combating discrimination of many kinds, none of which I will ever experience myself. Some people complained that my background renders me incapable of doing the job properly.

I hope to prove those doubters wrong, but there is a serious point here. Personal experience is, of course, very important in shaping one’s views. To take a topical example, I notice that friends who have had a bad dose of Covid-19 tend to be more supportive of tough lockdown measures than friends who have not had it at all or only lightly.

Personal experience is a kind of knowledge. But it is also highly constrained and even misleading, that’s why accusing someone of being anecdotal is usually an insult in an argument. Your own experience is one part of the truth but usually quite a small one.

When we are talking about big abstract things, like society or the economy we would not get very far just basing things on our own direct experience. We need facts, reliable data, objective things which can give us a handle on the bigger picture. We may then select the data based on our own interests or worldview — indeed it is almost impossible not to — but at least we are making some effort to use the apparatus of objectivity: logic and evidence.

Our knowledge of the world is usually some sort of balance between personal experience and abstract ideas. And it is my contention,  perhaps not a very original one, that in recent years the balance has been tipping away from the realm of the objective towards personal experience.

Suggested reading

Racial categories are reactionary

By Ralph Leonard

To repeat, that is not always a bad thing. One of the reasons we want our institutions to be at least somewhat representative of our society is that we recognise the importance of different experiences of the world: female, gay, ethnic minority and so on. And making it easier for people, especially from previously unheard groups, to speak for themselves rather than be spoken for, is self-evidently a step forward.

I have just written a book called Head, Hand, Heart which argues, among other things, that those with a certain kind of academic/analytical intelligence have been too dominant in our institutions and that we need more space for other aptitudes, intelligences and experiences.

But the focus on the primacy of subjective experience, and the authority that it is thought to bestow, can also go too far. At its most extreme it might call into question much of art and literature. Can, for example, the female writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner write truthfully about the sex life of the male lead character in her novel Fleishman is in Trouble?

That may seem like a silly example, after all, if she couldn’t plausibly get inside a man’s head, no one would have bought her best-seller. Yet quite extreme subjectivism is on the march. Consider America’s current polarisation with pro and anti-Trump forces having not only different opinions but selecting different facts about the world to fit their experiences.

The identity politics Left also often prioritises experience over data. Indeed, identity politics is partly based on the authority of who it is that is saying something, rather than what they are saying. And this is not a fringe phenomenon: the BBC’s new guidelines on racist language ask the reporter to consider who is saying the words.

The other source of this new bias towards individual experience as the source of knowledge and authority is surely social media. The new forms of public communication have dispatched the old gate keepers of the elite media, and given everyone who wants it access to the public square. Now conspiracy theories seem to compete on almost equal terms with well-established facts in an information free for all.

Suggested reading

What we meritocracy critics get wrong

By David Goodhart

The personal experience bias of social media has also seeped back into more traditional forms of media. The stiff, but authoritative, news programmes of my youth have given way to news that is much more focused on emotion and human interest, something all too evident at the height of the pandemic.

And our schools are not immune either. I was recently invited to speak about the Black Lives Matter movement to the sixth form of a girls’ private school in north London. I made what I think of as the liberal case for scepticism about two big assumptions associated with BLM, first that little has changed for black people in the last 40 years and second that claiming all white people are privileged by their race is a helpful way to promote race equality.

I cited lots of facts about the advance of black people and other minorities in education and employment, including into elite professional jobs — minority Brits now have higher representation in the top social class than white ones. I pointed to the private school itself — about half-white, half-Asian — as evidence of Britain’s relative openness. This did not go down well.

Afterwards a group of girls came up to me and told me about their experiences of racism in everyday life. It is true that the kind of micro-aggressions they were talking about are hard to capture or quantify in objective data. And for them, their bad experiences swamped my statistics of success and they felt by giving priority to those aggregate facts I was showing insufficient respect to their individual plights.

For someone like me, with privilege and power, to be challenged on these issues is obviously perfectly healthy, and if it makes me feel uncomfortable well that’s my own little First World problem. But too much subjectivism is also contributing to a less mature political conversation. Just as cleaving too exclusively to “the data” can produce a sort of blindness about human emotion (remember the Remain campaign’s focus on a dry cost-benefit analysis?), so, allowing your own personal experience to loom too large leads to a sort of equal and opposite blinkeredness, maybe excusable in 17-year-old students.

By chance I had an appointment with my mixed-race physiotherapist the same day as my sixth form talk. It turns out he is involved with a small group called the Cultural Health Club who are trying to make their profession more diversity-friendly. I asked what the problem was, and he said that physiotherapy was very white and middle class. I replied that this is a majority white middle-class country so that is hardly a surprise. No, he said, but did I realise that only 3% of physios were black? I did not realise that, but did he realise that according to the census only just over 3% of the UK population is black (meaning of black Caribbean or black African heritage). No, he had not realised that.

Suggested reading

Facts vs feelings in the BLM debate

By David Goodhart

He took my point in his stride and asked me to send the relevant statistics. He lives in a majority-minority part of London where it is easy to assume that the black population of the country is much higher than it actually is. I use this example not to challenge or belittle his reality — he told me of a horrible experience of being rejected by a patient because of his race — but to suggest that in democratic argument subjective experience needs to be combined with some knowledge of the bigger picture.

That ought to include knowledge of the basic facts of UK demography and perhaps also of the huge range in minority outcomes and experiences and, indeed, of views. A recent YouGov poll found ethnic minority Brits split down the middle on whether race has had an impact on their ability to succeed.

So, we all see the world somewhat differently but there are also shared perceptions that apply to particular groups, though even they tend not to be homogeneous as we have just seen.

And the subjective individual experience of someone does not necessarily tell us much about the average experience of someone from that group. To take a trivial personal example, I’m unusually tall and that means that I experience the world somewhat differently from a man of average height. But the fact that I’m prone to knock my head on doorways doesn’t mean the country as a whole needs to adjust the height of the typical doorway.

(I do not imply by that example — as some critics suggested when I used it in a BBC Radio Four essay — that we should defund support for better disabled access!)

