"Why European elites are worrying about African babies" Maybe the 'elites' are worrying that these poor babies will suffer from malnutrition and starvation due to being born to families and societies ill equipped to take care of them. Maybe the 'elites' are worried some of these children will drown at sea trying to escape their dire poverty. Maybe these 'elites' are worried that their donations to help these babies will be stolen by corrupt local governments and never get to the babies.
73
Climate is the chief factor that will drive Africans and Latin Americans north. They’ll have no choice. Their wealth won’t matter. That kind of desperate migration cannot be stopped, regardless of what Europe does with its own population, and regardless how high Trump’s wall is.
The task for Americans is to figure out how to accommodate the migrants. Flyover country has lots of room for them, and the Great Lakes can be tapped to create cities for them. If China can create megalopolises in the middle of nowhere, we can too.
11
Interesting that Macron says that, when former French colonies were providing less access to contraception than others.
"We find that countries with more liberal contraceptive laws had higher rates of contraceptive use. We consider colonial origin, as French colonies had stricter contraceptive laws than British colonies at the time of independence. There is a legacy of the laws at the time of independence in the current laws, and presently former French colonies have stricter laws than the former British colonies."
http://contraceptivestudies.imedpub.com/barriers-to-contraceptive-use-ex...
But the decline in birthrate based on improvements in standard of living and particularly on women's education has no place in being labeled Macron's Law, it's been known for decades.
Another study, in Nigeria, found a difference in use of contraceptives that appeared to split across religious lines, but closer inspection showed it was really due to the fact that the Muslim and traditional-religion women were in the poorer areas of the country.
Cambridge.org has a study "Religious Influence On Non-Use Of Modern Contraceptives Among Women In Nigeria: Comparative Analysis Of 1990 And 2008 Ndhs" The URL is too long for Times' comments.
So, we should be spreading education as broadly and quickly as possible, and giving help to allow people to thrive where they live.
16
A continent overflowing with corruption, disease and poverty, and an uneducated and apparently undisciplined population that continues to reproduce at an unsustainable rate. Sounds pretty threatening to anyone capable of rational thought.
50
Ross' concern that Africans will overrun Europe is rich, considering that our species originated in Africa. History does have a way of repeating itself.
As for his recommendation that Europeans increase their birth rate is like telling an obese person to eat more.
Our problem is population obesity, and I don't mean on an individual basis
25
Pronatalism is an insane position, Mr. Douthat.
The human population is currently so large that we are damaging the biosphere in ways that will harm the lives of our descendants.
We need to find ways to reduce population and improve life for the humans living on this small blue planet.
71
This is zero sum game Trumpist thinking . As in other domains of nature, there are cycles of thriving, perishing and renewal. European ( and Japanese ) and African demographics identify a problem and a solution. Sure a bit more development in Africa and a few more babies in Europe may soften the edges but it’s obvious that demography and geography rhyme to give the answer .
The barriers, fear , racism ( outright and subtle dog whistling like this article) and organisational structures to accomplish this outcome will mean the rate of admixture waxes and wanes over time but such population shifts are nothing new. Ask native Americans or Ancient Romans. Like forest fires, they pave the way for new blooms.
15
There are unforeseen side effects to plundering the world as the US and Europe have done. People living in the poverty and turmoil created by colonialism and imperialism now seek what was stolen, from them and their children.
Wouldn't you do the same?
What goes around, comes around,
As you sow, so shall you reap.
etc., etc., etc
20
Read somewhere that the population will grow to 11 billion by the end of this century. Considering the climate change is it appropriate to ask will there be enough food for for all?
22
How about n income tax surcharge for each additional child instead of a deduction, and give deductions for adopting.
23
What scares people is not the race but the culture. One has only to see the environmental impact in Haiti compared with the Dominican Republic. Virtually, every tree has been cut down in Haiti for charcoal. The same will happen in Africa with or without climate change. It will become like a Haiti size disaster. The only hope is that the Chinese will use their growing economic clout to force changes in cultural thinking.
17
At a time when All populations should be limiting their reproduction, leaders and others continue to ignore the basic mathematics of planetary sustainability. But, no matter. Mother Earth will prepare disease, famine and warfare to do a course correction, albeit a painful remedy.
33
The rise of the nativist Right in Europe is entirely understandable when one considers that the recent immigration flow from Africa is just the tip of the spear. By 2050 the population of Africa will be 2.4 billion. If one quarter of that population migrates north, as they well might due to the dire economic and political morass at home, they will outnumber the Europeans themselves. Any possible solutions are complex if even attainable, but to expect Europeans to wilfully surrender their culture and economic security is unrealistic. Without being melodramatic, a storm is coming.
45
Is it possible that our glorious market driven development initiatives have failed for the past three decades and led to widespread poverty and migration? Maybe we might also consider European colonialism? It seems amazing that Africans should have felt the beneficent effects of Western culture for so long without without becoming richer.
8
"It’s a law of modern Western and East Asian history (we’ll call it Macron’s Law hereafter) that with wealth and education birthrates fall — and fall, and fall." Of course we would call it "Macron's Law", because the definitions we use to create and maintain our world have historically been white and male. It started with "missionaries" who went to "savages" to bring them "civilization" when incivility was rampant in their own homelands. Truth be told, even with cell phones, televisions, modern medicine, and indoor plumbing, the modern world would still not survive if it didn't have the same thing that's keeping these nations alive, food and water.
It's far easier to look at these nations and say they should advance, instead of looking at ourselves and realizing most of what we have is monstrously unnecessary. The question also has to be asked, would we be as concerned about the size of Africa's population if it didn't threaten to bring these people out of permanent minority status and into a more formidable political and cultural power?
The thought of Africa's population swelling to a size that could force a redefinition of assimilation is terrifying to most. Of course, it wouldn't be had we treated them right. Assimilation standards have been one-sided (supremacy) and defined from a position of power and politics for centuries: we are the best, we know what's best, become what we say. When will it be time for this to change?
9
Humans are highly social beings and most humans feel the highest comfort with people that look like themselves. You just can’t around hunan nature.
6
Except for the ever increasing numbers of biracial/mixed race children.
11
With the invention of fertilizer and medicine, we have seemingly disconnected from nature’s natural population controls. But we are still mammals who need a safe and nourishing environment to thrive. And with our appalling treatment of this planet, corrective action is inevitable. If the white Euro tribe wants to succeed, ala competing tribes, they may need more members. But available food and water will inevitably correct our over reach.
12
@Patrise
And, mind you, fertilizer runoff is causing yuge problems, such as the red tide in Florida.
6
Regarding Catherine Pakaluk:
Doubtless she is providing for the material needs of all her eight children. But if she thinks that - presumably working full time - she is able to provide all those children with the individual love and attention that each needs, she is kidding herself.
39
Studies have shown that the most effective way to reduce global warming is by reducing the population of humans. Therefore reducing population growth is at least a first step. An added benefit of reduced population growth is a better standard of living. Encouraging Europeans to have more children is not a very bright idea. So how about this idea: We simply pay people in developing countries not to have children. People in poor countries have children because it is a type of retirement plan. They expect their children to support them in old age. So why not fund a social security type retirement plan for people in developing countries, and in exchange, they agree not to have children. For every child they have, their retirement money drops by "X" amount. Developed countries are already giving hundreds of billions of dollars to developing countries to combat climate change. Why not use the money for this?
31
Many women in such situations already suffer the sorrow of the death of their children. Many women want to increase their chances of a surviving adult child, so they have several. It is entirely logical. When childhood mortality rates decrease, many women similarly decrease their births.
10
@Dave
I agree. However, so as not to make Africans believe that we want to erase them, 1 child should not lead to a reduction of the retirement money. Certainly worth a try.
6
Mr. Douthat, raises a good question, I believe the world does have a maximum carrying capacity. I fear the compassion of more affluent countries will run out before the stream of immigrants does, then where will they be? The benefits of modern science are wondrous, are they not attended by other responsibilities.
8
Dear Ross Douthat:
Please check out the four gospels, the ten commandments, and the seven deadly sins. Then consider if your borderline eugenicism is truly Christian.
I would also recommend that you take a close look at climate change/global warming and consider your idea that population increase is a benefit to humanity.
Women do best when they are given control of their lives, birth control, so they can space their children, and job opportunities. You seem to prefer a veiled kind of "religious" (I would not call it spiritual) submission by women and the descendants of slaves, native Americans, and hispanics (who, after all, settled the south and west before we took over with our "manifest destiny" which turns out to have racist and genocidal (hopefully) unintended consequences.
Genesis, with its "dominion" instead of stewardship, and it's order to submit to men and masters, has done a huge amount of harm in the world.
Sure you are capable of growing in compassion and common humanity. I believe you are better than this!
26
@Susan Anderson
It's Catholic doctrine--no birth control is acceptable, except abstinence. Ross is a convert to the Catholic faith.
Most women born in the faith use contraception because they have more sense than Ross. They won't have an abortion, but they will use contraception. Perhaps they are Catholic in name only by doing so, but it sure beats having six or seven kids the family can't support.
28
The notion of "Be Fruitful and Multiply" is long past. I believe any sovereign country has the right to decline acceptance of immigrants if they do not have skills to support themselves. Europe, and, for that matter, the US has the obligation to take care of their own constituents first, the ones that have paid into the system already. There are limits to the resources that the North and West can provide without destroying themselves in the process. Questions like assimilation come into mind as well. When it comes to unstable governments, what involvement does the UN have in all of this?
22
Falling birth rate is related to falling infant mortality. If you don’t know you will have a child or 2 to take care of you in old age, you will have several as a guarantee. Things like clean water, sewage treatment and public health measures will reduce infant mortality more effectively , and parents will be more likely to embrace birth control. If Africans can invest in public health and related measures as well as education there would be less need to move to Europe.
13
Long before the African population bomb explodes, the automation of jobs by robots and AI will cut a huge swath through the sustainability of being fruitful and multiplying on every continent, rich or poor. Encouraging Europe to have more babies will only dilute whatever meager Universal Basic Income is put in place by then. The population bomb in Africa is an existential threat precisely because the means for a middle class to gain wealth, good paying jobs above subsistence level, will be destroyed everywhere. Like with climate change, capitalists will ignore the long term threat for the short term gain until it’s way too late.
23
I almost choked when I read the author’s solutions: Europeans should have more children. The current population is already raping and destroying earth. Self-described pro-natalists must want to hurry along human demise.
67
Christianity is the great unifier. No one need to fear the future and what it holds with its projections of uncertain assimilation and seven Africans for every European. Galatians 3:28 "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
Without Jesus Christ, yes, vast restive populations migrating into areas of established, yet stodgy inhabitants, will indeed be a difficult process.
4
Macron is a very strange person with his aged wife. No normal man marries a woman 20 years his senior. That no one seems willing to comment on it says a lot about European culture these days, and is just one more sign that the last days of Europe are rapidly progressing. Whether it become Moslem or African or both, one of the signposts will have been this otherwise healthy young man taking a prettied-up crone as his bride.
4
Wow! That one made me choke on my cornflakes! Your comment says a lot more about you than it says about Macron. Choosing to marry an older woman isn't an indication Macron is somehow "unhealthy" while describing his wife as "an aged crone" is just nasty. Healthy men can be and are attracted to a wide range of types and ages of women..and vice versa. And for sensible people the physical appearance of their partner is just part of the attraction that leads to a decision to marry. Suggesting the Macron's marriage points to the reason why Europe's birthrates are falling substitutes misogyny for rationale thought. Europe's birthrates reflect economic trends. Women are now expected to work full time and children are hugely expensive to raise. Ergo...fewer babies. Macron falling in love with an older woman has nothing to do it.
48
@Mark
Marriage is a partnership. As my mother used to say: "If it works on its side or upside down, don't mess with it."
Shame on you!
22
Is Mr Douthat seriously suggesting that the answer to increased African migration to Europe is that European women produce more babies to keep up some sort of competitive edge? Really?! What happened to the concept of global overpopulation? Just how many more people does he figure the earth can meaningfully support? Does he also believe that climate change is a hoax?
Actually of course as others have pointed out, the earth will survive, but we are breeding ourselves into extinction.
39
In 1960, the world’s population was 3 billion. It has now more than DOUBLED.
Has anyone noticed the tens of thousands of African and Middle Eastern economic migrants invading European countries these past few years? How about the thousands of migrants from Central America invading the United States every year. They cannot support themselves nor their numerous offspring.
Yes, kiddos....out-of-control population growth negatively impacts the climate, environmental resources, everyone’s standard of living, and social harmony. It is the most destructive force on the planet....and it is NOT racist to say so.
45
This article and the point of view behind it are totally delusional.
The Earth cannot support the current human population. We are fast destroying the environment that keeps us alive through climate change, deforestation and other forms of over-consumption.
Our current economic model based on ever-increasing growth in consumption of resources is unsustainable, in the most literal sense of that word.
We don’t need birth rates in Europe to rise. We need to get over our fear of the loss of white supremacy, overcome out-of-date religious viewpoints and help the entire world to peacefully and consciously reduce birth rates. Otherwise the planet will do it for us, much more painfully.
54
We should at least make birth control available to African countries. This the the moral choice. The Republicans and Trump's withdrawal of support for any organization in Africa that also makes available abortions has the effect of making many other programs that these same organizations provide unrelated to abortion such as birth control and immunizations also unavailable. It is the poorer countries with shorter life spans which have the highest birth rates. Cooperating to improve the health and education in underdeveloped countries is the only sensible choice.
25
Birth control availability is not the solution. Many women choose to have the kids. People would have to want to use it to be an effective policy.
2
There was an article some years ago about women in Africa enthusiastically using birth control when they had access to it even without telling their husbands. The women told the health providers that they knew they could take better care of smaller families. If birth control is offered in the right way without any coercion, I believe that many people will choose to avail themselves of it.
40
@Seb
Yes, many women choose to have children. Many women also choose to have three or fewer children, which normally requires the use of contraceptives. So birth control availability actually is the solution.
5
Lol, how'd I know that the rebuttal to common sense sustainability of the human species on Earth would come from the Catholic Church? Shocking. Can we please be done with that nefarious cult soon?
26
Education and economic opportunity are legitimate and sustainable options for African over-population; resistive coercion is futile.
"If you can't lick 'em, join 'em." (Quentin Reynolds in 'The Wounded Don't Cry')
1
Corporate America is also worrying about African American babies.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/21/business/pregnancy-discri...
2
European culture and European white skin both evolved out of the traditional climate of Europe. Cloudy, snowy winters favor skin with less melanin, so that more vitamin D can be absorbed from less sunlight. The hungry warlike people from the coldest regions, like the Vikings, who settled in regions with just a small sliver of a growing season, used to be the menace Europeans feared the most. The Nazis came from those cold climate countries too.
Climate change really is the issue here now. Those cold climates themselves are in danger. And the people who inhabit them have a long history of violent population realignment when they feel threatened.
Having more babies will only further damage the environmental and climate conditions that make Northeners feel safe. That is the ANTI-ANSWER. It will only make things worse.
12
Btw, the nyts today has two front page articles showing hordes of Central Americans climbing fences, mobbing bridges and flooding north to claim asylum in the u.s. There is no arguement anyone can make to convince the majority of Americans that this is a good thing. It is no different than it is in Europe. The planet is over flowing with people and if you live some place half way nice (translate, not over run with humans) you want to keep it that way. The left and the democrats had better come to their senses and acknowledge the reality of our not needing any more but the most minimal amounts of immigration or trump will be around for another 4 years.
38
As a well-off Westerner, I have a checklist of things I should be able to provide a child:
- cello lessons
- SAT prep
- equestrian lessons
- private school
- skiing in the winter (plus group lessons)
- summer trips to Hamptons/Cape Cod/Nantucket/MV
- their own bedroom with bed, desk, computer, clothing,
- bicycle
- dental care
- car on 16th or 18th birthday.
- college tuition
- grad school tuition
- summer tennis camp
- help with first home
6
Ross Douthat deliberately conflates long and rightfully discarded practices and attitudes with current voluntary efforts to ensure that every woman everywhere has the ability to determine her own reproductive destiny.
According to the nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute, there are 214 million women in developing nations - many in Africa -who want to avoid pregnancy but who are not using modern contraception. www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/adding-it-up-contraception-mnh-2017
What, Mr. Douthat, would you tell these women?
23
Perhaps Religious affiliations have more to do with African birth rates, than whether or not African women are using Birth Control.
Many religions forbid Birth Control measure. That should be looked at before any conclusions are made about the birth rate in African or Asian countries. We are forgetting that India is in the same boat as Africa.
9
Don't have the time to read all the comments on this silly piece and suspect I'm only one of many who tried to point out the obvious to Mr. Douthat, who is so unfortunately mired in his Catholicism that he can't perceive such obvious realities as the general, far-reaching effects of an ever-growing human population on a planet not getting any bigger.
I will mention only two, both of which already have implications and effects that only the willfully blind do not see: Global warming and diminished resources worldwide.
Combined with and directly related to population growth, these two trends have already created the immense movements of peoples that so worry conservatives both here and abroad, and that have fueled white nationalism everywhere.
Glaciers melt, usable water is harder to find, droughts persist, storms wrack population centers, people flee, political disorder heightens and strong men rise to quell it.
What we're seeing is the Irish potato famine writ large. The Disturbing enough to those who wanted to send the thousands of Irish Catholics who emigrated to the U.S. back to their country, those numbers were smaller than the tens of millions now displaced around the world.
More disturbing to some (like Mr Douthat?), the millions now displaced by burgeoning populations, the changing climate, attendant pressures on resources and the wars that inevitably result. are most often not even white or Christian.
And the answer is more white children.
Really?
10
If bearing children is the only contribution women are valued for, guess what, they will have a lot of children. Fundamentalists of all religions -Catholics, Orthodox Jews, Amish, Muslims, Baptist, etc. teach that women are innately second class humans, should stay at home, and must obey men. Such women tend to have large families.
When women can run their own lives, earn their own money, and get divorced from abusive husbands (or even have them arrested)
birth rates fall.
Well educated women tend to live in such societies. Yes, there are women with Ph.D.s and lots of kids, but they are probably members of conservative religious groups. Either that, or they really don't understand exponential growth.
(As a female college math instructor, I can testify that most Ph.D.s are just as math phobic as the general U.S. population.)
The key to preventing over-population is raising the status of women around the world - which implies educating everyone away from traditional religions.
35
At what point does it become not racist to acknowledge superiority of a land, a culture, a belief system, a form of self organization, whatever...something, anything that causes one people to leave its homeland for another? There must be something - something, anything- superior about Europe over Africa in the minds of hundreds of thousands of African refugees and it may well be, God forbid, “man”-made by Europeans. So long as we can’t be honest about this, Africa will wallow in the economic, technological and political morass it has been for centuries.
16
Unless you have an exaggerated sense of the importance of physical appearance then fear of Africans is unwarranted. Africa is a large, diverse place. An influx from Africa generally is likely to be assimilated. Immigrants will take up new roles as Europeans, much as immigrants from Europe generally didn't turn America, say, Italian: there were immigrants from all over and Americans remained the largest bloc in the resulting soup, giving it it's basic flavor, though the new ingredients added up to something novel. Something with a different paint job. The original Anglo-American culture remained as part of what resulted, no information was lost. Europe will remain. Don't panic.
5
As a practical matter it is certainly possible for Europe to keep out migrants. It is not nice or pretty or humane, but it certainly could be accomplished. It is a matter of popular demand and political will, not capability. Therefore it is perfectly predictable that migration will be stopped by upset European countries.
11
A few lessons in painful reality here: colonization of other planets is not going to work. The expenditure to get people to other planets will be so high as to be reachable only by the superbly well qualified. Second, climate change is going much, much faster than feared by even the most alarmed researchers. We're very likely to see crop failures in the next decade, and no, I don't think the Western world is going to cut back on its protein levels to feed the "nine billion" to which the American liberal media often refers. And AI: it will destroy middle class jobs in the Western world in the next 5-10 years, and even with subsidized housing and medical care, I think it will be a social disaster. But we sure won't be inviting in yet more workers; look at that bridge in Mexico, and weep; some of my more liberal friends are saying, "wouldn't they be happier in Mexico? Same language?" Probably, but Mexico doesn't want them either. And no, I don't want to see the US becoming the abortion provider for the world; women in the third world will have to work this out for themselves, and will probably get beaten up for the effort. Perhaps the UN could be of some use? Finally? Without idiotic comments like "the Western world must take it's fair share of migrants?" No, Mr. Gutierrez, they won't. Now suggest something. Giant refugee camps in Central Asia, perhaps?
11
We are suicidal. Lemmings. The biggest single problem in the world is population size and growth. It is the root of poverty, climate change, wars, misery. And it will end planet earth as we know it.
There are too many people NOT because the earth cannot sustain xx billion people but because our economic and social systems are structurally flawed. We are unable -- unwilling-- to change how we live and what we value ensuring humanity will despoil the planet and suffer catastrophic consequences.
Political, economic, military, religious systems spawned in times of low population and plenty reflect humanity's voracious, suicidal appetites.
Translation: ask America to stop consuming hamburgers & sodas, use public transport, implement a carbon tax and feel the heat rising.
Arraigned against the overwhelming individual and corporate vested interests protecting our suicidal social organizations are science and creeping, irrevocable environmental catastrophe which will fall most heavily on the poorest. Africa and Asia.
To be pro birth is criminal. Arguing over the US's foot print is almost irrelevant unless something can be done about it. And so high birth rate countries will suffer. This is not about justice but what will happen and where.
Science has given us an ultimatum. But humanity is organized for suicide, won't change in time. The meek will inherit the earth's graveyards without population control.
12
Race is not germane to sustentation. A family of 2, 1 or no kids is a more prosperous family. Large ones of any pigmentation are minatory in finite space. Colonia Martialis will likely impose a ceiling of 2000 diverse pairs c. 2140 CE, unless Kardashoff expansion requires more. Hail reason!
1
The planet can barely support the number of humans living on it already. Encouraging anyone, anywhere to have more children is perverse and yes we should be encouraging people in Africa, as well as anywhere else with a birth rate above the replacement level, to have fewer children. The Western world also needs to make major changes to our economic system so that it is no longer dependent on eternally growing populations.
I am sure that there is some level of fear of huge waves of people migrating from Africa to Europe. Given that environmental degradation due to overpopulation (alongside adverse effects of global climate change) is already a driver of migration from Africa to Europe it is entirely reasonable to worry about that being amplified by growing populations in Africa.
9
Western technology largely cured infectious disease starting after the Second Wold War. Increased food supplies from the developed world averted the worst famines. But there was no increased productivity and wealth creation in most countries, which still relied on single crop or subsistence economies. The political chaos, fueled by ethnic and religious conflict that crossed the artificial colonial borders, precluded development. Because of cultural deficits, the largely illiterate, undeveloped sub-Saharan continent never established the kind of growth in the post war period that was seen in Asia. Population movement is inevitable, and in some ways analogous to the Central American diaspora to the North. If African countries cannot impose order on the societies, the increasing anarchy becomes a problem for the world at large. Anyone who doubts that, or calls it racist, need only look at the rickety boats now crossing the narrow straits in the Mediterranean.
9
All this means is that the so called Euro "time of rule" is up. I don't know if everyone is paying attention, but the world is going through some biblical changes. This is supposed to happen this way, because karma or cause and effect has been tabulating an awesome scorecard of ancestral horrors, and by the signs, it's about time to pay up. I think it's great, however there are some rules, and those that are licking the plates of the so called elites are those that are cursing their children for generations to come. We're talking 2 or less and it's game over. This article causally mentions "population control" as if it's something Bill Gates and company should have say and sway over. This is what I mean. Mankind thinking so "godly" that they fail to see that their flesh is falling apart. It's only the beginning, however we can see the strangle hold of divinity around us right now. Hopefully everyone's bed is clean because if not, there will be no exceptions in this cosmic cleansing that's happening right now, and into the future.
1
Just a note for Douthat and Macron. The fertility rate of Africa an entire continent mind you is 4.6. It has been falling consistently for decades. Larger to be sure than the US right now at 1.8 but hardly 8 births per woman.
13
Hardly a new thought by Macron. Demographers have studied this for years. As a general proposition, in countries with a GDP per person under $,1000 per year, women tend to have 3+ children. In countries with a $10,000/per person GDP women have no more than two children. Yes some exceptions. And as noted the reasons are high infant mortality and children as 'social security' in old age. Figures from Federal Reserve.
6
On what planet does the author live? This essay lacks scientific perspective. Humankind is in overshoot of planetary boundaries, especially that of the carbon cycle, and the overshoot has been steadily worsening since 1970. Transitioning to sustainability requires to lower human demand on natural supplies. Praising high fertility rates would make sense in a Star Trek universe with countless habitable worlds and easy ways to get to them. On 21st century Earth, such an opinion piece is just plain weird.
17
Interesting how living breathing population control zealots (actually scolds) never testing their so called convictions by paying the ultimate sacrifice. Two selfless examples: self immolating Vietnamese Buddhist monks, Quaker Norman Morrison.
1
@Sean So you are saying a person's determination to live out their natural life and not commit suicide is just as wrong as having 8 kids neither they nor the earth can sustain?
I don't think population control "scolds" are advocating murder or suicide as a control measure. Mostly just asking women to take a pill.
And yes I'd say that anti-birth control advocates are spouting probably one of the greatest evils in the world because they would have us destroy the planet for the sake of ceaseless human population growth.
10
I’ll accept that ,there’s some hard but good true about your article and since this is about what wrong about the African Continent let just put it out there; very mindful and respectful of my words ,but truth to be said ,and in the context that you’ve written your opinion :
The main reason that gave birth to this despair the African continent is living under can be traced to the fact that, It has been rapped over and over again by what you refer to as : the western world
I’m just longing for the day that they will have good leaders that will stand their ground and say enough is enough.
1
@X. In 1950 Africa's population was ~220 million. It is now 1.3 billion, a number far in excess of what it can ever possibly, sustainably maintain. And you're blaming this on racism and colonialism?
15
Just for the record. European elites are no more worried about Black babies on the continent than American elites are.
Let's face it, racism knows no borders.
But one of the reasons why Mr. Macron is concerned about the number of birth rates, is not only because it will ultimately have an adverse effect on the entire African continent -- but because many in the African francophone countries have a way of finding a path back to France, and it too has a finite amount of resources.
This may sound racist to some, but given the larger picture, it also makes sense.
6
People who feel attached to the paleness of their skin had better be mindful of climate change. In a warmer world with a shrinking cryosphere, people will likely need more melanin to survive. The cold, snowy winters that gave rise to "white people" in the upper latitudes of the northern hemisphere are becoming a thing of the past.
