Demography and History

The Pros and Cons of Predicting the Future

Last week, I got lunch with a really smart guy here in Oxford. We were talking about whether Donald Trump’s jackbooted approach to foreign policy might alienate American allies, to the point that they’d look East for support rather than West.

China’s the obvious candidate here. It’s eager to pick up American diplomatic slack, especially in the Third World, with aid programs like the Belt and Road Initiative. A backpedaling American foreign policy could offer China the perfect opening to expand its reach and displace American unipolarity once and for all.

For many, after the post-WWII Pax Americana, the return of a multipolar world feels inevitable. Marco Rubio said as much in a recent interview with Megyn Kelly: “eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia.” China is on the rise, and the US seems content to settle for first- or second-place, depending on how the power-brokering works out. What’s important for Republicans is the domestic, getting a good deal, offloading these expensive side-ventures (our allies) and refocusing on our core business model (what again?). It’s one of the great ironies today that ‘Make America Great Again’ means reinstating a political dynamic where America is no longer great—no longer the Great Power—but rather one power among many in a Concert-of-Europe-style balance. The idea that we should recklessly pursue domestic political wins to the detriment of our international position is a notion so disconnected from the realities of a multipolar globe that only a Hyperpower could concoct it.

So China’s poised to challenge American hegemony, and Trumpian gunboat diplomacy seems like an advance-notice concession to multipolarity. Hegemony is just too expensive these days. But over lunch, my tablemate expressed that, after a brief flirtation with multipolarity, we’re heading back to a unipolar world. China won’t be able to keep up, for the simple fact that China’s a ticking time-bomb, thirty years out from demographic implosion. This all starts with the One Child Policy, a 1979 effort by the Chinese government to control population growth and avert a Malthusian catastrophe. Yet decades of the disastrous One Child Policy have riven Chinese demographics. Birthrates are declining, and there soon won’t be enough young people to compensate for a large and unproductive elderly population. These young workers will struggle to both support the elderly and sustain China’s miraculous economic growth. What results is a demographic bottleneck that will throttle the Chinese economy and wither its global footprint. By sheer dumb luck, America’s going to come out ahead.

This kind of ‘demographic thinking’ has become increasingly popular among Anglophone intellectuals and their technocrat political counterparts. Even if global demographic trends are dire, demography itself is a deeply comforting idea for the intellectual class. On the one hand, demography paints a difficult picture of the world fifty years out. Falling birthrates in the First World couple with high birthrates in the Third World, potentially threatening famine, migration crises, and a hollowed global economy. As the WEF puts it, “an ageing population in developed and emerging economies, and high population growth in parts of the developing world will have an enormous impact on our prosperity in the future.” On the other hand, more locally, birthrates seem to promise an American victory over China, and many otherwise clear-eyed thinkers are willing to accept the second consequence of demography but not the first. Demographic thinking is partial and ideological, but it’s also nothing new. It’s the most recent iteration of one of America’s definitive intellectual trends.

When it comes to China, “demography is destiny.” Population determines economic output, social cohesion, and political life. We intuitively treat demography as a law of historical development, an underlying mechanism which can explain the dynamics of our undulating geopolitics. India’s birthrate portends rising fortunes. Japan’s glut of outstaying elderly is a death sentence for the nation. China’s top-heavy population will sink its economic prospects. Etcetera.

The appeal of demography right now is that it posits a universal law of history which specifically favors American hegemony. America’s comparatively stable birthrate will ensure another generation of geopolitical dominance. This kind of assured and end-oriented thinking gives the American Experiment a feel of deep permanence and inevitability. The American empire feels natural, as an indissociable correlate of the global market, and America’s dominant position as economic producer is tied ideologically to a more fundamental demographic production—the production of people at the right rate.

In other words, we imagine America as both the origin and the end of the global market, with each new generation of Americans reproducing that global market. Our demographic viability reinforces our economic superpower status, and that’s why there’s so much concern about American kids, their test-scores, whether they’re watching too much Saved by the Bell. If China threatens America’s centrality to the global market, then this threat seems undercut, because China’s growing economic production is shadowed by a declining demographic production. People and products meld together as two forms of production powering the global market, and demography identifies long-term market trends which favor American enterprise. From this vantage, the current deployment of demography looks a lot like a scientific Manifest Destiny, a statistical proof that American empire-building is a protected historical project.