To try to understand the experiences of others, to walk in others’ shoes, is clearly desirable. And this applies especially to those whose experiences are untypical and a source of pain and suffering.

Some untypical experiences require public policy responses, others do not, obviously. We can leave those doorways that I have to stoop to get through where they are. Yet where does all this leave the wider argument?

Maybe one should not think of the subjective-objective as on a spectrum from personal truth to aggregate truth with the latter a higher form of truth than the former. Rather they exist on different planes, to some extent incommensurate. They both tell us different things about human experience and are both valuable in different contexts.

Meanwhile, the world is still coming to terms with the radical upending of our public information and communication systems. Elites have lost a lot of narrative control, to no one in particular. And the space for the objective stuff has been diminished, partly replaced by personal experience and emotion. That is not all bad but it seems to be making it harder to come to democratic compromises. And if a growing number of us come to believe that individual experience and perception is the primary truth then it just becomes your truth versus mine and we are all, like Fleishman, truly in trouble.

This is an edited version of an essay for BBC Radio 4’s  ‘A Point of View‘

Different cultures, colours, creeds, classes, languages and identities of every kind: all are included. Except for one group of people who find themselves increasingly excluded from the urban milieu: children.

Further reading

Can you afford parenthood?

By Peter Franklin

It’s a phenomenon explored by Derek Thompson in a must-read piece for The Atlantic:

“In high-density cities… no group is growing faster than rich college-educated whites without children, according to Census analysis by the economist Jed Kolko. By contrast, families with children older than 6 are in outright decline in these places. In the biggest picture, it turns out that America’s urban rebirth is missing a key element: births.”

Consider the statistics for New York:

“Since 2011, the number of babies born in New York has declined 9 percent in the five boroughs and 15 percent in Manhattan.”

Or Washington DC:

“…the overall population has grown more than 20 percent this century, but the number of children under the age of 18 has declined.”

Or the tech capital of the world:

“San Francisco has the lowest share of children of any of the largest 100 cities in the U.S.”

The great global cities are portrayed as places of youth and vibrancy. They certainly attract ambitious, highly educated twenty-somethings – which is why big companies base themselves there: so that they can take their pick of the brightest young minds. This is especially true of the tech sector.

In 2007, it was reported that Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, told a conference that “young people are just smarter.” Zuckerberg himself was only 24 at the time and well on the way to global domination – and thus could be excused for thinking such a thing (which, in any case, is correct in some respects).

He’s also reported as saying that “Young people just have simpler lives. We may not have a car. We may not have a family.” In a long-hours working culture, that’s something that adds to their employability – and another reason why top employers love big cities.

The heaving metropolis doesn’t just concentrate bright young things in one place, it also ensures that they can be worked without distraction. The sky-high property prices that put city-centre family homes beyond the reach of most young workers are a feature not a bug. They stop reproduction from getting in the way of productivity.

Further reading

The world's most successful* people get enough sleep

By Peter Franklin

Family life isn’t solely about having children of our own, of course. It’s also about continued participation in the families we were born into – and, beyond that, a wider circle of friends and neighbours. To take one’s place in a community, to learn from others so that responsibilities can be handed from one generation to the next, is (or was) part of becoming an adult – as much as getting a job or getting married.

The concentration of young talent in big cities severs these connections too; distance weakens established old family ties just as property prices discourage new ones.

But does this matter? There’s plenty of time in one’s thirties and forties to quit the city and do the whole family and community thing somewhere less frenetic. So why shouldn’t twenty-somethings – excuse me while I vomit – ‘work hard and play hard’?

It’s a neat idea, but collapsing birthrates around the world suggest that many people never make up for lost time. I wonder where the big employers hope to find the next generation of eager recruits if they’re not even being born? Immigration is only a stop-gap because western demographic trends are spreading to developing countries.

There are political consequences too. Derek Thompson describes America’s great divide:

“With its rich blue cities and red rural plains, the U.S. has an economy biased toward high-density areas but an electoral system biased toward low-density areas. The discrepancy has the trappings of a constitutional crisis.  The richest cities have become magnets for redundant masses of young rich liberals, making them electorally impotent.”

Any group of voters (e.g. college educated urban liberals) who concentrate themselves in a few locations are not only likely to lose elections – but also to be shocked when they do. After all, almost everyone they know thinks and votes the way they do – so, how does the ‘other side’ keep winning? It must be some kind of trick!

The sense of bewilderment is accentuated by one of resentment. If the cities are generating most of the money and thus ‘subsidising’ other parts of the country, then suburban and provincial voting preferences are perceived as ingratitude if not outright stupidity.

Of course, if you’re relying on other parts of the country to supply most of the people – it shouldn’t be so surprising if they perceive you as dependent on them.

Thompson sums it all up as a “division of labour”:

“America’s rich cities specialize in the young, rich, and childless; America’s suburbs specialize in parents.”

But while a division of labour may work in a factory – different workers specialising in only one part of the job – it can’t work in a country. Each component community, whether urban, suburban or rural, has to do the whole job of being a community, finding a place for people at every stage of life.

A truly flourishing community is an extended family, joining together the generations. The childless city, however, is something quite different: an extended workplace. For all its diversity, it is fundamentally incomplete.

Further reading

How WEIRD are you?

By Peter Franklin

As well as being monstrous, the argument isn’t even right in its own terms. Recent decades have demonstrated beyond doubt that achieving humanitarian aims with regard to the food supply, healthcare, education and economic security brings down the birth rate. Reduction in population growth follows development, not the other way round.

Suggested reading

Why the population bomb is not going to explode

By Fred Pearce

Globally, the human population – currently at the seven billion mark – is still growing. The UN predicts it will hit eleven billion by the end of the century. However, as Max Roser of Our World In Data explains here almost of all of that projected growth is accounted for by reduced mortality, not increased natality. Indeed, Roser shows how we’re getting close to ‘peak child’ i.e. a maximum in the number of babies being born each year. At that point, births will cease to contribute to global population growth, which will instead be entirely accounted for by people living longer (especially by surviving their vulnerable early years).

The fact that people from developing countries are getting the better of war, famine, pestilence and (premature) death cannot and should not be held against them.

