Mark Schieritz

Today, Foreign Affairs publishes a long essay I wrote summarizing some of my work on the global fertility collapse: foreignaffairs.com/united-st… It was a fantastic experience (with great editorial support) because the essay pushed me beyond pure economics to discuss issues such as geopolitics and polarization. Unlike some commentators, I don’t think the first-round economic consequences of fertility decline matter most; the second-round political and social ones do. Yes, social security systems worldwide are in danger, but reality will impose itself sooner or later. The same politicians who swear over their ancestors’ tombs that retirement benefits will remain untouched will cut them (even if they are French). It will not be pretty, and most likely the cuts will come only after a major crisis and after politicians have tried everything else and failed. Similarly, businesses will adapt to shrinking markets and valuations. Those who claim that capitalism somehow needs constantly expanding markets will be proven wrong. After all, this is the same misguided understanding of markets that has been proven wrong again and again since September 14, 1867, and that nobody really believes unless they have had the misfortune of earning a Ph.D. in a humanities department at an Ivy League school. The real consequences will come when collapsing populations poison political systems. Look at the recent elections in eastern Germany. That is the future for all of us. Also, the relative standing of great powers will shift drastically. Given current demographic trends, the U.S. will have a larger population than China by around 2100. The exact date depends on assumptions about net immigration into the U.S., but even with zero net immigration, the U.S. will overtake China by 2128. And Russia’s demographic future is only slightly more optimistic than China’s. Those who dismiss these changes forget how antiquity ended in Western Europe. The western part of the Roman Empire entered acute demographic decline around 200 CE. By 476 CE, the western empire no longer existed. Despite some revisionist views that have cast a more positive light on late antiquity (and rightly corrected what was sometimes an overly negative assessment of the period), the fact is that England or France in 600 CE had lost most of their classical heritage, and material life had lost at least an order of magnitude in sophistication. The eastern part of the empire, however, weathered its demographic collapse much better and lasted another millennium. No, I don’t believe we will go extinct (the Amish and Haredi will be enough for the survival of humankind), but the world will be very different in 2200 regardless of how you feel about it. The rational is the real and the real is the rational.