This is not a local oddity. South Korea is at 0.68 children per woman — the lowest on Earth. Taiwan, Singapore, Italy, Spain and Japan scrape along between 1.1 and 1.3. Much of Europe hovers around 1.5. No major developed nation is reproducing itself.
This is unprecedented in human history. Never before, in peacetime and without plague or famine, have entire civilisations voluntarily stopped replacing themselves. Generation after generation, across continents, people have looked at the future and said “no thanks.”
I grew up in the 1970s terrified of Paul Ehrlich’s *Population Bomb*. The experts predicted mass starvation, resource wars and standing room only. We were told the planet could not sustain us. Technology and free markets delivered the Green Revolution and abundance. The real bomb has gone off in the opposite direction.
The consequences are already here and they compound every year.
Ever-shrinking populations mean absolute decline, not just ageing. Fewer births today mean fewer workers, fewer taxpayers and fewer parents tomorrow. The pyramid inverts. A smaller cohort of young people must support an ever-larger cohort of retirees. Health systems, superannuation and debt explode under the weight. Innovation slows. The cultural dynamism that comes with youthful energy drains away. Societies become cautious, inward-looking and brittle.
For families it is quieter but deeper. Smaller households mean less support in old age, more loneliness and the slow grief of empty nests that never filled. Grandchildren become rare treasures instead of the normal blessing of life. The rich web of siblings, cousins and multi-generational memory that once stitched communities together frays and snaps.
For the economy the arithmetic is merciless. A shrinking workforce cannot sustain the welfare state built on the assumption of endless growth. Taxes rise or services collapse. Businesses cannot find staff. Debt piles higher. Every forecast of future GDP, infrastructure and living standards rests on a demographic lie.
I know human-like robots and artificial intelligence will solve the labour shortage. Robots can stack shelves, drive trucks and change bedpans, but they will never be grandchildren. They will never fill the churches, schools and sports fields with noisy, creative, unpredictable human life. They cannot create the flourishing society that comes from young minds challenging old ideas, young hands building new things and young families passing on the culture worth preserving. A nation of pensioners and machines is not a civilisation. It is a managed decline.
We were told to “be fruitful and multiply.” That ancient command was not sentimental poetry. It was the drive for human flourishing. Secular individualism, easy contraception, career-first culture, housing costs engineered by planning laws and a welfare state that treats children as optional lifestyle accessories have delivered the opposite.
The free market does not cause this collapse — it simply reveals the choices people make when the state removes old incentives and the culture discards old virtues. The solution is not more taxpayer-funded childcare gimmicks. Those are bandaids on a cultural haemorrhage.
New Zealand needs the courage to face reality. Affordable housing through lighter regulation, lower taxes on families, and a cultural re-embrace of the value of children are the only levers that matter. Empty pews helped create this vacuum. Only renewed respect for the family — and the transcendent command to be fruitful — can refill it.
The population bomb has detonated. The fallout is fewer New Zealanders, older New Zealanders and a poorer, greyer future. Time to stop managing decline and start reversing it. The alternative is a slow, polite national disappearance.
I grew up in the 1970s terrified of Paul Ehrlich’s *Population Bomb*. The experts predicted mass starvation, resource wars and standing room only. We were told the planet could not sustain us. Technology and free markets delivered the Green Revolution and abundance. The real bomb has gone off in the opposite direction.
The consequences are already here and they compound every year.
Ever-shrinking populations mean absolute decline, not just ageing. Fewer births today mean fewer workers, fewer taxpayers and fewer parents tomorrow. The pyramid inverts. A smaller cohort of young people must support an ever-larger cohort of retirees. Health systems, superannuation and debt explode under the weight. Innovation slows. The cultural dynamism that comes with youthful energy drains away. Societies become cautious, inward-looking and brittle.
For families it is quieter but deeper. Smaller households mean less support in old age, more loneliness and the slow grief of empty nests that never filled. Grandchildren become rare treasures instead of the normal blessing of life. The rich web of siblings, cousins and multi-generational memory that once stitched communities together frays and snaps.
For the economy the arithmetic is merciless. A shrinking workforce cannot sustain the welfare state built on the assumption of endless growth. Taxes rise or services collapse. Businesses cannot find staff. Debt piles higher. Every forecast of future GDP, infrastructure and living standards rests on a demographic lie.
