Crawling from the Wreckage (37 page)

People care hugely about demography, even if they sometimes don’t know that that’s the word they want. No political debate in Quebec, for example, is complete without a discussion of the dangerous rise (or catastrophic fall—take your pick) in the proportion of non-francophones in the population. It’s fundamentally about how one tribe is doing vis-à-vis other tribes, and you can’t blame people for caring about that
.

“The number of women aged between 15 and 50 is fixed,” explained Japanese Health Minister Hakuo Yanagisawa in a speech in Matsue City last Friday. “Because the number of birth-giving machines and devices is fixed, all we can ask for is for them to do their best per head.” Then
he paused a moment and hastily added: “Although it may not be so appropriate to call them machines.”

Too late. Even in Japan, a government minister calling women “birth-giving machines” is bound to raise a fuss, even if he has the excuse of being old (seventy-one) and stupid. Yanagisawa spent the weekend making abject apologies, and the debate about the plunging Japanese birth rate moved on. But he wasn’t just rude; he was also wrong. Governments
can
affect the birth rate.

Last week, France revealed that more babies were born there in 2006 than in any other year for the past quarter-century—830,000 of them, in fact. The fertility rate, which has been rising for years, is now up to 2 babies per woman and, at the rate it is currently rising, will reach the “replacement rate” of 2.1 next year. Compared to Japan’s incredibly low 1.26 babies per woman, it is a veritable baby boom, but within Europe the French birth rate is exceeded only by the Irish.

Japan and France had roughly similar demographic trends after the Second World War. First came the baby boom, as a result of which Japan’s population grew from 75 million to the current 127 million and France’s went from 40 million to 63 million. By the 1990s, however, both countries’ birth rates had dropped below replacement level. In the long run, that means the actual population is beginning to shrink. Japan’s population started to decline again in 2004, and by 2050 it is predicted to be only ninety million.

This is quite normal in the developed world, where among the larger countries only the United States still has a growing population (and that mostly thanks to immigration). Japan’s population is falling faster than most, but Italy’s and Russia’s are falling just as fast.

Yet the French birth rate, which was following the same pattern, suddenly turned around in 1996 and started going up again. What are they doing right? “The deciding factor [is] that it is easier to reconcile professional activity and a family life here than in most other European countries,” suggested Jean-Michel Charpin, director of the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies.

The dates do more or less match up. France’s unusually family-friendly policies, like universally affordable day care and generous parental leave, were launched in the early 1990s under then Families Minister Ségolène Royal (now the Socialist candidate for the presidency), and only a few years later the birth rate started to recover.

Even the racists in the National Front do not oppose such policies because every ethnic group has responded in the same way to these incentives: the fertility rate among France’s immigrant population is only slightly higher than that of the population at large. If current trends persist—that is, a declining population in Germany and a slowly rising population in France—by 2050 France will have the second-largest population in Europe, behind only Russia.

Others are beginning to notice the French success, and Russia most of all. Russia had 150 million people when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991; it’s already down to 143 million and it is shrinking by 700,000 people every year. This has been causing something close to panic in the Kremlin, where they see the increasingly empty spaces of Siberia and the Russian Far East as a standing temptation to an overcrowded China. (That sentiment may be paranoid but you hear it expressed in Moscow all the time.)

“The most acute problem in modern-day Russia is demography,” said President Vladimir Putin last May, and announced measures to increase the birth rate even more sweeping than those in France. Starting this month, Russian women who give birth to a second child will get an immediate cash bonus of 250,000 roubles ($9,500). That’s a small fortune in an economy where the minimum wage is just over $300 a month.

At the same time, Putin doubled the state benefit for a first child to $55 a month, while women who have a second child will get an extra $110 a month, plus financial help with child care. Have three children, and you will get close to the minimum wage without working at all. That should be enough to stabilize the population. Get the alcohol problem under control—one third of male deaths in Russia are alcohol-related, and life expectancy for men is only fifty-nine—and Russia’s population might even start growing again.

Not that the world actually needs more Russians or French or Japanese, of course. There are already ten times as many of them as there were five hundred years ago, and that’s probably already more than the planet can bear over the long run.

The first time I went to Russia—back in the early eighties, when it was still the Soviet Union—I knew something was wrong beyond the obvious things like no commercial advertising and a pervasive glumness, but it took me three or four days to figure it out. And then, suddenly, I realized what
it was: with the exception of a few conscript soldiers from the Central Asian republics absolutely everybody on the streets was white
.

All the Soviet-bloc countries were like that. They simply hadn’t had any immigration because who in their right mind would have wanted to move there? Even today they are still the most ethnically homogeneous societies in the West (on the assumption that they are all really part of the greater “West,” which I think is fair). That’s probably why they are the most racist part of the West, too. The ethnically more complex societies are also the more tolerant ones
.

If you are the head of something called the Equality and Human Rights Commission, your job is to complain about the racism, gender discrimination and general unfairness of the society you live in. So Trevor Phillips, chairman of Britain’s
EHRC
, broke with tradition when he said last week that Britain is “by far—and I mean by far—the best place in Europe to live if you are not white.”

Phillips, whose own heritage is black Caribbean, made his remarks on the tenth anniversary of a report on the murder of a young black Londoner, Stephen Lawrence, that condemned the British police as “institutionally racist.” So they were, at the time—but having lived in London half my life, I think Phillips is right. Things have changed.