If our numbers do reach 11 billion by 2100, it will therefore be for the right reasons. However, according to fascinating article by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson in the Guardian, things could turn out even better:

“Jørgen Randers, a Norwegian academic who decades ago warned of a potential global catastrophe caused by overpopulation, has changed his mind. ‘The world population will never reach nine billion people,’ he now believes. ‘It will peak at 8 billion in 2040, and then decline.’’

“Similarly, Prof Wolfgang Lutz and his fellow demographers at Vienna’s International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis predict the human population will stabilise by mid-century and then start to go down.

“A Deutsche Bank report has the planetary population peaking at 8.7 billion in 2055 and then declining to 8 billion by century’s end.”

It’s not that these forecasts are expecting more people to die, but, rather, fewer to be born. The UN disagrees, because they prefer to base their models on established trends:

“‘We imagine that countries that currently have higher levels of fertility and lower levels of life expectancy will make progress in the future in a similar manner, at a similar speed, to what was experienced by countries in the past,” John Wilmoth, director of the UN Population Division, says. ‘It’s all grounded in past experience.’”

That’s not unreasonable, but the dissenting experts point out that the development that led to falling birth rates in the past is increasingly taking place in a new and game-changing context:

“In 2007, for the first time in human history, the majority of people in the world lived in cities. Today, it’s 55%. In three decades, it will be two-thirds.

“A lot happens when people move from the countryside into the city. First, a child changes from being an asset – another pair of shoulders to work in the fields – to a burden – another mouth to feed.”

The impact of economic growth is therefore compounded by the impact of urbanisation.

As Bricker and Ibbitson point out, many of those moving to the rapidly expanding cities of the developing world still have strong links to the “immemorial, agricultural, subsistent and patriarchal” communities they came from. But with each generation those ties will get weaker – as they did with great rapidity in earlier waves of urbanisation elsewhere .

There are other forces accelerating the pace of cultural change – not least the spread of communication technologies. For instance, in Kenya, “over 75% of the population have mobile device subscriptions.”

A richer, more urban and faster-paced developing world leaves less need, space and time for large families. Indeed, it begins to look increasingly like the developed world where birth rates are generally below replacement level – often worryingly so.

Suggested reading

This demographic catastrophe will hit us all

By Peter Franklin

In fact, in the most populous non-western nations, the convergence has already happened:

“China, the world’s largest country, has a fertility rate of 1.5, lower than Britain’s. India, soon to overtake China as the world’s most populous nation, is at the replacement rate of 2.1 and falling. Brazil, the fifth most populous country, has a fertility rate of 1.8.”

Stable or declining population trends appear to be ‘baked in’ across most of the world. Africa, however, is the ‘swing continent’ – and what happens there over the coming decades will be the biggest influence on many more billions of us there are by 2100.

That said, westerners shouldn’t forget that the burden each of us place upon the planet should be weighted by consumption level – and that we’ve been consuming a lot more, for a lot longer, than anyone else.

Furthermore, it pulled-off this success story in the toughest of neighbourhoods. As well as sharing a peninsula with North Korea it has China to its west and Japan to its east. To the south, the sea is roiling with geopolitical tensions.

Suggested reading

Why the population bomb is not going to explode

By Fred Pearce

And yet the greatest danger facing South Korea comes from within. Quite simply, the country’s birth rate is catastrophically low.

It’s the subject of an article by Crystal Tai in the South China Morning Post:

“South Korea’s birth rate is also the lowest in the world, dropping to 0.95 at the end of last year – meaning that for every 100 women, just 95 children were born. To maintain a stable population, the birth rate needs to be 2.1. In the boom times of the early 70s, nearly 1 million South Korean babies were being born each year, but by 2017 that number had more than halved to 357,700.”

Birth rates of well below replacement level are now commonplace in the developed world. For instance, Italy’s is about 1.4. If such a rate is maintained over three generations then that means the second generation will be 70% of the size of the first, and the third generation half the size of the first. That’s quite the demographic slide, but consider what happens if the birth rate drops even lower to approximately 1. If that is maintained over three generations, then the second generation will be half the size of the first, and the third a mere quarter. In other words a fall in the fertility rate from 1.4 to 1, which South Korea shows is possible, doubles the rate at which new generations halve in size.

Think through the implications. Cast your mind forward 50 or 60 years and imagine what it would mean for schools, universities and the workforce. Yes, in some places, domestic and international migration could be a temporary compensating factor – but only at the expense of accelerating demographic decline in the regions and countries of origin. 

Suggested reading

The debate over immigration ignores half the issue

By Peter Franklin

What explains the fall in South Korean birth rates? Tai looks at the proximate causes:

“Yet despite this near-constant push to marry, an increasing number of South Koreans are forgoing weddings altogether. In fact, many don’t even date any more.

“A survey by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs published in early January found that as of 2012, the latest year for which figures are available, less than 40 per cent of 20- to 44-year-olds were actively dating. The proportion in traditional marriages is even lower.”

As for the deeper causes, Tai mentions the average $90,000 cost of getting married and South Korea’s long working hours:

“OECD data showed that in 2017, the average South Korean worked nearly 250 hours more than counterparts in the US, and 424 hours more than those in Germany.”

There’s also criticism of a patriarchal culture in which women are burdened with unfairly shared responsibilities at home and discriminated against in the workplace.

These factors may explain why South Korea has an especially low birth rate, but it’s worth remembering that birth rates are also falling in the most progressive, sexually egalitarian parts of the world – such as the Nordic countries. Even Finland, with its ‘baby box’ package of support for new parents and its impressive schools, has seen its birth rate hit record lows.

One of the most interesting countries to look at demographically is China. After decades of deliberately working to reduce its birth rate, most notoriously through the oppressive one child policy, the government has realised it may have overdone things. Since 2016, a two child policy has been in force, but the Chinese people are not rushing to take advantage of this new freedom. According to a report in the New York Times by Steven Lee Myers, Jin Wu and Claire Fu, there are fears that an already low fertility rate is heading lower:

“After a brief uptick that year, the birth rate fell again in 2017, with 17.2 million babies born compared to 17.9 in 2016. Although the number of families having a second child rose, the overall number of births continued to drop.

