John Chuckman

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

 

“A Light in the Darkness – the Topic of Nationalism”

 

H G Wells said it best: “Our true nationality is mankind.”

There is nothing less promising for humanity’s future than the re-emergence of nationalism.

Poisonous stuff in almost every aspect.

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Response to another comment

I’m not a New Englander in spirit, as in good fences make good neighbors. It’s a parochial sentiment.

And we don’t have to look as far as Hitler for destructive aspects of nationalism.

Trump does a pretty good job of promoting nastiness and conflict in the world, largely in the name of nationalism and narrow self-interest.

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Response to a comment saying, “As automation systems get more advanced, it is not a bad idea to have a nation with a slightly smaller homogeneous population.”

I respectfully disagree.

The only homogeneity genuinely needed involves talent, good will, and cooperation.

And Demographic Transition in all advanced countries promises not just mean a slightly smaller population. It promises, without in-migration, a falling population.

A population can only be maintained at a fertility rate of about 2.1, but in much of the advanced world, we see rates more like 1.5. That means declining populations.

And what nations even have homogeneous populations? Virtually none of the traditional “powers” from Germany to the US. None of the smaller traditional states from Sweden to Canada.

China, Russia – sort of. Their populations, in fact, have many kinds of ethnic groups in them, something often not appreciated by those abroad.

The prospects for future job creation are indeed unknown, over some fairly long time horizon. AI will eventually have large impacts, but I think we have to deal with those as they arise, not in some undefined dreamy notions now.

But we know what they have been and what they likely will be over some time once the pandemic is over.

All bets are, of course, off if our current terrible set of problems – disease, economy, finances, aggression, and fear – create a revolutionary storm with some brave new world beyond that we cannot imagine, something not at all impossible.

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Response to another comment:

Yes, I understand what you are saying, and many institutions over certain portions of their history do perform functions outside their primary ones to advance something worthwhile for a whole society. I’m sure it has been so at times for nationalism.

Certain Protestants come to mind concerning education. Because they wanted people to read the Bible for themselves, they boosted the idea of widespread education. But I do not associate Protestants today at all with any progressive cause like that, at least the great bulk of them.

Nationalism today is, to my mind, unpleasantly narrow stuff. I, me, mine. It really is a larger-scale extension of tribalism, which I do not think anyone associates with anything good today, although, thousands of years ago, it undoubtedly served useful purposes.

I very much admire past efforts to create international organizations for trade and other important matters. Many good things happened in the postwar period along those lines.

Many of those organizations and arrangements are now under attack by staunch nationalist types, like Trump. (What an irony that such a hugger-of-his-flag for photo-ops and one who makes many military threats avoided military service, and on the flimsy excuse of bone spurs in a college basketball player!)

In the end, the attacks will only make the world a poorer place. They will also increase the likelihood of conflict. Since Trump’s crowd is deliberately using a kind of hybrid economic warfare to extract advantages for itself, it is busy right now increasing the likelihood of conflict.

Nation-states, too, are haphazardly created over the centuries. There is almost no pattern or consistency, some getting a wonderful natural endowment, and others getting very little indeed. Are international borders and armies to lock that extreme unfairness in for all time? What’s admirable about that?

There are many other matters at work too. All advanced countries have passed through Demographic Transition, and their populations cannot replace themselves without in-migration.

Some advanced countries actually face population decline, as Japan.

So, international migration will be a larger and larger part of things. Changes in climate will also affect these movements. The changes will not be the same in all places, and some populations will need to move. International order and authority will absolutely be required.

There are many other considerations, but I’ll leave it there.

Of course, anything I say is predicated on the current storm of difficulties not turning into a catastrophe, a world-shaking set of events, and I think that is not impossible.

I do think the pandemic, when it is over, may create demand for additional international measures, an international authority around medical matters and warning systems and unified responses and best practices. That would be a very good thing.

John Chuckman

COMMENT STIMULATED BY AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE AND POPULATION CONTROL BUT NOT POSTED THERE

 

“If we want to stop the climate emergency, we need to break the taboo around population and contraception”

 

The author does seem unaware of dramatic changes having taken place in the composition of world population growth.

The natural engagement of a well-established social-economic phenomenon called Demographic Transition has already put population growth on a negative path in all advanced societies.

Every one of them. Any future growth in such societies depends completely on migration, and hasn’t that become a bitterly contested subject, migration, in great parts of the advanced world?

The natural rate of population growth – births minus deaths – is now insufficient to maintain the future size of populations in Europe, North America, Japan, and a good many other places.

Birth rates in fact do respond almost automatically to a sustained decline in death rates in advanced societies. People have fewer children with the assurance that those they do have will survive.

That was not so only a century or so ago, and it is not yet true in the Third World, where birth rates remain very high in some regions, as in Africa or the Mideast or parts of Latin America.