5
I have some pretty mixed feelings about any humans anywhere making a lot of babies. Poverty, war, climate change, overpopulation, to name a few pertinent reasons. Religion and ancestry are not good reasons to have a lot of babies. Macron is not wrong that far less women would choose to have many children if they were highly educated and had access to reproductive choice. That is actually true based on research. So it seems that if the world would just let women choose for themselves the amount of children to have, with full access to reproductive care, this issue would sort itself out in time. Trust women and give them the tools to choose.
13
Macron is correct in his analysis, even if superficial, of Africa's economic problem. I would not be surprised if he were forced by the French leftist radical intellectuals to retract his statement, that would be only slightly better than Lawrence Summers's 2006 resignation from Harvard Presidency.
Apart from the above, not to forget is the atavistic fear of each human race from having to share the Lebensraum with another.
France prides itself on admitting foreigners and allowing them to rise to the highest positions of state. Once, in a comment in the Parisian daily "Le Figaro", I counted some of the distinguished naturalized foreigners since the 1600s. One reader replied, perfectly correctly, that I listed only white, mostly Roman Carholic men.
2
Of course many people will attempt to migrate to pursue what they believe are better opportunities. The problem is the fact that they will need far better skills and more education than they presently have. They simply cannot compete. The people who “sneak” into Europe will only find poorly paying, exploitative employment (and even worse housing), if any. What will soon happen is more are going to find themselves being deported or sent off to live in a migrant colony.
12
In 1900, there were 1.6 billion living humans. Now it's nearly five times that number. We are fouling our nest, destroying what was left in 1900 of the natural environment, making life for Creation ever more difficult -- or extinguishing it.
Consider. The conservative answer would be, one might expect, "Go slow. This is too much change for a system to adjust to -- if it can -- wisely. Discourage further growth of human population and leave some room for the rest of God's handiwork."
Ross's solution? Get white people to have lots more babies.
8
@David in Toledo. There is no solution to the worlds problems that involves more people. Not more high consumption westerners (whites or their increasingly "people of color" neighbors ) or low consumption but still destructive third worlders. The planet needs fewer people consuming less.
5
Both Douthat (concerned for the xenophobic and 'economic' fears of the colonial and imperialist powers) and a lot of commentators correcting him for being "pro-natalist" (concerned for the health of the planet) all seem to have missed looking up the facts.
(1) For those concerned with "runaway populations" in Asia and Africa--did you know, the top 10% of the world's population (in terms of wealth) is responsible for 50% of the CO2 of Total lifestyle consumption emissions? I'd worry less about the poor people in Africa having multiple children, than about every household in the US having multiple gas-guzzling cars, consuming meat at insanely unsustainable rates leading to explosive methane emissions and using single-use plastics that are killing our oceans. Oh, and military interventions that are another leading cause of global emissions.
(2) Enough work on assimilation has been done in Sociology that shows true assimilation is a bi-directional process that involves openness from the host countries. If in the West we continue to ignore our part in creating the migrants (needing their labor, having colonized the countries and continuing to exploit their natural resources through neo-colonialist practices of executing military and corporate intervention) and view migrants as 'others' instead of future citizens and potential productive members of society that need human capital investment, they're not going to have a chance to assimilate and help grow host economies.
17
@Ccl Your point 1 doesn't make sense if you think dynamically about changes over time.
U.S. per capita greenhouse gas emissions are basically stable or declining. So at worst aggregate emissions in the U.S. will rise a bit each year with the population.
And it's true the poor in Africa don't emit a lot today. BUT that doesn't mean increasing population won't become a problem because as Africa gets richer, per capita emissions will increase with income (cars, A/Cs, consumer products, electricity, air travel, meat consumption, etc.), which will be multiplied by a few billion more people. So you could expect VERY large increases in aggregate emission out of Africa.
Just like why China is actually the world's largest emitter today (despite being relatively poor based on per capita averages).
The only way to balance the equation is either large reductions in population or a massive global move to green energy--enough to offset the population increases of the last 50 and next 50 years and then some.
And by "and then some" I mean on order of a 50%+ cut in per capita emissions among global middle income consumers. Which is unfortunately not realistic unless maybe we all do become car-free vegetarian minimalists.
3
@Mmm Your response is classic whataboutism.
Sustainability does NOT require everyone to become "car-free vegan minimalists." It requires reduced single-use plastics, using biodegradable materials, recycling, expanding the availability and use of public transportation, investing in renewable energy, bombing fewer countries... and yes, consuming less burgers and steaks (though don't worry, you don't have to given them up completely--just tone it down). You are opposed to this, but so quick to tell black and brown people to stop having multiple children?
-- The focus on the trajectory of emissions is actually less important in the current state of climate change because we need reduced emissions NOW, not in 50-100 years.
-- This idea of being concerned about future emissions potentially happening in Africa if/when their economies reach middle-income and if/when their population reaches 2bn+ (that is, if millions don't first die of war, starvation, drought, and rising temperatures) is again pretty hypocritical when the Western nations are still emitting at among the highest (per capita & level) rates. The current state of the climate is almost entirely attributable to western industrialization.
--China is the world's largest emitter, but the US is still the world's largest per capita emitter. This idea of holding different countries to different inherent standards is absurd, given that national boundaries are largely arbitrary formulations of western supremacy.
If the European elites are very worried about a future Black Europe thanks to north migration and a population explosion in Africa, they should realize that is the natural scheme of life activity way before humans arrived. Herds move to places where there is food and water where there is safety from predators. If the elites are really worried about maintaining their demographics then they should be helping Africans to stay in their own continent. Migration will halt if there is no reason. There is no human who'd like to leave their life behind if surrounded by green pastures. Hunger, lack of opportunity, fear i.e basic factors of existence dictates human behavior. Controlling populations and maintaining demographics is not the answer.That is just a fraction of the solution or not really. Besides it is not even humane. Education, improving food production, a stability brought by jobs and free of constant nagging fear of dying by available basic healthcare will go further than arming corrupt, dishonest cruel regimes. Europeans cannot have it both ways. Supplying arms and raping Africa of it's valuable minerals for a song, Europe has to face the consequences. Population control will happen with education, self-awareness and voluntary use of birth control. If the Europeans do not want to give up their colonial ways, they will be run over by Africans. And what is not good for Africa, is not good for Europe. In fact, it will be catastrophe for our planet itself.
5
More subtly than usual on the topic of sex, Ross thinks Europe (and the US) should put itself back under the thumb of the Roman Catholic church in matters sexual i.e. women should re-subject themselves to the doctrines that forbid use of any reliably effective contraceptive, confine sex to married heterosexual couples, require that any sexual intercourse must be with the intent of procreation and, Ross's biggest bugaboo, forbid abortion. Women's self determination about their reproductive lives is unique to North America and Europe and they have had it for only about 50 years. Legal, safe abortions and contraception are the foundations of women's choice about what happens to their own bodies. In most of the world, women have little to no choice about whether and when they have sex, much less control over or availability of modern means of avoiding pregnancy. While African women have more children, they also have lots of (illegal) abortions, in other words, just like America before Roe. Another major reason that women have had numerous children across the ages is that half or more born children died before the age of 5 from infections and agrarian life requires lots of workers to plant, tend to and harvest crops. Educating girls and aiding sustainable economic development in Africa and elsewhere, not producing more EuroAmericans, will do far more than finger wagging by either Macron or Ross Douthat.
14
Too many people everywhere, destroying Earth's environment and over utilizing its finite resources. The West has no cause to complain about African nations. Oh, the irony and hypocrisy of those educated Catholic parents with large broods bragging about the number of their offspring. It shows that having a Ph.D doesn't necessarily equate with being farsighted. Black, white, male, female, Catholic or anything else ... there are far too many of us already.
9
One thing I did not see addressed in this piece is infant mortality and health care. One of the drivers of a high birth rate is fear of child loss as well as poor access to health care, birth control and patriarchal social structures. Improving health care to decrease infant mortality and increase female control over reproduction would both help to reduce birth rates.
4
@Michele. It would seem that Africa's population going from 220 million in 1950 to 1.2 billion now can put the infant mortality reason for big families to rest. Btw, this same "experiment" has been run in the Western Hemisphere with the same result.
4
Increasing population in Africa is not the problem. Its population will decrease as it modernizes. The problem is that Africa is that it has not found that "IT" Paul Krugman describes in his Op Ed, "Notes on Global Convergence (Wonkish and Off-Point)." The "IT" is each nation finding a means of employing its population in a way that increases national GDP and raises living conditions. Short of improved living conditions, Africa will continue to have the lowest international GDP.
1
@cdearman
Africa is not a country so it could not find a single IT. And many countries in Africa have no population problem. The rate is falling.
I have always felt that over population is a huge problem not only for poor nations but also for the planet. I believe that religion and those people who believe in ‘natural law’ like the Roman Catholic Church is the root cause in creating poverty in Central and South America and now in Africa and is trying to become a bigger influencer in China.
We simultaneously scream about immigration and the millions of people migrating to the US and Europe but we continue to allow institutions like the church to reign supreme in those same places. If there weren’t so many unwanted and unplanned children there wouldn’t be so much poverty. We see the same problems in minority communities here in the US. Too many children and not enough resources to support them.
The more religious conservatives influence our politics the worse it gets. We need to remove religious dogmas about contraception and women’s reproductive freedom in national and international policy if we are to solve both the extreme poverty in the world that in turn leads to wars and violence that in turn leads to mass migrations of people to the west. We need comprehensive birth control policies on a global level to tackle inequality, poverty and save our planet. There is no point pontificating about the sanctity of human life starting at conception if we wind up creating a world where too many people lead to too many wars for resources and endless misery and suffering.
9
Try this thought experiment. You can live in the horrible, declining population (according to some) countries like much of Europe, Japan, Canada and without immigration, the U.S. Or you can live some place like China, India, Nigeria (ok anywhere in Africa ) Mexico and Central America with exploding populations. I'm not sure why it isn't obvious that having huge, poor, uneducated ever growing populations isn't a curse instead of a blessing. Is the left as numbers dumb as they claim the right is on subjects like climate change (which incidently is made much worse by growing populations as well) when it comes to the PC subject of over population?
10
Too many people on the planet as it is. EVERYONE needs to cut back.
14
Good lord. Yet another instance where some people need it spelled out for them:
No, you absolutely cannot tell women how many children they can have. What they do with their bodies is none of your business. If you're concerned about the world's population, put money into women's education. Is it an easy, immediate fix? No. Is it the only ethical way to address the problem? Yes, obviously. End of discussion.
11
@N. Archer. On paper you are correct. However, in most of these countries that's exactly what is happening. People, usually men, are telling these women how many children that can have and are often forcing them to have them.
4
I have to marvel at all the people here who argue that Europe and North America have no responsibilty to aid Africans and Latin Americans. I blame amnesia (aka the McConnell syndrome) How convenient is it to ignore the entire history of colonialism and imperialism where the northern peoples slaughtered, enslaved and stole everything that was not nailed down?
5
@Chuck Burton. We should help these countries because it will benefit us and them. Otoh, the incredible population growth of that part of the world cannot be blamed on: racism, colonialism, white supremists or anything but the people who live there.
7
The contortions in this essay give one an idea of what it is to humiliate the intellect before any Religious Authority. My understanding of the position of the Roman Catholic Church on contraception is that it is based on three notions. 1) That sexuality should be confined to procreation. This is a notion so foreign to our neuro-physiology that it never took hold before the so-called "sexual revolution" nor would it expand even if somehow the values of that period were to be exterminated under Kavanaugh jurisprudence 2) The idea that the shear quantity of life has value even if the quality of every human life was to be decreased. This notion requires that each person sacrifice their own interests for a value that is hard to describe and harder to understand. 3) The notion that it is God who is to decide whether a new life enters the world. Since it is quite clear that Douthat's pro-natalism will not in fact lead to greater European population he is, in effect, saying that we need to let God deal with the outcome of human affairs.In that case I again wonder why it is that the views of one religion, and in fact one segments of that religion, is given a place of privilege in the New York Times. One can only imagine if one who supported political Islam were to be hired as a commentator by the paper and give us weakly lessons in what the Sharia requires. I would join in the cacophony of criticism if my subscription was used for this purpose. What then is the difference here?
10
Europe think about sending more Europeans to live in Africa. The rate of assimilation of Europeans in Africa is far slower than that of Africans in Europe. There is still a lot of space on this globe. We just have to share it well.
3
While it is true that the masses huddle together - 35% of the people in the world live in only two fairly empty countries - there is a reason. Most of the land mass is not habitable due to lack of water and resources along with harsh climates.
1
It's amusing to see a powerful intellect come to the absurd conclusion that what the world needs is more people, based on an emotional attachment to religious tenets likely absorbed in early childhood.
33
It would be less of a problem for African mothers to have 7, 8 or 9 children each, if they could feed them. If African mothers and African nations could take care of their own families, and didnt' keep expecting help from other, whiter, wealthier nations, then it would be less of an issue. But they can't....as we all know, Africa has had famines, and there are water shortages as well.
The situation has such an obvious parallel to the problem of blacks dependent on government support in the US, that I'm surprised this is not more widely recognized.
It's part of being human to want to help others in need, but when others get themselves into great need because of their own bad choices...we have to draw some lines and stop helping and let them experience the consequences of their choices. This is tough love, and it's needed in our response to problems in Africa. African nations have kicked out
white colonial rule and in Zimbabwe and South Africa are taking land from white farmers, yet see no irony in then begging for help from Europe and the US, or begging to migrate to Europe or the US after they mess up their own countries.
And ...the whole world is threatened by overpopulation, which is the biggest problem for humanity. So it's irresponsible to talk about people having more mouths than they can feed, without seeing this in the context of a global problem. Certainly Africa isn't the only nation contributing to the problem, but we ought not help them do it.
7
This piece reads like an incomplete abstract to a piece Mr. Douthat forgot to write. He knows well the problem is far greater than presented here.
Africans aren't fleeing to European shores solely because they cannot feed their many children.
And....how many children is "too many"- Mr. Douthat (and commenters who supply a simplistic solution of Forced Birth Control)?
The continent of Africa has approximately 130 Million practicing Catholics. And we already know the Church's position on birth control. How many of those commenting about forced birth control came from families whose grandparents and great-grandparents had 10,11,12 children:
Birth control in the 1930's, 40's, 50's was when women stopped the menstrual cycle.
Mr. Douthat conveniently leaves out mentioning Trump's executive order
"...that denied U.S. assistance to any foreign-based organization that performs, promotes or offers information on abortion.... to the entire $8.8 billion in annual U.S. global health aid." (Washington Post-October 10, 2018).
Perhaps if those "elites" and others are so afraid of a Black Nation- they can join the "QuiverFull" movement and start making babies.
4
Mr. Douthat, this column was a fool’s errand. You got close to the heart of it near the end. I’ll translate: “White Europeans! Hold off the northern migration of Africans by having more babies. It’s your last chance before the Final Darkness.”
African birth rates, sir, are due to a lack of birth control (read: Trump administration) and a lack of Western medical investment in the continent. After Africa wrenched free of European colonialism—after the mother countries plundered the land, fauna and savaged the native inhabitants, they took what they stole (as America looked on with indifference) and left a ravaged continent to fend for itself.
It should also be remembered that in many countries in Africa, political corruption, nepotism, exploitation and genocide have also had their evil day with the continent. Where are the humane principles pertaining there? Algeria was not black Africa but what role did the French, Prime Minister Macron, play there? It wasn’t black babies there, but Muslim babies. And you know it.
America, situated thousands of miles away, cannot afford to look at it this problem from afar—but does so, happily (“glad we’re not Europe”). Climbing birth rates and grinding poverty are twin problems no civilized people should wish to see. But show me a civilized people.
10
One wonders if there is a population figure at which Mr. Douthat and other Catholic “pro-natalists” would be content - and at which point we could stop “multiplying”:
Ten billion?
Fifty billion?
One hundred billion?
(I do enjoy watching him back into his we-need-more-babies position.)
21
While there seems to be much angst on the part of the white Western world about population growth in Africa, the irony is that it's the Western (and now Chinese) economies that are wreaking the most havoc on the planet. It may not be babies or improving economies that force Africans to migrate, but lack of water and crops due to a warming planet.
This is the same for Mexico and Central America. American conservative, by refusing to recognize and contain climate change, will end up causing mass migration when coffee and other crops fail.
5
The Catholic view is life is a gift from God to be cherished and the Ph.d.'s in the article no doubt agree. For the poor, these kids are also a gift. However, one can be sure the desperate children would appreciate the gift of food, but who will pay?
Here in America, rural representatives want to cut food aid to the poor, even though they represent relatively well to do farmers in (blood red?) states. Oh well, at least they wave at the sick children from the football stadium.
7
The constant, consistent line from Douthat -- more children, more children, more children...Climate change is eventually going to wipe out millions of people...by heat deaths, lack of water, disease, rising sea levels etc etc.... It won't be pretty. Less children, less children, less children should really be our mantra (in addition to getting away from fossil fuels)--- but religions like Catholicism and others remain so primitive they are almost calling for the deaths of their own people.
9
Of course, Douthat gets this exactly wrong. Again. His answer to Africa's exploding population is for Europe to simply try harder to produce more babies. (!?!) He slyly tries to imply that meddling outsiders have tried to impose population control on China and India through cruel means, but follow his links, which refer to China's own one-child policy, and India's own sterilization camps. No, Mr. Douthat, the cruel, meddling 3rd world population control is the American one that has been imposed like clockwork by every incoming US Republican administration since Reagan, which cuts off funding from family planning charities in the developing world.
Here is the simple and easy rule about cruel vs. kind population control. Ask whether CHOICES are offered to the women THEMSELVES, or whether a policy (either forced births or prohibited births) is being enforced by the government against women's will. This shows that the current American anti-abortion/anti-contraception hammerlock is cut from the same cloth, and just as cruel and oppressive, as China's one-child policy or India's sterilization camps. Women make sensible choices when they have the CHOICE.
The oppressive government that can force you not to bear a child can also force you to bear one. We should know.
17
Amazing! Democrats accuse Trump of being anti-science because he maintains global warming is a hoax. You can look at pictures of the extent of the vanishing sea ice on a given date each year in the Arctic Ocean and verify that yes, Trump is wrong!
But it might be that Democrats are also anti-science. That is they ignore what should be part of the scientific consensus, and is still ignored for political or religious reasons.
Global warming is real and it is primarily caused by population growth.
From this point of view, Douthat's essay is as anti-science as any of Trump's pronouncements.
Africa's population is projected to double from its current level of 1.2 billion by 2050. That will contribute to global warming, but also to the bone-crushing poverty already present in many African nations.
What disturbs me however is not so much with Douthat's failure to see the problem with women having eight or nine children in an overpopulated world.
Instead, it that so many people, including economist Paul Krugman and journalist Nicholas Kristoff, who simply do not see any problem with continued population growth.
The evidence is not hidden. Leave your hotel in Cairo, or Nairobi, or Delhi, and look at the faces of the poor you encounter everywhere. That provides clear evidence of the toll overpopulation takes on hundreds of millions of people.
Douthat and his colleagues are like the prelates who refused to see the moons of Jupiter in Galileo's telescope.
6
Efforts by developed countries to impose population control in Africa or elsewhere are extremely problematic. Nevertheless, does Mr. Douthat really envision a peaceful, happy Earth with 15 billion people on it?
6
Pro natalist? This is nice to be a pro-natalist, maybe when you can decide when you start a pregnancy, when you have the means to feed, educate, see your kids grow up without the fear of war, of starvation, of systemic unemployment... when you know the father will be around to help, when you’re not a single mother struggling for her own survival. Family planning is not entirely evil. Having eight kids comes with risks, for the child, for the mother... I am for healthy mothers.
6
Things are just getting back to normal. Mankind evolved in Africa. There were more people (including human ancestors) in Africa than the rest of the world from chimp-human split until recently, perhaps as recently as 10,000 years ago.
1
The average American or European places a much greater strain on the world's resources than a poor African. We consume more material, more energy, and generate far more toxic waste per person. I don't see how making more of us solves anybody's problems.
The idea of a Marshall Plan for Africa may have merit. But the article is written with the underlying assumption that Europeans - and presumably Americans - need to figure out how to fix Africa. Maybe we should start by asking the advice of Africa's increasingly large, educated and competent middle class for their ideas.
5
@writeon1, If this is so then it is a good argument for limiting immigration into Westernized countries.
7
@MS. The left never acknowledges this fact. That turning a low co2 producing immigrant into a high consuming westerner is the single worst thing you can do for the environment and global warming. It's not PC but it's still the truth.
In fifty years of traveling to over forty countries I've never thought "What this place needs is more people."
25
@Arjay. It is really so simple when you leave your preconceived notions at home and embrace reality.
2
And why are you a pro-natalist? You really see no problem with an ever-expanding world population?
I will grant you that Europe's decline in population will present serious problems. A declining population may well be quite incompatible with a capitalist economy.
So if we need to rein in population to preserve the environment then we need to transition to a non-capitalist future. This will not be easy.
3
"A declining population may well be quite incompatible with a capitalist economy."
Why, exactly? Russia has a declining population. They're not going back to socialism. Quite the opposite.
@Patricia
Douthat implies that we must have a capitalist economy and so child birth rates must reflect that overarching goal??
Population activists prefer the term “population stabilization” to “population control.” Control implies coercion which is not what the enlightened person generally favors. But stabilization is a good thing which all societies need to aim for. Eternal growth is the creed of the cancer cell.
5
This essay is so close to the racist doctrines of the 19th and early 20th century that it is frightening.
The clear underpinnings of this article is that the planet/europe is being overrun by inferior darker skinned peoples and that the superior Europeans must improve birth rates to stave of total destruction. It also belies the underlying fears being bandied about by Trump and the republicans
The true reasons for the disparities in birth rates is the vulture capitalism that has come to dominate the world. It is based on keeping certain groups in servile, economically exploited positions at any cost. High birthrates plague these groups because of the lack of medical infrastructure and because of extreme poverty and higher rates of disease.
Ironically, the high cost of living in most western democracies are making those populations who have some access to medical infrastructure limit the numbers of off-spring. Only the very rich (which are few in numbers) and the very poor (which are many) are having a lot of babies.
One group having kids by choice, the other out of poverty and possibly necessity. The ones in the middle can't have many children out of fear of becoming poor.
Want to even out the birth rates?
Then, develop an economic system that does not mete out harsh punishments to and does not limit the upward mobility of large groups of poverty-stricken peoples
7
This issue points up one of the Catholic Church's most irresponsible theological policies. Over-population is an existential issue confronting the world, and the Church's refusal to adjust its position will go down in history as a monumental mistake.
5
@PaulB67. Please, don't leave the other religions out of this, especially Islam, as non PC as that may be. The Islamic countries have the highest birth rates by far.
4
I notice you offer no concrete policy suggestions to Macron.
As a "pro-natalist," I'm sure you would support a plan that would pay stay-at-home parents of either gender 30K a year to raise pre-pre-K children or take care of elderly parents. Right?
And I'm sure you are aware that of fetal death rates in red vs. blue states, or in nations with and without reasonable health care regimes. Right?
I raise this because your ire seems always fixed on the moral failings of an imaginary hippy left or their not-so-imaginary technocratic bully descendants. But if traditionally "women's" work were reasonably paid, and if wealth was taxed to sufficiently to pay for it, lo, the birth rate would rise. (Proof? The American baby boom when family was federally subsidized through the G.I. Bill. Proof, many young women would love to have more children if they could afford to house/school them.)
But that would not be as easy as pharisaically moralizing about the amoral left, now would it? That would involve crossing your wealthy right-wing benefactors who want to protect their aristocratic America. What about the log in YOUR eye!
Stop the one-sided, self-congratulatory moralizing, please!
4
I don't agree with Douthat on much--and I'm certainly not pro-natalist--but he's part of the pro-family right and does support subsidies for caregivers.
Encouraging increased birth rates anywhere on the globe is foolish. Humans are oxygen consumers. Trees (and other forms of green vegetation) are oxygen producers. Global deforestation is happening at an exponentially increasing rate and at the same time the world's overall population is increasing at an equally rapid rate. The inevitable conclusion is that humanity is well on its way to slow suffocation. Recommending that European countries increase their birthrates will only hasten this process.
6
Since industrialization, if not causing coincides with, lower birth rates it will be interesting to see what happens in any countries that see their industrialization move forward.
Douthat poses a real problem. Critics here pose a failed solution: more birth control.
This has not worked and will not work. This white funded birth control has also been termed colonialism and racist.
The stark fact remains: there is no solution.
European whites will not increase their reproduction rates. Assimilation will not succeed, Black reproductive rates will continue to be high.
Better to face unpleasant facts than dream on.
4
Ross, the book of Genesis commanded the human beings of earth to "be fruitful and multiply".
Mission accomplished. We should congratulate each other, and applaud the role of modern science and technology in the grand fulfillment of this cosmic imperative.
But now a new imperative has become obvious to all of us who look to the heavens, the laboratory, or the deepest recesses of the human heart for wisdom.
That imperative is to stabilize the population of the earth, so that new leaps in human development and understanding remain possible.
With the advent of climate change, it is entirely plausible that human beings will either be unable to realize this next imperative - or that nature itself will be compelled to impose the limits on population that we refused to impose on ourselves, so that this imperative could proceed.
The era when couples were forced to produce 7 or 8 offspring, in the hope of having 2 or 3 survive into adulthood, is behind us.
The earth cannot sustain a continued exponential growth of population. We either take it upon ourselves to stabilize populations, so that a new phase of human development can begin, or look to a future where nature will almost assuredly begin to do it for us - assuming that it even allows the human experiment to continue.
Either way, the evolution of all life on this 3rd planet orbiting the sun will continue.
6
The author talks about the inevitable mass migration of hundreds of millions of Africans to Europe. Why is it inevitable? Why can't Europe choose to enforce it borders if a majority of its citizens want their borders protected?
Ask yourself a few questions: Let's say Africa successfully sends 500 million or 1 billion people to Europe. With their shrinking population, the indigenous people's of Europe would become a tiny minority, and at the same time, Europeans are certain to become a small minority within North America.
1. Do you believe a dominant African population in Europe would become prosperous and successful after 50 years there? After 100 years?
2. Would the people remaining in Africa become prosperous and successful? Or better off in any way? Or would the heartbreaking status quo of disease and overpopulation simply get even worse? With massive population increases, why would it be any different than South Africa - which started with tremendous advantages in 1994 but is now imploding towards poverty parity with the rest of the continent at frightening speed.