“According to preliminary official figures cited by The Global Times, a party-run newspaper, the total number of births for 2018 could fall to as low as 15 million. Some cities and provinces have reported declines in local birth rates of as much as 35 percent.”

Some experts believe that the official fertility rate of 1.6 does not reflect reality:

“Yi Fuxian, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written that China’s government has obscured the actual fertility rate to disguise the disastrous ramifications of the ‘one child’ policy. According to his calculations, the fertility rate averaged 1.18 between 2010 and 2018.”

If this is correct, then it’s world-changing stuff.

We talk about the ‘greying’ of populations due to increasing longevity, but the biggest story is not one of improved retention, but a collapse in recruitment. The fact that birth rates are lowest in the east Asian economies that have low levels of compensatory immigration, but which are also relied upon as the drivers of global economic growth, has implications for everyone.

Suggested reading

Will China's demography be its downfall?

By Isabel Hilton

“The most common year of birth for the baby-boomer generation is 1947. Since their most common lifespan is around 87 years, Peak Death could occur in 2034, when Britain will see around 15% more fatalities than in 2018. “

Because there’s so many of them, Baby Boomers set all sorts of records simply by existing and getting older – everything from ‘Peak Conception’ and ‘Peak Birth’ all the way through to ‘Peak Retirement’ and ‘Peak Funeral’. Now that they’re reaching the latter stages of life’s journey, they’ll be leaving a pretty big gap behind them – not least in the nation’s housing stock.

Suggested Reading

What's bugging the Millennials?

By Peter Franklin

If it isn’t too indelicate to say so, might this not present an opportunity for excluded Millennials to get onto (or move up) the housing ladder?

“The thinking goes that, within a decade or two, baby-boomers—the bumper generation born between roughly the early 1940s and early 1960s—will begin to sell up, as they first start to downsize, then move into elderly people’s accommodation and, eventually, to the great old-folks’ home in the sky. As their properties are put on the market, supply will rise, depressing prices and bringing ownership within reach for more people.”

However, there are reasons why the Millennial housing dividend may never materialise.

At the very least, it looks likely to be delayed. As the anonymous author of The Economist article notes, British retirees are reluctant to downsize – an aversion ascribed to a shortage of “good retirement housing”. That’s putting it mildly. We should be designing visionary retirement communities designed to keep older residents independent, active and connected. Instead, we throw up soulless blocks along busy main roads,  with the excuse that the elderly are too deaf to be bothered by the noise. Would you swap a much loved family home for that? The planning wars should have taught us that people don’t want poorly designed, badly integrated housing built at all – let alone for themselves to move into.

Suggested Reading

The horror of renting from one of London's rogue landlords

By Charlotte Pickles

Of course, being mortal, the Baby Boomers can’t stay in their homes forever (not unless they turn them into mausoleums). So even if the Millennial housing dividend is delayed, it has to materialise at some point, doesn’t it?

Again, don’t count on it. By the Peak Death year of 2037, today’s twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings, will be in their forties and fifties – quite possibly too old to get a conventional mortgage, if they’re first time buyers. Furthermore, while the passing of the Baby Boomers may increase supply to the housing market, we shouldn’t bet on reduced demand. In a globalised economy the British property market is an attractive destination for surplus capital.

Also, the Baby Boomers won’t just be vacating their property upon departure, but bequeathing it to their inheritors. Those who call for this cascade of wealth to be confiscated can forget it. Inheritance taxes are deeply unpopular with voters, being seen as cruel and unfair – especially when applied to family homes. And I dare say that many of the minority currently in favour will reconsider as soon as they find themselves in line to benefit.

The real challenge is to stop the capital flows of ‘Peak Inheritance’ from finding their way back into the housing market – and especially not into buy-to-let investments. 

Suggested Reading

Could a Land Value Tax tame unscrupulous landowners?

By Liam Halligan

To extend the opportunity of home ownership to ‘generation rent’, we must act now not in 2037. We need community land trusts for those disadvantaged by, or excluded from, the conventional housing and mortgage markets; and we need land value taxation and other measures to keep speculators, both domestic and international, out of housing.

Whether or not one blames Baby Boomers for the housing crisis, waiting for them to move to another plane of existence is not the solution.

And then there’s what could be the most important difference of all: populists, at least those of the nationalist, culturally conservative variety, usually do better among older voters than younger.

Further reading

A culture war the Founding Fathers couldn't foresee

By Henry Olsen

Why that should be is a question considered by Edoardo Campanella for Project Syndicate. He blames “insecurity” – mainly of the economic kind:

“Most likely, a growing sense of insecurity is pushing the elderly into the populists’ arms. Leaving aside country-specific peculiarities, nationalist parties all promise to stem global forces that will affect older people disproportionately.

“For example, immigration tends to instill more fear in older voters, because they are usually more attached to traditional values and self-contained communities. Likewise, globalization and technological progress often disrupt traditional or legacy industries, where older workers are more likely to be employed. The rise of the digital economy, dominated by people in their twenties and thirties, is also pushing older workers to the margins.”

That sounds plausible, but economic insecurity is hardly exclusive to older people. Typically, youth unemployment runs at a higher rate than general unemployment. Then there’s the student debt that the young stagger under – and the unaffordability of home ownership.

On these grounds, it should be the young registering protest votes – not the old. And in many countries they’re doing just that – but typically through populist movements of the Left such as Podemos in Spain, the Corbynite wing of the Labour Party in the UK, and the Bernie Sanders tendency in America.

Perhaps, instead of looking to economic insecurity for the main explanation, we should look to cultural insecurity. The young have less reason to feel culturally insecure – they’re still at an age when everything is new and therefore fears about the loss of familiarity don’t apply. It also helps when culture – and especially popular culture – revolves around your own age group.

Ironically, the post-war idolisation of youth – and devalorisation of age – began with what is now the older generation. The age group that was the first to be widely referred to as ‘teenagers’ are also the first to be referred to as ‘gammons’ – a nasty little slur designed to invalidate political opinions solely on the basis of the age of those holding them.