But it is the new norm for advanced societies. Its reality represents the interplay of many forces. Just good hygiene and nourishment and generally healthy, safe conditions plus advanced medicine and miraculous drugs make the probability of a child growing into adulthood extremely high. Also, many social security measures such as pensions add to the adults’ sense of security.

Families are relieved of all old notions of having to have a number of children just to guarantee the survival of at least some of them. Gone too are the old fears of not having someone to look after you and the farm when you are old.

Women in advanced societies want careers, good ones. Families want to maximize their total earnings with two working adults so they can enjoy more of the good things of life. And there is the immensely high cost now of raising even one child well with adequate education and recreation and entertainment over a long period.

The problem with talking about serious population control in such a world is that, de facto, you are talking about people in advanced countries imposing things on people in less advanced countries. Race also enters the issue when we think of Europeans or North Americans telling Africans and others about how many children they can have.

Remember, too, that all the fears and concerns that afflicted generations of European and North American families for centuries still very much afflict families in the Third World. They are not dry old stories from textbooks, they are part of what it still means to be alive and have a family.

So, while it is easy to glibly speak of population control, that glib speech hides a number of massive difficulties, difficulties touching profound and dangerous matters such as race and imperialism and “the rich versus the poor.”

The ideal way to bring population growth down in the Third World, and thus for the world in total, is with economic development there, so that its people too experience the social changes Europeans and North Americans already have experienced, but what are the chances of that? How many serious efforts do we see along those lines?

Indeed, I think it not exaggerated to say that calls for population reduction in the name of climate change or any other goal, no matter how seemingly worthy, calls with no appreciation of the facts I’ve outlined, are potentially quite dangerous.

We do live in a time with a rather heavy undercurrent of resurgent nationalism and ideology as well as a time of an immense number of wars and interventions, advanced states like the United States having come to regard destruction and death as a normal activity of national policy.

Is it not easy to see the potential for something hugely dark and destructive emerging from demands about population? A call almost for a kind of international crusade? One conducted by those who have against those who do not? And on an almost planetary scale?

 

A FEW NOTES ON POPULATION GROWTH

Here is the way population increase is analyzed. I’ve looked a bit into the numbers now, and we do have some surprises.

To replace an existing population with no growth requires a “(total) fertility level” of about 2.1 children per woman.

That is a level which replaces the two parents but with a small allowance for some inevitable infant mortality.

Actual fertility rates for women in North America and Europe are on the order of 1.5 – 1.8, which is a number not sufficient to replace the parents.

This is way down from the beginning 19th century, when fertility levels in places like the United States and Britain were about 6.

The global fertility rate is about 2.5 today, about half of what it was just fifty years ago, so we are making big progress, although there are countries still with rates like 5 or so, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

Charts of all countries’ rates suggest eventual future convergence of fertility rates at around 1.6 to 1.7.

Artificial birth control as well as programs to immunize children have played an important role in these changes. Immunization has played a role in assuring parents that the children they do have will survive.

 

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“Want To Have Dinner With Putin? Have 7 Kids and Become a Russian Citizen and You’re In!

“Let Western media label these photos as “creepy”; we find Putin’s personal interest in traditional families–and the families themselves–downright charming. What do you think?”

 

I find this charming.

However, I do not really believe such practices can turn around birth rates.

As societies advance, births decline, always.

It is a universal experience.

Declining births represent real economic incentives.

With better medicine and food, people come to understand that most babies will survive.

That, of course, was not always the case.

Babies died in large numbers, so people responded by having more of them.

Rural farmers also saw a large family as a kind of guarantee for their old age and decline, young people with strong backs to keep the farm going.

But part of modernity, a big part, is people leaving farms for cities. Farms become consolidated and run as huge corporate enterprises, with lots of the best machinery and with limited need for workers.

Except at picking time, a time in most places where migrant labor comes in temporarily to do the job.

But technology may even end that because new kinds of harvesting and picking machines are invented regularly.

Also, traditional family farms cannot compete with vast corporate farm systems. Their costs are too high.

So traditional incentives for large farm families, over time, disappear. Of course, there are always little pockets here and there, but overall, that is the story.

New specialty crops can affect this somewhat for a time, as the organic farming in North America requires more intense labor and commands premium prices for crops and encourages some smaller farms.

But the effects of that cannot last as technology continues to do new tasks.

In cities, people want to pursue careers, including women, and having too many children is a serious barrier. Costs go up. work opportunity, especially for women, goes down.

And urban careers require a good deal of preparation too in the way of education, again an incentive against having children in any numbers.

So, young urban people generally do not want more than two kids.

Well, it is just a fact that if every couple in any country has only two kids, population will decline. Any degree of infant mortality, and there is always some, means the total couples have less than replaced themselves. And not everyone marries either.