I know human-like robots and artificial intelligence will solve the labour shortage. Robots can stack shelves, drive trucks and change bedpans, but they will never be grandchildren. They will never fill the churches, schools and sports fields with noisy, creative, unpredictable human life. They cannot create the flourishing society that comes from young minds challenging old ideas, young hands building new things and young families passing on the culture worth preserving. A nation of pensioners and machines is not a civilisation. It is a managed decline.
We were told to “be fruitful and multiply.” That ancient command was not sentimental poetry. It was the drive for human flourishing. Secular individualism, easy contraception, career-first culture, housing costs engineered by planning laws and a welfare state that treats children as optional lifestyle accessories have delivered the opposite.
The free market does not cause this collapse — it simply reveals the choices people make when the state removes old incentives and the culture discards old virtues. The solution is not more taxpayer-funded childcare gimmicks. Those are bandaids on a cultural haemorrhage.
New Zealand needs the courage to face reality. Affordable housing through lighter regulation, lower taxes on families, and a cultural re-embrace of the value of children are the only levers that matter. Empty pews helped create this vacuum. Only renewed respect for the family — and the transcendent command to be fruitful — can refill it.
The population bomb has detonated. The fallout is fewer New Zealanders, older New Zealanders and a poorer, greyer future. Time to stop managing decline and start reversing it. The alternative is a slow, polite national disappearance.
Rodney Hide is former ACT Party leader, and Minister in the National-ACT Government from 2008 to 2011. This article was first published HERE
19 comments:
The majority of New Zealand doesn't believe in sky fairies anymore. Nor should they.
There will need to be a different motivation to get people to breed rather than " God says so".
Another AI article from Rodney. Looking past that, the neoliberal corporate policies of the last 40 years are proving their worth. Everyone is unsurprised but the neoliberals, confusingly.
>"Empty pews helped create this vacuum. "
The Pope and the Quiverfull Movement (do look them up - hilarious website) would certainly agree, but I'm not aware of many other sects that forbid birth control and promote large families.
Falling birth rates come with the change in the status and lifestyle of women, urbanisation, the sizes and costs of housing, and material expectations. Hence we observe them in most countries outside the European and European-derived sphere as well - Asia (S Korea is noted), Japan (whole villages with hardly a soul under 65), and Muslim-majority countries (eg. Turkey, Iran, Lebanon).
The way forward is to officially regard children as a 'public good' as they will grow into the next generation of productive (well, hopefully) adults, workers and professionals that society needs to flourish. Society as a whole needs to take an active role in this human capital production process by financing children. Surveys in many countries show that many married people would like to have kids (or more kids) but they can't afford it. The second income is as essential as the first with regard to paying the mortgage for starters. An unplanned pregnancy (or even a planned one) may result in a couple's loss of home and financial ruin.
Exactly how this ought to work is a complex, multifaceted topic that we as a society need to look at hard - urgently.
The UNs engineered population control through womens education has run amuck - marxist feminists used this opportunity to brain wash western women into believing their biological function has no value compared to career.
The role model is reinforced every night on TV.
Good luck trying to turn that around.
Genesis 1:28 KJV, “and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over … every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Well, we’ve replenished, subdued and controlled it. Now what?
Our economy cannot keep growing forever; the world is already stressed and needs fewer humans. We are responding in a rational way. Only have children if you can afford it, not lie back and think of England. We need to find a way to manage that.
By the way, having more children to resolve changes to race demographics is not an appropriate approach.
I blame socialism.
That is destroying western society and "developed nations".
Sub Saharan African nations don't give a monkey's butt about housing affordability.
Yet their fertility rate is through the roof.
>"Sub Saharan African nations don't give a monkey's butt about housing affordability. Yet their fertility rate is through the roof."
The urban-dwelling ones, especially the educated classes, most certainly do have concerns about housing affordability - their lifestyles are very 'Western' and they face rents and mortgages just like we do. To a village dweller, housing affordability is an abstraction: they live on tribal land and build on it at will. But Africa is becoming increasingly urbanised. And guess what, birth rates, while still much higher than ours, are heading south.
Oswald Spencer rightly observed in his seminal The Decline of the West back in the 1920s that when a People no longer reproduce as a matter of course and as a consequence of a subconscious biological imperative, and when they instead believe it is just another lifestlyle option among many, then it's all over for that People. In short, we are finished.
That would be bad enough without the mass non-White immigration all over the West, but the future for European Man is eventually becoming an increasing minority among fertile strangers who don't think twice about reproduction.