Further reading

The tragedy of the ‘gammons’

By Peter Franklin

Remarkably, the fact that older voters have fewer years left to them than younger voters is offered as a serious argument as to why their votes should count for less – especially on future-facing issues such as Brexit. The idea that many decades of lived experience might give one a valuable perspective on the overall direction of a society is less fashionable.

One of the most poignant graphs I’ve ever seen is part of a series of six that show who Americans spend their time with at different stages of life. The first one is for friends – who we spend the most time with in our teens and then less-and-less as we get older, get jobs, get married, etc. Another chart is for parents and siblings, which naturally peaks in the childhood years before dropping away. Equally to be expected is the chart for time spent with one’s own children, which peaks among thirty-somethings. The chart for co-workers is a long plateau, stretching across one’s working-age years all way until retirement when it suddenly drops away. The heartbreaking final chart is for time spent alone – which is fairly flat until middle age, after which it climbs and climbs and climbs.

The baby-boomers were instrumental in creating a culture based on the values of liberal individualism. They’re now discovering how that ends.

Further reading

The trouble with tackling loneliness

By Giles Fraser

Those of us in younger age groups have a choice: we can either interpret the way our elders vote as sour grapes or as a warning.

Further reading

If you want people to make more babies, build more houses

By Peter Franklin

In a briefing for the Zillow Research blog, Jeff Tucker presents further evidence.

He starts with the (American) context:

“The U.S. baby bust started at the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, when the total fertility rate began falling. It dropped from a high of 2.12 per woman in 2007 to 1.93 by 2010.

“Most observers expected that fertility would rebound as the economy recovered, but instead the fertility rate has continued falling. In 2016, the most recent year with detailed birth records, the total fertility rate was down to 1.82, and preliminary data show it dropped to 1.76 in 2017.”

Might this have anything to do with house prices? Tucker takes a look at the data:

“If rising home values contributed to fewer babies being born, we would expect to see that birth rates fell more in places where home values rose more. Birth records from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics show that this is, in fact, what happened: There was a strong negative relationship between home value growth and birth rate change across large counties in the U.S. for 25- to 29-year-old women, from 2010 to 2016”

25-to-29-year-olds, by the way, are the age group “most likely to consider having a baby but not already own a home”. Anyway, here’s the key finding:

“On average, if a county’s home value increase was 10 percentage points higher than another county’s, its fertility rate fell 1.5 percentage points further…

“Counties with the largest home value increases had exceptionally large drops in fertility”

That would appear to be pretty conclusive, but there are some complications. For one thing, the average figures conceal a great deal of regional variation. The link between rising house prices and falling birthrates is much stronger in some parts of the country (especially “urban counties in the West and North East”) than others (especially the South and South West).

In the American Sun Belt, property is generally more affordable than in the big coastal cities – and a price rise from a lower base is going to be less of a hurdle than one from a higher base. Indeed, in a ‘cheap’ property market, appreciating house values may help create a sense of confidence that an area is ‘up-and-coming’ – always nice to know when if you’re planning to raise your kids there. However, in a property hotspot, further price rises may look like a crash waiting to happen. The last thing new parents need is to buy at the top of an overheating market.

For all of these reasons, we shouldn’t expect property price rises, even if uniform in percentage terms, to have the same impact on birthrates in different parts of the country.

Tucker also points out that whether the link between increasing house prices and decreasing birthrates is strong or not, we cannot assume the causal direction:

“One alternative explanation could be the possibility that there is clustering into certain counties of people with careers that pay well enough for expensive homes but make it difficult to have children before 30.”

Further reading

To close the gender pay-gap we need a family-friendly work culture

By Peter Franklin

This may well be part of the explanation – and, in the long-term, it might not make too big difference to population dynamics if childbirth is merely being delayed. However, the author notes that the latest figures show birthrates down for women in their thirties too.

That might reflect the fact that, as in the UK, American 30-somethings are less likely to be home owners than previous cohorts. (The average age of the American first-time buyer now stands at 35.2, which is up from the 2010 to 2013 figure of 32.5.)

Clearly, more evidence is needed to understand the precise balance of causal factors. But one thing is for sure: things won’t end well for a society that can’t afford the space nor the time for children.

Further reading

Is capitalism ‘productive’ or a city ‘diverse’ if they don’t leave room for children?

By Peter Franklin

It is the same promise of opportunity that explains the new wave of immigration which, from 1965, has come predominantly from Latin America and Asia. And it is throwing up the same questions, challenges and tensions that Americans grappled with in the later 1800s and early 1900s.

The numbers speak for themselves, over 56 million Americans, nearly 18% of the total population, already claim Hispanic heritage,[1. Unless noted otherwise, the data about Hispanics, their heritage, and their socio-demographic characteristics, are taken from https://www.pewhispanic.org/2017/09/18/facts-on-u-s-latinos-current-data/.] and by 2045 it is projected to reach nearly 25%, or over 80 million people. In fact, driven by the huge rise in the Hispanic population, it is predicted that by 2045 America will no longer even be a majority White country.[2. William Frey, ‘The US will become “minority white” in 2045, census projects’, Brookings, 14 March 2018]

Understanding this seismic demographic shift is, therefore, crucial to grasping some of the current and future challenges facing the US. Here are six facts that help explain the potentially profound social and political change ahead.

1. Most Hispanics are from Mexico

Fully 63% of Hispanic-Americans came from one country: Mexico. No other country comes even close to this total. Puerto Ricans, the second largest group of Hispanic-Americans, comprise less than 10% of the total, while the third-and-fourth-largest groups, El Salvadorans and Cubans, are a mere 4% each.[2. Migration from Mexico is down following the Great Recession, but as so many Mexican-Americans are already citizens they will comprise the vast majority of Hispanic-Americans for the foreseeable future.]