This optimistic view of geopolitics encourages political passivity. If demography shows us that America has legs, that things will work out in the long run, then we should concentrate on short-term gains rather than long-term planning. Neither is this misguided optimism unique to Chinese geopolitics. For decades, Democratic strategists have waited for left-leaning immigration to flip southern battleground-states blue, trusting in the sheer power of numbers. This obviously hasn’t happened yet, for the simple reason that social behaviors are much more complicated than simple population distributions. But the failure of this kind of demographic wish-making speaks to the political quietism at the core of our faddish demographic thinking: there’s nothing we need to do politically, because demography is on our side, so we’ll eventually win out. Demography is doubly comforting, because it promises American victory while discouraging costly steps to ensure that victory. This is the ideal ‘deal’ for a risk-averse political and intellectual elite. Short term wins, with the blind presumption that these translate to long-term victory.

As I’ve alluded to above, China’s declining birthrates are no assurance of a diminished economic output. The advantage of demography is that it offers a tentative glimpse into the future. We know how many fifty-year-olds America will have in 2045, because we know how many thirty-year-olds we have today. Demography provides a rough contour of our future work-force, but it makes no guarantees about what that work-force’s economic activity will look like. Different forms of productivity could easily supersede our present labor needs. New technology could change medical care and lighten the infrastructure weight of an elderly population. More darkly, countries could simply deny elderly people in-demand medical care after a certain age, thus leaning their populations (an idea long rumbling in medical ethics; Ezekiel Emanuel asks in the Atlantic, “whether our consumption is worth our contribution”). The point is, if demographic trends are forecast in advance, then the rest of economic and political life remains highly malleable, more than ready to adapt to changing populations. Reading this essay in advance, a friend sent me a section from Tocqueville that makes a similar point, far better than I could:

Providence has not created the human race entirely independent or perfectly slave. It traces, it is true, a fatal circle around each man that he cannot leave; but within its vast limits man is powerful and free; so too with peoples.

Demography simply isn’t the one-size-fits-all key to understanding social dynamics, and even the biggest believers in demography show their cards when they hedge in attributing political ascendancy to India or Africa. It may set basic parameters, but there’s a lot of wiggle-room within those parameters. Whole lives are lived within those parameters.

Indeed, this rhetoric of demography might even work against us. Frightened by its future demographics, China could lash out while it still has the numbers. If the future international system is rigged against China, then why not upset that future? Like characters in a movie, American intellectuals monologue their master-plan, but they should start being quieter if they want this plan to actually come true. That’s why, for me, it’s hard to see this unspieling demography-narrative as much more than loser-talk. It’s gab from a declining American elite, whistling past the graveyard.

I’ll give you one more crushing example of why this demographic destiny is fallacious. We’ve been through this song-and-dance before. Post-WWII, there was a spate of ‘Neo-Malthusianism’ among upper-crust American society. Chair of the Federal Reserve Marriner Eccles described overpopulation as the “most vitally important problem facing the world today.” This all came to a head with Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb in 1968, mainstreaming overpopulation catastrophism within the US popular consciousness. Although the book parenthesizes occasionally that this ‘population bomb’ isn’t inevitable, it sure treats it like a fact, and millions of Americans internalized that demographic anxiety. Science showed the world would soon have too many people, and prosperity would be in trouble. Now, again, it’s obvious this didn’t happen, both because demographic trends were wildly exaggerated, and because the world changed to accommodate more people. New technology was pioneered. More crops were planted. Augurs of demographic doom didn’t account for the fact that demography constructed just a small portion of the future world, and that other elements would determine how demography really panned out.

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So what does demography offer us? Demography provides a convenient ideological reason for dismissing China, sure, but beyond that, it appeals to us because it makes history quantifiable. Demography outlines what life will look like in an increasingly enigmatic future. It reidentifies a stable logic in the progression of historical events, makes history again into a progression. A comprehensible system, bound by determinate rules.

