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 n chapter
9 of his book The Birth of the Modern, the historian Paul
Johnson notes the following feature of British life in the early
19th century:
Half the population were aged 15 or under. There had been, by
the 1820s, a revolution in infant mortality of a kind never before
experienced by any society.... The painter William Daniell's friend
Mr. Wilkins, Sr., had 30 children, all living. The great financier
Sir Robert Wigram had 15 sons and 5 daughters. The Rt. Rev. Henry
Bathurst, Bishop of Norwich, was one of 36 children his father
had by different wives. Maria Edgeworth was one of her father's
22 children by four wives... John Gulley, the prizefighter-turned-gentleman,
had 24 children, 12 each by two different wives... A study of
50 [aristocratic] women shows that they tended to marry at age
21 and have an average of eight children, the last at age 39.
Working-class women were even more productive, since they were
less likely to practice birth control or deny their husbands.
Scholars of the future, looking back on our age with the long perspective
of historical hindsight, may marvel at the tremendous stroke of
good luck the human race enjoyed in the 19th and 20th centuries.
It so happened that the first nation to conquer infant mortality,
and so to generate the resulting demographic tsunami, was Britain
— a nation with a long, strong tradition of law, rights, justice,
and liberty. That tremendous surge of population gave Victorian
Britain the manpower, and the energy, to dominate the world for
decades. Other nations followed with demographic transformations
of their own, of course (America's was swallowed up in settling
this huge land), but sometimes just getting there first counts for
everything. We are still living in the aftermath of that demographic
royal flush.
In determining the course of large historical events, hardly anything
is more important than demography. Who's got the people? Who will
have the people a generation from now? Numbers, as the late Enoch
Powell used to say, are of the essence. Thinking about the matter
a little deeper, in fact, it is not so much the numbers as the rate
of increase — the "first derivative," for those readers
with a little calculus. In sheer numbers, China in 1820 was way
ahead of Britain: around 320m versus 28m. In demographic dynamism,
though, there was no comparison: China was stagnant, Britain surging.
This was, as I said, a huge stroke of luck for the world, or at
any rate for those of the world's people who like an open society
under the rule of law. The Pax Britannica had its problems and its
dark spots, there is no denying, but a Pax Sinica doesn't bear thinking
about.
And so to our own time. What does demography tell us about the
world our children and grandchildren will inherit? Will they enjoy
another, similar stroke of good luck? Whose populations are surging
right now, and whose are stagnant? I'm afraid — genuinely afraid,
speaking as a doting father — that the news is not good.
For a sample of what's in store, take a look at the Middle East,
a part of the world where democracy, liberty, and the rule of law
are pretty much unknown. Back in January 1998, the Center for Strategic
and International Studies published a report with the title Demographics
and the Coming Youth Explosion in the Gulf. If you open
the report (you need that Acrobat thingy, which you can download
free from the web) you will see that it is done like a business
proposal: no big blocks of text, just some colorful graphs and bar
charts and a few pages of bulleted key points. Page 9, for example,
has a bar chart showing how long it takes for a region's population
to double at 1998 growth rates. For the "advanced developed
nations" it takes 162 years; for MENA (i.e. the Middle East
plus North Africa) the number is a mere 26 years. Page 22 has a
3-D bar chart showing anticipated population growth in some MENA
regions and nations over the period 1990-2030. Arab North Africa
is a huge red slab, rising from less than 150m to almost 300m. The
Arab Middle East is a lesser slab, but rising faster, almost tripling
across the period. Below that is Iran, impressive considering it's
just one country, coming up over 100m some time in the next decade.
Cruelly, the analysts have added a slab for Israel...except that
it isn't a slab, more like a trifling sliver, barely visible and
hardly rising at all. It is tempting to conclude that everything
you need to know about the future course of events in the Middle
East is right there on page 22 of the CSIS report — though,
of course, history is never quite as neat as that.
One of the more surprising features of the report is that it declares
the "conservative" Muslim states of the Islamic heartland
to be the ones for which the prognosis is most dire. "Oman
is a demographic nightmare case... Saudi Arabia faces growing problems...
Oil wealth cannot offset a steady drop in per capita income... Nearly
40 percent of the population is under 14 [sound familiar?]... Education
is breaking down and often irrelevant... Direct and disguised unemployment
of youth averages 25 to 40 percent, with little improvement in sight..."
Page 53 is a series of bullet points headed: "Destroying the
Future: Other Problems Affecting Youth in the Middle East."
Some of the points:
· Lack of effort to educate population in need for family
planning; official denial of the seriousness of the problem.
· Failure to perceive that the Middle East must train its
youth to be globally competitive with youth in lead developing countries
such as those in East Asia.
· Shift to Islamic education in some states without regard
to lack of relevance to real-world economic needs.
· Systematic lack of economic rewards for productivity and
efficiency...
You get the picture: it shows a huge and fast-swelling pool of
young people with no marketable skills, no rational economy to practice
them in even if they had them, and their heads full of visions of
a worldwide Islamic nation vanquishing the infidel. Meanwhile, in
the nations of the West, populations are static, or in some cases
(notably Italy and Russia) actually declining.
Predicting the future is a fool's game, of course. All sorts of
unknown quantities are involved: sudden technological breakthroughs,
unexpected plagues or natural disasters, the introduction of energizing
messianic faiths or ideologies (who, in 600 A.D., could have foreseen
the rise of Islam?) Inasmuch as there are any reliable predictors
at all, though, demography supplies by far the best we have. You
count the current generation, look at its age structure and procreative
habits, and make reasonable assumptions. If the number of 5-year-olds
is currently N, then ten years from now the number of 15-year-olds
will be pretty much N, too, barring catastrophes. There are very
few things about the future that can be said with such a high probability
of being true. It's just basic math.
This present, er, engagement with the world of Islam will, I am
sure, end with a victory for the West over those who wish us harm.
Looking past it, though, into the middle years of this new century,
it's hard to avoid the impression that, demographically speaking,
the West's luck has pretty much run out. Numbers are of the essence.
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