Then, of course, given an increasingly good life with careers in cities and two incomes, there are many couples who will choose not to have children at all.

This whole phenomenon has a name in economics. It’s part of what is called Demographic Transition.

It is not a fanciful idea, but a reality, a concept proved in every advanced society.

When incentives for changed behavior are real – real as in “the real economy” economists speak of – then they can only ever be effectively countered by real counter-incentives.

That’s why many states give money to families with children, but it generally cannot be enough to compensate for the lost economic gains of having more children. It in fact costs many tens of thousands of dollars to raise just one child to adulthood, and if you add parents’ paying for higher education, a phenomenon of the late 20^th century, you can add tens of thousands more. And then there is the lost income of a spouse who can’t work.

So, monetary incentives in general are not too helpful, simply because governments cannot afford to hand out sizeable incomes for those having children.

In the long term, and we see this in every advanced society in the world, only immigration can make up for declining births.

So, such celebrations as President Putin does are pleasant, and they communicate a certain sense of values, but they cannot make a really big difference in the long term.

The recent history of every modern North American, European, and Asian Rim country demonstrates it convincingly.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“Russia Considers Taking in 15,000 White South African Farmers Fleeing Black Violence”

 

They would make excellent immigrants for the most part.

Hard-working and skillful, they can make a real contribution. Plus, they have financial resources.

I hope it works out for both parties, although South Africans would have quite a climate-adjustment to make.

And people are not racists, as one comment suggested, just because they want to flee a terrible situation.

South Africa’s violent crime rate, sadly, is one of the highest in the world.

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Response to a comment saying the migrants were too many at one time:

Too many too quick?

15,000 on a population of about 150,000,000?

That’s tiny.

It’s an excellent opportunity to get some very capable migrants.

By the way, Russia is definitely going to have to become more of a country of migrants.

You face the prospect of Demographic Transition.

This is what has happened to much of Europe, America, Canada, Japan, and others.

After that, you simply do not replace your existing population, and, if nothing is done, population ages and declines. Japan is facing a true crisis in this way because it has been a country that historically has been reluctant about migration. It is loaded with older people.

And there is no use talking about incentives to have babies. They’ve all been tried in various countries, and they simply do not work, unless they are so generous that they make no economic sense.

When women and men reach a certain level of prosperity, they do not want kids, at least not more than one or two.

This is a universal phenomenon with human societies, and of course there is little familiarity with it for many people since any society’s population only goes through this change once.

The past of desiring lots of kids to help with the farm and to provide a form of old-age security simply disappears in cities with women pursuing careers and couples experiencing increasing prosperity. No one then wants a huge new, high-cost, long-term burden with several kids.

So, national birth rates drop below the level required to replace the existing population. The replacement level is always an average of more than two children per couple because you must allow for infant and child mortality as the children grow up.

It would be a good idea to develop national plans for this with a well-constructed immigration program which encourages quality migrants, those with skills, ambition, and education.

By the way, such people also are not going to have lots of children, so immigration must be on-going.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

YET FURTHER POSTED RESPONSES TO COMMENTS ON DOUG SAUNDERS’ COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“It is clear that western societies have sublimated their culture to accomodate [sic] new ones. Christmas trees and prayer rooms in schools, for example. And it is a powerful argument…”

The writer misses the point.

We are in a new era of massive global migration, but there is nothing new about migration over time changing the norms and practices of a society. It’s just happening more quickly now, just as everything else is happening more quickly with ever-speeding technological (and that driving economic) change.

Take just one example, Britain. We could equally well choose just about any other old European country, but Britain is very familiar.

In the era BCE, Britain was populated by Celtic and other tribes.

Starting with the Emperor Julius Caesar’s expeditions in 55 BCE and extending beyond Emperor Claudius’s invasion of 43 CE, Britain began centuries of becoming a Romanized society.

After the fifth century CE, the Anglo-Saxon tribes – Germanic people began to conquer. Britain became an Anglo-Saxon country then for hundreds of years.

In 1066, as we all learned in school, the Normans conquered Britain, and it became a Norman society for centuries.

There were many other changes of varying importance over the centuries in Britain, but these big steps in each case meant an entirely new culture and language and political norms and even religion being established.

People have gone from speaking Celtic languages to Latin to German to French, and they now speak the true hybrid, English.

The nation state as we know it is a relatively new thing, mainly a product of the 19th century. Most of human history has not even known nation states, but empires and kingdoms which viewed any new people or territory as a fair gain.

Already in many respects, the 19th century concept of nation state is fraying at the edges. Europe once defined its modern states by language and culture, but already we see them becoming migrant states, the kind of states we have always had in the New World.

This is an unavoidable consequence of a globalized world with relatively cheap transportation and communication and huge movements of goods and services around the planet.