This means that demography is the de facto way in which we place ourselves historically. We envision America as a population these days, a product of the census rather than a culturally unified people. Regulating population becomes a proxy-war for curating culture, hence the political thrust behind immigration, citizenship, and reproduction. We conceptualize our society’s lifespan in generations, in demographic blocks with common economic tendencies and political prerogatives. These generation strata—think Baby Boomer or Gen Z—then become our default categories for making sense of contemporary social behaviors.

If we understand the present and past in demographic terms, we similarly treat the future as necessitated by demography. Or, perhaps more cautiously, by universal laws of history in which demography figures prominently.

The future doesn’t look good. Overpopulation will exhaust our natural resources and drag institutions into ruin. Climate change will induce ecologic collapse, slashing our planet’s carrying capacity. I don’t want to dispute these doomsday scenarios, but I do want to point that both of them are demographic. The catastrophic future is the self-contradiction of current demographic trends (i.e., overpopulation destroys the ecosystem, leading to underpopulation; or—among the right wing and WEF—underpopulation in the First World erodes infrastructural safety nets and results in catastrophic overpopulation elsewhere). The apocalyptic register of these predictions reflects the deeply intuitive naturalness we attribute to our demographics. Upending western demography feels like the end of history rather than its reconfiguration.

We can get some perspective on this shift in historical thinking by considering how people 100 years ago thought about the year 2000. Our grandparents viewed 2000 as a symbol of fantastical technological development—a millennial (and millenarian) time when anything would be possible. These possibilities weren’t always good; wild technological acceleration might stymie the societies producing such technology. But the future was contingent. It was open, the product of individual innovation, and it always carried the stamp of specific cultural values (the future would be American, the future would be Soviet, etc.). In contrast, we see 2100 as a ravaged endpoint. As the inevitable, decultured and inhumane consequence of current scientific trends. The year 2000 was an individualized future where you’d wield technologies beyond your wildest imagination. The year 2100 is a future measured in millions and billions, a molten catastrophe affecting everyone, not you. This pessimism only compounds when it’s derived from rules of historical development, like demography. Science creates the year 2000; science reveals the year 2100.

What’s really going on here is a change in the way that we understand history. The year 2000 was thoroughly ahistorical. It was an exercise in Utopian thinking, conjured up by futurist intellectuals and science-fiction writers, with little connection to 1900. The year 2100 is ahistorical in a different sense; we take the coming catastrophe as the exact outcome of present-day life, bracketing our own potential to change the future. We treat scientific tends as natural and immutable, even when they’re not. This results in a flawed history, in a kind of eschatological future wherein humans have no hand in shaping their history.

The world ends. The USA beats China. Texas flips blue. There’s no point quibbling about the inevitable.

There’s a longer essay here about modern attitudes towards history. About 19^th century philosophy and its search for a logic of human society. I won’t get into that now, except to say that predicting the future is dangerous stuff. It’s rarely right, and it’s all too often a self-fulfilling prophecy. We sense that the future is radically uncertain, and we try to limit our exposure to that infectious uncertainty. We build models. We hypothesize. We comfort ourselves that certain things are necessary, for better or worse, because it’s easier to digest bad news than the tension of uncertainty.

I’m not denying that scientific models like demography give us a good sense of emergent trends and possible outcomes. But I am denying that these are the be-all-and-end-all of forging a future. Proactive effort is always required to guarantee future gains. I think that modern life works against this point—which is so evidently true—makes it feel implausible to us, even if rationally we agree. In a hyper-connected world, it’s hard to feel distinctly the effects of our actions, and even harder to understand the movements of the crowd. We feel like we have less agency, that our world determines the things around us, that history’s been taken out of our hands. Life is out of control, but this lack of control also makes life feel permanent. Even natural. Ideologies like demographic thinking are ways of explaining this lack of control and rubber-stamping this feeling of naturalness. But a geopolitics which is earnest about its goals can’t succumb to this kind of dishonesty. People change, and the future’s still up in the air. Don’t let demographic thinking tell you otherwise.

(Title image is Police Controlling the Crowds. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2023862209/).