If your answer is continuation of the long-existing trends for both African migrants and Africans on the home continent, then does allowing mass migration to Europe make any sense? Is it in the benefit of the indigenous population? Or the migrants?
Or would the inevitable trillions be better spent on mandatory population control to prevent the mess in the first place?
7
Folks, listen: The anthropocene is well under way, not in some vague global hothouse of the future. Just look at extincion rates and the current waves of migration. The focus on Africa, or South Asia, or any other area where population growth remain exponential, is misdirected, and columns such as this fan the flames of impending catastrophe. The planet is already gravely overpopulated, maybe more than ten fold, including our own northern regions of prosperity, which became so and are maintained by relentless extraction of limited resources, not just rare metals and soybeans and cocoa, from the South. With or without our help, the global population will crash under its own weight as water is depleted, the oceans rise, crops fail and billions migrate North in desperation.
11
Part of the problem is the traditional, patriarchal societies enforced by religion and culture, which give women no power over when they have sex nor the ability to obtain or insist on birth control (i.e., that men use condoms). Women in developed countries have ready access to safe, affordable birth control and have a much greater say in when they have sex. It would be interesting to know how many children women in Africa would like to have. I suspect that the answer would not be seven, eight or nine.
7
The argument here seems to be similar to the one used by the NRA. Let us solve the problem of too many guns in the wrong hands with more guns everywhere.
The idea that we can live in a round box (planet) and continue to fill it at nauseum is, of course, unsustainable.
To become more tribal as a way to solve all these problems is laughable.
May be Climate Change is the one thing that will get us to have the conversations that we need to have.
9
When I was young many many years ago, my closest friend lived in a small house as an only child in a lower middle-class area. Next door was a Catholic family who had around six children. Assuming that both families had approximately the same income, as the neighbor did not have a much better job, should my friends family have given part of their income to their neighbor so that all the children had approximately the same standard (excluding living space)? This is a ethical problem I have often thought about.
Another point.
It is true that the West uses much more of the planets resources. However whatever happens, even if the West were to vanish, the remaining people on earth would aspire to the standard of living we in the West now have. The genie is out of the bottle and if sub-Sahara Africa, India and other areas continue to have large families the problems in the future will be even worse.
18
@Ian, The rapidly increasing middle classes of India and China all need or want cars and air conditioners too.
We can't even come close to reversing climate change now.
4
"Which is why anyone who hopes for something other than destabilization and disaster from the Eurafrican encounter should hope for a countervailing trend, in which Europeans themselves begin to have more children. "
What utter insanity. The world needs fewer children and lower populations. ALL THE WORLD.
Granted, in the short to medium term lower fertility rates in some countries will cause economic dislocations. But, in the long term the very survival of the planet is at stake.
25
Much of Mr. Douthat's column accurately describes current trends in population and migration patterns, but his suggestion on how to improve growing conflicts over immigration to developed countries--Europe in particular-- is shortsighted. Suggesting that Europeans have more children to try to "even out the balance" and be better able to absorb immigrants is an irresponsible solution in a planet where increased human activity is threatening many countries' very existence.
Immigration policy will continue to be of global concern not only because of differences in birthrates, economic opportunity and resource use, but also because of the accelerating pace of global warming. As coastal cities, drought-ridden countries, and island nations find it harder and harder to exist on a planet where the average temperature will soon reach 1.5 degrees celsius above pre-industrial times, immigration is only going to increase.
Europe would be much better off by sharing green energy technology with African countries, helping educate their populations--especially women and girls--to reduce their birthrates, and sharing technical skills to help countries adapt to climate challenges. One of the 100 actions to reduce climate change that is listed in Paul Hawken's book, Drawdown, is the education of women and girls. It has been demonstrated over and over across the globe that the education of women and girls improves the health of communities, curbs violence, and reduces birthrates.
19
@Jennifer Roberts
Indeed. One would think that the amount of solar energy that falls on the Sahara Desert each day, if captured, could create quite a supply of constantly renewable energy. Energy that could be sent both north and south and reduce the carbon footprints considerably.
4
@Patrick. In countries where just obtaining food and shelter due to huge populations is the primary activity most days, there are few resources left over for development.
@Jennifer Roberts, Right this all sounds good yet will men allow birth control and support education for females? Doubtful.
1
Not too long ago, the Bill & Melinda Gates' foundation were heavily invested in helping Africa. By inoculating African children, trying to find new vaccines and funding a Malaria campaign, et al. Then they've done a 180. Perhaps the Gates have recognized that saving millions of African babies is not prudent for the future of the planet.
Their work and policies have in part resulted in the unexpected uptick of over population there. In theory their work was virtuous and benevolent but in reality it prevented mother nature from taking its course and culling the human herd.
The planet is overdue for a severe famine, flu or other epidemic, perhaps even a world war. The population MUST be reduced somehow or we will all perish in a very short amount of time. 50 to 100 years we could be finished. Easily.
11
This is a perfect example of the problem. Unimaginable wealth in the hands of just a few people who try to play god.
4
It should come as no surprise that the rapid rise in the world's population over the past 150 years from roughly one billion to the now almost eight billion is analogous to the rise in climate change we are now experiencing. Anyone who denies that this dramatic rise in population over such a short period of time is what exactly brought about climate change is a climate change denier, plain and simple. That climate change is inevitable is a no-brainer. That those in the lower geographic areas will flood (no pun intended) those in the north due to this change is also inevitable. Your children and grand children, and so on will survive according to the decisions you begin making today regarding the confluence of a number of reasons. You can make of this what you will. Good luck.
162
@Tee Jones What brought about climate change was the emission of greenhouse gases. Per capita emissions vary spectacularly by country, with the highest being more than 50 times greater than the lowest.
3
@Tee Jones
"Anyone who denies that this dramatic rise in population over such a short period of time is what exactly brought about climate change is a climate change denier, plain and simple."
That fallaciously dichotomous thinking--very reductive. The way we live has also changed dramatically in the last 150 years. Placing the blame wholly on population increases is a convenient way of not feeling responsible for the things that are in our control right now. I mean, why should we Americans be forced to consume less when the real problem is those people in Africa having too many children, right?
And people don't "flood" anywhere. They migrate.
3
The future is more promising and optimistic than you can imagine. There will be a minimization of human suffering, disease, and want. People will live happier, fuller, more joyous lives than are now thought possible. If you hear anyone say the future isn't what it was, they're right. It's even better.
2
Interesting that there was no mention of climate change in the opinion. In the future we need less population not more.
13
World overpopulation is the gravest problem facing humanity. Already, we would need more than 1.4 earths to sustainably support the world population at the current standard of living. But of course, everyone wants a higher standard of living. Inevitably, this is unsustainable and will lead to ecological and worldwide population collapse. Every country and continent must be responsible to reduce their population, probably by 40%. Moving people from one continent to another solves nothing. It is not Europe's or America's responsibility to take in the masses fleeing the results of overcrowding or poor economic conditions elsewhere.
268
@Sly I fear that you conveniently ignore the entire history of colonialism and imperialism. Poor economic conditions in Africa and Latin America did not evolve out of nothing, but from slaughter and resource robbery at the point of a gun.
1
Then why do the democrats and the nyts keep telling us we have to take all these people in?
3
@Sly Technology would be able to solve this if there weren't cultural barriers such as politics, religion and prejudice. Suffering exists because the "winners" of the world need it to push other people around.
2
The decision to have children is not able to be affected by the government or any other outside entity unless the State can control the people like China has. That is not the case in North America, Europe or Africa. This is a private matter only that is decided more than anything by cultural norms and to a lesser extent, economics.The way to diminish the overpopulation of the planet and more environmental degradation is through education and empowerment of women and girls.
259
@Steve Does 'education' include sex education? Does 'empowerment' include access to birth control and family planning? If so, it would seem that there are things governments and outside entities can do....
1
@Steve
"The way to diminish the overpopulation of the planet and more environmental degradation is through education and empowerment of women and girls."
...And within a century we should see some results from this effort.
2
@SteveThat’s not true. You can incentivize childbirth, through tax breaks, like in the US, or you can punish it by not providing any incentives, since kids are really expensive.
1
My great-great grandparents averaged twelve children , my great grandparents averaged four, my grandparents had three, my parents had two my siblings have one each, I have none.
Population reduction isn't a horrible thing. Children born on a farm are a blessing of free labor, children born into a one bedroom apartment are a different matter.
Medical advances mean that half of your children won't die in childhood. With that comes rapid changes in fertility rates. If Africa continues to advance in wealth, they will most liikely follow suit.
Also, Europe is under no obligation to open their borders to their neighbors to the south.
303
@Scott Europestole everything that wasn't nailed down. Certainly they have no responsibility to aid their victims.
1
Please tell the democrats the same logic applies here. We are not obligated to take in the millions streaming towards our southern border.
1
It's flawed thinking to suggest, as some of the comments here have, that population increases in underdeveloped countries are what pose a significant risk to the environment.
For example, the per capita CO2 emissions for a single American is nearly 10Xs that of a resident of India. We are so wasteful with our huge McMansions, constant air conditioning, multiple cars, closets full of clothing, etc., that our self-congratulatory environmentally-friendly small families still do as much damage as the large families on other continents.
We ought to pull the log out of our own eye before we point out the speck in another's.
377
@Feminist Academic There are many more things straining the environment than just CO2 emissions. If the entire earth was carbon neutral, we would still be hurdling towards environmental collapse by the activities required to sustain the population. And, the population is already unsustainable.
12
@Feminist Academic. Your logic is sound, and seems to advocate for keeping the third world population right where they are. I couldn’t agree more.
@Feminist Academic You really need to visit Africa before rote denunciation of developed countries. Every village swarms with small children, bored youths have nothing to do as unemployment in many countries is over 50%, and much of the land is dying due to bad farming practices and overgrazing by livestock, which is turning the northeastern part of the continent into rock and sand desert. African leaders, of course, are too busy stuffing their pockets to pay attention to what is happening, our Republican government is more worried about abortion than starving Africans, and everyone's favorite Pope continues to fight family planning.
3
Yes those racist Europeans ranting about "brown hordes" on their border.
Next thing they'll want to build a wall.......
Ross knows of that of which he speaks.
5
So a member of the largest, most immoral kleptocracy in the world, the Roman Catholic Church, doesn’t care about overpopulation, just about the “darkies” overrunning white homelands. His ( his cult’s) suggestion is that white people start breeding like flies to form a solid “European” barrier to the dark hordes. No wonder the he is a proud member of the Republican Party, the party of greed, evil, racism and no-nothingism.
25
OMG. With global warming, in the not too distant future, rising seas, rising temperatures, decreasing availability of arable land, food and water – – and you favor large families? Anywhere?
This defies logic. It is sure to increase the suffering for millions of people. Already so many children are being born throughout the world, not just in Africa, who do not have enough food. No healthcare. The only way out is to reduce the worlds population wherever possible. Calling a hope to see lowering of birth rates in Africa racist is not fair. A desire to reduce birthrates everywhere in fact supports with compassion the future of humanity. Bill Gates is trying desperately to change the direction of his giving, to increase opportunity, for the ultimate result of smaller families. But it will not work now, because there is not enough time. Global warming is heating up. That changes everything.
16
@Judy reynolds, Gates has turned his mission into an educational, state side one. At long last, he finally gets it.
We need MORE smart people to potentially fix the problems of the future. Overpopulation being one of them. Ignorance breeds ignorance.
In countries with high infant mortality, people have lots of children to increase the odds that some of them will survive to adulthood—when they are needed to care for their aging parents.
I have lived in Africa and seen children die. I know African farmers with crippling back injuries who can no longer swing a machete; thankfully they have grown children to tend their fields.
Africans are not stupid. I do wonder about Western commentators.
7
Yeah, that having lots of kids is really working out for Africa isn’t it? I guess they’re exporting that great idea north because it works so well?
10
Then why do we see boatloads of young African males trying to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe? Apparently enough children reach maturity and their labor is not needed in Africa.
8
@Max Alexander, They obviously can't do basic math if they can't understand that when the crippled father dies his plot is then divided among his children. The less the children, the greater the amount of land received per child.
3
The European concern has a legitimate basis and, contrary to the headline and Douthat’s suggestions, it does not have to have anything to do with race or fear of a “black” Africa. It has to do with the astronomical growth of economically and culturally failing societies that spread into other societies and do damage to them. Most people legitimately do not want that no matter what the race of the people involved may be.
7
Are Euro/American (whites) going to fix Africa like they did the Native Americans? The Aboriginal Australians? The Roma? The Jews? The Aztec? The Inca?
Euro/American (whites) are the "Ab initio!" The problem in the first place.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
~Karl Marx
14
@Joie deVivre: Europe dragged the world into the 21st century, and here we are. Now we have two types of countries; the successful exploiters and the unsuccessful exploited. Until we can think of a way to square the circle so that a country can be successful without exploiting its neighbors, our problems are intractable. Some of us Westerners are working on it, but we face opposition from vested interests in every place we turn. African dictators and Western corporate leaders like things the way they are and will only let them change over their objections. And they will resist the change with deadly force.
In the past you complain about, people like them were the cause of the problems, as they will be in the future as well.
It's easy to say "look at all the bad things your ancestors did" and punt the problems, but that won't fix anything. Without a different paradigm, nothing will get fixed, and the future is a gated community of countries blocking out the desperate people from everywhere else.
You can bemoan in the past and/or you can work towards the future.
8
@mlbex
It is well for the heart to be naive
and the mind not to be.
~Anatole France
Worldwide arms sales! Over One Billion A DAY!
Ask John Lennon! Give peace a chance.
Yes, I know the words. It's just not reality.
https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2017/global-arms-industry-firs...
"It's the part of the future that European's actually deserve to control". How dare those racist Europeans desire to preserve their wonderfully unique Swedish, Dutch, French, Irish, Danish, etc. etc. cultures that they have created and treasured over the centuries? How dare they not gladly help their cultures vanish forever by welcoming hordes of unskilled, uneducated immigrants who those same cultures will be expected to feed, clothe, and house until those cultures no longer exist? It is not immoral for Europeans to choose not to commit cultural suicide. They most certainly "actually deserve to control" who enters their sovereign national territory.
37
@John J.
This is just straight racism. Immigrants can absolutely adopt culture. What they can't adopt is skin color. Just come out and admit what you are.
2
@AK. But when euros and others have invaded Africa that is colonial and racism and a terrible crime. Can't have it both ways. Every country gets to control its borders. Past bad behviour in Africa does not mean Europe doesn't get to say who comes and goes because now Africa has eaten itself out of house and home.
Many people are poor because they have large families and live in environments that have been destroyed.
Think of a farmer with a plot of land large enough to support a family. When that farmer dies that plot is divided and you end up have multiple farms- all too small to support a family.
We must accept that there is a limit to how many people any given amount of land can support. We must also accept that people who willingly choose to over-populate and destroy their land are responsible for that- and should be required to live with their choices.
We must stop the flow of economic migrants. Poverty is in many cases self-created.
I wish people all over the world the best of luck! Remember to plan for a family that you and your environment can provide for.
8
Jared Diamond wrote Guns, Germs and Steel to explainer where we have come from. If you are concerned as some Europeans and Americans apparently are about being subsumed soon you better build a wall, a high strong wall, because there are not enough resources for all.
7
Wrong! The system is the problem!@Mike
According to the NYT!
World’s 8 Richest Have as Much Wealth as Bottom Half, Oxfam Says
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/world/eight-richest-wealth-oxfam.html
2
I’m sensitive to the issues of race, justice, and the legacies of historical wrongs at play here. But do you know what couldn’t care less about those issues? Nature. In the end, our world is finite, and anyone who believes that infinite growth is possible in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. So we can ignore runaway population growth by insisting that we really a consumption problem (which to be fair we do have), or by saying that focusing on it a smokescreen for racism and abdicating responsibility for the legacies of the less noble of our ancestors (which to be fair it can be used as), or we could optimistically assume that technological innovation will always keep us one step ahead of the impending crisis (which has more or less worked for us so far). But when we finally, inevitably, hit a wall that we can’t innovate our way around (of when our innovations backfire on us harder than we can take), then nature will take over, and nature’s tools for regulating our population – famine, violent chaos, epidemic disease – will be catastrophic. And the worst affected people when that happens will be the most vulnerable with the fewest resources and recourses to ride out the storm. We absolutely need to address the issues I brought up first. Human decency demands it. But if in doing so we ignore runaway population growth, it will be a pyrrhic victory.
16
Mr Douthat, you're confusing a blank statistical observation (as educational levels rise, birth rates fall) with Macron's moralistic and clearly racist judgement (those ignorant, uncivilized Africans can't stop themselves from breeding).
Those of us who have experience of the traditional French condescension towards Africa have less trouble separating these two things.
2
After God stopped the construction of the Tower of Babel just before it reached his Kingdom, He told the people to go forth and multiply. Procreation is not only man's God-given right, but it is also his duty before God. God commanded man to procreate. In that sense then, white Europeans are defying God, by encouraging Black Africans who have migrated to Europe to use birth control. Similarly, the United States has defied God by promoting birth control, including the ultimate form of birth control, the abortion. In fact, Planned Parenthood was founded on similar fears as PP would often set up shop in or near the ghetto, to influence African American women's procreation habits and, if need be, abort their children. This by PP and the actions of White Europeans defies diversity, which is promoted by the Progressive Left. Nothing but racism! America and the entire world must go back to the ways of God. Thank you.
Westerners are becoming loathe to introduce more humans into a populist, nationalist, extremist, christo-fascist, resource stretched world. Why would anyone want to introduce innocent children into a Trump (and the like) infested world?
7
So explain why they all keep trying to get here? You can’t have it both ways. The west is racist and horrible and yet every minority population on earth is trying to get here. How can this be?
5
LOL. When I saw the title of this Op-Ed, I was sure he was going to be talking about the U.S.! (Though, in our case, it is a a Black and Latino continent they fear.) After all, why else would the GOP be doubling down on such blatant voter suppression, almost exclusively in minority districts? The U.S. is expected to be "majority minority" by 2020. And that scares the bejeezus out of (predominantly) White Christian America.
4
What on earth? Macron is right. What if some educated women have 13 kids and some uneducated women have no kids? The causal link exists despite outliers.
No rate of economic growth in India - for instance - can produce a rich country (based on per capita GDP). The population plain outspawns growth rates. Uneducated, underfed crowds in places without water, food, hygiene, law and order translate to corruption, wretchedness, and a large variety of sociopolitical illnesses and produce refugees.
But, for Europe, this is a karma payback. Most years that begin with 18 or 19 saw Europeans either killing each other (and everyone else they could find), and/or exploiting and corrupting the southern countries (Indochina, South Asia, Africa, Latin America). So if African refugees are causing alarm - it merely suggests the existence of karma.
Yet, no amount of refugees in western Europe will singularly destroy European, as did European exploitation of Africa. Please see reap-sow connection for explanation, and Rwanda for Exhibit A.
Macron's wistfulness of a European Marshall plan for Africa, is laughable. The European DNA is more about exploitation and colonization, not helping others.
It is sobering to note that while refugees and immigrants flood into Europe for good and bad reason, Europe has strong fascist tendencies, and inhuman yet effective solutions to dealing with people they don't like. They will do it again, this time more effectively.
4
Pro natalist? The earth is being destroyed by human overpopulation. Any just and fair policy that helps limit population growth in any country is necessary. A choice to have many children now is dooming them to a life misery.
10
Europeans making more children means they can take in more Africans? You lost me there. What it really means is the European nations will have more soldiers to fight off the desperate immigrant hordes, which is what it will come to eventually.
8
Reading 3 main Dutch newspapers daily, never heard of fear for African babies. What people like Douthat, people from the ultra (?) right here, fear, is that the whole of Europe becomes Islamic. I think that fear mongering is their sole interest in life. I realize that it is necessary to give people like Douthat a podium to utter their nasty nonsense, but don't believe them.
10
So, now the white baby challenge has entered the pages of the New York Times? Amazing.
I cannot wait until this feverish planet sheds us like the virus we are.
I only wish the birth rate would fall to zero, everywhere.
With no new innocents born only to suffer, I could enjoy the coming storms without this pain in my heart.
15
The New Yorker had a good piece on environmentalism and racism.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/environmentalisms-racist-history
2
All I can so is WoW. Are Europeans and white Americans really that afraid of being the minority?
12
"As a pro-natalist"...
I had to read that twice.
The arrogance is spectacular and predictable. What business is it of Ross Douthat's to have any abstract position on someone else's very real-life reproduction?
11
Repeat after me: Quality of life over quantity of miasma.
Hunans are literally destroying all other species and the planet with our refusal to simply use birth control. Nearly all of the excess current 3 billion humans emanate from Asia and Africa. Nearly all of the excess next 3 billion humans will come from the same places. All have one thing in common: miserable, misogynist violent conditions that hold all females as little more than breeding livestock.
12
I guess you can have all the babies you want. Just don't you DARE think that everyone else has to pay for them.
Take care of them yourself!
The world is full.
Enough!!!!
12
I don't mind if white people and Asian people evolve ourselves out of existence. But things would certainly get ugly along the way.
Reading this, I can't help imagining a world where the 'natalists' conceive all the babies their wives can manage before their uteruses prolapse and deploy those babies to the bits of the world where Ross and Macron think they are most needed.
4
Douthat is so immersed with church dogma that he is oblivious to the role that population growth has played in creating the current existential crisis caused by global warming. He is not capable of seeing that dogmas created millennia ago by people completely ignorant of science and worried about an unpopulated heaven is destructive to human life today.
Population increase on the part of very poor people just maintains poverty. Had Douthat studied history, he might understand that the great increase in world population in the past two centuries has been due to sharp declines in death rates throughout the world. The slowdown in population growth in the "Western World," including Japan and China, is due mainly to urbanization and the high cost of maintaining large families in cities, unlike rural areas. As well. families have chosen to have fewer children but to give each more, including parental time.
The issue is not race, but culture, the belief that more is better. In the Western World, "more" pertains to GDP and educational achievement. In areas in which primativism reigns, and religious fundamentalism is the cultural norm, excess population relative to the capacity of the society to provide for them is the basis for the surge in migration.
Why, Mr. Douthat, do you think it is God's will that the numbers of the wretched of the earth should increase?
8
population control or family planning is most urgent issue.
without it, there is no hope to address the issue of climate change.
I imagine if the Palestine and Israeli population is half their current level, their conflict will be more solvable.
4
Wealthy women should not have children. The average American child will produce a carbon footprint more than 20 times that of an African child.
Over his/her lifetime, each American will produce an average of:
3.1 million pounds of CO2 (same as 413 plane trips from New York to Tokyo)
The carbon footprint and pollution produced by a child from a mother on the Upper East Side is unimaginable.
9
The solution is obviously very, very strict immigration policies.
6
We don't need a wall, we need more rockets to Mars. Seriously, world population growth has grown from 3 billion to close to 8 billion since 1960. Clearly not slowing down. It really doesn't matter if we are talking European growth or African. The situation is not sustainable and likely not fixable. We are using up the planet.
2
@Born In The Bronx. On a planet that can't feed people with all the resources at our disposal, the solution will never be to send them to basically uninhabitable planets. Exploring planets is great. It will never be a solution to over population here.
3
Does that professor with eight children wish that every woman on earth would have eight of her own? Has she any notion of how it would be possible to grow enough food to feed the hordes? Has she worked out how long it would be before the planet collapses under the weight of billions upon billions upon billions?
As we've seen with our President and HUD and Education Secretaries, education does not guarantee intelligence or clear thinking. Or sanity.
18
What a strange column.
The column could be paraphrased: There is a terrible crisis in Africa and many Africans will continue try to continue to emigrate to Europe. The only response I can think of is to encourage Europeans to have more babies. That encouragement will probably not succeed. I can't think of anything else.
11
Not to worry. I've read that the leaders of the Alt-Right are pressuring their followers to have as many White babies as they can. (Alt-Right women are encouraged to not work, but to stay home and raise the next generation.) They, like Ross, are "pro-natalist" and see great advantage in increasing their (White) numbers.
5
This is nonsensical. There is no benefit - and every conceivable detriment - to having more humans crowd planet earth. And the color of the humans makes no difference.....A good 50% of the world's problems - pollution, clean water shortages, sufficient arable land, hospitable regions in which to live - would improve with a decrease in human population over the next several centuries. (The other 50% of our problems would improve with a global movement away from religion.)
12
The developed world is weary (and wary) of egregious overpopulation. The US and Europe should not be compelled to destroy themselves because other nations refuse to embrace family planning.
17
It's amazing how irrational fear and hatred - racism in this case - can make people say the most ridiculous things.
1) It took over 200,000 years for the global population to reach 1 billion people. It's taken only 200 years for it to reach nearly 8 billion. In my lifetime, the population has more than doubled from 3 billion to 7.6 billion. Yet, you suggest that it would be a good thing for 'whites' to try and embark on a population war with Africans and are frustrated that this probably won't work. Have you considered the environmental impact that even more people would have on the planet? Is the current climate catastrophe not enough for you?
2) Though you use terms like African and European - what you mean is, 'blacks and whites'. Can you explain to me, what natural, moral, or biological law exists that suggests that this planet needs to be more white than black in the first place?
3) It is surreal to read an American decrying the growing population in Africa, whilst American politicians and religious leaders regularly go to African countries and do their level best to restrict abortion, birth control and contraceptive use. This past year, the US government has again cut financial support to African organizations that contraception and other services. Naturally, this has led to a greater number of unwanted pregnancies.
The impending climate catastrophe will surely cull the human population. Billions may die. It'll surely be poor people of colour.
15
@Mike Bonnell. It will be all of us, but you're right, it will be in proportion to our exploding numbers.
2
Governments have no business discouraging or promoting pregnancy. Bill Gates and his do good friends need to let families make a few decisions for themselves. The U.S. birthrate is in decline and over 50 million abortions has been a waste of human resources. "Growing old alone", without children, siblings, or spouse is the new social disease.
1
@Eugene Patrick Devany
Perhaps you should go further: WOMEN should be making family-planning decisions instead of MEN...
And if you're going to discuss abortion sheerly in terms of "human resources," you need to acknowledge that the monetary cost of an abortion is far, far less than social services society must shoulder over a lifetime.
3
I'm with @Dadof2--why do we care what color babies are? Any nation--the U.S., France, etc.--that wants to ensure the survival of their culture should work to make their culture the envy of the world--vibrant, exciting, tolerant, and inclusive. Must the survival of culture mean the exclusion of the other?