In this economy? Unaffordable, thanks to a series of NZ F / ACT corporate socialism legislation. Better to go to Aus to start a family.
Our World is akin to a Petri dish in that it has finite boundaries and levels of resources. Humanity is a small part of the equation that has in many ways managed to outgrow its usefulness to the Planet. Whatever happens in the future is entirely up to nature. We can prattle on about too many or too few offspring but nature does not care, it does not negotiate, it will just do its thing. Whether we have or play a long or short hand in the grand scheme of things will not matter a jot in the end.
People are being frightened of by doom and gloom about global warming , pandemics , destruction of normal civil society with lack of freedoms , wars and warfare worse than ever and we have in NZ , by far the highest youth suicide rate . Something is very wrong .
I don't blame people for not having children - the world has become too scary .
I align with Rodney- belief in a divine, benevolent being who cares about us is helpful when considering the future and producing more children to live in it .
Anon 821 reminds me of Wolf Larsen in Jack London's 1904 gripping novel 'The Sea Wolf', in which he summarises his attitude to life as follows: “It is like yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move for a minute, an hour, a year, or a hundred years, but that in the end will cease to move."
>"Whatever happens in the future is entirely up to nature."
No. For the past three million years or longer, we have been defying 'nature' through our social organisation and the use of technology, starting in the Old Stone Age (Palaeolithic), to maximise resources and take the edge off population limiting factors. If we had stayed in the Old Stone Age, the planet would be able to support half a billion people at best; we now have 16 times that number.
We have beaten 'nature' at its own game, but we have now hit the self-destruct button by cutting back on breeding owing to socioeconomic factors that I describe in my first submission above. We need to now use our brains and deal with this problem rationally and effectively.
ACT changing the law so we don’t have security of employment, like it was in the 70s and 80s. Why raise a family in a shoebox ACT apartment when you can lose your job at any time. Keeping the poor, poor and insecure.
Re BV 7 May 10:20
"The urban-dwelling ones, especially the educated classes, most certainly do have concerns about housing affordability -"
Ok then - if you want to split hairs.
The "uneducated masses - in sub–Saharan Africa" don't seem to give a monkey's butt -because housing affordability to them is "an abstract idea."
The notion that it is only the "educated" class for we should be concerned about is a bit odd.
Given I know just as many educated morons as uneducated.
Life is a chain: the function of each link is simply to connect the preceding link to the succeeding one. The purpose of life is life.
And, yes, we need to now use our brains – specifically our uniquely-human, hopefully still-developing rational faculty – and deal with this problem rationally and effectively.
But it’s not happening, is it?
Even if we have now hit the self-destruct button by cutting back on breeding and we consequently go extinct, does that matter? If so, why?
It is admittedly irksome that we don’t seem to be able to collectively get our act together.
Straw man alert: Anon 804 claims that I am saying that we should only be concerned for the educated classes in Africa. That is not what I am saying at all.
Anon 804 would do well to spend some time in agrarian developing countries (I spent over 20 years in them) and suss out how people live. Rural folks live on communally owned land where they can build homes out of bush materials and/or materials they buy from selling agricultural surplus or their labour and pay no rent or mortgage. Educated people get salaried jobs and have to live in towns and cities where they have to buy or rent housing.
PS: Of course there are non- or poorly-educated people living in towns and cities in Africa as well. They are the ones we should be most concerned about. They live in shanties and can barely afford to put food on the table (back in the village, you grow your own tucker).
Re BV 08:59
I spent many years living in a developing nation too.
Doesn't make me an expert though.
You have missed the entire point of the argument.
Most of the world's population live poorly yet it doesn't stop them from having children.
Perhaps you could go back and finish your mission of re-educating the poor and tell them where they are going wrong?
Anon 859, poor people in poor countries continue having lots of children because child labour is so important to their family economy. I remember a study in Bangladesh that showed that a boy born to a peasant family started earning his keep at age 12 and was supporting a sister at age 15. In urban areas, children can be put to use doing crap jobs and begging. Tell those people they are "going wrong" and they will tell you that they wouldn't survive without those kids, especially when they get a bit older. Children in those societies are economic assets before they hit their teens. Accordingly, having plenty of them is a rational response to those people's predicament.
Post a Comment
Thank you for joining the discussion. Breaking Views welcomes respectful contributions that enrich the debate. Please ensure your comments are not defamatory, derogatory or disruptive. We appreciate your cooperation.