Mark Steyn says that demography is destiny.

I wonder if there's an instinctive basis for the seeming inverse relationship between wealth and birth rates. It has often been remarked that birthrates in poorer countries seem to be much greater than in the industrialized west. Many reasons are given, such as emancipation of women and womens rights, and less of a need for farmhands in the family. These seem plausible, but an alternative explaination has occured to me:

For 99.99% of human history, we existed in a zero-sum situation with respect to wealth. During these periods of time, wealth was not something you produced or created or invented. It wasn't something you could build a factory to make from near limitless natural resources (this abundance due to our improved technology to mine and manage them). During the fuedal and ancient worlds, wealth was the land and peasantry that lived on it, the plants that they could skim off the naturally arable regions of the world. During the prehistoric era of the hunter-gatherers, wealth was the land that you chased animal herds across. It was a fixed quantity, existing due to no one's effort. You could find it, consume it, and steal it. Unlike in our modern industrial world, it wasn't something that you created.

In fuedal societies, nobility and aristocracy didn't want to have children at greater than a replacement rate. Many aspects of fuedal society that seem to recur, such as primogeniture, are there specifically so that the land that the aristocracy lived on would not be divided and subdivided over the generations. It was to keep the per-capita wealth of the nobility static. If it became too small, the members of the family would decline in power and influence. The prospects for internecine warfare are increased the more children you have who would be disinherited due to their birth order. If the land managed became too large, the possibility of rebellion and overthrow becomes too great.

On the other hand, the peasants needed children in great numbers. Due to the brutally hard conditions under which they labored (only a small percentage survived to adult-hood), if children were not abundant, the peasants would have no one to support them in old age. Furthermore, the wellbeing of the peasant family, unlike the nobility which primarily concerned itself with warfare and control of land, was proportional to the small margin left over between the fruits of their labor and the bare per-capita subsistence required to survive plus the taxes levied by the aristocracy.

Mankind has existed in a state of fuedalism for most of it's history. The enlightenment, the rennaisance, the entire modern world is a blip on our historical radar screen. A wonderfully fortuitous, but extremely singular anomaly in an almost static pattern that has dominated every culture for thousands of years.

If this zero-sum economy has dominated humanity long enough for it to shape our social instincts, then the strange switch that has occured in our birthrates may be due to collective instincts deciding that, due to our relative level of physical ease, we must be filling the role of an aristocrat, and hence want to have children at replacement rates or below. This despite the fact that the industrialized world is far more capable of supporting arbitrary populations than the uneducated, unindustrialized, desperately poor third world. It might be another consequence of the nasty logic of fuedalism.

I wonder if it also may have anything to do with people's stubborn insistence that the wealthy in our capitalist economy have gotten their wealth by stealing it from the poor. (This has, in our pre-industrial past, been literally the method by which the nobility has sustained itself). That and our panic at someone else's success somehow being unfair or coming at someone's expense.

It would be pretty sad if the only way to remedy the situation was for all of us including the Episcopalians (!) to breed like rabbits. Some North American communities such as the Mormons seem do a pretty good job at this as well. There's a lot to be said for space and lots of it around us, whatever the "carrying capacity" of the earth. Few things can match the power of the wilderness in touching something beautiful inside us.

Notice that the places where people breed most mightily is where people just don't have anything else to do - most of Africa and the oil rich Moslem-Arab nations. Nothing to do because either they are too wealthy or miserably uneducated, especially the women.

Gaza and the Palestinian territories are a misfit in this picture in the sense that breeding mightily has become an accepted method of changing "the facts on the ground" and is encouraged greatly by all Palestinian factions: more Arabs, less Jews etc.

Incidentally Sri-Lanka (Ceylon) is a very interesting case where the population is already stable. A case could be made for its very high literacy as compared to India and Pakistan, and the also the role women play in Sri-Lankan society (much better than anywhere else in South Asia).

I don't have the exact numbers but the birth rates in Indonesia and Malaysia are likely much lower than in Saudi Arabia. Both Moslem nations but where women are much better educated.

The economic problem with reproduction is that it extracts a cost on the parents but the benefit (that is, existence) accrues to the children.

When a disconnect between costs and benefits such as this arises, you can reach a suboptimal equilibrium. The solution is a tax or transfer of some kind to compensate. In this case, one could imagine a law where parents are entitled to a share of their children's income. This could be piggybacked onto federal income taxes.

This policy would have all sorts of desirable side effects. It would encourage parents to properly educate their children, since this would affect how much money they would earn as adults. It could solve the social security crisis. And, of course, it would increase birth rates. The degree of increase in birth rates could be adjusted by adjusting the fraction of income the parents could claim.

"It could solve the social security crisis."

Yeah, but you're assuming that because of this, social security goes away :-P. Washingtonian: You ain't from around here, are ya?

And it could encourage parenticide.

Mark Steyn is a one-note Johnny who keeps repeating the "demographics is destiny" meme like a broken record. He is really becoming a bore.

He takes no account for the possibility of radical life-extension, robotics/AI, or other transhuman tech. Nor does he take account the possiblity that if the muslims do breed like rats and swamp out all the other societies, that just possibly someone will develop a genetic designer virus to do in all of these "rats".

Besides, the muslim birth rates are declining as well. Iran and Turkey are below replacement and Egypt, while still above replacement, is steadily dropping. These are the "big 3" muslim middle-east countries, in terms of population.

Mark's thinking is way too linear and one-dimensional. But what do you expect from a political pundit?

Mark Steyn needs to spend more time around Ralph Peters:
http://www.nypost.com/php/pfriendly/print.php?url=http://www.nypost.com/seven/11262006/postopinion/opedcolumnists/the_eurabia_myth_opedcolumnists_ralph_peters.htm

I think Peter's analysis is spot on.

Kurt:

Hmmm. Interesting idea. Of course, it doesn't have to be genetic. 20 years' time, when nanotech has got going:

Speech analysis software; trivial. (We almost have it working now!)

So release a replicating assembler that has the programming as follows: Speaking the words "Ash-hadu an la ilaha ill Allah. Wa ash-hadu ana Muhammad ar-rasullallah" (which I do not believe) lead to the immediate dismantling of the host organism.

Problem solved - permanently.