4
This is nonsense. Rather than trying to establish that some births are better than others, with all the racist and xenophobic baggage this entails, why not build on the historically accurate reality that migration can be positive, both for the countries of origin and those that are destinations? What is needed is less tribalism and more cosmopolitanism, more curiosity and humility and less fear and aggression. In oversimplified shorthand, Brits should recognize that there is a reason they appreciate good chicken tikka masala more than the badly-prepared steak and kidney pie they grew up with.
3
well, most of humanity, our race was black and colored. So maybe its just Make Earth Great Again!
1
Africa is racing toward catastrophe. Most of its one billion inhabitants are already poor and undernourished. How can it feed another 3-4 billion people? There will be mass starvation and social upheaval, and the pressure on Europe will become intolerable. African governments are doing little to encourage a lower birth rate, current US government has cut back on family planning initiatives, and the Catholic Church continues its disgraceful, medieval policy of encouraging ever more births. We will human deaths like nothing we have seen since the world wars.
4
I think the better idea is for Europe to pay for vasectomies in Africa.
Ross just dont seem to realize that Europe's population is kinda peaked out by geographics. Come on, aren't 60 million Italians on that little rocky, mountainous peninsula a few more than enough?
3
How many billions of people are there on this planet? Why on earth would we want to lift fertility anywhere?!
5
Ross, all of us, every one of us, traces his heritage back to the Ethiopian Rift Valley.
Where is the "horror" in a universally brown humanity? Is the idea so repulsive to you, as it is to millions of "Whites"?
I'll go no further because you know where I'm going. Suffice to say, or to remind you, that population control by race is a chimera. It's overall population control that cries out to us. But we won't listen until resource wars begin to thin us out without regard to race.
4
Really great news about Africa population explosion. This means that the selfishness of the declining white populations of Europe and the United States is being offset by the generosity of black Africans.
This phenomenon should be welcome news as an answer to who is going to do the work and pay the taxes in the future. But, of course, it will not be good news to our Progressive friends whose belief in Malthusian catastrophe theories about population growth blind them to the fact that such theories are purely imaginary.
We, Europeans, deserve to also control our immigration and foreign aid policies. We could spend our money on boosting our natality, not on the seventh child of a Malian mother or on welfare for migrants.
6
Why are Ross Douthat and other social conservatives so convinced of and obsessed with the desirability of women producing large "broods"? Is it some kind of attempt to reduce the female half of the population to a lower form of life than men, animals who exist primarily to reproduce? I really don't understand and wish someone would explain the rationale for this.
13
'We must find a way to convince African women to stop having so many babies' sounds rational enough, but what happened to the men? The fairer sex often have less of a choice in these matters.
5
For those blaming the Catholic church for the population explosion in Africa, please note that Africa is only 17% Catholic (135 million of the 809 million Africans as of 2005) but is 50% Muslim. The Pope, of course, has 0 influence on Muslims.
Just so you know, Muslim majority countries have the highest population growth rates of all countries, by overwhelming margins, not Catholic-majority countries.
Source Wikipedia.
And Western Catholics practice birth control just as most Westerners do.
3
I guess he deserves credit for not explicitly referencing “Camp of the Saints” or Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech in his piece, although maybe that constitutes plagiarism.
3
"But focusing on European fertility has at least one moral advantage over Macron’s finger-wagging at African babymaking: It’s the part of the future that Europeans actually deserve to control."
Oh the irony! Four hundred years of bread upon the water is washing up on European shores.
A mere few hundred years ago Euroopeans invaded, I mean colonized, Africa. Not to seek a better life from the terrible hardships of European life, but to steal as much as they could with both hands. With god, and Christian missionaries, on their side, they willfully, systematically, destroyed the existing African social structure from the nation to the village to the family, and enslaved much of the native population. After enough time and generations had passed for native Africans to be seperated from their historical culture, the Europeans, with a few minor pangs of guilt, left, leaving the Africans on their own. The theft of natural resources quietly continued under tin horn "presidents" propped up by the mining and other interests that quietly remained.
Many Africans see nothing for them in their own land. This is exacerbated by widespread drought as a result of global climate change, a phenomenon for which Africans bear little responsibility.
Europe, these are your own children coming home.
9
I think that in the not so distant past the concern was with too many Catholic babies - you know, those Irish, Italians and Polish folks who wanted to take over for the Pope.
4
Let's see. Africa produces 30 million net extra humans per year. This in a continent that cannot feed itself, is destroying its environment, resources and wildlife, to produce ever more people while the economic system cannot give the vast majority of them anything to do and population is NOT a problem? There is a reason that the Mediterranean is full of people going north to Europe and it isn't because Europe needs more poor people. No solution to any of Africa's or the world problems from wars, poverty, global warming, economic development or preservation of the environment and other species involves more humans. The pie that is planet earth only can be cut in so many slices. As the slices become smaller and smaller (to feed cloth and produce more people) there will be less for each of us and of coarse, less for all the other creatures that are disappearing. What about this don't you and the nyts get?
7
Demographers have studied the "demographic transition" from high birth rates to low birth rates for some time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
The 800-pound gorilla in this specious argument is the full disingenuousness of American "conservatives." They want to make America "white" majority again.
5
At some point we're going to have to consider a new approach to illegal immigration: Stay where you are. Sorry. The gate is closed.
6
If that baby's face doesn't make you smile, you have a serious problem.
4
@RipVanWinkle. The serious problem is why is this kid and it's mom risking the Mediterranean crossing to leave Africa.
2
Exactly how is this kind of talk different then during the late 19th century when both Europeans and Americans openly worried about a "Yellow Peril"? Perhaps if Europeans would invest some of the wealth that they originally stole from Africa to create jobs for Africans in their native homelands then black people wouldn't have to walk accross a dessert and cross a sea in tiny open boats in order to search for opportunity amongst a people who dispise them so completey.
15
For those blaming the Catholic church for the population explosion in Africa, please note that Africa is only 17% Catholic (135 million of the 809 million Africans as of 2005) but is 50% Muslim. The Pope, of course, has 0 influence on Muslims.
Just so you know, Muslim majority countries are very well represented in the list of high population growth rate countries.
Source Wikipedia.
Western Catholics practice birth control just as most Westerners do.
1
Lamentations of unbridled African birthrates with ZERO mention as to why that is. Amazing. Even when the subject trys to take on a benign air, it still reeks of blatant human racism.
I'm sure the French leader would be willing to share both the secret---and RESOURCES---for a more nominal future African population???
Oh, and then there's the sheer brilliance of encouraging population growth based on the most self-serving premise imaginable, all with the knowledge that human population, from this point on, will outstrip the planet's bio-output and sustainability. Right at that point, the argument is ALREADY rendered mute.
1
I guess poor old Ross has never heard of Earth Overshoot Day which this year fell on August 1st. It is the date on which humanity's demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds that which earth can regenerate in that year. Needless to say, we are not doing at all well and having more babies is the last thing our poor planet can handle.
It's not a matter of white babies versus black or brown babies; it's a matter of way too many babies, including the children of women with PhD's who should know better and stop being so greedy.
8
"there could be seven blacks for every white"
Looks like the master race is being outraced. The sons of Ham (Nimrod) were the first great civilizers, and it looks like they'll be the last. I casually mentioned the rule of smaller families to a fairly well-off Mexican mother and got the sharp retort "but we love our children." In the Western (Hollywood) psyche, large families conjure images of cultural impurity (Elvis)--if a mother showed up at Walmart with nine children in tow, the manager would have a nervous break down and feel compelled to call an ambulance on standby. Imagine the shocked looks if at a formal dinner setting you mentioned that two of your aunts had 13. That's 13 extra plate settings--and the anarchy. Macron is a fool. To prove it, he just needs to ask his over-childrened mothers which of their children they would be willing to part with. Both these mothers are now in their nineties, surrounded by countless grandchildren. who would sooner die then put them in a nursing home. I have yet to meet one anxious Leftist willing to exit the stage to save the planet. We have an absolute right, not only to be here, but to enjoy a lifestyle with all the trappings. Others do not have the right even to be born. Especially, in Africa.
1
The Planet is overpopulated and climate change will restrict habitable and food growing regions. The only hope for Africa is to educate women and girls. Educated relevance fewer children.
3
More racist fear mongering from republicans who do everything to prevent women from using contraceptive measures. The evangelicals haters are against contraception and now you complain about the results. Africa needs more enlightenment in this regard. But republicans are against it. The evangelicals will destroy the US in the long run. Congrats. They hate education . They hate experts.
6
There are many more coloured people in the States than there are in Europe. Their numbers will increase immensely. They will soon represent the voting majority of US citicens and teach certain whites an unforgettable lesson. Wether you like it or not, it's going to happen.
@pierre This is exactly the kind of post that heightens fears. To say that when one race reaches some point, it will "teach certain whites an unforgettable lesson" puts many people's lives at risk and hardens many hearts.
3
@pierre: What will be the "unforgettable lesson"? How about this: "We're just human beings like you. All of us are the same under the skin."
3
The earth population is 7 billion plus and growing. Anybody who isn't worried about Africa's birth rate is nuts. And Asia's birth rate, and South America's birth rate, etc. And even places like Europe and North America who have falling/lower birth rates are still growing. How many people do you think the world can hold?
PS. I don't have children.
14
The two slogans of this piece might be phrased:
(1) White people! Get back to work and have lots and lots of babies.
(2) White people! Don't be racists and interfere with the African population explosion.
Does no one take Microeconomics 1A any more? Let's have a spot quiz: how many of you college graduates out there have ever heard the phrase "diminishing returns".
Diminishing returns means that if you double population, and then double the other variable inputs, you won't double output. This is so because there are yet other resources, which are not variable. You can't control them: e.g. quality of land, quality of population, air quality.
People will become poorer.
Virtually nobody who comments on population is an economist. They don't focus on these principles. To that extent they mislead, tragically: kids! kids! kids!
So, we learn here that African population should grow at 400% per generation (7 or 8 kids per Mom). At this growth rate, African population in 2018 will be 64 times larger than at present, or perhaps about 30 billion, a tad larger than the present world population of less than 10 billion.
The extreme shortage of resources, down to near zero per person, will reduce output far below subsistence.
In good Malthusian fashion, almost all of the 30 billion will die, solving the problem.
This not my solution. It is forced by the absurd idea of continuing unlimited population growth.
It's a good program for depopulating Africa.
5
Why is it assumed that declining birth rates in Europe and larger birthrates in Africa are a bad thing? Why is it assumed that the economy in Africa will always be bad and that Africans will still want to immigrate to Europe in 100 years and that will some how be bad?
1
Here’s why. Nowhere with an exploding population is prosperous. Just the opposite. People complain that the prosperous West has falling populations but that is, in fact, why they are prosperous
3
For centuries, Europeans have exploited the vast majority of people of Africa into perpetual poverty. At the same time, Euros have perpetuated a claim that the negritude of Africa's people was negative. Fast forward to modern day, and Europeans, the Gates Foundation included, are terrified of Africa's growing impoverished population with the color of skin that white people fear, and Africa is the problem? in a world of sweet justice, Africans will continue to populate and migrate throughout Europe and America. The wave should be so overwhelming that white people will be forced to recognize it's despicable history of race hatred and falsely earned wealth. "Poor Africans" are not the problem, a falsely idolized European society and rich whites are.
6
BRAVO! @john
2
I blame religion. If women ever get into power, free birth control and free morning after. That will solve the population crises.
The fact that this simple and effective solution does not exist shows how deeply entrenched religions are and should be scrutinized. Especially in all Democracies.
5
Africa is the new fertile ground to attract members of the Catholic Church, who of course doesn't believe in brith control.
6
Bill Gates wrote in the NYT recently, look it up. Also, the GapMinder, a website that projects and shows population rates, is available for free. Hans Reisling has passed, bu 50 minute videos are very entertaining. Hmm, birth control, an issue on a continent,..., where has that been a problem? Maybe Planned Parenthood, where women use drive 200 miles to get a morning after pill? Douthat is going to do away with birth control here in the US. (sadly his wife is likely no longer fertile, but his kids and grandkids are. Imagine waking up in Missouri, and finding out that you and your husband did something stupid at 3 AM, after working and taking care of your teens. You have to take the next day off work, and drive 200 mils to get a sterilization, vasectomy, IUD, sponge diaphragm, patch, female condom, vaginal ring, IUD. (It seems embarrassing to discuss these in an open forum, but hey, the Republicans are the ones making politics out of something that should be behind closed doors, between a woman and her doctor, and if she chooses, a male partner.. )
1
@4Average Joe
Ross only married nine years ago and his wife is relatively young. No info on how many children they have produced so far.
Isn't there an implicit racism here in a concern about immigration and assimilation of black persons into lily-white Europe? There is a despicable premise in this article.
4
what do you expect from a “natalist”? Planet Earth is a closed system. Our species is already changing the climate , obliterating ecosystems and other lifeforms. For supposedly ‘moral’ people, natalists who largely hide behind religious dogma, are really greedy beasts oblivious to their monumental arrogant selfishness and hypocrisy. Even the self absorbed occasionally think of their own future. Spoiling the nest will be hardest on the poorest of the human billions. Regardless of the racial aspect of his article, more people of any kind is not the solution.
4
what I do not hear in these comments is the vast differences in the societies that African and European countries create. I'm glad that we are having a more honest conversation about these things, and it is not racist, we as a world population need to start addressing what a heck of a lot of educated people have been thinking for decades but no one wants to talk about. Asian and European nations are advanced and account for just about all of the noble prizes and technological advances in history. Most of world history can be boiled down to Asian nations against European nations for world domination. This is an uncomfortable topic because we have created a fairy tale that all people all over the world are completely the same. I believe it was the Foreign policy magazine a few years ago that published an article that there are no, and have never been, advanced African nations. what kind of a world will it be when everyone has been transformed into Mexico or Africa? not a world you will want to live in, we need to talk openly about these issues, please stop the politically correct censorship and let's talk it out. https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/09/there-are-no-successful-black-natio...
6
So Douthat says: "...in addition to being cruel, past population control campaigns were often ineffective..." Of course the link that Douthat has to his comment of "being cruel" is a reference to abortion. The word contraception does not appear anywhere in this opinion piece. I think that most of the world agrees that overpopulation is a real danger to the viability of the planet. Why not try and limit the number of people in a country to those that the country can support? Why not try and control the growth of the population, that is unless your disagreement is based upon Catholic religious preaching. Once again Douthat undermines his arguments by basing them upon some made up religious doctrine that only applies to the cult to which he belongs.
2
Women everywhere should have a choice about having children or not. They should know that being pregnant and delivering a child will not be a life threatening experience for the mother and the child. Women should expect that their children will not die of preventable or treatable diseases, war or famine.
None of those conditions are prevalent in most of Africa. And add a patriarchal society and frequent pregnancies are the result.
Scandinavia may be an exception to falling birth rates in Europe and the USA because women there have health insurance, have humane post delivery time off of work, fathers too. Have excellent subsidized day care and know if their children are capable that their education will be funded by the state.
If Douthat were truly a natalist he would agitate for similar conditions for women here instead of reducing access to contraception and abortion..
2
I love Ross Douthat. Again and again he dares to tackle the issues that matter most, issues which are too taboo to discuss in polite company. And, even though I consider myself a progressive, I find myself agreeing, or maybe half-agreeing, with Douthat more often than not, even if I find some of his notions a bit out there.
In these respects, Ross reminds me of someone who, on the face of things, is his polar opposite. I'm thinking of Charles Mudede, a Marxist, native Zimbabwean columnist for Seattle's alt-weekly, The Stranger. Mudede came to mind just now because, this past week, he covered a similar topic, how the phenomenon of dog ownership taking the place of childbearing in Seattle marks it as the apotheosis of the cosmopolitan, high-tech city. You can look up his blog post: "Seattle's Rising Dog Population Reveals What Children of Men Got Wrong."
Mudede relates this to Alfonso Cuarón's 2006 dystopian thriller "Children of Men," which depicts social breakdown in a Western capital in the midst of a global infertility epidemic. Spoiler alert: finally, one woman is discovered to be pregnant, a woman who happens to be an African refugee. Observe that Mudede is himself a member of the African diaspora.
It's worth noting that Charles Mudede has a certain obsession with "Children of Men." (Confession: so do I.) Then it occurred to me, "Shouldn't Ross Douthat as well?" Then I vaguely recalled something. So, I did a search:
"Ross Douthat" "Children of Men"
Sure enough…
1
Our planet is over-populated. People from third world countries who migrate to Europe and the US and cannot support themselves should not have 7, 8, 9 or more children and expect us to take care of them. European countries have their distinct national identities. They have the right to maintain their identities and not become Western Africas. And so do we.
6
"In the late 1990s Europe and Africa had about the same population; a hundred years later there could be seven Africans for every European."
It won't happen. We don't know why. But people in 2100 will.
All these comments about African women having more babies and immigrants inundating Europe and not one word, not a single word about colonization, slavery and Europe's historic economic and environmental depletion of the African continent! Can we talk about that invasion and its devastation before we point fingers at women for having "too many babies" and not following the example of their former overlords?
3
@Afi Scruggs. You can whine all day about former interventions of the colonial powers and their mostly negative effects around the world, but that will never account for the billions of extra people that are destroying the third world and threatening to inundate the rest of the planet. Over population is a literal home grown problem that will only be fixed by home grown solutions regardless of former colonial activities.
10
Can't do much about the past. Focusing on it prevents finding a solution to the current problems.
4
I fear this column starts from the premise that any European reference no Africa must be determined either by imperialist tendencies or by racist instincts. So Macron must be a hypocrite!
It's interesting that in Europe this sort of skeptical denouciation of everyone is coming from those who do not hide their racism and sense of civilizational superiority...
Anyway I really cannot see how can one be a happy go lucky "natalist" while forgetting the cultural, economic and environmental conditions in which Africas' out of control demographics is developing.
The example of that Catholic University professor cannot hide the conditions of African women. To deny them access to birth control on "natalist" grounds is an utmost form of cruelty. To do it while accusing others of "hypocrisy" is an utmost form of comedy.
And considering what we already know about the environment, in a few years all this can result in human catastrophe of proportions never seen.
2
Europeans have always had an appetite for murderously exploiting the nation's of Africa for its wealth of resources , without the least concern for the various people's of Africa.
Why should anyone, particularly "educated " people, belive in anything Europeans ( and their western counterparts) say to "help" Africans?
Prof. Patrick Lumumba expressly pointed out the "pernicious" French policies and practices toward Africa and so it is true today.
Is it really a "new" arrogance of tired old racism that continually drives some westerners to tell Africans what to do and how to live, without any input from Africans ?
Hmm, the Berlin Conference of 1884, saw "enlightened", "civilized" and "educated" white men introduce a continental policy of corruption, theft, bloodshed, death and destruction of Africa's people and resources , that today's " concern" , is merely a decietful camouflage to continue the same European horror.
Africa beware. Never forget.
2
The religious mantra to multiply and populate the earth is amongst the most insane diktats issued by the powerful; a genuine racket for lucre and control of the masses. Ignorant masses are easily fooled and imbued with fear. Fearful, the ignorant masses will procreate and choke the Earth. Nobody wins!
How to reverse this? It must start with a few rich philanthropists who will pour billions into non governmental educational programs meant to create stable sustainable ecosystems where not economic growth and profits are motivating factors but quality of living and health of ecosystems. Once such projects are becoming proved models they can be replicated on larger scale.
Most saliently, the religious dogma in regard to unchecked birth growth must be denounced as an existential threat to Mankind while education and science be given the deciding role in bringing knowledge and the increasing necessary consciousness that population control is a necessity and not a religious whim or haphazard breeding!
And the justifiable European fear of being overrun by a population spawned by Africans' (women AND men) refusal to use birth control will spread to the united states.
The spreading of such fear will lead to the continued election of people like Trump who will, by exploiting the fear, be able to destroy all that James Madison secured.
3
One of the (many) challenges of climate change (and that, of course, is the real problem of overpopulation) is that it's just so enticingly easy to blame "Them". It's the Chinese, Indians, Africans, oil companies, (R)egressives…, anybody but "Me".
The other side of the "with wealth and education birthrates fall — and fall, and fall" coin, is that "with wealth and education", consumption grows - and grows and grows.
Each of us here in The Land of The Free (old white men) consumes, on average, 5 times our share of the planet's resources. Our 327 Million peeps are the Consumptive Equivalent of 1.6 Billion, making us the largest National Consumption Population on the planet. Compared to the average African, our consumption rate is exponentially greater - but hey, it's their fault for having too many starving kids.
Our blithe Over-consumption is doubly destructive - Google "US energy waste" and learn that we waste (WASTE!) somewhere between 60 - 85% of the energy we produce. We drive here, there, everywhere in our single-occupant urban SUV's; overhear/cool our too-big, under-insulated Tacky McMansions; run the lights, TV's, computers even when they're not in use…, all the while refusing to even consider changing our ways because, you know, "they" are worse than me and why should I change unless they do?
We've met the enemy and we're toast.
1
@Miss Anne Thrope. As the "land of the free" becomes increasingly less white our resource consumption is not lessening. When the white majority is finally eliminated thru immigration and birth rates and things haven't gotten better here, who will you blame then? The problem isn't "old white guys". It's humans and old thinking.
2
Pro-natalism is probably one of the most absurd ideological positions that I’ve ever heard of.
Nihilism is more rational. Nothingness has no chance of leading to Malthusian catastrophe.
3
"The cure for poverty has a name, in fact: it’s called the empowerment of women. If you give women some control over the rate at which they reproduce, if you give them some say, take them off the animal cycle of reproduction to which nature and some doctrine—religious doctrine—condemns them, and then if you’ll throw in a handful of seeds perhaps and some credit, the floor of everything in that village—not just poverty, but education, health, and optimism—will increase. It doesn’t matter; try it in Bangladesh, try it in Bolivia, it works—works all the time. Name me one religion that stands for that, or ever has." --Christopher Hitchens
5
Europeans are not going to have more children with the specific, and somewhat strange, goal of beating out Africans in the baby race unless the government is willing to pay for them, and I don't mean some little sop of a tax deduction. The Europeans tend to be socialists and families get far more support there than here, but it's still expensive to raise children there. The only way to get more white children on this planet, which is exactly what you're talking about, is for governments to pay for them.
You're a right winger, which means you don't want any government anywhere to pay for any social services. It's your mantra. So, you're advocating for something that requires an enormous amount of time and resources, but you're not willing to pay for it.
You do realize that makes no sense, right?
But, of course, it does make sense when one remembers you are Roman Catholic. You have a political agenda--the Roman Catholic agenda. Birth control, except strict abstinence, is forbidden. Large families are encouraged. It's no surprise that the Catholic women were the first to chime in when Macron made his unfortunate statement.
Yes, keep pushing that state religion on us, Ross, which if you had your way would be Roman Catholicism.
6
Further evidence of how little governments can actually control. Short of a famine or pestilence that reduces Africa's population dramatically, Europe is likely to be overrun by Africans escaping poverty and kleptocratic governments. The face of Europe in 100 years may be black. As for the US, who knows. The indigenous peoples escaping similar problems in Central America may recolonize the US as a Native American country. Wouldn't that be ironic?
2
So Europeans don't "deserve to control" immigration and their own borders? What complete nonsense. The answer is very simple, close the borders. If Africa insists on having several billion people, most which can't be fed, that is their problem.
12
Actually all humans alive today are of African origin, and they are all the same race. Where they differ is their ethnicity. Thus there are white Africans, black Africans, yellow Africans, and brown Africans. These Africans live all over the globe. The question is, how will these various ethnicities of African origin humans interact? Assimilation doesn't seem to work in large numbers. Most likely, the white Africans will continue to hole up in Europe and have stricter laws to prevent the black Africans from coming into their countries in the future. Regardless of how bad it gets in continental Africa.
1
9 kids? 11? That's obscene. I'm sorry that my contribution to the future sustainability of the planet of exactly zero kids by choice is apparently in vain.
6
@rtj. The childless should get the tax breaks, not the other way around. Our tax system should evolve, just like our immigration system.
7
That is why immigration is the number one issue in Europe.
2
Does "pro natalist" mean someone who wants the state to force women to give birth who don't want to. Probably there are more accurate names for someone like that.
4
So, the solution to the difficulty in dealing with over population in Africa and uncontrolled immigration of Africans to Europe is for Europeans to have more children. This just does not make sense when one of the world's biggest problems is over population. It does make sense if you are using a primitive desert tribe's religious beliefs which have been transmitted to us through the tradition of an unmarried priesthood as a guiding principle. I prefer the Macron approach.
2
I'm surprised you are celebrating the African situation Mr. Douthat. The stats prove that Africans are following Catholic teachings : deny women societal power; don't let women use birth control; ban abortion. I'm surprised that you aren't celebrating God's African children for adhering, whether they are Catholic or not, to Rome's laws.
3
I’m not sure statistics projecting what may happen in the year 2100 are at all meaningful.
The African continent has a lot more to be concerned about TODAY than population growth.
The people there are starving to death - 20 million Africans are at risk from malnutrition- many of them children....and the world watches
@JMS. And you don't see the connection between over population and starvation?!
5
No one should be having large families anymore- regardless of where you live, what education level you have, how much money you have, what race you are or what religion you practice.
Climate change is already making the current population level unsustainable on this planet.
I predict that if global population control is not voluntarily engaged, things will get so bad within the next 50-100 years, many if not all countries will put a limit on the number of children allowed to be born- as China used to do until very recently.
This is not a desired outcome, but will be inevitable if governments do not encourage birth control as well as curb every person's carbon footprint starting today.
4
I’m tired of mysogyny. Either women have too many or too few babies and none of the governments out there make it any easier to raise these kids. And at the end of the day that sad tired old response .... “but you CHOSE to have kids.” Honestly, there has to be a healthy discourse about responsible population replacement levels and whether we value the role of bearing and raising the next generation. Again, we come back to the institutionalized mysogyny characterized by patriarchal societies the world over.
4
The future belongs to those whose descendants are there to inherit it.
5
But the real problem is Africa having too many babies, not Europe having too few. Overpopulation is the real existential crisis affecting our planet. Global warming is just a symptom. The failure of previous effects to reduce the African birthrate doesn't mean it isn't worth trying to get right.
3
What Mr Douthat leaves out from this Op Ed is his continuing opposition to abortion and birth control. His support for more rapid population growth in developed Western economies would mesh with this but somehow he leaves it out, this time
2
And there are those that say we don't need to colonize space.
Male talking about female reproduction. Result - race not gender is the issue.
4
Insane!. I have found in the past a few of Mr. Douthat articles illuminating but this one reinforces the idea that religion truly clouds your mind. We are 20+ year away from environmental catastrophe and the response is lets start having more babies now!!
