JUST PAY FOR MY DOTAGE AND SHUT UP:

A nation 'fearful of young people' (Press Association, October 22, 2006)

Britain is a nation fearful of young people, a children's charity has claimed.

Youngsters have been "demonised" by the media and politicians creating myths and increasing fear amongst adults, Barnardo's said.

The political war between the many old and the few young in the secular world (the West other than the U.S.) is going to be very ugly. In the early innings the aged will tax the young more and more heavily, but eventually the young will have to realize their physical strength and, especially given the racial divergence, violence is not unlikely to follow.

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The Exceptional Nation (Austin Bay, 20 Oct 2006, Tech Central Station)

["A]merica Alone" is a doom book of a peculiar sort -- it's insistently witty and trenchantly written. Both are achievements, given the core subject matter: American demographic success and vitality (fecundity, folks) compared to the demographic decline of other democracies and modern, industrialized nations.

Steyn is an arch "Euro-pessimist," who backs his pessimism with numbers.

Europeans are reproducing below the "replacement rate" -- thus the average age of their populations is increasing sharply. If current trends continue, by 2050 one in three Germans and Italians will be over 65 years old. In the United States, only one in five will be so gray.

As a result, the Europe of the European Union (Steyn disdainfully calls it "Eutopia") faces economic decline and risks systemic change. Steyn writes: "Tax revenues that support the ever growing numbers of the elderly and retired have to be paid by equally growing numbers of the young and working. The design flaw of the radically secularist Eutopia is that it depend on a religious-society birth rate."

Japan faces the same "gray threat." Even China has a birthrate below the demographic replacement rate. Among the modern industrial nations, only the United States (and possibly India) has the knack for reproduction.

The United States also grows through immigration that includes political and cultural integration.

Europe's Muslims, however, are multiplying -- but they are not integrating culturally. Steyn argues that if European nations fail to culturally integrate Muslims, Europe faces profound political changes.

"As fertility dries up," he writes, "so do societies. Demography is the most obvious symptom of civilizational exhaustion, and the clearest indicator of where we're headed."

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 22, 2006 7:37 PM