The Nearing Crisis of Demographics

By George Friedman July 8, 2025 @ Geopolitical Futures

(Editor's Note: Geopolitical Futures is a subscription site.  If you're confused as to how, why, and what is going on in the world and you're looking for answers, GF is well worth the subscription.   George Friedman is the Founder and Chairman of Geopolitical Futures, a respected strategist, creator of the field of geopolitical forecasting and an international best selling author of books such as The Next 100 Years and The Storm Before the Calm, which I've read and I think is excellent.   I would like to thank Mr. Friedman for allowing me to publish this article.    To read more of George's and his team's analyses subscribe through this link.  RK)

There are moments when I am exhausted by crises that come and go, and remember the next real existential crisis of humanity. It puts things in perspective. Please forgive my momentary indifference to the current crisis of the week.

In my 2009 book, “The Next 100 Years,” I forecast that the next major socioeconomic problem would stem from a demographic crisis, with falling birth rates, decreasing death rates and increased life expectancy.

Birth rates are falling in the United States and other parts of the world. Last year, the U.S. birth rate was about equal to the death rate. Next year, the death rate is expected to be slightly higher than the birth rate. According to forecasts, in the next 10 years – perhaps as early as 2033 – declining birth rates will become a long-term reality at the same time that life expectancy increases to 80.4 years from 78.4 years. This seems like a small increase, but given the size of that age group and the contracting birth rate, it implies an era-defining crisis.

My model of American history is that the socioeconomic status quo shifts every 50 years. I forecast that the late 2020s will be when the current cycle ends and the new one begins. If I am right, and the numbers seem to indicate it, then the issues we are obsessed with at the moment will fade into history just as Watergate did.

Economists tell us that the economy pivots on land, labor and capital. If so, we are entering a period in which labor will contract, and, with it, so will capital. I say that because the numbers indicate that the labor force will shrink over the coming years, while the rate of consumption will increase. With death rates falling and life expectancy expanding, consumption will increase in two ways. First, the elderly will continue to consume long after they have stopped working, and second, their consumption habits will be heavily skewed toward health care services. One solution is euthanasia for the elderly, to which I am totally opposed. The other is a radical transformation of the medical system, with the goal of increasing the productivity of the elderly, particularly between the ages of 65 and 80.

Each 50-year cycle is driven by a core technology that emerges to meet a social need. Over the past 50 years, the core technology has been based on the microchip, which supports a range of industries and activities and powers the economy. In the previous period, from about 1930-80, the pivotal technology was the automobile, which enabled a substantially growing population to leave cities for the suburbs yet continue to work in industries centered on cities. In a way, the microchip created, among other things, a communications system that allowed for population dispersion without loss of connectivity.

If this model of socially driven innovation holds, then the next 50 years will pivot on revolutions in medicine. As life expectancy grows, the level of productivity of the elderly must at least match the level of consumption in order to maintain capital flow. We are already seeing significant advances in medicine derived from material science, which enables engineering at the molecular level, aided by artificial intelligence. I do not see AI as the central technology because it is a tool, not the solution. The next breakthrough lies in rethinking the human body through multiple disciplines and technologies.

We need to consider the origins of this crisis. First, medicine is guilty of already extending life expectancy dramatically. Second, the decline in the birth rate is triggered by radical – and related – changes in culture and medicine. Medicine created the birth control pill, which made feminism as a social movement possible. Once women could limit the number of children they had without celibacy (I am not touching abortion), they could more easily enter and remain in the workforce. Indeed, women entering the workforce has, up until now, sustained productivity despite falling birth rates.

The current U.S. administration is obviously aware of this problem and is proposing legislation to encourage more births. Its proposal is to give parents $1,000 for each child born between January 2025 and December 2028 to invest in their future. The legislation also increases the child tax credit to $2,200 from $2,000 per child starting in 2026.

Another current crisis related to the demographic problem is immigration. All advanced industrial nations will face this demographic crisis, and in the early parts of the cycle, before the crisis is in full swing, they will begin competing for workers, particularly at the menial and unattractive levels. That is hardwired in the numbers. Immigrants stabilize labor markets, consumption and capital formation. While we wait for radical medical solutions to be found, we need to think a little about not only how migration can meet demand for low-skilled workers in sectors like agriculture and farming, but also how helpful the educated and integrated children of immigrants will be in the next 50 years.

