RACIAL PROFILING AND THE EXCEPTIONAL NATION (via Jeff Guinn):

Power and Population in Asia (Nicholas Eberstadt, February 2004, Policy Review)

Auguste Comte, the nineteenth-century French mathematician and sociologist, is widely credited with the dictum “Demography is destiny.” It is a wonderful aphorism — but it promises too much and offers too little. A more operational formulation might suggest that demographic forces can alter the realm of the possible, both politically and economically, for regularly established population groupings. Demographic considerations can (but are not always required to) alter the complex strategic balance between, and within, countries.

By comparison with other contemporary forms of change — social, economic, political, technological — demographic changes are very slow and very regular. Over the past generation, for example, a 3 percent per annum rate of population growth would have been considered terribly high in Asia, while a 3 percent inflation rate would have been regarded as remarkably low. And demographic change is only sharp and discontinuous in times of utter upheaval and catastrophe (circumstances, to be sure, not unfamiliar to modern Russia, China, Cambodia, and Korea — and a number of other Asian or Eurasian populations). From the standpoint of strategic demography, momentous developments can and do occur from one generation to the next, but rather less of note can be expected to take place over the course of three to five years.

For our purposes here, we will try to peer into the Asian and Eurasian demographic future to the year 2025. [...]

[T]he most extreme and extraordinary instance of population aging will be witnessed in Japan. By 2025, in unpd medium variant calculations, Japan will have a median age of just over 50. Less than a quarter-century hence, by those same projections, almost 30 percent of Japan’s populace will be 65 or older, and almost every ninth Japanese will be 80 or older. This future Japan would have very nearly as many octogenarians, nonagenarians, and centenarians as children under 15 — and would have barely two persons of traditional “working age” (as the 15–64 cohort is often, not unreasonably, construed) for every person of notional “retirement age” (65 and over).

Some of the implications of such extreme and rapid population aging have already been widely discussed and analyzed. To begin, there are the fiscal implications of Japan’s version of “graying”: Under current rules of the budgetary game, these look unambiguously bleak. A 1996 study by oecd researchers, for example, estimated the net present value of the unfunded liabilities in the Japanese national pension system at 70 percent of 1994 gdp. Unless radical changes in that pay-as-you-go system were implemented, they warned, Japan’s annual deficit would approach 7 percent of gdp by 2025, and the total “pure aging effect” on public finances for 2000 to 2030 could be a debt equal to 190 percent of 2000 gdp.

Given the fact that gross public debt in Japan rose from about 60 percent of gdp to nearly 150 percent of gdp from 1992 to 20028 — in a context of relatively limited population aging — those numbers may sound ominous indeed. [...]

For most aging Chinese today, the pension system is the family, and even with continuing national economic progress, Chinese families are likely to be placed under mounting pressure by the swelling ranks of seniors. By 2025, there will be nearly 300 million members of China’s 60-plus population, but, at the same time, the cohorts rising into that pool will be the same people who accounted for China’s sub-replacement fertility patterns in the early 1990s and thereafter. Absent a functioning nationwide pension program, unforgiving arithmetic suggests there may be something approaching a one-to-one ratio emerging between elderly parents and the children obliged to support them. Even worse, from the perspective of a Confucian culture, a sizable fraction — perhaps nearly one-fourth — of these older Chinese will have no living son on whom to rely for sustenance. One need not be a novelist to imagine the intense social tensions such conditions could engender (to say nothing of the personal and humanitarian tragedies).

Second, and no less important, there is no particular reason to expect that older people in China will be able to make the same sort of contributions to economic life as their counterparts in Japan. In low-income economies, the daily demands of ordinary work are more arduous than in rich countries: The employment structure is weighted toward categories more likely to require intense manual labor, and even ostensibly non-manual positions may require considerable physical stamina. According to official Chinese statistics, nearly half of the country’s current labor force toils in the fields, and another fifth is employed in mining and quarrying, manufacturing, construction, or transport — occupations generally not favoring the frail. Even with continuing structural transformations, regular work in 2025 is sure to be much more strenuous in China than in Japan. Moreover, China’s older population may not be as hardy as peers from affluent societies — people likely to have been better fed, housed, and doctored than China’s elderly throughout the course of their lives.

Data on the health status of older people in China and other countries tend to be spotty and problematic, and comparability of method can never be taken for granted. However, some of the survey data that are available through Réseau sur l’Espérance de Vie en Santé (reves), the international network of “health expectancy” researchers, are thought-provoking. According to a 1989–90 “health expectancy” study for Sichuan province, a person 60 years of age would spend less than half (48 percent) of his or her remaining years in passable health. By contrast, a study in West Germany for 1986 calculated that a 60-year-old woman could expect to spend 70 percent of her remaining time in “good health.” For men the fraction was 75 percent.11 Although one probably should not push those findings too far, they are certainly consistent with the proposition that China’s seniors are more brittle than older populations from more comfortable and prosperous locales.

Thus, China’s rapidly graying population appears to face a triple bind. Without a broad-coverage national pension system, and with only limited filial resources to fall back on, paid work will of necessity loom large as an option for economic security for many older Chinese. But employment in China, today and tomorrow, will be more physically punishing than in oecd countries, and China’s older cohorts are simply less likely to be up to the task. The aggregation of hundreds of millions of individual experiences with this triple bind over the coming generation will be a set of economic, social, and political constraints on Chinese development — and power augmentation — that have not as yet been fully appreciated in Beijing, much less overseas. [...]

If some countries in our conspectus appear to face especially disadvantageous demographic constraints, others enjoy relative strategic advantages from their own population circumstances. Interestingly enough, the Asian Pacific power with the most strategically favorable profile may be one that we have not yet discussed: the United States.

By the unpd’s medium variant projections, the United States is envisioned to grow from 285 million in 2000 to 358 million in 2025. In absolute terms, this would be by far the greatest increase projected for any industrialized society; in relative terms, this projected 26 percent increment would almost exactly match the proportional growth of the Asia/Eurasia region as a whole. Under these trajectories, the United States would remain the world’s third most populous country in 2025, and by the early 2020s, the U.S. population growth rate — a projected 0.7 percent per year — would in this scenario actually be higher than that of Indonesia, Thailand, or virtually any country in East Asia, China included.

In these projections, U.S. population growth accrues from two by no means implausible assumptions: 1) continued receptivity to newcomers and immigrants and 2) continuing “exceptionalism” in U.S. fertility patterns. (The United States today reports about 2.0 births per woman, as against about 1.5 in Western Europe, roughly 1.4 in Eastern Europe, and about 1.3 in Japan.) Given its sources, such population growth would tend, quite literally, to have a rejuvenating effect on the U.S. population profile — that is to say, it would slow down the process of population aging. Between 2000 and 2025, in these unpd projections, median age in the United States would rise by just two years (from 35.6 to 37.6). By 2025, the U.S. population would be more youthful, and aging more slowly, than that of China or any of today’s “tigers.”

And so does the maintenance of American exceptionalism depend on the defeat of both the secular anti-life Left and the anti-immigration Right. While victory in the clash of civilizations is nearly assured.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 17, 2004 8:54 AM