3
Nature will turn out to be a contraceptive that pushes our global population back in a more sustainable direction. Prepare for lots more human misery.
6
Education for women, education for women, education for women.
5
I was tempted to hurl my laptop against the wall upon reading Ross Douthat's words, "As a pronatalist,...." Mr. Douthat: the earth's population is already too large. We are careening toward environmental, economic, and political catastrophe, which you, and perhaps I, may even live to see. What on earth are can you possibly by thinking?!
3
As long as Africans continue to arrive in Europe in their millions, with hands out, why do Europeans not "deserve" to influence Africans' "baby-making"? Seems to me that some version of "beggars can't be choosers" applies to the Africans' position here.
The safety valve that Western nations provide in absorbing the world's poor via migration needs to be switched off. The Japanese have a prosperous society while accepting virtually no immigration as compared to the immigration-drunk Western basket cases. Oh, the Japanese are "suffering" population decline? Where do I sign up?
5
Higher birth rate is not going to save Europe from the African invasion. They need a group of leaders who have the courage to put up resistance, guard Europe against further immivasion, and yes, that includes towing the ships back to Libya. They should also start mass deportations.
One look at the riots in Paris after they won the World Cup should tell Europeans what the future will soon look like if they don't stop this disastrous invasion from Africa and the Mideast. Multiculturalism is a failure, and assimilation is a pipe dream. Europe needs to wake up in a hurry for their own survival.
5
F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The rich get richer and the poor get - children.”
And yes there are exceptions as mentioned in the article, but the above statement is just as correct today as it was when Mr. Fitzgerald said it.
4
A NYT cultural Marxist "talking point".
But, really, who cares? If they--or whoever it might be--assume what's left, good luck--ivy league safe-spaces sans Hegelian dialectic will be of no help in getting everyone fed and to bed before Late Night.
Greece lost literacy for more than a century. Can happen again--especially if the nodes go down.
1
I'm tired of these unfounded dismissives against immigration. Will immigrants assimilate, even large numbers of them? Of course! Maybe not the way many Europeans and white-centric folks wish, but, yes, assimilation will happen. Europe of a thousand years ago, or even 500 or 200 years ago, is not the Europe of today. People move, things change, deal with it.
4
Whenever I’m feeling gloomy, I turn to National Review and conservatives like Ross Douthat to get thru my day. Their climate indifference and end-times happy talk questioning the motives — rather than the data — of climate scientists lifts the spirits. For a time. Then the reality returns. Douthat suggests that Europeans have more babies because that way there’d be more European workers to, I guess, build dwellings and cars for the hundreds of millions fleeing climate change to come live on the Alp next door. What will all that additional carbon do to the planet? And what will the demise of every non-human species do? And the destruction of green space? And the further disappearance of coastal cities? One thing I am learning from Douthat: climate indifference is evil.
4
"We must find a way to convince African women to stop having so many babies."
You've got to love the way rich men gather to judge poor women and their "many babies." How easily men forget where babies come from.
Have Macron or Gates or any of the other strident male voices considered getting men to keep it in their pants or, at least, use condoms? Probably not. How about getting a woman's consent? In many countries a woman must submit to her husband.
Men want what they want when they want it, leaving women to deal with the consequences. Perhaps the rich white men having these high brow discussions should open the discussion to poor women of color. It might open their eyes.
4
“We must find a way to convince African women to stop having so many babies.”
All other issues in this piece aside, the sexism is infuriating. Does Douthat realize that women can’t make babies on their own? Why are they solely responsible?
4
Of course birthrates have fallen in the developed world, especially in Europe & North America, & it's not all due to higher education levels for women. It is also due to the high cost of raising children in the middle class lifestyle which became the norm in the last century in the developed world. It is difficult to feed, clothe, educate, house & provide medical care for large families on two incomes, much less one. Women go to work out of economic necessity, but can't afford childcare so they forgo children. That aside, I can't think why on earth Mr. Douthat thinks that a higher birthrate among native Europeans would make African migrants easier to assimilate. If anything, there would be more pressure to keep them out to conserve precious resources. The world doesn't need endless population growth. It can't support it. 'Pro-lifers' need to become responsible stewards of human life on earth.
2
More European babies won't solve the crisis of migration or population. The only solution that makes any sense is for Africa and Central America to become decent places to live, so that people want to stay there. This can't happen unless birth rates fall.
Other things need to happen as well. They need good governance, and they need something that I call a high-quality, low footprint lifestyle. Of course we need that in Europe and America as well. The world can't even sustain our footprint, much less extend it to Africa and Central America.
I doubt either of those things will happen. There are too many vested interests in the status quo on both places. So the future looks like more of the same.
The last paragraph in the article has two problems. First, making more Americans and Europeans will not slow down the northward migration. Second, a society has an absolute moral imperative to defend itself. If that requires interference and a wall, so be it. We hope it doesn't end up there, but if it does, moral or not, our societies must defend themselves or go extinct.
Finally, "Macron's law" has a flip side. In developing countries, as the economy rises, the birthrate falls. But in developed countries, as the economy falls, the birthrate follows it. In those places couples tend to delay childbirth until they have steady employment and a home. Given current trends, this often does not happen until too late, and they end up childless.
2
Instead of writing a rebuttal, I'll just report on the choices I personally have made since Ross seems to drawn to this sort of thing:
I'm a white woman who has a BA, MA, PhD, and JD, and I'm married to a white man who has a BA, MA, and PhD. Adoption was our first choice for how to create our family, and we are now the proud and incredibly lucky parents of two amazing children who are not white. We recognize that they have faced and will continue to face challenges growing up in an interracial household, but we are trying our very best to help them become happy, well adjusted adults who will make a positive contribution to the world.
Ultimately, Ross, I don't think this column is about Africans at all. What you really can't abide is the idea that there are educated white women out there who choose not to bear biological children. You obviously find us threatening. Maybe you think we are somehow cheating our destiny?
Otherwise, as so many other astute commenters have pointed out, why ignore the obvious problems of global overpopulation and encroaching environmental disaster?
6
My first day in Paris in 1985 I saw a large billboard with a white infant on it. Below ran the slogan "France needs babies!" And so it has ever been since Camp of The Saints first appeared in that country.
What we all need are fewer babies of any color. Mother Earth is groaning already and lashing back, her systems of balance wrecked by our hubris.
Luckily for us and our fragile civilization, social mobility, education, and modern economies tend to produce smaller families.
So we in the "developed" world all need to ask ourselves what we all can do to not only stop population growth but manage contraction to, say, a couple of billion folk in a century. A new form of capitalism not based upon continual and accelerating growth could do it, but that solution requires books, not comments on an op-ed.
5
@Peak Oiler
Google "Responsible Capitalism." From startups to corporate giants like Unilever, people and corporations are trying, against great odds, to figure out how to balance capitalism with equality and sustainability. Books have been written. Articles have been written. Movements have begun. Our global capitalistic system, on the whole, just doesn't care. I believe it's going to take some sort of global catastrophe for us to change course.
Me? I'm just sitting here drinking my coffee, annoyed with Ross for trying to turn everybody into a Roman Catholic.
4
@CF, yes. Ross always does that, mindless to the very good reasons that many of us LEFT the Church in the first place.
I am fond of works like Cradle to Cradle that present alternatives to Cancerous Capitalism. There is another way trying to be born. What I'm not seeing is enough attention to this vital work. We need to move ahead beyond the false god of Profit as our sole motive.
Not even a sentence or a thought addressing the real problem with population growth: the continued degradation of the environment. Wake up Ross and fellow natalists; there are already an unsustainable number of humans on our overwhelmed planet. We should be focusing on controlling growth, not on breeding more Europeans.
4
Actions speak louder than words. In the US, for example, incentivize middle-class child-rearing by instituting free preschool and large, refundable tax breaks to young people with children. Instead, we eliminate the personal exemption from the tax code while young parents pay thousands they can't afford for childcare, all so we can give huge tax breaks to the 1%.
2
The history of Europe may be instructive. The noted historian of first millennium migrations, Peter Heather, points out in "Empires and Barbarians" that the contrast between the wealthy Roman Empire and the impoverished Germanic "barbarians" on their borders led to repeated and successively larger incursions and invasions. Eventually the Roman frontiers fell, and the Empire with them. It might be a good idea for Europeans to be thinking about the long-term evolution of the population and wealth disparity between them and their African neighbors.
4
Another fine example of Mr. Douthat's instinct for unintentional comedy. His analysis can be paraphrased as, "We seem to have an overpopulation problem, but it's not really a problem. We'll just grow our way out of it by increasing our population more."
The human population of Africa is presently around 1.4 billion, and is expected to increase to about 2.4 billion by 2050 (source:
https://africacheck.org/factsheets/factsheet-africas-population-projecti....
Meanwhile, global warming is causing climate change more rapidly than previously predict, with major impacts expected by 2040 (source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/10/ipcc-report-clima....
Global warming will severely affect agriculture in Africa, more than in Europe. We can anticipate a humanitarian crisis on the scale of billions of lives within 20 to 30 years.
We have spent the last 20 to 30 years arguing about whether to even do anything about global warming, so I do not see not much reason to be optimistic about progress in the next 2 or 3 decades.
President Macron is correct in his concerns for the future of Africa and the future of Europe. And the rest of humanity.
We are all together traveling on a big ship called Earth. We believe it's unsinkable. We might just be wrong about that.
10
Remarkable how racists, who believe that they are "more human" than others, fail to see that racism is an indicator of being *more* like a chimp or monkey.
This is Douthat's version of joining the Trumpian bandwagon-- it is now OK to say that "white" people should out-reproduce "black" and "brown" people. Incredible.
European culture (the Enlightenment, democracy, rule of law, value of the individual), as others have pointed out, can be implemented, and obviously has been, just as well by people with different skin color and facial features.
All it requires is that people mature beyond the point where their only sense of identity comes from which chimp-troop they belong to...Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, "White", and so on.
12
When women have no control or power with regard to their own lives there is a higher birthrate. As women become more educated and have more control over their own lives the birthrate tends to fall. Perhaps Mr Douthat will find a solution in those statements somewhere that explains why white women in Europe aren't having more children. Maybe those African families moving into Europe with girl children will do what the white European women are doing.
3
@Carole Goldberg
Not long ago I read, that the middle and upper classes of Ghana and the Ivory Coast still have 4 to 6 children. Unfortunately I forgot the source of the information. But girl's education seems to be only one factor among several contributing to a lower birth rate.
1
@Carole Goldberg. You are correct of coarse. The problem is that in places like Africa the entire social system is breaking down due to over population. When the everyday struggle is just to feed the ever growing hordes of people there is no energy, money, time, resources, or anything else available for education of women or anybody else. The environment, everything, is sacrificed to just survive and produce more people. It's the most self destructive thing humans are capable of.
2
all who read this and thought Ross was actually advocating for higher European birthrates miss what he really is saying;
that African migration will ruin whats left of Europe and it must be stopped so they might survive b/c most of Africa will be lost.
I believe in climate change as much as any non-republican but the armageddon/cataclysm/doomsday projected, and yes its just projecting it'll be near human extinction by 2100, is kinda laughable.
but if you take his argument a step further to understand what he's really saying; its starting to happen there and same thing will happen in US if we dont stanch immigration despite fact its slowed down alot, realize that if made same assertion regards hispanics, he's be tarred and feathered in these pages faster you can say identity politics. he knows better believe me.
which shows why he-who-will-not-acknowledged-nor-named is using it as his biggest motivator to prevent a "blue wave" we all hoping for at mid-terms.
and its in part due to the overreach by both sides that will make Mr. Bloomberg the next president mark my words.
3
I don't think Douthat did the issue of contraception, racism, and overpopulation justice.
Advocating more white births is a short-sighted solution to a large issue that needs a long-term one. Ideological change is fundamental, which can come with better thought out contraceptive programs in both developing and developed countries. Education does inevitably lead to lower birth rates.
4
Douthat is blinded by his pro-life faith into bad thinking about global population policy. Past population migration movements encouraged technological growth abroad in a world with untapped resources. As outliers, young people sought more opportunities and maltreated minorities (often bright and educated) fled oppression. Rapid improvements in trade technology provided an expanding infrastrucure for creating healthy socio-economic growth (desptie initial strain for displaced natives). Modern-era migration is driven by national collapses affecting the entire population (rampant political failure, war and tribal strife, greed). The Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s is an early example: English mis-rule ended up creating the Irish-American community. Today such mis-rule is international: A mixture of local awefulness and unrestrianed global corporcracy mixed with authoritatian oligarchy leavened with self-serving ideology. Chinese "Belt and Road" investment in Africa will not deliver the goods. The world has to help Africa fix its problems at the source - develop responsive government in Africa that creates local production infrastructures that encourage local agronomy and industry to flourish for community benefit. Even then, African nations need population control devices to deal with climate change, whichs start with birth control for all women who want it free of hectoring by Ross Douthat and his superstructure.
2
And so Europe turns a darker shade of pale. So what? The answer isn’t guns at borders, accelerating white populations or colonialist eugenics. The answer is increased global collaboration and sharing of the wealth, education and care towards the survival of all. We are either in this together or we are all doomed to a short brutish and very unhappy world.
9
It seems like encouraging population growth in Europe as a solution to excessive population growth in Africa only solves the problem of the relative African population of Europe increasing, if that's really a problem.
The more concerning thing about population growth in Africa is the concerning thing about population growth anywhere. More people put more strain on the earth, and we're not doing a great job of protecting the earth from the effects the humans we already have.
3
It is a near certainty that climate change with the inevitable, resulting mass migrations, combined with the major wars that will result, will cull the human herd. There is nothing sustainable about modern civilization as it is now run.
The sad truth is that until people start dropping like flies in the Western and advanced Asian countries nothing of consequence will be done. It will of course be too late by then.
This columnist’s concerns are built on assumptions that will no longer be important or relevant for the world our descendants will inherit. War is coming, mass starvation is coming, along with disease and mega death.
These are not the opinions of a ‘prepper’ or religious fanatic, or maniac of any stripe. I am simply an ordinary someone who is well read in history, and well informed about the coming climate and political disaster.
The Trump administration, and to be fair many other governments are playing the game according to rules that are wrong or irrelevant. Our fate is sealed. Let Africa breed, it won’t matter in the end.
2
@D Priest. The euros will eventually militarize their southern border. Their native populations will demand it. We are headed to the same conclusion here. No one wants to live in a northern version of these failed countries.
1
7.7 billion people on this planet and still rising. Mr. Douthat you want more people still? Come on man! When is enough enough? The tipping point will not be pretty. When mother nature does her re-balancing act humans will have to face the pain head on. I am glad that I will be gone. Humans are so short sighted.
7
I once read that a couple in India had to have at least 12 children (at the time) to have a better than 50 - 50 chance that one of them would be a male child who would be able to support them when and if they reached old age. (Women had no chance of doing this)
I would wager that the situation is similar in many African countries today.
3
2046: "Italy south of Rome has been abandoned to climate refugees from Africa. The remaining portion of Bangladesh and other countries east of the irradiated zone between Delhi and Lahore are exploring emergency interventions in the atmosphere to prevent runaway warming. The border wall between Mexico and the US is holding (for now). The newly elected Green Administration in Washington has characterized this intervention as 'dangerous' and threatened them with a nuclear response." from minute 12. "Climate Wars" (2010) https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1475819433
3
@Jamie, Read 'Camp of the Saints' by Jean Raspail.
1
It's also fascinating that while white people can shop for ethnic identifications on ancestry.com and by using "my 23 and me" saliva swab kits, many of those same people don't actually think about how their potential transatlantic or transcontinental connections actually came about...
The subtext of this article and some of the early comments reflect the fact that many Americans just don't like to talk about race.... This MIGRATION PROBLEM of non-white, non-European people in places that NEED population growth is inherently an issue specific to race and ethnicity. It's almost as though climate change concerns are just a more palatable way of centering policy concerns about non-white migration flows.
Tell it like it is.
2
@Kenneth Leon. Here it is then. No where on this planet needs any population growth. No where is there a longterm sustainable population. Everywhere could do better with fewer people. The developed countries use far to many resources per capita and the undeveloped world is simply breeding itself to destruction. The way forward is fewer humans everywhere.
5
Malthus correctly pointed out long ago that when there is gross overpopulation of a continent, natural forces such as disease, lack of food, hazardous weather, lack of water, and the like tend to intervene to reduce the overpopulation problem.
4
@Dave D
And global Big Pharma has an expensive solution to that.
2
Evidently Ross shares Trump's and other white supremacists' concerns about the color balance of the worlds population and protection of European culture. So sorry that you fear these "others." I just downloaded an album of music recorded by Sheku Kanneh-Mason, an incredibly accomplished and talented cellist of Sierra-Leonean descent whose family immigrated into England. He and his talented siblings who are all musically gifted will help to carry on the European culture that Ross is so fearful will be lost. And he is very brown! One well-to-do young family I know has eight children but most of them are adopted from places like Ethiopia and Guatemala. And yesterday at the grocery store I noticed white parents with two children, one of which was Hispanic and the other Asian. I applaud these parents because they are the ones who will save the world if that is still possible, not white people who have a lot of children out of fear of those people of color.
8
It's the title of this piece that bothers me. Why does the NYtimes continuously use titles that imply racist motivations when racism might not necessarily be the driving factor? Any publicity is good publicity and I feel that this sort of thing is counterproductive - people think "A lot of people are apparently racist? Well...then there must be a reason. The mainstream media tells me simply to not be racist because it's bad. But if so many people are racist, there must be more to it than that". All of this despite the fact that it's you proclaiming that "blackness" specifically is what these people fear.
2
Ross, may I use Sweden as an example of the Europe you want the Popeäs views on birth control to become policy.
Present policy in Sweden. Up to age 21, all methods of birth control are free. In some counties the age limit is even higher, up to 25. We do not want you persuading people to change that.
Imagine if that policy were to be practiced in every state in the USA. (I start with that sentence to remind you how hard it is for American politicians and religious groups to even talk about such policy, let alone implement it).
If the United States cannot bring universal birth control and universal right to abortion to all 50 states plus Puerto Rico, how could such national policy be brought to a country such as Somalia?
I use Somalia because SE has a large Somali diaspora, and since all us immigrants are registered by country of birth it would be possible for a medical research team to compare birth rates for Somali-born women in Sweden with their sisters in Somalia, perhaps by beginning at the Edna Adan hospital in Hargesia.
You can take that further. I have used that example since I have met individually many 100s of Somali-born female high-school students at the Red Cross in Linköping SE and often imagine medical research projects that might be worth carrying out.
If you dear reader live in MN, vote for Ilhan Omar in November!
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
10
No mention of climate change? Overpopulation is one of the real problems on the planet and contributes a lot to climate change. Droughts are a real problem in a large swath of Africa, people are having trouble already in feeding their children. Women can't advance themselves if they are always having children. Birth control is needed so they themselves can choose. What? Women choose for themselves? Yeah, women should choose for themselves.
Your examples of Catholic women with many children are RICH and can afford to advance in their careers. Most women in sub-Sahara Africa are not rich and having one child after another ruins their own health and hampers any dreams they themselves may have.
Oh, I wish men like Ross were the ones having babies. Yep, I surely do.
6
There you go! Counter what you pose as a racist sentiment with the suggestion that we have more white children.
The desire to level population growth in Africa, as well as in other parts of the world, like Bangledesh, as an example, is that the land upon which they live does not sustain the population. They need economic growth, crop and farming growth and sufficient rainfall, to keep the population they have alive. The color of all of those potential families is not relevant; the fact that destitute and starving they need to migrate is relevant.
Raising more white babies does not help an African find water, or build an economy. Having more white babies does not reduce the need for migration. Having fewer babies in regions that historically have not supported the families reduces the misery levels.
Ross, we often disagree, but it isn't usually because you made a dumb argument. This time it is.
15
America's white European majority is aging and shrinking with a below replacement level birthrate. And the white European American majority life expectancy is decreasing due to alcoholism, drug addiction, depression and suicide. While the only white Americans having any babies come from the bottom of the socioeconomic educational heap,
Africa was the last continent to be fully colonized by Europeans. Advanced organized civilizations along with hostIle diverse environments including disease were barriers that limited Europe to trafficking in human beings until the end of the 19th Century. While the ethnic sectarian tribes of Europe pretended to occupy a higher civilized nation state of humanity. Two world wars exposed the deadly hypocritical white supremacist charade.
Fear of a black continent has nothing to do with values or interests. Ethnic sectarian supremacist nationalism hid behind fascism and communism as nominal socioeconomic political theories. This is all about color aka race and political governing socioeconomic supremacy behind rhetorical euphemisms.
1
It was a $100 billion+ event just to manage the 30% drop in New Orleans' population post Katrina. In the next 80 years billions will need to be evacuated from the tropics/subtropics to somewhere north of 40 degrees (the Kansas -Nebraska line).
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature15725 (Figure 4) and "the slope of the damage function is large even for slight warming, generating expected costs of climate change 2.5–100 times larger than prior estimates for 2 °C warming" in relevant part.
1
I don't share Ross's religion, though I was raised in it. I spent most of my life if not anti-religion, certainly not thinking well of its institutional forms. Newly converted to a much smaller, older version of Ross's faith, but very close to it doctrinally, I have come to terms with what is happening. It's odd, really. I love humanity, but we are an incredibly stupid and short-sighted species, on whom our brains are wasted.
That being said, I have no problem with our breeding ourselves out of existence. If we choose to give into the forces of evil, and destroy the creation God made, that is on us. I do feel sorry for the planet, as we will destroy most of it in the process. Well, except for the cockroaches. Maybe the meek were truly intended to inherit the earth after all, and if you doubt their meekness, shine a flashlight on some. They long preceded us here, and will undoubtedly survive until our sun goes nova. Humanity? Not looking that likely. So be it.
3
Given Douthat's focus on the Catholic Church, it is puzzling he makes no mention of that institution's influence on fueling the African population bomb by their staunch opposition to any form of birth control beyond the woefully inadequate rhythm method.
The suffering created by "holy men" who claim to read God's mind is beyond comprehension and without mercy.
If the motivation isn't primarily to assure that Catholics out reproduce people of other religions, I cannot fathom another rational reason.
But what's logic got to do with it. About as much as love has to do with it.
13
@alan haigh. Between Christianity and Islam Africa is well on its way to a population catastrophe. The sooner we (the human race) abandon this primitive notions of "out breeding the competition" the sooner we will at least have a chance of saving ourselves and the planet.
4
@Al Of course, churches are the original corporations and if they aren't growing they are dying - the bottom line is about increasing the population of followers to support the church.
By definition, ideology is not rational or based in reality--it is simply belief. As children grow up, they check their beliefs (Santa, the tooth fairy) against reality, and they usually adjust their beliefs accordingly. As much as you want to believe more people is a good thing, surely even a cursory observation would show you that, sans more planets to live on, your belief is unsupported by reality.
The solution to a catastrophic flood is not another, countervailing flood. The fact that past Western attempts at third-world population control have been cruel, exploitative or ineffective does not mean the problem is not real. Your "solution" is nothing short of crazy.
2
For those blaming the Catholic Church, do you really think that Africans are avoiding birth control to stay on the good side of the church? That is laughable, as is the notion that the Church's advocating family planning would make a bit of difference. But don't fret, the corrections put into place by a warming planet are here and accelerating. The population forecasts in Ross' article will never be realized.
Mother Earth will take care of our population problem. Two hundred and fifty years of industrialization has set the stage for a horrific chapter of life here on the third rock from the sun. If you are worried about migration / assimilation issues now, what will we do when 50 million people have to flee Bangladesh?
7
The applicable natural law is not the Macron law but the Malthusian law, which dictates that population growth is exponential while the growth of the food supply is linear.
8
I agree with this article. If demographic and cultural change happens too quickly in ANY society, the result is an ugly (possibly genocidal) war. This notion that functional multiracial and multicultural democracies are somehow the norm is dangerously naive.
(In fact, I'm not aware of a functional multiracial democracy anywhere in the world right now--western or non-western.)
4
Overpopulation is a large part of the world's turmoil right now.
3
We all out of Africa. The difference is only when and how, by car, by boat, by plane or by foot.
@Paddy O'B
European Neanderthals were not out of Africa; there are Europeans and those of European ancestry that have those genes. Wherever the "out of Africa" humans traveled, they destroyed and violently harmed as much as they invented and built. Just cycles of war, rape, slavery, and revenge.
1
Good lord. Suggesting that Europeans solve the immigration problem by having more children is nuts. The planet is already in crisis. More European children is not the answer. If Macron is right, education and opportunity for women could make a difference. We need to spread knowledge and wealth, not hoard what we have.
31
So the next arms race will be a baby race? Because otherwise they might really replace us? I know that's just the distraction. The real issue here is the .1% must have their consumers. There's never enough for some people.
2
European elites are worrying about African babies for the same reason that no Republican president will ever appoint a Supreme Court justice without a wink-and-a-nudge that Roe v. Wade will, at its core, be upheld. (Syllogism #32: the Roberts court will never take a case that might put Roe in jeopardy.)
They will tinker with waiting periods and parental notification, but Roe will always be the law of the land. ("Roe Hysteria" gets the masses to the polls.)
To the original point: European elites are worrying about African babies for the same reason that no Republican president will ever appoint a Supreme Court justice without a wink-and-a-nudge that Roe v. Wade will, at its core, be upheld. Because if Roe is out of force, then the clinics in Gary will be closed, and we are looking at a tsunami of minority voters -- and a "blue" Indiana -- 20 years hence.
Ugly, but true.
1
The world's population has doubles in the last 50 years. The population of Africa has grown 30% faster than that of the rest of the world. That's not 'Afrophobia' as this article suggests, it's irresponsibility on the part of Africans for contributing to an unsustainable world population growth.
4
@James. The planet produces 80 million extra people per year. This means another billion every 12 years. Africa is responsible for 30 million/yr of those. It is not racism to call attention to this. It is a matter of humanities survival.
No one with a functioning brain or functioning ethical system is "pro-natalist" in the face of 21st-century climate change, resource depletion, and habitat destruction.
16
I read this a few times trying to get the gist of it. I think Macron & BiIl Gates for that matter are worried that all these people will have no where to go but North, or to more prosperous places. I don't think 'white' Europeans having more children will solve the problem. The problem is too much poverty & too many people. And not enough land, jobs, money to keep them home, (so to speak). They will migrate for opportunity. We are going through something similar right here, although for different reasons. Thousands, maybe millions of people are coming North because there is nothing but violence, no jobs, no law, total corruption throughout Central America. Look at this caravan of 5 thousand people. This problem is mainly fueled by the illegal drug trade, and could be solved by legalizing drugs. But it's still the same end result. In fact when I saw the title I though Mr Douthat was talking about North America. Probably the main reason Trump got elected, and keeps his hardcore supporters is fear of a 'Brown' USA.... Bill Gates & others have been trying to slow down the African birthrate problem for awhile, as mentioned. It's common sense and the humane thing to try and do.
