Culture and Demography: for 1P5

Servers and Sacred Ministers at Mass for the Latin Mass Society's AGM
at Westminster Cathedral in 2021. Phot: John Aron.

My latest on One Peter Five is a double book review I wrote for the last Gregorius Magnus. It begins:

This is a reflection on two books published this year:

Catherine Pakaluk Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth (Regnery, 2024)

Paul Morland No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children (Forum, 2024)

Over the last decade or two, we have become used to the fact that we are facing a demographic winter. For some time this fact had to struggle to be heard, because of the entrenched idea that the problem was the opposite, a population explosion that would overwhelm the world’s capacity to produce food. Although this theory was dominant in the 1970s and 1980s, and lingers to this day in some circles, it was always very dubious and for a long time now has been clearly false. The rate of the growth of the world population peaked in the early 1960s. The growth rate has continued to decline since then, and as night follows day it will fall below zero in the decades to come, and the world population will begin to shrink.

These two books give important insights into the relationship between economics, demography, and values. Paul Morland is a demographer without a particular religious axe to grind: he frequently reminds his readers of his support for contraception. Catherine Pakaluk, married to the Catholic philosopher Michael Pakaluk, is a Catholic mother of eight, and also a social scientist with a background in economics, who led a research project to interview 55 women in America who had college degrees and at least five children.

Paul Morland sets out the facts of the demographic implosion the world is facing: how severe it is, how difficult to reverse it will be, and the frightening consequences that can be expected from it. These consequences are already unfolding in Japan, a rich country where old people are increasingly dying alone and untended in their homes. Japan is unusual in having resisted mass immigration as a solution to falling numbers of young people joining the workforce, but as Morland points out, the world as a whole cannot solve its demographic problem through immigration. When poorer countries arrive at the demographic stage that Japan is in today, the consequences for the care of the elderly will be ugly. Already, relatively poor nations such as Thailand and Jamaica have fertility rates well below replacement levels, and many other countries are heading in the same direction. The demographic winter will reach some countries before others, but it is not a problem only for the rich world.

Read it all there.

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