Did Marshall McLuhan See This?

For your consideration: could this unobtrusive home intruder mean the ultimate death of all mankind?.

Just back for a stroll through my Filipino summer neighbourhood. It is a delight—everywhere, families out playing with their children.

I think I may have hit on why there has been such a collapse in the birthrate in the industrialized world—and, increasingly, in the developing world as well.

It is not the cost of college, though one thinks it ought to be. In Germany and Sweden, college is free, and they have it worse than most.

It is not the availability of old age security. As someone has worked out, in the Third World, without it, the old folks continue to be worth more in income to the family than they cost until quite late in life.

It is not feminism. Feminism is weakest in Japan, and their demographic collapse is legend.

I think it's TV.

We might forget it now, since we don't have them any more, but watching my neighbours, it is borne in to me that kids have a lot of entertainment value. Once upon a time, that mattered, because we did not have all that many other things to do once we came home from work in the evenings.

And exactly the same has happened to other things that were once good entertainment. Church attendance. Membership in voluntary associations: the Masons, the Elks. Bowling leagues. Playing cards. Botticelli. TV killed it all, by offering massive free entertainment at home.

Of course, computers and the internet are only making it worse.

TV showed up in the postwar years, right along with the baby boom, but it only reached 90% of US homes in 1962. And it took at least as long for there to be enough worthwhile stuff for adults to watch.

The baby boom ended, by common calculation, four years later.

The Demographic Death of Islam

World fetrility rates in 2012, according to Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. Note that Iran and Algeria are already in the lowest category.

I am amazed to learn from David Goldman, aka Spengler, that the demographic cliff that faces the developed world and China is also hitting the Muslim Middle East. I thought they were one region that was immune. Just the reverse. He writes that “the Muslim world is on the brink of the fastest population decline in recorded history.”

By the end of this century, Spengler notes, the working population of Western Europe will fall by two fifths, i.e., 40%. The least fertile countries could fall by 60%, i.e., be down to 40% of their current population. Eastern Europe and East Asia will fall by two thirds, 67%. Imagine China with only 33% of its current population--smaller than the US. This is a good deal bigger than the effects of the Black Death.

The US, on the other hand, will grow by 25% over the same period, if present trends continue. Besides having a higher birth rate, the US economy, US culture, and the US political system have the drawing power and the capacity to assimilate immigrants indefinitely, even if the rest of the world is in demographic decline. Canada has similar advantages, but for the weather.

This is a big reason why I think it is wrong to write off the US as “in decline.” Demographically, it looks instead as though its strength will grow against all likely comers. And demographics are the clearest indicator, I think, of who is heading up and who is heading down. The first sign of despair is no longer wanting children; the first sign of hope is wanting them. Moreover, people are the only true source of wealth.

In this context, it is ominous to note that the Muslim birth rate is apparently falling faster than anyone’s.

The Muslim world is not a rising threat to anyone. The Muslim world is not poised to take over; they have their hands full and more than full merely preserving what they have, especially once their strong position in terms of natural resources (oil) inevitably begins to fade. "Islamism" is perhaps a rear-guard action.