233
@Doctor Woo, Not too long ago Bill & Melinda Gates' foundation were very invested in inoculating African children, reducing Malaria campaign, finding vaccines, etc. Then they've done a 180. Perhaps recognizing that saving millions of African babies is not exactly prudent for future of the planet. It has in part resulted in overpopulation there.
1
Dude, watch Soylent Green. Nuff Said. There’s a terrible reckoning coming, a la “The Spanish Disease.”@Doctor Woo
@Doctor Woo: W/in a century, pigmentation will be CRISPR-optional. Race will fade as an issue. Viz: top journals.
2
As an African, some of the things I read in the article and comments are painful - not because of their truth but the ignorance. A little research would do justice. Population is not the biggest problem for Africa...its the Western world, and now the East.
167
it's the trend that matters, not the current population size.
1
@Fred
Much of the uncertainty, economic shifts, strife and discombobulation that the U.S. has endured for the better part of 20 years now is due to the DOUBLING of our population since the 1960s. And that doubling is the result of LBJ's poorly thought out revamped 1965 immigration laws that has resulted in 150 million immigrants flooding into the U.S. since then by Africans, Latinos, Asians - all high breeding, low skill, low education and highly religious regions. Not all change is good, especially floods of massive disruptive numbers of other populations.
2
@Fred. I notice you live in the U.S. I'm wondering why you move to, and live in the hell of the western world? Perhaps a quick visit to a place like Nigeria would open your unseeing eyes to reality. If you can actually go to Africa and not see what over populations is doing to that continent and its people you are blind and ignorant.
5
1. Africa is not a country. You can’t talk about “African birth rates” and expect to come up with answers.
2. What do the women of African countries want?
3
@Julie Zuckman’s. 2) easy. Get to Europe.
Europe will be overtaken by the womb alone. Muslims will be the majority in a few more generations.
5
Once you inject the term "racist" into a dialog, justified or not, there is no longer a dialog. Or at least one including you.
3
The problem between Europe and Africa is on a smaller scale occurring between the US an Central America. Convoys of migrants heading to the US are the latest sign. The answer is not more walls or increased birthrates for white people. It is development aid and political pressure to end the corruption and crime waves that have engulfed these countries. Helping countries become more prosperous and less corrupt is not easy but we actually have made a great deal of progress around the world. For a period of time Brazilians in Massachusetts were returning to home because the opportunities were better. Now progress has stalled, some countries have fallen backward and some have not made much progress. It is all the more reason for Europe and the US to act as moral leaders by getting over our xenophobia and racism and attacking the difficult problems these countries face in an organized and humane way. With effort we can even get China see that they can become a respected leader among nations if they help in this effort. They already did it once when they helped break the logjam on the Paris Climate Change Accord. The alternative, as the effects of climate change take hold, is massive migrations from poor to rich countries that can only be slowed but never stopped with brutal military power. Wall will be mounted with machine guns and other heavy weapons. We will actually end up living in the dystopian hell portrayed in is so many current movies.
2
Women have fewer children when 2 things happen.
1) they have access to birth control and 2) infant and child mortality decreases enough so you can expect your first children to live. It’s hard to persuade women who watch their children die of disease that they should have fewer.
As for that first thing, the GOP could get behind family planning. And when they do maybe they could be taken seriously.
Whether GOPers like it or not, climate change is happening and it will get hotter and stormier. Their delusional beliefs do not change the facts. It will be harder to support the populations we have. And BTW, Americans suck up far more than their share of the planets resources.
Georgia is already coming after Tennessee’s water because they don’t have enough in Atlanta. They want to move the border; we are opposing that. It’s already started.
We already seem to have more people on this planet than we can employ. Maybe it’s time to abandon pro-natalisman and make life less miserable for the non-wealthy people we already have.
5
Another matter that adds to increasing surges of relatively poor populations to regions that will enable them to access more resources are advancements in information technology. More and more poor people now know there are opportunities for better lives elsewhere. Cell phone penetration in Africa is now at 60% this will only increase. Mobile populations with information are going to move. Both climate and economic disasters on the horizon will make - in short order -our current migration issues seem insignificant. We are looking at a tsunami of the dispossessed armed with cellphones quite understandably looking not only for "a better life" but survival. What has been happening in Europe and the Mediterranean has only been a small scale dress rehearsal. Buckle your seatbelts. We are sitting on our hands while the world - due to climate collapse and economic disruption - is about to go to hell in a handbasket. We need to be working on rationale plans to address these issues and implementing them now. Not waiting till the complete chaos coming is upon us and cooler heads are unlikely to prevail. I am not optimistic.
2
I think Europeans now care more about a disgusting US President blindly and sycophantly supported by lawless Republicans.
@Anna. Trump will be gone at some point. The millions headed north will not. Priorities.
2
Macron, et.al., are missing the point. The massive influx of incoming African's is not due to Europe being particularly attractive. It's not because of a surging birth rate. It's more that people, human beings, are fleeing untenable lives all across that continent.
Rape, murder, genocidal warfare, environmental degradation and sheer madness swirl all over their lands. What human being, especially one with children, will live in such a hell as that when there's the possibility of a safe-harbor elsewhere?
So the worries of Macron, Trump and the rest are misplaced. We here in the West need to deal with, support solutions to, these core problems of madness that confound not only African's but Latin/South America and the larger world as well.
We have the wealth; we have the power, consequently it's our responsibility to aid them in place. And for the sake of our humanity we should; as a matter of fact we'd better. Because we cannot afford to ignore their cries, can we? Born of desperation they will come anyway if we do nothing.
John~
American Net'Zen
2
@John
Don't you think it rather patronizing towards Africans by assuming they are not capable to conduct their own affairs? Rape, murder, genocide and environmental degradation are not social maladies that can be prevented through the magic wand of guilt ridden white men or women.
@dm: Of course they bear some of the burden, but do you have ANY sense of the history of the last few hundred years of Africa? Look at it clearly. Several hundred years of colonizing, invasive, rule by Europeans (especially) are a root the main cause of all the current crisis. Colonization that was all about extraction and to hell with the local populace (for the most part).
And in today's world it continues doesn't it? The corporate world, in conjunction with Western/Asian (now) States, in seeking, unfettered access to resources and raw materials continues to perpetuate the turmoil and chaos because it is in their interests to do so.
And since those corporations are mostly homed in the first world West we now suffer the consequences of their actions. Actions I might add they, so far, have suffered little repercussions from. So again, the burden is on us to help them. Maybe we should pull in those corporations, too, eh? Heh!
Bottom line? The elite and privileged West put them in their hole; morality dictates we help get them out.
Just some thoughts worth about that much.
Welcome to the world our African friends.
Macron is a very SLY talker.
Europe's and his crisis isn't black babies, it's Muslims planning their European caliphate bringing Sharia Law, head-chopping, human slavery, and the genital cutting of girls from Germany to Gilbraltar.
While Democrat progressives gained a lot of support talking up eugenics and abortions for black people a century ago under Woodrow Wilson, America has dismissed such garbage since.
(Well, excepting how Planned Parenthood has been the top ender of black lives going back 45 years, of course.)
3
There are two population issues that need to be addressed and resolving them will not comfort anyone.
First, we need to recognize that the most demonstrably intellectually competent, innovative and capable people in the western world, Japan and a few other spots are not having enough children to sustain their populations. This is a matter of choice by the men and women involved. It is cultural suicide.
Second, we need to recognize that the people having the most babies are least likely to solve the major problems confronting civilization. Sub-Saharan Africa, India, Pakastan et al societies remain closer to stone age villages than to 19th century Europe. There are many reasons, including but certainly not limited to colonialism, for that reality.
So one issue for global survival, let alone tranquility, is obvious.
Over time, people will have to solve matters of global climate change, technological displacement of labor, Orwellian mashups of propaganda and news, fresh water supplies, nuclear proliferation just for starters.
Which peoples are better able to address these issues?
Over what period of time?
So far, the western peoples have really screwed up much of the world while at the same time advancing the quality of life broadly through innovation. Other than over population, the under developed have not contributed to the major problems of the world, but have not contributed much of anything to improving quality of life either.
The outlook is not promising.
3
Given the new projections about climate change, why would anyone have children and inflict that future on them? I already worry for my grown children and two young grandchildren. If I were younger, I am not sure I would have children.
8
@aacat
I'm a Boomer and decided in the 1960s not to breed. Instead, I adopted a girl abandoned at birth by her married parents in a highly Catholic country who already had a litter. They couldn't be bothered to use birth control, didn't want a girl. Her prospects were: release at age 16 from the state orphanage onto the streets to sell her body or deal drugs and die young.
1
Natural selection is galloping along, unaffected by the opinions of educated Westerners. Affluence and education adversely affect reproduction, like a disease that reduces fertility. Education and affluence spread the disease. So the whole situation appears hopeless. Europe especially is a sinking ship, in some countries with remarkably low birthrates. Europe is increasingly populist and dysfunctional, with serious internal conflicts including those leading to terrorism and rioting (how many cars torched in the last five years?).
1
Deserve to control? Yes, they should try and control Africa's birthrates if many millions of them go north into Europe in the future. Like the Honduran caravan except only much bigger.
This is an international concern, not just Europe's alone.
3
There he goes again.
There are many possible solutions to the fraught encounter between Europeans and Africans, but Europeans having more babies is not one of them.
When will people like Douthat get the message? If we care anything about nature, beauty, and the climate, the world cannot sustain the number of people we have now, let alone millions more who will want, quite reasonably, to eat meat, drive cars, live in air conditioned buildings, and travel on vacations like we do. So, no, Europeans should not have more children. No one should.
Douthat has two abiding obsessions, ones that continually distort the thinking of this otherwise intelligent columnist: That we need to have more children, and that a group of partially differentiated cells of, say, 8 weeks' gestation has rights that trump those of an adult human being. It is as strange and sad as it is irrational.
18
@Wesley Clark. Exactly. 17th century thinking in the 21st century is no longer just outdated. It's insanity.
2
Anything that can't go on forever, won't, including population growth. If Africa will have 4.5 billion people, should Europeans try for 4.5 billion too? What would life be like for those billions? For nonhuman living things? The only sustainable rate of population growth is zero.
5
Sorry, but the last thing the world needs is more humans, of any color. We are destroying the planet, laying waste ecosystems, pushing mass extinctions of every living thing that isn’t us. Eventually, we will render the planet uninhabitable, unless we stop breeding beyond sustainability. We are rushing toward a future without adequate food, water, or clean air. Then what? Famine, disease, war, extinction.
12
@LJ. The planet will always be habitable, although not necessarily by humans. Life is resilient.
1
Many false things here. First of all, no need to go through a European detour to be concerned about Africa birthrates (more bluntly: many more people will die in Africa than by trying to reach the coasts of Italy ...eg remember that Nigeria is anticipated to have 400 000 000 inhabitants by 2050, a drama by itself), so Macron's concern needs not be wholly self (or european-) centered.
Next, France's birthrates have traditionally been somewhat higher than those of other European countries (notably Germany) thanks to generous parental leave, early (and free) schooling, and adequate job protection for returning mothers. So yes, European birthrates can (and should) be boosted, by the use of progressive regulations ...
Nevertheless, this will by no means "counteract" the demographic time-bomb in Africa, which should be vigorously addressed by women's education and birth control, including (yes, horresco referens), abortion...an agenda unlikely to be endorsed by Mr Douthat
2
It's blatantly clear that Africa and the world need population control. The load on the planet's resources and the waste produced are already at unsustainable levels and are leading to an environmental and social catastrophe.
Studies have shown that when women in third world countries start having children later and have fewer children they have a better chance for education and economic progress. The birthrates in third world countries are high because of cultural and religious norms and the oppression of women.
7
The planet is already overpopulated. When do humans call a stop to that? I, for one, don't want to subsidize big families.
14
The photo is too adorable. The article is worth clicking on for that (1 baby) alone. Sigh... 4 and a half billion goings on!; this is... worth writing about. Who doesn't remember the joy and trials of any childhood? While the world's, not just USA and others', poverty rate has fallen, from 90% in 1990 to 25% today (in which time I became poor), it's a pretty non-economic problem, if you ask me, the amount of new Disney productions I! want to buy, let alone what to do in the time it takes an average parent to figure out how to work a dvd player, without crashing an entire hotel. There's got to be a niche in there somewhere...
It is consumption that drives climate change not the numbers of humans.
Having said that, if governments and men stop focusing on controlling women ( more babies, less babies) and instead empower them to make their own decisions , the people who want children will have them and the world will be a happier place.
5
As an equal-opportunity anti-natalist, I will never pass up an opportunity to comment on one of Ross Douthat's articles. The position of empathy is clear. NOBODY (regardless of parents' race, nationality, etc.), NOBODY should be forced into a 100-year-long meaningless bout of sentience without their consent (and, of course, such pre-natal consent is impossible). To create sentience is to create the capacity to suffer. I never want to be the reason someone suffers. Whether that's a scratch, a stubbed toe, or cancer. I never want to cause another human being to suffer needlessly. Anti-natalism is the position of human empathy. Let us go quietly as a species into that good night.
2
The part which blows me away about this is that nobody considers the issue of climate change. With the warming of the earth @ the pace we're doing right now, these countries will continue to see their citizens emigrate en-masse to western countries. The good news is that fertility rates in these countries are falling thanks to improvement in living standards in some areas, but the best way we can help to develop these countries & stop the mass migration of these people into the west is to invest heavily in renewable technology & stop the progression of man made climate change.
Sex education is strongly important as well, something that poverty, corruption & hostility by the conservative leadership & segments of their societies make much more difficult. Africans, Latinos & Arabs do deserve these education like everyone else.
Lastly, let's do keep in mind that fears about demographic changes are mostly borne out of racism & xenophobia, as well as fear of losing status. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if some future dictator in say the U.S pulls of Nicolae Ceausescu which is banning abortion,contraception & imposing fertility quotas for whites to prevent what they see as ""The white race" going extinct". There are unfortunately some racial undertones with both this article & some of the sentiment I described in this paragraph.
3
Trump appeased "pro-natalist" conservatives by cutting contraception and family planning funds in Africa, and Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accord because conservatives deny climate change. Together, conservatives create a perfect lethal African storm, and all Ross can say is that perhaps white women should have more babies so that we're not overrun by black people?
Let's be responsible and moral instead, like conservatives purport to be:
Restore free birth control and abortion access in African clinics, so that women in Burkina, for example - who bear an average of 5 1/2 children - don't live in permanent poverty with children at death's door. Their world is grim now, and with more babies and dire food and water shortages expected in the coming years, it will be nothing short of devastating.
From www.unenvironment.org:
No continent will be struck as severely by the impacts of climate change as Africa. Given its geographical position, the continent will be particularly vulnerable due to the considerably limited adaptive capacity, and exacerbated by widespread poverty. Climate change is a particular threat to continued economic growth and to livelihoods of vulnerable populations.
By 2020, between 75 and 250 million people on the continent are projected to be exposed to increased water stress due to climate change. In the same year in some countries yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent.
7
It seems to me that there is considerable evidence that if over-population is not controlled, we all are going to be in serious trouble. We are seeing this already by massive migrations from entire regions. The problem is not only in Sub-Saharan Africa, but also from Northern Africa to Asia and Central America. Many people seem to forget that Sub-Saharan Africa is the continent that has the most refugee camps. Mr. Douthat's solution for the African migration to Europe seems to echo the war of the womb, as it was called in Israel, which seems to mean that the best defense against a demographic threat is to have more children. Mr. Erdogan has openly defended this proposal "Make not three, but 5 children" (cited in the last link). All of this looks very bad, especially if you factor in Trump, Putin, MBS, Maduro and others.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/opinion/sunday/rember-the-population-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/world/europe/erdogan-turkey-future-of...
4
@J. Parula. Mexicos and central Americas population has gone up over 4x in the last 50 years. This is the major reason the caravans are headed north. There is no political or economic system that can support those numbers. To take them in is just to encourage more breeding and caravans. The planet is stuffed to over flowing. We and Europe ca help these people at home, but letting them migrate is a fools errand as currently there is no end in sight. The only hope for us and earth is to gradually lower ALL our numbers to a sustainable level.
This is one of the most important global threats along with greenhouse gas emissions, advanced weaponry and WMD proliferation, the rise of China as a hegemon, etc.
Why don't we just cut to the chase and identify the ideal outcomes order of desirability:
1. African populations stabilize according to "Macron's law" without any unseemly intervention.
2. Western and African leaders intervene aggressively along the lines of China's one child policy to stabilize African populations.
3. Ross's view with some environmentalist realism thrown in: African populations continue to grow at the current exponential rate but (1) Western populations keep up and can absorb the inevitable migration from the South and (2) we simultaneously develop breakthrough agriculture and energy technologies that can absorb the extra humans with enough efficiency left over to actually reduce aggregate greenhouse gas emissions despite billions of more people (as is necessary to stave off a runaway feedback loop).
4. Dystopian but arguably most likely scenario: African population explodes, global warming runs away from our control and ravages the global South, while European population shrinks -- leaving Europe with basically the choice to either defend its borders using all necessary means or succumb to what a visiting extraterritorial anthropologist might find curious: a displacement of Europeans in Europe within a century or two.
4
This article is rife is with pernicious simplicity, which many other critical commenters have eloquently exposed. Mr. Douthat's observations do nothing to separate correlation from causality in his "one-Africa-fits-all" characterization across 54 countries. From Morocco to South Africa there are a range of policies, birth rates, and socio-economic conditions that have impelled these record migrations from select countries into Europe; isolating the reason around a "continental birth rate" alone is willfully absurd. Of course, birth rates are a serious issue for the long-range stability of many African countries, but lowering them is no panacea to staunch immigration into Europe and Mr. Douthat offers no evidence of how great an impact it would even have if effected.
Looking at the other continent in question, one wonders when the "long view" in arguments like Mr. Douthat's will ever account for the hypocrisy of a continent led by former colonial powers that could not conceivably have achieved their current standards of living without the military expropriation of land and people from the very places they now wish to demographically quarantine. Anyone who leaves the post-colonial legacy of racism practiced continentally by the original authors of "identity politics" out of this discussion is not even close to crafting either a coherent analysis or a viable solution.
7
We absolutely have the right to impose birth control on Africa as long as they make more new humans than they can possibly feed and the huge population excess moves to our countries. It's simple: Make only as many children as you can feed, or if you don't want to do that, stay where you are and deal with the consequences.
And there is no demographic problem in Europe. A declining population is a huge civilizational achievement we should be extremely proud of. We are the enlightened vanguard of a species that has for all its history been parasitical, ever multiplying and devouring resources with no heed for the grave damage that did to the planet. We are the first ones who try to stop this kind of 'deficit spending' and are creating a surplus to leave a better planet for future, smaller generations.
Except for some transitional and manageable economic problems that stem from how our system relies on perpetual economic and therefore population growth, a smaller population is a decidedly positive thing. There is literally not a single benefit in having more people living on Earth.
437
@GS: We are also the first society with the wherewithal to slow our population growth. Until the '60s, modern birth control did not exist.
I agree with most of what you say, but I disagree that we have the right to impose anything on Africa or Central America. We do have the absolute right to prevent them from coming to our countries.
4
@GS
"We absolutely have the right to impose birth control on Africa".
No. You don't. You can do what you want in your own home. That's about it. Live your life. Let other's live theirs. We can all remember the last time that a German representative decided to cull the population of a specific group. It didn't end well for that group, nor for the German people.
Let's not repeat history here. You don't want people to migrate to your country? Fair enough. But keep your own views inside your own border. Let Africa decide what's best for Africa. Oh, and if Europe hadn't colonized most of Africa, and robbed it blind of its resources, perhaps Africa wouldn't be so bad off now. Reparations might be in order, don't you think?
Tschüss
3
@GS
GS wrote: " We absolutely have the right to impose birth control on Africa as long as they make more new humans than they can possibly feed and the huge population excess moves to our countries....... We are the enlightened vanguard of a species"
this is pure racism....
How is your belief that Europeans are superior and therefore have the right to control African birth rates any different from totalitarian regimes of the past that imposed forced sterilization and even the "final solution" to limit numbers of what that society considered inferior peoples?
2
The birth rate drop has actually happened in Latin America. This has had a very positive effect on the lives of poor people. For years maids in Colombia (the country I am most familiar with) had been exploited. But no longer. Young women are no longer flooding into the cities in sufficient numbers to exploit. If one employer doesn't treat a maid well, they find someone else. And now you better be willing to pay health insurance and vacation and overtime. If you don't? No maid.
You should hear the rich women complain. But that is economics. In addition, you no longer see poor children on the streets begging. They are all in school where they belong. The lowered birth rate has brought many benefits to Colombia.
The reality is that high birthrates only benefit the rich who can use the exploitable labor to enrich themselves. The poor are much better off with slow or no population growth.
485
@Tony Mendoza
This is why powerful men have always opposed birth control and abortion. Because controlling women and promoting the birthrate provides them with cheap labor.
2
@Tony Mendoza This is such a good insight - thank you for sharing. Regarding your comment: "The poor are much better off with slow or no population growth.", that is so true but it is well known that poverty and higher birthrate are strongly correlated. Perhaps because poor are more insecure about the survival of their children and therefore have more kids to improve the chances of passing on their genes to the next generation (all subconsciously or instinctually of course). Which is why Bill Gates' foundation is focused on reducing infant mortality rates so that Africans won't feel the need to have more children in anticipation of losing a few to diseases like malaria etc. I grew up in India and it was common to have 4 or more kids when my parents were growing up, but within a generation, as health care access improved and the Indian government ran a campaign advocating 2 kids only, almost all middle class and above now have 2 kids only. The poor in India, though, still multiply faster, making it impossible for India to get out of the poverty trap. Which makes me wonder why the fertility rates fell amongst the poor women of Colombia.
2
@Tony Mendoza: Bravo--Ecce futura!
We shouldn’t ignore the fact that falling birthrates across much of the world (especially Europe, America, and Asia) is a huge reason for the development of those countries. More resources can be invested in children to develop the society further. Just as important, it’s also one of the key reasons we’ve had a huge drop in armed conflict in the world.
It’s one thing for an American university professor, whose family can support itself well and who live in a society with more responsible fertility, to have 8 children. It’s another thing entirely for unemployed people in underdeveloped societies to all have 8 children that they have no ability or intention of educating and developing.
We should not feel constrained in criticizing the African and Islamic math that says if a child costs $5,000 a year to educate, and I’m unemployed, I can afford to have…. 8 children. It’s no coincidence that these are the parts of the world still experiencing violence on levels that the developed world has left behind.
4
The central point that immigration should be limited to an assimilable proportion (because by implication culture matters and humans are not interchangeable parts) is the common sense of the "populists" who are usually represented in the press as bigots because their cruder representatives in fact are or like Trump portray the problem of immigration as that of keeping out the criminals who are no more represented among immigrants as in the native population.
We would all be better off if we addressed the best opposing argument rather than the worst, the straw man. Rudyard Kipling (now in the dustbin of white supremacists) once said that he likes to see the best in people because it's easier. Depends on what you mean by that, but, it's actually harder to address one's opponents best argument. It's lazier to attend to their worst. Sadly Trump never presents a good argument for his point of view, so, it's lazy to attend to him too seriously and why we need thoughtful people to usurp the populist common sense.
60
@Michael Hart
I am a liberal guy that thinks limiting immigration is probably necessary. Just from a selfish perspective, importing massive numbers of desperately poor people into my country lowers the wages I'm likely to earn. GDP might increase, but that mostly benefits the rich who own the means of production, not the working class who -are- the means of production.
The thing that I cannot stand is the arrogance of those that hate and insult the poor immigrants. If I were in their shoes, I would be trying to do the same thing, and I know for sure that I personally did *nothing* to earn my citizenship. That was just luck. So nationalists and "proud" Americans make me sick.
Hating those that were born different than you is immoral. Hate the rich guys trying to take advantage of the poor illegal immigrants by hiring them instead legal workers.
You should be proud of what you do, not what you were born with.
1
Ross, you hinted at it, but didn’t come clean about the primary driver of fertility trends, one that supercedes government initiatives, NGOs, religious affiliation/doctrine, and availability of birth control: the level of female education. Across all cultures, all races, all religions, and all regions of the globe, there is a negative correlation between the level of education a woman has and the number of children she has. Study after study after study, from all over the world, has shown that. Even a single year of secondary school reduces the birth rate. So, a true “pro-natal” call to increase fertility sounds much like a call to reduce educational opportunities for girls and women. Tread carefully there, Ross. When women get education, the get agency in their lives - both through exposure to intellectual ideas and in the ability to support oneself. Women use that agency to have fewer children, and when women have fewer children, those children grow up in better conditions, and receive more food and education, themselves. The fertility “problem” is a female education “problem,” and I don’t really like the cure. I say this as a doting mother of three, but also as a woman with an advanced degree that I use as a working professional.
2
Mr Douthat-
As long as you are 'pro-natal', you should state as well that you are anti-survival. Each child born in America will produce, on average, about 17 tonnes of Carbon per annum. An African child will generate a projected less than 1/3 of that amount; a western European, about 2/3. You are speaking of cultural 'disaster' for western Europe in the face of mass migration from their nearest neighbor caused by a benightedly non-responsive United States and EU.
4
Certainly, make it possible for women to be educated and prosper, and families are better taken care of. Birth rates reduced is a natural side effect. Women who prosper are less likely to be abused by her husband and family. It is not a racial problem. It is a human one, that only men can repair through pro-active programs on behalf of women. As it is, half of the human race's potential is wasted with the talents of women suppressed and ignored. Gates has not been especially helpful. He is the handmaiden of big corporations, especially in Africa. Mohammed Yunis has written about his first hand experience with women often, but because he is outside the mainstream of big corporate international bankers and their control over the masses, he is disregarded and his message is suppressed. I suggest this audience read his books..old now..but so good..Banker to the Poor, Social Corporation, etc. Women empowered will bring the population growth in the world under control. Families will thrive. The world would be a much better place for everyone. First order..dismantle the war machines.