2. Most Hispanics are legal immigrants, but most foreign-born Hispanics are undocumented

While Trump’s focus on building a border wall with Mexico might suggest otherwise, around three quarters of Hispanic-Americans are living legally in America, either because they are native-born US citizens or are legal immigrants. Nevertheless, nearly 8.5 million Hispanics living in America, and around 5.5 million Mexicans, are in the US illegally,[3. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/25/as-mexican-share-declined-u-s-unauthorized-immigrant-population-fell-in-2015-below-recession-level/] and two-thirds of foreign-born Hispanics are undocumented.[3. Author’s own calculation based on data from the Pew Hispanic Center. According to Pew, about 8.4 million of America’s 11 million undocumented or illegal immigrants are of Hispanic descent. A Pew analysis of the Census Bureau’s 2015 American Community Survey finds there are 12. 6 million foreign-born, non-citizen Hispanics living in the United States. See Table 3 in https://www.pewhispanic.org/2017/09/18/facts-on-u-s-latinos-current-data/. Thus, roughly two-thirds of foreign-born Hispanics are not legally in the country.] This simple fact is one reason why immigration is such a potent issue in America – and why President Trump’s call for the wall resonated so widely.

3. Hispanics are overwhelmingly in working-class jobs

Hispanics in America are overwhelmingly in the labour force and occupy traditionally working-class jobs. That’s not a surprise considering their relatively low educational attainment. Nearly half of American-born Hispanics, and nearly three-quarters of those born elsewhere, have no more than a high school diploma. In fact, nearly a third of foreign-born Hispanics dropped out of education before even reaching high school.

Foreign-born Hispanics are particularly concentrated in jobs requiring physical labour. About half are employed on building grounds and in maintenance, construction, factories, or transportation. Another tenth are employed in food services. Given the high proportion of undocumented foreign-born Hispanics, that means millions of largely low-skilled jobs are held by illegal immigrants.[4. According to American law, the roughly two-thirds of foreign-born Hispanics not legally in the country should not be employed. According to Pew, roughly 14 million foreign-born Hispanics had been employed in America between 2011 and 2015. See Table 23 in https://www.pewhispanic.org/2017/09/18/facts-on-u-s-latinos-current-data/. Applying the two-thirds figure to this 14 million figure, we find that nearly nine million Hispanics not legally able to work in America nevertheless did so during that five year period. Even accounting for people who come and go from the country, it is clear that in any given year millions of jobs in America are held by Hispanics not legally authorised to hold them.] Coinciding with rapid job decline in the manufacturing industries that traditionally employed White working-class Americans, these data help explain why anger over illegal immigration is especially concentrated among this group.

4. Hispanic-Americans are disproportionately poor

The median household income for Hispanics born in the US is about $46,000 a year, well below the equivalent $61,000 for Whites. Over one-fifth of Hispanics, and over 30% of Hispanics under 18 years old, live in poverty. This increased likelihood of poverty and low income makes Hispanics much likelier to receive means-tested government benefits than their White or Asian counterparts. Over one-fifth of Hispanics receive food stamps and nearly 40% rely on one of the many publicly-financed programs for their health insurance.[5. A further 20% do not have health insurance at all. This masks a vast difference between US-born Hispanics, whose rate of non-coverage is only slightly higher than that of Whites, and foreign-born Hispanics, 36 percent of whom have no health insurance. See Table 37 in https://www.pewhispanic.org/2017/09/18/facts-on-u-s-latinos-current-data/. This likely arises because people in the country illegally do not qualify for most government-sponsored benefits, and as noted before about two-thirds of foreign-born Hispanics are in the country illegally.]

5. Hispanic-Americans are concentrated in a small number of large states

Hispanics are concentrated in the American West and Southwest, especially in those states bordering Mexico. Hispanics comprise nearly half of New Mexico’s population, nearly 40% of California’s and Texas’, and about 30% of Arizona’s and Nevada’s. Most Hispanics in these states are of Mexican origin. Other states with high Hispanic populations, such as Florida (25%), New York (19%), and New Jersey (19%) tend to draw their Hispanic populations from Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, or Central and South America. All told, about 40 million of America’s 56 million Hispanic residents live in one of these eight states.

6. Hispanics tend to favour big government and vote Democrat

Hispanics are supportive of a much more energetic role for government than are Whites. A 2013 survey found that by a nearly 2-1 margin, Hispanics backed higher taxes and more government spending over lower taxes as a means to encourage economic growth. The same survey also found that Hispanics strongly supported government action to reduce income inequality (72%) and to guarantee all Americans had health insurance (58%). While Hispanics do oppose abortion (52%), they prioritise other domestic issues such as education and the economy over this. Since the Republican Party remains at least rhetorically committed to reducing spending, cutting taxes, and limiting government’s role in addressing social problems, these attitudes partly explain why Hispanics are generally supportive of Democrats.

Whether measured in terms of partisan identification or by actual voting behaviour, most Hispanics prefer and vote for the Democratic Party.[6. There is a debate over just how strong the Democratic Party advantage is among Hispanics. The official 2016 exit poll found that Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump among Hispanics by a 66-28 margin while Latino Decisions’ election day poll found Clinton won by a 79-18 margin. See https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results/exit-polls and https://www.latinodecisions.com/files/8614/7866/3919/National_2016__Xtabs.pdf. The true answer is probably in between the two, as each pollster’s methodology has its flaws. But the overarching finding, that Hispanics are overwhelmingly Democratic, is undisputed.] This preference has already moved the once-Republican states of Colorado and Nevada into the Democratic column, and placed the former swing state of New Mexico out of the Republicans’ reach. One respected analysis estimates that the Hispanic share of eligible voters will rise from today’s 12% to 18% by 2036.

Cultural and political challenges await

Predicting the future is a fool’s game, but there are nevertheless some clear implications for American culture and politics that no degree of choice or chance can prevent.

Hispanic and Asian immigration have already made White Christians a minority. This, along with the concurrent rise in atheism, agnosticism, and other forms of non-Christian belief, is one reason the status of Christian beliefs and institutions play such a large role in American politics. In the 1980s, the religious right called itself the ‘Moral Majority’ and sought to rally the majority of White Christians behind an agenda designed to reinstitute traditional Christian beliefs.

Today, White Christian activists know they no longer constitute a majority, but fear the fallout from becoming a clear minority. Managing this change peacefully and in such a way that both the new majority and White Christians have a respected place in American life and politics is one of the greatest challenges America will face.