Taking a view anything like the writer of this comment, despite the reasonable tone of most of his remarks, is to enter into a debate defined by the Anders Breveiks of this world.

The only response that makes any sense in the Norwegian response, not the response of the United States or that garrison state Israel, which is fighting a pointless and losing battle with the forces of modern society.

Breveik is a kind of modern murderous Luddite – the people who used to smash machines in the Industrial Revolution in order to keep things as they were – only he smashed people hoping to keep things as they were.

Whether violent or not, these are futile, doomed-to-lose battles.

The future we already have glimmers of: A world of multi-cultural states amongst which a great deal of human migration occurs (just as goods and services move now), and it will require more international governance and treaties, all of which will slowly erode the nation state as we’ve known it.

There is no alternative, unless you want to build fortress states and give up the economic potential of globalism, but even if you do that, you will have to surrender in the end because the forces at work are real and simply overwhelming.

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“Therefore, the fiction that they are Muslim therefore they breed is plain WRONG!”

Of course, the notion is garbage.

Promoting that nonsense is just one more aspect of the Islamophobia being vigorously promoted by special interests.

Any decent economist or demographer can refute the nonsense.

Demographic Transition, the phenomenon of falling birth rates in response to falling death rates, is an established fact.

The death rates fall through the growing prosperity of economic development and all that that entails. Then people automatically have fewer babies since almost all will survive.

The theory explains why countries like Canada or France or Britain cannot replace their own population. Migration is essential unless you want economic decline.

And Israel, too, a western implant with western concepts, cannot replace its population, and it is surrounded by poor nations with high birth rates.

Which only goes to prove how much more intelligent would have been a policy of assisting your neighbors instead of attacking them and spending unholy amounts on the military.

The United States, too, acts quite stupidly in this regard. It should have been dropping dollars on places like Afghanistan or Iraq instead of bombs.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

This is like scholastics counting the angels on the head of a pin.

Only here, misery and death on a massive scale are involved, actually making it a rather dreadful discussion.

These relatively ineffective, home-made rockets – it is altogether wrong to call them “missiles” for they have no real guidance systems as do the deadly American-supplied, Israeli Hellfire missiles – are police matters, no war matters.

They could be treated as a police matter if Israel would simply establish normal relations with its neighbors, something it has never genuinely pursued in my view.

Here is a parallel situation, a very close one actually, that makes the point of how irrational and savage Israel’s responses are. In America’s ghettos, horrible crimes are common. In the Chicago where I grew up, for example, it became common for sewer covers – or large pieces of pavement – to be rolled to highway overpasses and dropped on the cars below.

A number of times, there were ghastly deaths and accidents. That is why today all overpasses are covered with chain-link fencing, something going back to the 1960s.

But imagine, instead, the authorities having responded by calling in the National Guard to bomb a section of the ghetto, killing many innocent people? That is precisely what Israel does, time and time again. That’s why Rabbi Lerner rightly called the policy stupid.

Israel alienates most of the world with this barbarism, especially the liberal-minded intellectuals of the world who should be its friends. It also creates new enemies by the score: it’s the principle of revenge at work.

And time is not on Israel’s side. The Palestinians, like most third-world people have a high birth rate. Israelis have the birth rates typical of all advanced countries – that is, not high enough to replace its own population in the long term.

The reason for the disparity is an economic concept called Demographic Transition. It has many long-term implications. Just one of these, we see today, is the youthful nature of the Palestinian population. When Israel bombs, it kills and maims kids, unavoidably, and it disgusts the world, as it should.

And it sows a new crop of enemies, young people being very headstrong and emotional.

All of Israel’s ugly policies have failed, from tearing down people’s homes to refusing permits for business and construction in occupied areas to blockades. This way of behaving is a one-way trip to nowhere.

I’ll turn the argument in your column of the other day around, Daniel. All Israel has to say is let Palestine exist and let them choose their government.

Then negotiate and deal legally as any neighboring governments do in the world. No savagery, just words and legal agreements. It doesn’t matter what Hamas thinks of Israel so long as it abides by the rules, which there is every reason on earth to believe they will. They have tried in the past to have an understanding with Israel, and they are rejected as not being worthy of talking to.

I have to say, Daniel, I was disappointed in published responses to your commentary the other day.

It was clear that you selected favorable ones and ignored others, at least at the point I looked. Hardly a dialogue, and what’s the point of having a comment facility if it is treated that way, as it is regularly by The Times regular columnists?

You are fair and generous in allowing responses to your blog, but that mode of thinking never extends to reportage or columnists in The Times.

Maybe it should. Toronto’s Globe and Mail, a fine and distinguished paper, allows virtually free comment on stories and columns – only filth and libel and prejudice are excluded.