My DVD of Demographic Winter arrived and I have watched it. I must declare myself disappointed. For one thing, it’s just not a very good production. The doomy, Twilight Zone-ish music quickly gets irritating, as do the repetitive slo-mo shots of people fading away into thin air, empty swing sets, and so on. The rest is just talking heads, with a scattering of graphs, none of which is well explained, and some of which are not explained at all. There are loose ends, too. One way forward, we are told, is the “Swedish model.” But what is the Swedish model? Nobody tells us.

The movie doesn’t really tackle differential rates of population growth and decline – the stuff Mark Steyn bangs on about. It doesn’t have anything to say about other differential population characteristics, either, except for a passing mention of the connection between religious belief and philoprogenitiveness. There is in fact something parochial about the whole thing. There is almost no attention to any populations other than white-European ones. (The main exception here is Philip Longman telling us that Mexico’s decline in fertility is “without precedent in human history,” a thing I should like to see substantiated.)

Demographic Winter is strongest on economics, with some particularly interesting segments on the relationships between population profile, spending habits, and production. I think they could have done more with this. All in all, a bit of a missed opportunity, I thought. I hope I’m not being unfair. Have other Corner bloggers seen the DVD? I’d be interested to hear their opinions. Possibly my discontent is just that the thing didn’t have enough math for my taste. Where quantities of math are concerned, my taste is eccentric, I’ll allow. On the other hand, demographics is a very math-y subject, and you can’t really understand what’s going on unless you’re given all the math.