Lucinda Platt of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Essex University thinks so, too. She has just published a report revealing that one in five children in Britain now belongs to an ethnic minority—and one in ten lives in a mixed-race family. The first statistic might merely confirm Enoch Powell’s fears of forty years ago. The second proves that he was utterly wrong.

Enoch Powell was the Conservative politician who made a famous speech in 1968 predicting a race war if the United Kingdom did not stop non-white immigration from the former empire. He dressed it up with quotes from the classics, but the message was plain: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’ ”

“That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic,” Powell went on, referring to the race riots that devastated many large American cities after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, “ … is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, [the non-white part of the British population] will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now.”

Powell was promptly expelled from the shadow cabinet, but an opinion poll soon afterwards showed that 74 percent of the British population shared his fears. The general opinion at the time in Europe, based mainly on observation of the American experience, was that different races could not live comfortably together.

Fast-forward forty years, and Britain is more or less as Powell predicted: the proportion of non-whites among its citizens is almost the same as it is in the United States. But the next generation of British are not fighting each other, as Powell predicted; they are marrying each other.

Among British children who have an Indian heritage, 11 percent live in families with one white parent. Among kids with a Chinese heritage, 35 percent have one white parent. Among children with a black Caribbean heritage, 49 percent do. Including my next-door neighbours.

Among Muslim Britons, the rate is much lower (only 4 percent for kids of Pakistani heritage), but the younger generation of British people is largely blind to ethnicity and religious differences, all the old shibboleths. And apart from some former mill towns where unskilled immigrants from a single ethnic group confront the old white working class, both of them now unemployed, there are few racially segregated ghettoes in Britain.

Of London’s thirty-two boroughs, none is less than 10 percent non-white. On the other hand, only three reach 50 percent non-white, and those just barely. Despite the happy-ever-after inauguration of Barack Obama, the urban scene in New York, Los Angeles or Chicago is dramatically different.

This does not prove that British people are more virtuous than Americans. It just shows that people of different races can live comfortably together, can even come to see race as essentially irrelevant to their choice of mate,
provided that there is no heritage of race-based slavery
.

The French “race riots” of 2005 and 2007 occasioned much discussion of France’s failure to integrate its immigrants, but lots of angry white kids took part in those riots, too. The same was true of the Brixton “race riots” in London in 1981. They were actually anti-police riots, and whites were welcome to join. Many did.

Eastern Europe is different: it has far fewer non-whites, and so it is far more racist. But Britain, and to a lesser extent France, is rather like Canada, another country that was 98 percent white only fifty years ago, but now has a racial diversity that equals or exceeds that of the United States. Yet it simply isn’t an issue for most of the young. Indeed, London and Toronto are probably the two best cities in the world in which to bring up mixed-race kids.

None of this detracts from the historic achievement of Americans in electing a black (well, all right, mixed-race) president. It’s just to say that it was much harder to do that in the United States because of the malign influence of history.

All the more credit to Americans for doing it anyway; and full marks to the British and the Canadians for showing that race really doesn’t matter when history doesn’t get in the way.

The biggest demographic change of the current era, by now visible in every continent except Africa, is the greying of the planet. People are living longer and the birth rate is dropping, so the old will soon outnumber the young. This has an intriguing implication: an older population is probably also a more peaceful one
.

That’s history for you. King Lear was an exception, but most of Shakespeare’s kings and princes were under thirty, many under twenty. Their hormones
were still raging, so of course they committed murders, massacres and the like. In a world where the average life expectancy was thirty and most people didn’t even survive childhood, politics was bound to be pretty turbulent. It was always the same, in every part of the planet—but what if all the nations grew up together?

At the end of a discouraging year, here is an encouraging thought: the world
is
growing up. The average age in the world today is twenty-eight. (In Shakespeare’s time, it was around fifteen.) By 2050, it will be forty. At the age of forty, calculations of long-term self-interest have largely prevailed over hormones. Aging doesn’t necessarily make people nicer, but it certainly makes them more careful.

When experts play around with population growth statistics they are mostly concerned about overpopulation, pressure on resources and the environment, all the usual worries—and they are right to worry about those things. They pay less attention to the political effects because they are less easy to trace, but they are there, and they are very important.

There has been a steady run of good news on the population front in the past few decades. In 1968, the United Nations Population Division predicted that the world population would grow to twelve billion by 2050. By 1992, the same office was predicting ten billion people by 2050. Last month, it predicted that the world’s population would peak at 8.9 billion, and not until 2300—although it will already be pretty close to that figure by 2050.

In reality, even this is probably a pessimistic prediction. All these projections have been based on an assumption that birth rates will continue to fall—a straightforward projection of the world’s population based even on today’s birth rate would yield a total of around fifteen billion people by 2050—but the assumptions about how fast they will fall have consistently been too conservative.

You can see why the forecasters tended towards pessimism: the recent history of human-population growth has resembled an avalanche. It took almost all of human history to reach a total of two billion people, around 1927. It took less than fifty years to add the next two billion, by 1974. It took less than twenty-five years to add another two billion, by 1999. And we’re still growing at seventy-six million a year: an extra two Canadas every year.