I attended the PMPA annual meeting last weekend and watched an inspiring talk by Herbert E. Meyer, Former Vice Chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council.
He gave a unique perspective on where the opportunity lies in the coming decades for U.S. manufacturers. India, the Middle East and Africa will be the leading consumers in the next few decades, while Europe and Japan will literally die. According to Meyer, the Western capitalist democracies in Europe and Asia simply don’t produce enough children to support their aging populations. A rate of 2.1 births is needed to sustain a population, and modern capitalist welfare economies need young people to pay taxes to care for the retired geezers. In addition to providing tax revenue, large families spend a lot more money to fuel economies than the AARP folks.
Throughout Europe the family birthrate averages 1.5 children per family. According to Meyer, if Europe were to somehow reverse its downward spiral in population growth, it would take two generations to get back to the required replacement birthrate. In Germany 40 percent of college educated women have no kids. One out of seven couples gets married in England. Spain and Italy have rates of 1.2 children per family. Japan averages 1.5 births per family, and by 2020 one out of five Japanese people will be over age 70.
Everyone worries about the threat of China’s booming economy, but the country’s workforce shrunk for the first time last month as a result of its 1.1 birthrate. Nature’s ratio of males to females is 103 to 100. In India and China there are 118 males to 100 girls. One hundred million men in those countries will never marry–can’t be great for morale. According to Meyer, the present level of political unrest in China is higher than that in the Soviet Union two years before its 1992 revolution.
Speaking of Russia–the life expectancy of a male in that country is 58. Demographers predict that by 2050, Russia’s population will be smaller than that of Yemen. Thankfully, Hispanic immigrants have enabled the United States birthrate to hover right around the 2.1 children per family replacement required to leave its economy well positioned in the coming years.
While Europe dies, huge opportunity awaits in India, the Middle East and Africa. India has a healthy 2.8 children per family birthrate and many countries in the Middle East and Africa have large young populations. Manufacturing plants are finally beginning to sprout up in Africa. The Arab Spring is spawning democratic governments all over the Middle East (different interpretations of democracy than ours) that will eventually pave the way for a larger global middle class. Meyer said that each year throughout the world 50 million to 100 million people emerge from poverty. The new prosperous populations will need to build infrastructure, grow more food, and produce more fuel. They will manufacture goods domestically and want to buy goods produced by American companies.
Keep having babies and develop a taste for Falafel and Tandoori Chicken.
Question: Are you scared by the possibility of an Arab dominated Europe?
5 Comments
Lloyd: Germany has had negative birth rate for several years now. The influx of Turks have off-set this situation and they are becoming very good machinists as wells as filling in the other trades. Germany is concentrating science, math anf engineering on their younger generations thus leading the way in product technology. We benefit from that. Jack Frost
Lloyd: Excuse the typos. I must be tired. No nap. 91 and a half. Jack No I am not afraid of them taking over Europe. They did control an area from the Iberian Peninsula to Turkey for hundreds of years. What would be different and why would history be different. Spain tried its holocaust without success. Hitler also. Why would Arabs make me worry. Jack
I’n not afraid of an ARAB-dominated Europe, any more than I’m afraid of a Hispanic dominated America. What worries me is an ISLAMIC-dominated anywhere, because Islam has been prone to domination by a small group of intolerant Muslims. As we see almost everywhere in the Islamic world, there is no room for people of other (or no) faiths. The Coptic Christians of Egypt are justifiably just as worried about Islamic domination as we should be. Let’s make sure that our own Constitutional safeguards are strengthened. And we’d best not allow political correctness get in the way of refusing to tolerate bigots and racists, regardless of their race, creed or country of origin
I agree that there’s no problem with an Arab Europe. There’s definite reason for concern when it comes to Islamic extremism. The European welfare system has spawned a breeding ground for extremist Islamic philosophy. It places Middle Eastern immigrants in glorfied “ghettos” of public housing where there is no assimilation into modern European society. There is no encouragement for individual freedom and personal responsibility. The welfare society has fostered a whole generation of Islamic young men unable to work for living, who have been fanaticized by the crutch of extremist Islam, and hold mass pent up anger at the state.
Encourage assimilation, education, and personal empowerment/responsibility among immigrants.
If China were not executing children with cleft palates, birth marks/defects, one out of two twins born healthy and other pregnancies that exceed the one family, one child mandate, maybe they would have enough workers to sustain there communist society. China’s birth control program has eliminated approximately 30 million unwanted, unlawful, births per year, almost ten percent of the US population. India has a similar program, though not as draconian, called, ” we two and our one “, which has been in effect for years.