Hispanics, most notably Mexicans, will clearly have significantly more political power in the next two decades. In the past, American immigrant groups have brought their culture and experiences from the country of their origin to bear on their political engagement. We can, therefore, expect America to take a growing interest in Mexican affairs, which will likely mean a decline in interest in other regions of the globe. Combined with the rise in Asian political power, this could lead to a re-evaluation of the importance that traditional ties with European countries should play in American global policy.

Suggested Reading

The elites missed populism's rise (but shouldn't have done)

By Henry Olsen

Hispanic preferences for a more active and extensive government will also create political conflict with economically dominant Whites. Even though Hispanic income is likely to rise as the children of immigrants attain higher levels of education, and hence obtain higher paying jobs, Hispanics will continue to be disproportionately lower-income for the foreseeable future.

But while the increase in their economic power may be slow to take off, their political power is rising much more quickly, and with it, that of the White population will decline. It should not be a surprise if the result is heightened political struggle between a political coalition influenced by Hispanic desires for increased taxes to fund more social services and one heavily comprised of Whites who will pay those taxes. The ethnic and racial dimensions of this conflict could give rise to greater racial and ethnic tension within America.

These tensions could be exacerbated by another phenomenon: White ageing. The median age of Whites continues to increase as the largely White Baby Boomer generation ages and fertility rates for younger adults decline. Since America pays for its state pensions through a tax on wages, Hispanics will be paying the taxes to support a largely White retired community.

Retirees would clearly exert their political power to continue these benefits, which in turn will could lead to large numbers of working-class Hispanics either pushing for cuts to pension benefits, increasing taxes on higher earners, or taxing unearned income (which accrues to Whites in much higher proportions) to support pensions.[7. Jared Bernstein and Henry Olsen, ‘Two perspectives on demographic change and the future of the workforce’, AEI, February 2016] Adding racial and ethnic dimensions to the pressing political issue of social security increases the likelihood that American society will be more, not less, divided in the future.

Conclusion: Demography need not be destiny

Social and political conflict that arises from demographic change is not, however, a new occurrence in American history. In prior eras of mass immigration, American leaders insisted that immigrants abide by majority norms in terms of democratic values and the role of the state, even as they fought intensely over social norms such as the role of Catholic schools, language, and alcohol consumption. At one point, the native-born Protestant majority even used its political power to outlaw alcohol consumption (1919) and virtually end immigration (1925). But an affinity on the part of both the native and the foreign-born with American ideals kept these conflicts from disrupting essential American unity.

These previous generations did this by limiting the scope of their political claims and by emphasising each sides’ loyalty to republican self-government. And native-born Americans, largely White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs, to Americans), did not argue that immigrants already in America be deported to their country of origin. Nor did they try to prevent them from voting, holding political office, or practising the bulk of customs they brought over from ‘the old country’.

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Trump won because he cared – lessons from Levittown

By Henry Olsen

It is true that WASPs often practised widespread social discrimination against newcomers, including, for example, refusing to hire immigrants or denying them admission to universities or private clubs. But they did not seek to prevent immigrants from becoming full legal citizens, or from using that political power to enact laws more favourable to the immigrant population’s views.

Immigrant populations, in turn, largely respected these boundaries. Catholics, in particular, emphasised that they supported the idea of religious freedom no matter what pronouncements came from the Vatican. Catholic politicians always maintained that their first loyalty was to the US, and that they would faithfully execute American laws no matter what the Pope or the Church said. And in the face of discrimination, immigrants built their own institutions – universities, social groups, and clubs – to rival those to which their access was restricted or denied. Any loyalties to the home country were subsumed under their loyalty to America.

Similar prudence and shared commitment will be necessary in the coming decades to manage the growth of the Hispanic-American population. Should such shrewd social and political leadership be forthcoming, these new Americans should energise and enrich America economically and culturally just as prior immigrant waves did. Should such statesmanship be lacking, however, America is at risk of following in the footsteps of countless nation-states that fail because racially and ethnically derived identities trump, and ultimately destroy, the national identity that allows people of different backgrounds to live together in harmony.

Leaving aside very small countries such as Monaco and Luxembourg, what is the most densely populated nation in Europe?

The conventional answer is the Netherlands with 505 people per square kilometre, followed by England on 426.

And yet according to Alasdair Rae, the true answer is Spain. Rae may be a professor of urban studies and planning at Sheffield University, but how can he possibly be right? Spain’s population is smaller than England’s, while it’s geographical area is almost four times bigger. That surely settles the matter.

Or does it? Rae’s insight is that the Spanish population isn’t spread out over Spain, but rather a small part of it. This is how he puts his case in a thought provoking piece for the Conversation:

“A good way to understand this measure is to look at Spain. It has a population density of 93 people per km², giving the impression of a sparsely populated country. This is borne out in the map, where much of Spain appears to be empty; much more so than any other large European country.

“…Yet characterising Spain as a sparsely populated country does not reflect the experience on the ground – as anyone who knows Barcelona or Madrid can tell you.

“Spain contains within it more than 505,000 1km squares. But only 13% of them are lived in.”

By recalculating population density in each country using only the land area where people actually live he produces a measure of what he calls “lived density”.

By this yardstick, Spain’s population density leaps from 93 people per square kilometre to 737 – way above the equivalent for England and the Netherlands. From a human point of view, Spain is a densely populated country that happens to have a lot of empty countryside attached to it. Another good example is Iceland – which has a conventional population density of just 3 people per square kilometre, but a more convivial 187 when it comes to lived density.

All of this is an object lesson in the way the statistics can be demonstrably ‘true’ and yet completely misleading as to how people actually experience their lives. The political consequences of this phenomenon are explored in ‘Blindsided’ – a special series for UnHerd from our Flyover Country editor Henry Olsen.

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There’s a further point worth unpacking from Professor Rae’s detailed analysis of population density.

It’s often argued that because just 11% of England is built on, there’s plenty of room to build new houses while leaving most of the English countryside untouched. This is true (even if it does ignore the fact that the urbanising impact of development extents beyond its immediate ‘footprint’). However, it distracts from the fact that we could, if we were willing to do the redevelopment, pack a lot more living space within our cities – especially the global ones – which, crucially, is where the highest demand is:

“Spain has the most densely populated km² in Europe; more than 53,000 people inhabit a single 1km² area in Barcelona. France also has an area with more than 50,000 people in a single km², in Paris.