4
I dislike the word "control" here for obvious reasons... the GOVERNMENT should not control anything about birthrates. The decision to have a baby or not should rest with the individual woman, and anyone else she cares to loop in on that decision. However, if a government wishes to ENCOURAGE women to have babies, better healthcare and family leave policies are in order. It would also be nice to have a cultural shift in which men are socialized to understand that they, too, might have to make career sacrifices to raise their children. Otherwise, "pro-natalist" sounds like just another word for guy-who-wants-to-keep-women barefoot-and-pregnant.
14
@Motherboard
It's pas time for medical science to devise birth control for males that can be put in a water system, because males are half the population but nowhere on the planet do they voluntarily restrain their seed spreading and misery inflicted on females.
1
Considering the toxic consequence of the current way of managing our planet and resources, which is still to a large degree very an European or at least European-inspired project, it does certainly not matter whether the future babies born in Europe will be white or black. And it would not matter otherwise either, unless one still is adhering to the destructive idea of better or lesser races. We can solve the problems of survival only as one mankind, and if the rich European societies were really serious about their future they would stop trying to misuse the world's resources, propagating the consumer society as the ideal way of live and converting themselves in a kind of gated community. Then they would be serious about protecting the environment, social justice, and democracy. But this is not the case (since most efforts in this regard are feeble or just for show), thus such articles like this one, sound the old "drinking wine and preaching water" while the orchestra in playing on the Titanic ...
4
Most of the “humanitarian aid” that has flowed into Africa and other developing countries has been in the forms of nutritional and medical assistance - relatively little has been devoted to education beyond the elementary level. It should surprise no one that this is one of the reasons populations have been growing at an unsustainable rate. Perhaps we should be thinking more about building and staffing university level educational facilities within Africa itself rather than supporting organizations that are distributing tons of food. Build colleges in Africa and Africa will not be at Europe’s doorstep.
9
One of the key reasons that sub-Saharan birth rates are so high is early marriage, often with a young woman marrying a man who is older. The teenage girls are uneducated, so within 20 years of their own birth they begin producing children. The fact that Douthat can point to a handful of educated western women who have chosen to have large families is irrelevant -- The teenage girls of Africa have been given neither an education nor a choice.
Fertility rates in countries where women do receive an education are below replacement rates, across religions, cultures and geography. Islamic Iran, secular Germany and catholic Brazil all have fertility rates below 2. Korean women have the lowest fertility rate in the world, at 1.18 children per woman. The US fertility rate is 1.80 (all data from the World Bank).
So will education make humanity extinct? Douthat is right to raise the question, perhaps he is right that education is a kind of devil's bargain.
But if we look beneath the demographic data, some interesting trends emerge. As Macron points out, very few educated women want to have 6 or more children, the pre-industrial, pre-birth control fertility rate. Yet, many women DO want to have more children than their economic condition allows. Affordability of child-rearing is the key constraint on fertility for these women.
Give women an education and they will choose to have fewer than half a dozen children. Give them economic security, and they might choose to have more than 1.
26
@Milo Minderbinder
The girls as young as 9 are not just subjected to genital mutilation to control them, they are SOLD to and raped by older men, forever in that patriarchal culture squelching any sort of decent life for females in African countries that comes with an education, economic stability, reproductive and marriage or any CHOICE in their life.
I don't believe the contention that successful economic development makes people more likely to emigrate to either Europe or America is supported by any evidence. If it were, wouldn't we now be facing a massive emigration out of China? Which is demonstrably not happening. Instead, I would argue that it's the four banes of war, pestilence, famine and disease that have pushed families in both Africa and the Middle East to seek refuge in Europe. And those are what successful economic development is designed to address.
3
Where no social safety net exists, family is the safety net, and the larger the family, the better and safer its members will be. Where a strong safety net exists, the costs of a large family start to outweigh the benefits. The main incentive to have children is to enjoy the pleasures of child-rearing, which though undeniable for most, can be satisfied with raising one or two children.
These dynamics are not easily altered. Want to encourage Africans to have fewer children? Make African nations richer, more stable, more equitable, and encourage female empowerment and the establishment of strong safety nets. But that might threaten the dominance of the current winners in the global economy, including Europe.
Want Europeans to have more children? Strip down the safety net. Or embark on a "Handmaid's Tale" regimen of pushing women back into the home, breeding for the fatherland. Yeah, see how that flies.
In the long sweep of history, these demographic disparities might even out. We could foresee a richer, more stable Africa, with a lower birth rate, and a somewhat browner, less insular Europe.
But climate change has disrupted the equilibrium. The mass movements of people northward are driven not by population but by environmental devastation born of the developed world's greed and indifference to the consequences of its carbon-based industrialization. Handing out condoms isn't going to help with that.
9
The answer was in your article... with education, birth rates plummet. We should all support mandatory education globally and provide resources where they are needed. It is a simple answer, but difficult to implement. So was the aspiration to get to the moon.
It’s doable and it is necessary, in order to prevent social and economic upheaval. But do we have the will to do it, or will we be delayed and obstructed by those who advocate an easy answer, like “build a wall”?
4
Calling for a higher European birthrate is not the answer. The world needs to reduce population growth everywhere. We need to find economic and social solutions that do not presume that population growth is necessary for progress, or we lose the planet.
28
I am confused by this: "But focusing on European fertility has at least one moral advantage over Macron’s finger-wagging at African babymaking: It’s the part of the future that Europeans actually deserve to control." Is this some sort of interpretation of a divine privilege which gives Europeans special status to "deserve" control?
It's time we recognized that we are one large family. The economic and other advantages that most of the West enjoy came partially at the expense of the less fortunate. We cannot hold back the march of population growth, environmental changes, and the implications they hold. It is too late.
5
@tagger I think he means that encouraging Europeans to have more babies is moral because it’s focusing on European control of their own family planning, as opposed to trying to get Africans to have fewer babies (over which Europeans should have no control.)
Have you closely examined why you feel this way? What about fellow humans do you find so threatening? Please don’t pull out the “they take jobs”nonsense. Automation has eliminated more jobs than anything else - are you against robots? Thank you for your uplifting views of human nature on a Sunday morning no less.
Humans have a choice. We can control our population or let nature do it for us. It requires a certain degree of disengagement, lack of empathy, or religious arrogance
(or some combination of these factors) to think that starvation and disease are acceptable ways to reduce our numbers. I am glad that I do not have children because the world future generations face is not going to be pretty unless we make radical changes, including curbing population growth.
31
Population growth in Africa is also not occurring at the same rate in all countries.Nor is economic development occurring evenly in Africa nor political development. Nigeria for example could have a population twice that of the US in the lifetime of many alive today. In a land area one quarter it’s size. How this will turn out is anybody’s guess.
4
@Damian McColl. Guessing is not needed. Nigeria is a mess and getting worse by the minute. The third world isn't flooding north because over populated, poor, resources depleted, polluted countries are great places to live. The west should think about this when they think of opening their doors to the millions trying to get there.
1
Macron did not answer "Where is the Marshall Plan for Africa?" correctly. For decades the affluent West has been pouring billions of dollars of direct aid into Africa. Africa has received technical assistance, loans at preferential rates, eased commitments to enter the WTO and receive market access to other countries, indirect help through export finance and political risk insurance.
The developed world is committed to helping Africa. But there is only so much that help can do.
6
@Lisa And how much of that aid ends up in western banks through well established systems of corruption and wealth extraction?
Democracy is highly correlated with the rule of law, control of corruption, effective government, human rights, the control of factionalism and democratic military and police systems.
The need isn't for a Marshall plan but a democracy plan. We know that democracy can't be imposed. But it can be learned. Look at Why Nations Fail.
The population explosion is Africa's revenge for colonialism.
Vietnam Veteran and Retired Army Officer
7
@Lisa
China also has been pouring money into Africa and is not known to be timid or wallow in indecision about policies and people controls. One way or another, the 3rd world - mostly men of the worst and often most conservative religious patriarchies - voluntarily will have to use birth control and using young females to breed litters or the great reckoning will do that for them.
When the world around you offers you nothing, what would you do. When you are trying to survive in a world that is trying to prevent you from doing so you do the one thing that will assure your species survives. Reproduce, because the # 1 goal is to produce enough offspring that will, themselves, reach the age of fertility for the species to endure. And when there is a very poor food supply and other negative external pressures try to block the path to that goal, you move to where those pressures are reduced or eliminated. It's not that complicated really. Whenever we face that in other population explosions (like with insects or bacteria or vermin) we find ways to minimize the impact on us. With humans, however, those methods of population control become, shall we say, rather distasteful. So we have a choice. Allow the conditions impacting fertility and the need to migrate go unchecked and impede the migration, demanding nature take it's course, or try to mitigate the conditions that are causing the problems in the first place (global warming, poverty, and poor health care). Take your pick.
4
@Walking Man
It is not the choice of girls and women to do that. It is the men, always the men - particularly as Africa has become highly charismatic evangelical and Catholic.
2
Mr. Douthat suggests that European self-interest is behind the chorus of calls for limiting families in the African continent. Perhaps it’s part of the picture, but he should get out more anyway.
Let’s move our gaze from the frightened Europeans to the people actually involved. A trip to Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, Tanzania, or Mozambique to meet child brides expected to bring forth babies as soon as married or “old” women in their thirties who want to limit their family size to four children are far too common. Women dying in childbirth is more prevalent in Sub Saharan Africa than almost anywhere else.
Women in these countries want to delay their first child and limit their family size. They are not thinking about moving to Europe, but about how to feed their families and protect their health. The unmet need for contraception in low-income African countries is well documented. There’s much more to say, but the notion that birth control is some sort of racist plot devalues these women's own dignity as human beings.
One of the hardest days in my job was visiting a health center in Senegal. As we approached the building, my colleague gestured to the line out the door of people to be seen. Some of these people won’t be seen today, she commented. When I asked why, she responded that our visit to interview the nurse would take time away from seeing patients. I looked at the scores of waiting patients through different eyes.
We need to see the people actually involved.
45
Douthat seems oblivious to the fact that children need to be fed and clothed and educated; that an impoverished family is made still more impoverished when still another child is born; and that the child begins its life destitute. Being pro-natal is understandable; being pro-natal without concern for children after they are born is not.
67
Birthrate aside, population wealth is exploding and is causing food demands pushing the earth to unstainable levels of production. Arguments regarding land, water and agriculture animal waste is the bugaboo in the mother earth ointment. Worse is the demand for higher quality food stuff that is overwhelms robust systems into overproduction and soil, water and waste catastrophic exhaustion. Actual population growth does not tell the real story but rather the growth of the middle class will kill us all.
11
Paul Ehrlich wrote about a" population bomb" 50 years ago and like Malthus has been proven wrong. Higher birth rates in Africa are also a cultural social security system. Medicare and social security which were created in this country and only recently, doesn't exist in vast portions of Africa or other parts of the world. Having a large family is a long term security.
Condom distribution will not solve the problems of very high birthrates in Africa any more than reducing the extraordinary number of single out of wedlock birthrates with multiple fathers in our country.
There are profound ontological differences in our diverse world, nationally and internationally and uncontrolled immigration is an example of one of its symptoms.
8
@Robert, actually Erlich and Malthus we’re right; they simply had slightly incorrect metrics. The human population on this planet and its drain on finite resources (like potable water and potash, not to mention rare earth metals for all those wonderful solar panels and electric cars that are gyro save us!) is like the fable of frogs in a slowly boiling pot of water. More people more climate change. More people fewer fish in the ocean. The list goes on and on. Every man, woman and child in North America and Europe could stop burning any more fossil fuels and it wouldn’t stop the increase of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere. China wants more cars. India wants air conditioning. Africa wants higher protein food. Game over.
17
@Robert
Paul Ehrlich was correct that enormous populations are highly detrimental to the earth and the living things on it. The negative consequence of starvation has been largely avoided, however the overall gargantuan consumption of the earth has not, including a massive deterioration of the quality of the soil. (Many vegetables in the U.S. now have 1/15th the nutritional value they did in 1900.) We are devouring the living-beings-usage ingredients of the earth.
Some years ago Ehrlich was asked: If he wrote his book "The Population Bomb" now, would the book's alarm be different. He replied that it would MORE alarmist than when he initially wrote it, due to the dramatic acceleration in these earth-consuming trends and the monster of climate change before us.
Thanks.
9
This op-ed by Ross Douthat illustrated glaringly how well-intentioned efforts of both liberals and conservatives that are intended to fight racism actually do the opposite, and cause the premature deaths of hundreds of millions of people in the third world.
The facts are clear. Africa is projected to double in population by 2050. Yet most African nations are struggling with inadequate resources. Hunger is rampant in Sudan and Somalia. Rapid population growth has destabilized governments in the Congo and Rwanda, leading to either civil war or genocide. There is inadequate water to serve the growing population of South Africa. And the list goes on.
We know the reason. It is connected to global warming. Many pundits correctly castigate President Trump for his denial of clear scientific evidence that ice at the poles is melting because the Carbon emissions from autos and factory smokestacks is causing climate change. But that climate change is also due to population growth.
And politicians of both parties ignore the science that has been present since Paul Ehrlich's the Population Bomb iof 1968. The world has finite resources. Having large families in an overpopulated world condemns our children to fights for dwindling resources as population growth outstrips those resources.
China had the right idea with its one child policy. We need such policies for third world countries. We need to encourage small families by providing access to family planning.
55
@Jake Wagner Will increased access to family planning happen under the trump administration? Unlikely, for either the US or African nations. Republicans certainly don't care about the children after they are born!
@Jake Wagner
"We need such policies for third world countries. We need to encourage small families"
Population control needs to be mandated for every first world country, not necessarily in third world countries.
The lifetime pollution and carbon footprint of the Western World individual is far greater than in the Third World. It then becomes exponentially greater when those children have children.
What's needed - to solve the population problem in one generation - is for each parental pair to have only one child. That would also solve climate change if we're not past the tipping point.
@Jake Wagner, One child policy in developing countries leads inexorably to female infanticide which leads thirty or so years later to a significant nember of disgruntled men with no prospect of a heterosexual relationship. As the Chinese experiment shows it looks good on paper until it is seen to be catastrophic.
This op-ed by Ross Douthat illustrated glaringly how well-intentioned efforts of both liberals and conservatives that are intended to fight racism actually do the opposite, and cause the premature deaths of hundreds of millions of people in the third world.
The facts are clear. Africa is projected is projected in population by 2050. Yet most African nations are struggling with inadequate resources. Hunger is rampant in Sudan and Somalia. Rapid population growth has destabilized governments in the Congo and Rwanda, leading to either civil war or genocide. There is inadequate water to serve the growing population of South Africa. And the list goes on.
We know the reason. It is connected to global warming. Many pundits correctly castigate President Trump for his denial of clear scientific evidence that ice at the poles is melting because the Carbon emissions from autos and factory smokestacks is causing climate change. But that climate change is also due to population growth.
And politicians of both parties ignore the science that has been present since Paul Ehrlich's the Population Bomb iof 1968. The world has finite resources. Having large families in an overpopulated world condemns our children to fights for dwindling resources as population growth outstrips those resources.
China had the right idea with its one child policy. We need such policies for third world countries. We need to encourage small families by providing access to family planning.
7
@Jake Wagner
Correct me if I am wrong, but didn't China recently lift the ban on the 1 child policy ?
Thank you for writing this column — not because I agree with you, but because it is good to be willing to express your ideas honestly and in good faith, even though you can expect to receive criticism for it.
That being said, there are a lot of counterpoints to be made in opposition to your assertions. I’ll stick to a tangential one that I find compelling, trusting other readers will make the other points.
It’s this: why do supposed pro-natalists not implement policies that would truly encourage births and child-reading and instead just complain a lot? Going around and saying people should have more children is unproductive. A real pro-natalist should want free healthcare for pregnant women, should subsidize adoptions, should encourage men to take more responsibility for childcare so women can more easily have both children and lives.
In short, if you want people to do something, you should offer incentives. You should do whatever you can to make it easy for them to make the choice you want them to make. But cutting health care, disempowering women, keeping traditional gender roles so men are of less use for child care? These are excellent ways to fail at your supposed goal.
It strikes me as terribly irrational. You won’t be able to drag us all back to some 1950’s fantasy. One must find strategies that work now, in this decade, in this reality.
82
@Antikat
Douthat has written favorably about "pro-family" government programs to boost fertility rates on numerous occassions, as a quick Google search would reveal. For example:
"America has no real family policy to speak of at the moment, and the evidence from countries like Sweden and France suggests that reducing the ever-rising cost of having kids can help fertility rates rebound. Whether this means a more family-friend tax code, a push for more flexible work hours, or an effort to reduce the cost of college, there's clearly room for creative policy to make some difference."
I must be missing something, but you seem to be arguing that one solution to countervail the fear of increasing migration to Europe from Africa is for Europeans to start having more children. From that perspective, the issue is not really overpopulation, but the relative population weights of Europe versus Africa. Europeans can be as fertile as they wish, but European overpopulation cannot be a reasoned response to overpopulation in Africa, which, notwithstanding the social media postings of a few Ph.D.'s, remains rooted in lack of education and opportunity for African women.
Africa's population will stabilize eventually as more women are educated and freed from the twin claws of cultural/religious patriarchy and diminishing economic opportuinties exacerbated by global warming.
Mitigating the impact of climate change in Africa, helping to educate women and reduce corruption, and creating the conditions for more equitable trade between Africa and the rest of the world would be more effective to stem the migration tide than Europeans having more babies or Macron's ineffectual finger-wagging.
35
@Latif
Another way would be to not allow any more immigration, period. They can get tough if they want to. Think of it as an invading army. And we need less people on the planet, not more. Why Africa is such a failure I don't know. But they are. I would hope birth planning would be made available to all, but that hinges on having real leaders that care about their people, which they seem unable to produce. That speaks loudly against their cognition abilities as well as a non-culture. Europe does not need that kind of people crowding underbridges with tents, or filling up their hospital beds. Take care of your problems in you own continent. You have had centuries to do it.
2
The world we are leaving our grandchildren is not going to be a very equitable one. The smartest move would be to offer aid in the form of expertise, investment and education to African nations. If the majority of the profit is left in the nations and the infrastructure is developed Africa could rival every other continent. Perhaps not perfectly educated, but more than enough to consider how many mouths a couple want to feed would dramatically lower the birth rate. Education along these lines is something the whole world needs
18
Humans are at terrible risk right now of cataclysmic unintended population reductions. The kind that lead to radical social upheaval and destruction. There are far too many of us for our own capabilities of organization and self control. Climate change Is happening. The consequences of that could manifest at any time now. Are we ready for a 15 year drought in the Central Valley or Midwest? Changes in which land is arable and the changes in rain patterns are literally the destroyers of civilizations. Fewer people to support and Move as climate changes will mean fewer and smaller disasters.
The long promised reduction in the need to work that capitalism made is on the horizon with the advent of robotics and AI. The west is poised to be able to reduce it's human workforce. Population growth is not needed to support the aging population. The single biggest material advance humanity can make right now is rapidly and radically shifting our energy sources to ones that do not put carbon in the air.
The single most important factor in birthrate reduction is education and empowerment of women. The second most important is shedding the social disease of religion as a guide to anything regarding life on earth. To some degree that goes hand in hand. Where education is absent or backslides, religion fills the void with nonsense.
Color is immaterial. Given climate change, where people are what color is going to change. Trying to prevent that is the last thing to be paying attention to
51
The facts of global warming and other serious environmental degradation call into serious question much of the analysis. Frankly, we as humans - all of us - simply can not continue to grow as we have.
46
We ought not to overlook surprise outcomes. All of the advances from science can be overwhelmed by war or plague, and that right speedily.
The climate change that Trump cannot see is also a factor.
My grandson and his schoolmates will inherit a world that Trump, like me, could never imagine, let alone prepare for in any way or sense.
9
@zarf11 Your grandson and classmates will inherit a world of ecological decline and eventual collapse caused by overpopulation. In comparison, global warming will be a footnote. Unfortunately, Trump is not the only one who cannot see that.
1
Though I often disagree with your positions, Ross, I read you with real delight.
The topic you chose (Africa's & Europe's populations) is definitely important to everyone on our planet. No one else (known to me) has addressed it so prominently. You did.
Thank you kindly. I look forward to many more of your columns.
7
Ross Douthat is correct that if Europe cannot control how many migrants enter from Africa over coming decades, then Europe will eventually be over-run by the African population explosion.
It is a value-based decision, but I believe that European citizens have the right to control who enters their countries. If they do not do so, then these countries will be altered irrevocably. The population arithmetic is truly shocking, and once the African migrant population has a strong enough foothold, the demographic replacement process will become unstoppable.
I applaud Ross Douthat for openly discussing this very serious public policy issue.
45
@Peter Johnson You are absolutely right. The African population in Europe will vote for politicians who support further immigration. No one will claim to support open borders, but the weak immigration policies will have just that effect. More Africans will come, they will gain a greater political voice and politicians wanting power will buy into that, and soon Europe will be more African than European. In time, Europe will be black, America will be brown, and maybe Russia will be white.
1
Actually, there has already been a major African invasion of Europe. The "Out of Africa" theory has modern human species coming from Africa into Europe and replacing the Neanderthals that were actually supremely fitted to survive in the cold climate that prevailed at the time. A little climate change, some interbreeding, and, Presto-Changeo, we of "European" stock actually got the majority of our Homo Sapien genes from Africa. I can't see what we have to fear genetically. Been there, done that.
1
@Peter Johnson
Those European and UK countries have already let themselves be irrevocably altered in negative proportions. Paris is a mess, London is crime riven, cities in Italy and Greece are not what they were even 20 years ago. Ditto, in Germany, Sweden, Denmark. And on and on. Just like in the U.S. Does the rest of America really want to become another version of the wholesale dysfunctional California, not just fiscally broken but crime riven and where nearly all murder warrants in LA are issued for illegal latino males? Without the NoCal tech industry and stolen water from other states, SoCal would be uninhabitable and might as well annex itself to Mexico.
3
It was not long ago that the continent thought the US anti-muslim positions were unacceptable. Of course, that was prior to the immigration onslaught of the last few years. Despite Trump's xenophobia and racism, the US has been a country that has embraced and to a large degree assimilated immigrants. Western Europe is another matter. The very nature of their country states is rooted in immutable heritage. Their righteous liberalism works when your neighbors are all the same. Africa is a long term problem. The short term problem are the 23 Arab states and their massive, unemployed, radical vulnerable youth population.
28
So a bunch of female PhDs posted pictures of their large families. So what? This anecdote goes against the observed fact that education is one of the most effective forms of birth control.
136
@mancuroc
Religion remains the pivot, as there is only so much education can do to fix a culture based in ancient desert peasant cults.
3
Africa continues to be the talking subject of Western leaders who have little clue of what's going. As long as Western outdated yardsticks and canons are used to "measure" Africa, they will continue to miss the point.
I can think of nobody of my generation in my immediate family and surroundings born after 1970 with more than 4 children. So the first question is where does Macron get his numbers? What I do see however is kids growing up and not dying at birth. Is it not safer to say that African population is growing less because of uncontrollable birthrate than because of a growing life expectancy? Can it be simply that people live longer including children who 30 years ago would not have made it to 5 years old?
Second, the West should stop seeing Africa as a homogenous, uniformed entity where datas, trends in Zimbabwe or Niger can be "naturally" applied to Senegal or Sudan, and the entire 50 plus countries. Ethiopia and Angola are among the fastest economic growths in the continent. Yet Angola is in the 3 slowest population growths while Ethiopia is at the opposite. Besides is Total and Orange are making huge profits in Africa thanks to that population growth.
Methinks Macron is just signing his name under that long list of Western leaders, especially French presidents, who can't help telling Africans what to do, how to think or the "shitholes" they live in. Beware though: "focus always on the snake and you will miss the scorpion". Fulani proverb.
25
While signaling out Africa, Ross also signaled out Europe. Yes, there was no Angola or Ethiopia, but there was no Italy or Poland either.
4
You don’t have to know anything about Africa to see that it’s exploding population is a rolling, on going disaster. They have zero chance of taking care of the people there now, not to mention the 30 million extra coming every year.
1
I remain unable to understand the reason that so many people consider a declining population to be a negative development. To the contrary: a slowly declining population results in more space for each citizen, lesser demands placed on the environment, and probably more affordable housing as fewer people live in the same space.
158
@Quiet Waiting,
And fewer workers to fund retirement programs for the expanding population of aged, not to mention the shrinking of output relative to what would flow from a stable population. And heaven forbid, should a military be needed... I'm not saying that a shrinking population is completely a bad thing, but let's acknowledge the downsides as well, eh?
5
@Charles Becker
However, we can take in immigrants to make up for any shortcomings in US birthrates, if needed. Japan's problem is that they need immigrants, but for cultural reasons they don't take them in.
Don't forget that we are going to need more workers to change our diapers and feed us gruel when we get sent off to the old age homes. We don't have enough of our own children, let alone enough who´want to do that. Wouldn't it be nice if the caretakers in the old age homes of tomorrow could actually talk to us in our own language?
1
There will be mass migration from the Middle East before mass migration from Africa. Climate change will see to that.
Searching for Water Across Borders (NYT Oct 18) provides some details. Iran is also in dire straits for water.
Before the time frames that Mr. Douthat discusses have passed, Europe will be a fortress.
22
God wants there to be more people on the planet, so He will repeal the working of the laws of nature -- that overpopulation leads to exhaustion and destruction of the resources needed to support the population and thereby to population crashes. Germs celebrate their victory over the immune system by reproducing until they kill the host, and die themselves. The products of our prosperity are making the weather more unusual and unpredictable, which are leading to crop failures. It used to be that people in an area where crops failed would die, but with modern transportation the area in question is the planet. Pharaohs used to save grain to see the people through seven bad years, but we are much more efficient.
When the crunch comes, we will have to either curse God or curse the religious people who did not use the brains God gave them to figure out that since God's instructions did not include that our modern situation was coming, they also would not include what to do about it.
When vaccinations were developed, some warned that smallpox was God's way of summoning us home and that this modern health technique interfered with His will. These people were perfectly correct and we ignored them at our peril. If we dare to mess with God's plan, we have to mess with it all the way, figuring out the consequences of this messing and how to deal with them.
7
The election of right-wing anti-immigrant governments in many countries in Europe should put to rest the notion that migrants attempting to come from Africa or the Middle East will be welcomed in Europe. On the contrary, there is likely to be increasing European resistance to admitting migrants especially with growing automization in workplaces and few jobs available. Therefore, people should get used to living on the continent on which they are born, and work to control its population growth.
46
Douthat writes like a typical religiously informed American who just can't comprehend how fearful and apprehensive people in other countries are about overpopulation. I once talked to some people from Japan about population numbers, noting that coincidentally the populations of the United States and Japan respectively reached the 200 million and 100 million marks in the same year (1967).
