The Myth of America's Decline by Josef Joffe

Author:Josef Joffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2013-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

4. Demography as Destiny. Predicting the fate of nations is as reliable a business as foretelling earthquakes and tsunamis. But there is a fourth fault line that is widening no matter how the economy fares or the Party maneuvers. Its name is “demography.” Demography is about long-term forces unfolding over decades, not about blips or cycles. These forces are largely autonomous, hence removed from the grasp of the state. The Chinese regime might well decide to drop the one-child policy, but liberalization will take generations to bear fruit, so to speak. Cultural change is even harder to reverse, as Europe’s desperate attempts to raise fertility rates suggest. Once women are educated and working, procreation is trumped by prosperity, independence, and career. Lavish family allowances and day care boost fertility only at the margin, if at all.

Dropping birthrates are the price of modernization; that is the gist of a very long story. The West has been paying it since the dawn of the twentieth century; it has risen steeply since World War II. Today, only the United States and Iceland come close to the steady-state rate of 2.1 children per woman of childbearing age. Even an authoritarian regime like China’s will not be able to lift the curse of modernity. So demography is destiny. China’s population dynamics, as the next chapter tries to show, will flummox the prophets who foresee the unstoppable rise of the Chinese behemoth.

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