“There are 33 1km² areas across Europe with a population of 40,000 or more: 23 are in Spain, and ten are in France. England’s most densely populated km², in West London, has just over 20,000 people in it. “

As I’ve argued before, cities like London could densify – and furthermore do it sympathetically, even beautifully.

Traditional architecture and street patterns are not only compatible with density, they’re a time-tested way of sustaining it over decades and centuries.

If we want to push up ‘lived density’ then we must make density liveable.

However, that doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t question widely agreed assumptions – especially when they provide a foundation for government policy. It’s worth checking just how broad a basis of evidence the whole edifice rests upon.

Via Medium, there’s a great example from Ian Mulheirn, who scrutinises the widely accepted narrative for why we’re not building enough new houses. His focus is on the UK – England in particular – where he says that estimates for the number of new houses needed each year depend on projections of average household size.

Mulheirn explains why these projections are so important:

“The origins of the UK’s mythical housing shortage lie in the methodology used to forecast household formation. Only at census time do we really know how many households there are in England, and in between censuses we have to rely on forecasts based on past trends in the size of households of different types, combined with population estimates. The household size projection is the crucial element: the smaller the average household, the more homes are needed for any given population.”

Unfortunately, the UK Government keeps getting these projections wrong – assuming a continued decline in household size that has long since halted:

“During the last third of the 20th century, household size shrank rapidly. DCLG implicitly assumes that this trend is set to continue, basing their projections on census data starting in 1971.”

But the evidence we have suggests that English households — in keeping with most other developed OECD countries — stopped shrinking around the start of this century.

The UK Government does not deny that this has happened. It’s in the 2011 census data, so they could hardly do otherwise. However, according to Mulheirn, the Government is projecting a resumption of the downward trend.

Might this be a reasonable assumption? Could it be that the upward spiral in house prices has had an inhibitory – but temporary – effect on the formation of new households? Perhaps, but as Mulheirn points out, the halt in the trend towards smaller households goes far beyond the UK and its peculiarly overheated housing market.

In any case, one can hardly expect the decline in household sizes to go on for ever. There are natural limits – like the proportion of couples who actually want to split up or the average age at which young people want to leave the family home.

I’ve met some of the government analysts responsible for these projections. They are perceptive and conscientious professionals and I’d be surprised if they hadn’t recommended reforms to the methodology.

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The problem, however, is that the current approach, though statistically flawed, is politically convenient. After all, the argument that we need to match the number of new houses to the number of new families is seemingly unanswerable. Of course, what the politicians really want to do is restrain house prices – but that’s not something they’d dare say to the millions of voters who already own their homes.

Another reason why the politicians don’t want to get into a discussion about house prices, is that they reveal where housing is in greatest demand – i.e. usually where the most dynamic local economies are. It would make sense to allow as many people as possible to move to where they can use their talents most productively and hence earn the most money, but that would require the Government to ease key restrictions on new development – another politically contentious issue. It might even require the Government to have an explicit spatial policy – i.e. a geographically-literate economic policy.

Whether in Britain, America or elsewhere in the western world, housing markets are deeply dysfunctional. But there is one way in which they work exactly as markets ought to: through the price mechanism they provide a remarkably rich and detailed source of data about exactly where new housing capacity is most needed.

This is about as close to the economic concept of perfect information as we’re likely to get; unfortunately our politicians seem determined to ignore it.

Another way is to look at parts of the world where marriage itself takes a radically different form (different, that is, from western marriage traditions). The most obvious non-western form of marriage is polygamy, which as the Economist reports, is much more widespread than we might assume:

“Because polygamy is illegal in most rich countries, many Westerners underestimate how common it is. More than a third of women in West Africa are married to a man who has more than one wife. Plural marriages are plentiful in the Arab world, and fairly common in South-East Asia and a few parts of the Caribbean.”

What effect does polygamous have on the societies that practice it? The article paints a pretty grim picture:

“A study of 240,000 children in 29 African countries found that, after controlling for other factors, those in polygamous families were more likely to die young. A study among the Dogon of Mali found that a child in a polygynous family was seven to 11 times more likely to die early than a child in a monogamous one.”

Then there is the destabilising effect on society as a whole, which comes down to basic mathematics:

“…every time a rich man takes an extra wife, another poor man must remain single. If the richest and most powerful 10% of men have, say, four wives each, the bottom 30% of men cannot marry. Young men will take desperate measures to avoid this state.

“This is one of the reasons why the Arab Spring erupted, why the jihadists of Boko Haram and Islamic State were able to conquer swathes of Nigeria, Iraq and Syria, and why the polygamous parts of Indonesia and Haiti are so turbulent… The taking of multiple wives is a feature of life in all of the 20 most unstable countries on the Fragile States Index compiled by the Fund for Peace, an NGO…”

Of what relevance is any of this to countries where polygamy is not legal? While various campaigns to legalise same sex marriage have met with notable success, the idea that marriage is between two people has yet to come under serious pressure. Some campaigners have called for the legal recognition of polyamorous relationships, which they see as ‘liberated’ and radically egalitarian. However, it’s difficult to see how any move in that direction wouldn’t also cover non-western, highly patriarchal forms of polygamy.

And yet there are ways in which we could be creating some of the problems of polygamy without legalising it. Open border policies that welcome migrants on the condition that they make hazardous journeys over land and sea skews immigration to those most willing and able to undertake such an ordeal – i.e. young men. For instance, Sweden has seen dramatic shifts in its gender ratio as a result. The effect has been exaggerated in certain age groups by some migrants falsely claiming to be younger than they actually are; but whatever the true age profile, the recent wave of asylum seeking migrants to Europe has been overwhelmingly male.

Another way that countries can skew the gender ratio is sex-selective abortion. Examples include China (where there were 33 million more men than women in 2014) and India (37 million more men than women in 2011). The resulting imbalances are especially extreme among young adults – as a result of older (and richer) men marrying younger women, leaving even fewer potential partners for younger, poorer men. This cannot end well – either on a personal or a political level.

Monogamy is the foundation of a stable society, as is a balanced gender ratio. We undermine either at our peril.