One of the Japanese persons I mentioned this to reacted with a noticeable shudder of discomfort. He was not at all proud of the fact that his country, geographically smaller than California, had a human population in the nine figures range. Tell people from South Korea that if reunification occurs with the North the resulting single country will be home to more than 75 million people and I doubt you'll find those people pleased.
I don't think Americans have ever really had to grapple with true resource scarcity and the prospect of malnourishment or even starvation resulting from too many people. The typical American view on this issue, revealed by Douthat in this column, should be considered outside the global mainstream and taken with a grain of salt.
99
Even if Europe or the US is on track to become majority black, there will be a multigenerational transition period when no group will dominate and all groups will need to learn to compromise and live together in peace. The lessons of that period, not the polarizations of the current period, will determine what happens later.
25
Douthat is profoundly wrong here.
The notion that Europeans need to have more babies to act as some kind of countervailing force against a rising African population is a racist sentiment. Yes, we've seen a rise in fear in the United States and in Europe as white majorities give way to demographic change. Trump's rise is a part of that fear. The response to this is more tolerance, not a rallying cry for more white babies.
The reason African population projections were lower in 2004 had a great deal to do with the outlook of the AIDs epidemic in Africa. That the population is now projected to be larger in 2100 is due to interventions that began during the Bush administration. Furthermore, these health interventions have been built on previous successes that have brought down birth rates throughout developing countries, not through "population control" but through education, family planning, and economic opportunity.
Globally, the birth rate has fallen from a peak of 2.2% per year in the early 1960's to about 1.1% per year today.
Douthat is also in denial. The change is coming regardless. But thankfully the younger among us are more welcoming of and less fearful of the change.
64
@Russ For the most part I agree with you whole heartedly, but I think your missing the gist of Mr. Douthat's thesis. The expanding population in Africa has as much to do with poverty and our present policy of not providing birth control education and the actual methods. I believe western nations need to have a world vision which allows for a far reaching open borders policy to, among other challenges, increase our diminishing reproduction rate. We also need to address the growing concern regarding endemic poverty throughout the countries in Africa to provide financial assistance for education, distribution of food, as well as birth control and prenatal care. Additionally, as a parent of 2 children, to the degree that we can put in place the support network to make that an option for all of us ( I was incredibly fortunate my wife and I didn't need assistance ), then the world can be a better place.
1
@Mark Flynn
Certainly, but Douthat seems to have missed the fact that birth rates in countries throughout Africa have already been falling, along with infant mortality. Improved health outcomes are the primary reason population growth remains high in some African countries, and this no different than what has occurred in most parts of the world. Throughout most of the world lower infant mortality has preceded a decline in birth rates. Birth rates in Africa are falling, and doing so faster than they did in Western countries, without coercion.
Douthat's biggest sin is in conflating a fear of coercive or autocratic population control measures with improved access to the resources for basic reproductive health. That's a message that will only serve to limit support in Western nations for the very assistance you and I both agree is needed.
1
@Russ that's so true. If we want to continue this positive track record, we must halt the progression of climate change so that these regions do not fall back into poverty, chaos or conservatism; the best way we can clamp down on the massive influx of migrants & refugees into the west is investing in renewable technology & putting in place proper policies that halt the progression of global warming. We must also heavily invest in women's education like what Malala Yousafzai is doing, which will add tonnes of benefits for these countries such as more G.D.P growth, solving major problems & help to drop the overall fertility rates in these countries.
2
"As a pro-natalist"
How nice of you to let us know this, Ross. Do you dream of the entire world looking like the Philippines? Specifically, a place where impoverished women who have more children than remaining teeth in their mouths and who are aware of the existence of birth control methods/pills and wish to access them but are denied that access by the Roman Catholic officials who dictate public health policies despite not being the least bit qualified?
Why, exactly, is anybody pro-natalist in the year 2018 with 7.6 billion humans and counting? Do pro-natalists dream of a world where humans breed uncontrollably like rats and stray dogs until there are 100 billion of us living shoulder to shoulder in piles of our own filth?
446
@AR, Mr. Douthat is Catholic. He believes that a man in the sky says we should be fruitful and multiply. This belief informs his thinking and writing. That’s why.
1
@AR Pro-natalist jumped out at me, too. There's a term that could use some unpacking.
1
@AR. amen!
1
Great column.
Population control Is naturally self regulated in the Western world, Russia, Japan. The growth rate is actually below replacement levels, if it were not for mass immigration in the Western World. We are the good guys in this regard.
Everyone knows that China recognized that its runaway population growth was a liability and not an asset, and implemented tight controls, since relaxed, in order to increase their standard of living. The plan worked tremendously. They are still the most populated country at 1.39 B and still growing, but at least the growth has slowed, unlike Africa's.
When mass migration advocates claim the opposite, that the Western world's advanced economies need population growth via mass migration, it is obvious that that is not true.
They rely on an unsustainable economic model, where alternative sustainable models aligned with low population rates are available instead, such as Japan's.
The majority of westerners do not want to be inundated by foreigners from failed states, who cannot take care of their most basic needs. The numbers are just too great. If we allowed immigration at the current rate to continue unabated, we will be vastly outnumbered, and our countries would slowly but surely turn into the failed states from which the migrants fled.
We are literally in a lifeboat. Politicians who recognize this, such as Trump, are ascendant, and politicians who do not, such as Merkel are descendent.
71
@Philly: "The majority of westerners do not want to be inundated by foreigners from failed states, who cannot take care of their most basic needs".
If the West would stop raping Africa of its resources on the cheap and pay those countries what their resources are really worth, less migrants from Africa would head to the West.
@Philly
The one nation on the planet with a sensible immigration plan is, ironically, Russia.
2
@Philly - They breed too much, we consume too much. Who's the bad guy?
1
Current World Population
7,658,095,290 (7.6 Billion)
Births today
349,501
Deaths today
144,761
Population Growth today
204,740
Births this year
113,000,199
Deaths this year
46,803,813
Population Growth this year
66,196,386
This will not end well, Father Douthat.
One of the trade offs with modernity is that we must flush our medieval religious textbooks down the toilet if the human species expects to survive its reproductive stupidity and recklessness.
We need a global Manhattan project on contraception : free IUD and LARC implants for all..... and let the religious loons cry themselves to sleep over modernity.
‘Be fruitful and multiply’ got us into this environmental mess.
Critical thinking and contraception will be the only things that save us.
612
Unfortunately, after Genesis 1:28, The Almighty did not tell humanity what to do once we HAD become fruitful and multiplied. Multiplying some more seems like a good formula to bring about famine, war and pestilence.
15
@Socrates
The last three times that European elites feared and worried about any babies they were Catholic, Protestant and Jewish.
While America and Europe have 12% of humans they share 45% of the world's nominal GDP. Although China has the nominal #2 GDP with 20% of the human race being ethnic Han Chinese on a per capita basis China ranks # 80 near the Dominican Republic.
With the #3 GDP Japan is an aging and shrinking nation with a tenth of China's population. While China is also aging and shrinking from the effects of the one child policy, a growing middle class and a preference for male babies.
@Socrates
The Trump administration/regime has cut off aid (including gynecological aid) to any NGO that is suspected to even mention abortion.
As for wondering about assimilation, did the Europeans who destroyed the economies of so many African countries even assimilated while they were overlording the natives?
I'm thinking in particular about the Congo and the Belgian king and assorted resident colonizers had a ball having local folks' fingers and hands cut off, etc.
Patrice Lumumba was my hero (I even had the honor of meeting him). The colonizers of course had him murdered and put a series of corrupt individuals in power so that the wealth of the country could be siphoned to the former colonizers as well as the newly created local elite. The Republic of Congo should normally be a very wealthy country but its wealth went elsewhre..... etc etc etc
How dare former colonialists who destroyed the local societies and economies and kept their European ways, now speak of "assimilation" for the people immigrating to Europe from areas that have been looted by colonial settlers (I'm also thinking of Algeria....which experienced the total destruction of its original economy....)
etc. etc. etc.
(except of a statistically minimal segments of individuals amazingly found in all societies at all times of history, the human primate species stinks)
2
Here's an existential question: Why do we care what color babies are? Seriously. Why do we care?
I'm as White as can be, so is my wife. Our younger child is Brown, adopted of course, and he is the joy of our life (no cut on his older brother, but he's been out of the house for several years). He's smart, funny, caring, thoughtful, polite, talented, handsome (in my "unbiased opinion"). He's a teenager who does NOT give us tsoris! (at least not much and not often) There is absolutely NO reason why ANYONE should see him as a threat to America, or "Western Culture", other than the higher concentration of melanin in his skin than his family. He's what we need MORE of, and his skin color shouldn't mean any more than his eye color.
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@Dadof2
What we have here is another motivation for anti-abortion policies: the decline of white births. Steve King let the cat out of the bag in his recent European interview. Democrats should push their anti-choice political opponents to admit this publicly. That's not to say they don't have sincere moral concerns; but moral concerns about unborn babies isn't the entire story of what's driving their politics. Fear of white extinction is also in the mix.
2
Given the all environmental problems we face, how can the solution possibly be adding even more people to the world? It is odd that Mr. Douthat does not even touch on the issue.
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@M - It's important to remember that Mr. D's worldview is centered in the 15th century.
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@M Because all the evidence shows that the very best way to decrease birthrates anywhere in the world is to do everything possible to improve the survival rates of babies who ARE born. This through education of the mothers, vaccinations, clean water and nutrition. When babies survive, women have fewer and can afford to educate them better, thereby leading to fewer babies in the future generations. This is the only humane way to control population. Anything else - such as forced birth control, legal limits on family size and letting brown and black babies die is disrespectful at best and racist at worse. And doesn't work nearly as well as education and improvements in child health globally. I sure wish pro-life people would get with the program and start saving REAL babies.
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@M I suspect, though I do not know for certain, that Mr. Douthat knows absolutely nothing about Africa. The problems that overpopulation is causing in many if not most countries are staggering, resulting in misery on wide scale. How many times does it need to be said: women need to be empowered, not forced to breed themselves into oblivion. That route doesn’t help Africa move forward. All those who wander hopeless and jobless in Africa’s cities, all the children who will starve when resources can’t manage the demands of a ballooning population are or should be on Mr. Douthat and his church’s conscience. Pigs will fly, however, before we realize the damage we westerners do in our unplumbable stupidity.
2
I am pretty sure that the population of the world is going to have a few downturns over the next couple of decades as the effects of global warming become more prevalent and severe. Africa is possibly least capable of handling what will come. Europe and the US may very well be able to last somewhat longer, but by that time the feedback loops that make global warming accelerate even more may be beyond the point of no return. As permafrost melts methane is released, as areas experience droughts wild fires will be common and will release carbon dioxide, as the oceans warm methane is released. Overpopulation is a problem that will be taken care of. Life will go on, just possibly not human life.
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@Chris
There we go, problem solved!
As President Bartlet used to say "What's next?"
How can the experience of the recent refugee crisis demonstrate anything regarding assimilation? Isn't it standard for assimilation to take at least one generation?
Instead of complaining about people from other cultures not respecting Western values, how about we put more effort into spreading those values? How come there are no parallels to the subsidized madrassas that churn out Muslim extremists? Why isn't the West investing in education of liberal values and tolerance?
31
I think it is pretty obvious that the high birthrate in Africa, combined with global warming, will produce a major crises that will result in the collapse of democracy in Europe combined with aggressive external military defenses against mass immigration. Of course, that is what the Romans tried, and look what happened to them! Overall, the individuals born in the west before 2000 are likely the last generation to enjoy a truly civilized society with reasonable wealth for, if not all, then most. After us the deluge.
71
Population is exploding in Africa, declining in Europe? The mismatch between exploding population in troubled, low economic success areas of the world and declining population in the most advanced economies?
This problem goes to show just how little we understand about the foundation of successful civilization. We cannot even get the quantity of human beings right not to mention have the courage to determine the differences in quality between human beings necessary to keep civilization at least aloft.
Does anyone really believe there will be anything other than environmental catastrophe in generally southern hemisphere areas of the world, that never are human beings so close to being considered little different than animals than when they breed out of control and can't even form civilizations successful enough that their citizens don't flee them for other parts of the world?
And what about the most advanced economies? Are they any brighter? They can't even figure out proper match between population size and continued economic advance? People within advanced economies even propose to fix their declining population problem by replacing their diminishing numbers with people from population explosion areas of the world, people who can't even control their population and form their own economies in a satisfactory fashion?
It's all so absurd. It beggars belief. It's civilization dying as it becomes more advanced and needing replenishment by the least advanced human beings.
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Mr. Douthet's comments are always thought provoking. The assumption in the article and the comments is that Europe cannot assimilate all the Africans (and other non-Europeans) who are pressing upon its borders. But why is it assumed that European culture as it currently exists should continue. Maybe Europe is a spent force that will eventually be overpowered by the more vigorous peoples of Africa. Europe went through this in the fifth century when the Germanic tribes were able to breach the Rhine and overcome the Romans.
It appears that industrialization of society (capitalist or communist) results in a devaluation of child bearing in favor of self-realization and individual economic self-sufficiency. The result is older and declining populations. If the Europeans (or Americans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, etc.) won't populate the land, why shouldn't someone else be allowed to?
The same applies to
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@Dan Rooney Excellent. The Nordic/Germanic push against the entire Roman Empire could be a perfect parallel.
5
@Dan Rooney Why shouldn't someone else be allowed to populate the land? Because the population is already excessive.
@CPMariner
And in which civilization would you have preferred to live: the Roman one at its height or the suitably named Dark Ages that followed?
Consider the poverty, over-population and continuous warfare in Africa, the Middle East and Central and South America.
Is it possible humans may be on the cusp of inventing break-through scientific solutions to solve these potentially massive social problems aided by scientific advances including robotics and artificial intelligence? It's possible.
Can we expect world politicians will choose a long-term solution to any problem? No.
18
@Political Genius - Well yeah, but every "breakthrough scientific solution" we've come up with - beginning with the wheel - has led to more population and more consumption. We're apparently trying to breed our way out of our Population/Consumption problem.
1
@Political Genius Not South America. The birth rate there is below much of Europe.
"This would not forestall the near-inevitable northward migration, but it would make it easier to assimilate immigrants once they arrived — European economies would be stronger, ethnic polarization would not fall so dramatically along generational lines, and in politics youthful optimism and ambition might help counteract the fear and pessimism of white Europeans growing old alone.
What am I missing, Ross? Why are you certain "European economies would be stronger" with higher birthrates?
Because of more workers? If I'm not mistaken, Europe, particularly France, still suffers high unemployment.
Exploding the workforce in 20 years wouldn't help much.
With all the problems from rising economic inequality, climate change, tribalism, and endless wars, why you're advocating higher birthrates escapes me.
Anyone considering having children needs to know how they will survive the above problems.
Not to do so is irresponsible. There, I've said it.
As a very conservative Catholic, you think more offspring are good (preferably white, according to this column) in line with church teaching that life is sacred.
Yes, life is sacred but not just in utero--all new babies you advocate need safe and secure places to live, food on the table, and jobs.
Requirements that seem harder and harder to fulfill on our beleaguered planet.
188
Actually, economists are almost as worried as religionists regarding lower birth rates.
@ChristineMcM
He's a Roman Catholic, a convert to the faith. Catholics do not allow birth control, except abstinence. It's doctrine. Ross will contort reality to fit with with the Catholic point of view that women should have babies early and often.
I find it interesting that Mr. Douthat is worried about population projections in Africa in the year 2100. While his own newspaper reports that the African Continent will be severely impacted by heat and water shortages that will make the it largely unlivable by that time. We can no longer discuss any long range social, political or financial predictions with out viewing them through the lens of climate change. I can see a future world where we will see significantly fewer babies being born, and even fewer surviving in Africa, or anywhere else.
116
How many people is enough, Mr. Douthat? And why does it matter what color they are? World population is projected to grow from 7.3 billion to 8.5 billion by 2030. That's less than 12 years. We all share the same planet. Having more babies because white control will otherwise erode is not the answer.
262
Wait. So let me get this right.
Europeans are, according to Ross, concerned about the high birthrates of people in Africa.
And in response, Ross suggests that Europeans have more babies.
This in a planet that is already overpopulated, and in which the rate of population growth is increasing. And according to recent reports, a planet that is twenty years away from a climate crisis.
Ross, buddy. You didn't think this one through very well.
632
@Vin. Who are we to tell Africans to stop having babies? They are free to do what they like in their countries, just as Europeans are free to say enough is enough.
1
@Vin
Ross is Roman Catholic and thus must have a growing brood. Right? Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich are also Catholic like Pope Francis.
1
@Vin,
I think his point is that African populations will replace European populations unless European people start reproducing at a higher rate.
The climate crises is unavoidable now. It will be a century of constant war over resources.
Uhmmm..... I think many don't really understand what's been happening. Woman having many pregnancies has been around in developing countries for centuries. It's how they were able to maintain a living standard by using the free labor children provided. But what kept many of the families smaller is the mortality rate.
The continued explosion in population in Africa is really due to the improvements in health care which reduces the mortality rate for children.
58
Overpopulation on the poorest of continents has been a serious problem for a long while now and it's only been getting worse, thanks in large measure to the Roman Catholic Church of which Mr. Douthat is a devotee. Why not insist that the Vatican (or Italy, in any case) accept every new economic refugee from Africa until the Pope accepts birth control as a rational solution? It's one thing to be opposed to abortion, but contraceptives?? Come on, Your Holiness, demonstrate a small portion of your vaunted humanism. As for Africa's secular leaders, they may ultimately arrive at the same awful solution that China accepted not so long ago: one-child-per-family (now raised to two per Han Chinese couple), with abortions coerced or draconian social/financial punishments imposed upon all offenders.
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@stu freeman,
The Pope has already ventured that there is no need for humans to breed like rabbits, causing an uproar.
1
Well, there's certainly a lot of gray area here.
It might sound suspicious to single out African women for bearing high numbers of children, but at the same time, it is hard to imagine most mothers coping, let alone getting ahead, with that birth rate. It's fair and not inherently racist to suggest having smaller families, as many Europeans do now.
And while the French and other Europeans undoubtedly question how their countries and culture will change with an influx of immigrants, that reluctance is shared by every other society seeing a steady stream of new arrivals.
But even so, some ambivalence about a strong African influx into France or Italy or the UK doesn't compare with referencing 'shole' countries, or wishing people back to 'huts,' or seeking migration from Norway.
8
"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
- Stein's law
Mr. Douthat as a "pro-natalist" and self-described climate change "lukewarmer", is there ANY limit to human population that concerns you?
While you may be "lukewarm" on climate change, climate scientists are sweating bullets about drastic changes in the lifetime of their children. Economists worry about the impact of massive automation and AI on future employment.
One way or the other, nations are going to have to figure out how to thrive with stable population growth. One way or the other population growth WILL stop.
We can do it the hard way and start moving in that direction now knowing that difficult changes take time on a global scale.
Or we can do it the REALLY hard way, ignore the signs that we are headed over a cliff, pray it will all work out somehow, act surprised when the death toll starts climbing with no end in sight, and pray some more.
Seems like the former is the wiser choice. Even if you believe in prayer.
98
Thank you for this case study on how race, class, and gender intersect with white supremacist undercurrents that inform both a) infertility and b) concerns about climate change.
Sure, sure, let's call it "euro-centrism" and "concerns about sustainable human population levels" instead...
While Douthat acknowledges the racist undertones in these arguments, there is a third rail that remains untouched.
The notion that economic development will "solve" anything at all is so bizarre, given that our paradigm of economic development is THE major consideration for defining what a sustainable human population looks... do you really think there will be a desirable plant to exist on if "they" (the entire continent of Africa and the Global South more broadly) can live like "us"?
30
@Kenneth Leon: Dear Kenneth--I'm sorry, but reality isn't racist no matter how much you'd like to argue it otherwise. Your grandstanding on making the reality of overpopulation somehow racist is the statement of a scoundrel.
1
Wow. So trying to control the number of children born in poor counties is bad? We want more poor, starving kids?
Family planning is about resources. Emotional, spiritual and frankly financial. This is not a race issue; it is a humanity issue.
European wealth should not be required to subsidize bad decisions by African families. If each family could pay their own way, let each decide their size. But with the expansion of social services, the costs of each child are born by the state.
My wife and I (a mixed race marriage) have one child. And we are both professionals fortunate to earn a nice living. We could have had more children, but made hard choices best for our family.
Would that it were for others to do the same, and for the author to support such.
127
@EWG: So how do we get contraception/abortion rights to women in Africa so that they can have the same experience with their partners as you and your wife here in the States? The first thing Trump did when he entered our White House was stop/constrain family planning centers around the world, just as W did. What IS it about contraception that so frightens Republicans? Can somebody please explain it to me? Abortion I understand their point of view though I do not agree. But contraception? Women and girls around the world, no matter their color!, should be able to CONTROL THEIR OWN BODIES. And then they can, through education, rise to their own human potential.
Until we end Patriarchy and honestly respect women and not look at them (me!) as 'lesser than and we (men!) will control that', we have no hope. And Crony Capitalism/Income Inequality is the second reason, known as GREED.
Ending those two things around the world would help enormously. But it will not happen in my lifetime or my daughter's lifetime. I am so grateful she has decided not to have a child.
Am I angry? Yep.
3
@EWG
Yes, trying to control the number of children born in poor countries (which is really a euphemism for non-white countries) is bad. It is called eugenics.
Racist attitudes are often veiled as humanitarian ones. America forced the sterilization of many women of color (who were believed unable to care for their children according to the culturally specific standards of white middle-class America) under the guise of working toward the common good for humanity.
2
@EWG
"European wealth should not be required to subsidize bad decisions by African families."
You do realize a large amount of European wealth came from exploiting Africans
2
Credit to Mr Douthat and Mr Macron for highlighting an issue which is emotionally fraught and solutions easily attacked.
China is the only country building a public private project to develop Africa on a massive scale. Maybe that is because they have achieved in their own country a reduction in poverty unprecedented in human history. As in their own country, there is plenty of criticism over debts, corruption and self dealing by leaders. The efforts of other countries and international organizations typically target nutrition and health issues, but not the economic development that leads to higher education and falling birth rates.
Mexico achieved a dramatic drop in fertility, from around 7 to under 2. Their trade relationship with the US, combined with aggressive family planning efforts, made a huge difference.
The wealthy countries of Europe would do well to encourage their own private sector to take bigger risks to promote development in Africa. Otherwise, the effects of demographics and climate change will be beyond their control and massively disruptive.
29
One presumes the women with Phd's who have large families, also have the means to support their large broods, and provide their posterity with adequate shelter, food, and medical care. Many African women do not even have the luxury of being able to feed their children.
Anxiety about a northward creeping African population aside, we have a finite amount of arable land on this planet. During the last 40 years we have lost "33% of high-quality, food-producing land" due to erosion and pollution according to scientists. This tired earth cannot support an ever expanding population. That doesn't apply just to Africa, it applies to all of us. Birth control should be encouraged, not discouraged as you would have it. This isn't about racism, nor church rhetoric, it is about the ability of those who live on this earth to have an adequate supply of food to survive. That can only be accomplished if the population doesn't outstrip the ability to produce food.
Mr. Douthat it amazes me that you can look at poor countries in this world, many populated by those who profess your chosen religion, and not see the suffering caused by having more children than you can feed, clothe, or shelter. Birth control would be a blessing, yet your Church, with which you agree, labels it as intrinsically evil. Tell me exactly what is good about a child who starves to death because there isn't enough to go around.
692
@Diana
Amen!
1
@Diana Food & Water. Water will be like gold.
Good comment.
1
Beautiful!
Every once in a while, Ross tires of his devoted religious following and resolves to make a dent in the wider world of ideas. This, though, was a doozey.
Convincing African women to not have so many babies may rely more on convincing African men. And that’s perhaps a different but just as intense a cultural problem. Yet it’s not a difference that’s likely to engage Macron, as he’s focused just on the numbers.
But Ross returns to religious verities eventually. Euros should have more babies. That by extension relies on less use of abortion and artificial methods of birth control – and perhaps developing a taste for raw oysters.
We have problems related to excessive human population that go WAY beyond the cultural assimilation of multitudes in non-native societies. We’re stoking an eventual heat-death on this planet that is fueled largely by human bodies. THAT’S what eventually will capture the attention of the world, not Macron’s concern for the survival of the French culture and classical phenotype in the teeth of cross-border human inundations.
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@me
A lot of us DO sympathize. But my comment was directed at Ross's Catholic religious evangelization far more than at Macron's cultural protectiveness.
1
@Richard Luettgen
And how does the free unregulated market deal with the coming heat-death? Is it not that people should make as much money as possible, even if this accelerates the coming of the heath death, because lots of money buys a place in wherever is still habitable.
7
@Richard Luettgen
actually the planet is vastly more threatened by north american ways of life, than by human bodies as such (Africa currently disproportionately consumes less and produces less waste)
As for the clash of the cultures, no need to look that far ...
2
A century ago people started saying, "The rich get richer and the poor get children." Now we see that played out on a global scale.
Runaway population growth IS a problem, not for western civilization per se, but for the very thing we call civilization itself. If we kill off the planet by consuming its resources and destroying its ecosystems, does it matter what color its final human inhabitants are going to be, or what languages they speak?
264
Good observations, however you seem to be missing the point that post-industrial nations do not need as many people. A fifty year history of automation now accelerating with advanced robotics and AI will make people even more redundant. The plethora of minimum wage jobs we may be currently seeing will not put people into fashionable neighborhoods. Do we really want a servile under-class? The ratio between nominal minimum wage and community college tuition has increased by two and a half times in 50 years, so gaining skill-sets is problematic. Given our incapacity for problem solving, old reliables like war and famine supplemented by new disasters augmented by environmental catastrophes will be called upon to do their dirty work.
99
How naive to compose an essay about the future of projected populations without taking into account climate change and how it will inevitably differentially determine carrying capacities of Europe and Africa. “Natalists” can’t just decide how many people our continents will accommodate. Food and water supplies, dependent on climate and rainfall will determine population size, and will catalyze migration in unpredictabe ways. It is beyond naive to consider population growth as merely a political choice, when the the lives of millions will be forfeit to starvation and war, if we don’t consider the biological consequences of climate change and overpopulation.
377
@Edna, I find it quite disgusting & amazing that most of the same people who complain about migrants coming into the west are climate science deniers. There is a massive link b/t climate change & migratory patterns to the west from poorer, non white countries. Plus, these regions will lose the progress that they've made & the problems that these people complain of will re-worsen (again).
4