Mark Steyn recently lost a court case against a climate scientist named Michael Mann. This case took 12 years to reach a trial and verdict, which is bad enough, but even more distressing is that Steyn was found guilty of ‘defamation’ for criticizing Mann’s influential ‘hockey stick’ graph, so named because it reported to show that the earth’s temperature held steady for hundreds of years and then suddenly shot up at the dawn of the industrial age. This was said to be the result of CO2 in the atmosphere, and it was this graph that justified a morbid fear of what was then, around 1999, called ‘global warming’ but has since morphed into the all-purpose ‘climate change.’ This change is said to be an existential threat to all humanity.
The Mann v Steyn case may not be at the end, however, since Steyn is a journalist and claims that what he writes is protected under the 1st Amendment, and further, he has stated that Mann’s hockey stick is a fraudulent piece of agitprop and not science. If this case reaches the Supreme Court, however, given how slowly the case has thus far wound its way through the Washington DC court system, another assertion by Steyn may be more obviously and manifestly coming true which supersedes any threat from ‘climate change.’ Steyn has been writing for the better part of twenty years that the population of the earth is starting to fall in certain societies, and that it will fall further and faster very soon, in every society on Earth.
Steyn stated years ago that the demographic decline of Europe was barely a story but would be the only story in time, and I have noticed, within the past three years or so, the idea of voluntary population decline is, in fact, becoming a story across the media landscape. I heard yet another snippet on Instagram recently in which Louise Perry noted that in South Korea, every 100 adults would produce only four, FOUR, great grandkids.
This seemed so incredible that I set out to model the phenomenon on an excel spreadsheet. I may not an the eminent expert in data, but I know how to use excel, so I modeled the population using four age categories, and then applied a birth rate (the rate in which women give birth) and the death rate (the rate in which people die) and this allowed me to create a very crude but accurate way to model the population of South Korea and eventually, the rest of the Earth.
The age ranges are 65+, 35 to 65, 15 to 35, and kids under 15. These four categories contain different age ranges, but they model the four stages of life. In 30-year increments, I just moved one group over to the next stage and generated however many kids to add in the next generation based on the birth rate, and how many old people to subtract based on the death rate and moved the middle categories to the next stage. The birth rate calculation was applied to the 15-to-35-year-old group, since those are the years that a women can give birth. The new 15 and under group was created by taking the old 15 and under group, now the 15-35 group, dividing by 2 (to isolate out the women) and then multiplying by the present birth rate. I totaled the four life categories to see the total population, and then separately created a percentage to see what percentage the 65+ group and the 15 and under group made of the total population.
Using this crude tool, we can model South Korea. In 1950, this country had a population of (more or less) 28 million people, in which a low percentage of people were over the age of 65. The post Korean War years saw a surge in births, and better health care that came with greater wealth caused the population to rise from 26 million in 1950 to 43 million in 2010. That was South Korea in roughly three generations.
But, at the same time, as the death rate fell, the birth rate fell even faster, and so the percentage of 65+ people in the population rose from 13% to 28%. The percentage of kids fell from 29% to 12%. Nevertheless, it looked rosy because the population was rising, and the majority people in the middle were building cities and growing businesses, but all the while the population was getting older and older and more and more women were passing out of the age in which they can carry a child.
Going forward, if we hold the birth and death rate steady, we see what happens next. By 2040, just 16 years from now, the population falls for the first time, from 43 million to 38 million, and the percentage of 65+ rises from 28% to 47%. The number of children falls from a peak of 13 million to 1.8 million, and the seed stock of the future, the 15 and under group, will make up only 10% of the total. Only 1 in 10 South Koreans will be a child.
And so, it isn’t that we’re going to run out of kids. We are there NOW. Peter Zeihan has been saying the same thing for years. We ran out of kids 30 years ago, and now, we’re at the decline inflection point. The future is here. The kids we didn’t have won’t magically arrive, and relatively few young healthy people want to move to South Korea, even if the South Koreans would let them in.
From here, South Korea enters a population death spiral as the 65+ population grows, and the 15 and under cohort shrinks. By 2070, in one human lifespan from now, the population of South Koreans over 65+ rises to 70%. By 2100, they are statistically dead with 83% of the population over 65. By 2190, there are less than 2 million South Koreans alive, and they pass away forever in the following few decades.
2190, you might point out, is a long away, but 2040 is only 16 years away, and at this point, the bulk of the Korean population cannot produce children. Demographic math simply becomes inevitable, leaving aside the culture that allowed this to happen in the first place. Already, masses of South Korean children have no siblings, no aunts, uncles, or cousins. Is it realistic that this is going to suddenly reverse itself, and South Korean women are going to start having four kids each? It’s hard to imagine any situation in which that would happen. The culture that gave us K-Pop will not give us a loving mother of five bubbly babies. The adults are the new babies.
This phenomenon is playing out in Japan, China, the rest of Asia, all over Western and Eastern Europe and in other parts of the world. South Korean demographics are bleak, but only marginally worse than the rest of the earth. Only Africa is still producing more people than die, and they are starting to slow.
This graph shows, despite what Michael Mann and the other climate doomsayers may predict, is the real disaster. No war or plague has EVER, in the long history of humanity, produced such a dramatic downward change in the human population, and unless this math suddenly flips, nothing we have ever been through has been more fatal to the total population of people on the plant. The fall in the birth rate of humans has never been replicated in the modern history of humanity, as far as we know. If it has, it certainly hasn’t been voluntary as it is now. Wars, plagues, famines, and genocides kill, but the birth rate is not being driven by any of that. We have the resources for more kids, but we just aren’t having them.
Note that I’m no biologist, climate scientist, or statistician, but I can do basic math, and I know basic biology, and that is why I know this is the real story, as Steyn predicted. There is no need to worry about man-made climate change in a world were man himself is what is in danger. As is typical, the idiot credentialed class is worried about all the wrong things because they are not nearly as smart as they think they are. Human beings are experiencing an extinction level event every day, in our homes and relationships and if nothing happens to stop it, a lonely remnant of humans will occupy a planet that will return to its native state in a few more decades.
Using the same excel, I modeled the entire population of the earth, and it looks like this:
If the birth rate falls further or faster, the population could drop to half it’s current level in 200 years. A few wars and plagues could push the death rate up and drop the population even faster. It is here. We’ve reached the end of the civilization that industrial society delivers.
It is said that the driver of this is a change in incentives for having children. In a farming society, children were a source of labor. Now, they are a cost driver, and if the final reason to have kids is simply because you love them, and you want to have heirs, and you think humans are worthwhile and you want humanity continue, then you will still have children. But if that impulse gone, and the adolescent kid-free Disney-loving adults of the world only live for the now, then tomorrow’s adults will live in a far different world. That world will be static, and I predict, poorer. We’ve been told by the teacher’s lobby for years that kids are the future at the same time we stopped producing them.
We’re about to reap the dead wind we didn’t sow.
Download the excel file here and try it yourself.
tomroushonline.com 