Again, I apologize for this strange discourse, but after constant study of the actions of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, one needs a break – if not bed rest – then at least a discourse on anything not mentioning one of them.

"Copyright 2025 Geopolitical Futures, LLC.  Reprinted with permission."  

George Friedman

https://geopoliticalfutures.com/author/gfriedman/

 

George Friedman is an internationally recognized geopolitical forecaster and strategist on international affairs and the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures. Dr. Friedman is also a New York Times bestselling author. His most recent book, THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM: America’s Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond, published February 25, 2020 describes how “the United States periodically reaches a point of crisis in which it appears to be at war with itself, yet after an extended period it reinvents itself, in a form both faithful to its founding and radically different from what it had been.” 

 

The decade 2020-2030 is such a period which will bring dramatic upheaval and reshaping of American government, foreign policy, economics, and culture.

 His most popular book, The Next 100 Years, is kept alive by the prescience of its predictions. Other best-selling books include Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, The Next Decade, America’s Secret War, The Future of War and The Intelligence Edge. 

 

His books have been translated into more than 20 languages. Dr. Friedman has briefed numerous military and government organizations in the United States and overseas and appears regularly as an expert on international affairs, foreign policy and intelligence in major media. 

 

For almost 20 years before resigning in May 2015, Dr. Friedman was CEO and then chairman of Stratfor, a company he founded in 1996. Friedman received his bachelor’s degree from the City College of the City University of New York and holds a doctorate in government from Cornell University.

An Abundance of Uncertainties

By Rich Kozlovich

George Friedman is the owner of Geopolitical Futures, a subscription site, and well worth it, I just upped my subscription for three more years, who has stated on more than one occasion the cold war didn't really end with the collapse of the Soviet Union.  The cold war was predicated on preventing Russia from conquering Europe, hence the creation of NATO.  But the collapse of the Soviet Union didn't alter Russian goals.   They still had the same goal of taking over Europe just as it was the Soviet Union's.   As a result the cold war continued as a practical reality.   George states that concern ended with the Russo/Ukrainian War, which ended the cold war reality.

•  A confusing world without a hegemon  A growing concern dominates Western politics and diplomacy: the unraveling of the so-called rules-based world order. Many place the blame on the Trump administration. However, this shift was inevitable because of geopolitical, geoeconomic and demographic forces, regardless of who occupies the White House.  This world order – never truly universal – provided a framework for relative global stability under the Pax Americana. From the 1950s until the collapse of the Soviet Union, it served as the foundation for peace and prosperity in the free world. The threat of mutual nuclear destruction created a tense balance between the capitalist and communist blocs. ..............

Previous to this, everyone, including me, believed NATO was a wet paper bag without the United States, and it was!   As a result without American support it was reasonably believed Russia could drive down the North European plain right into France, and Europe wouldn't be able to stop them.  While I believed Russia could cut right through Europe, but I didn't believe they could hold it.  Even before this it was clear Russia didn't have the economic wherewithal, nor did they have the manpower to do so as Russia's demographic pyramid was a mess. Well, everyone, including me, was wrong!  Even without American support we now realize Europe still had the technological and military capability and wherewithal to have stopped them in Poland.

Russia has what they consider seven defensive gaps that must be maintained.  Ten years ago they only had manpower to fully man three of them, and it's gotten much worse since then as Putin is destroying his young population.  The Russian demographic pyramid was already all out of whack with the 15 to 50 demographic filled with alcoholics, drug users, victims of AIDS and drug resistant TB.   The critical 15 to 50 age group which creates the economy and the next generation, both of which he's destroying.   Socialism always turns into a form of monarchy.    It doesn't matter whether you call an autocrat Emperor, Chairman, President or King.  An autocrat is an autocrat and invariably they cannibalize the societies they control.

We now we know Russia isn't the mighty bear we thought it was.   Russia had what was considered the number two military in the world, yet it has been unable to defeat the number twenty two rated military in almost four years, and has now had to resort to threatening to use nukes.

Russia's now lost hundreds of thousands of young men, and is now running out of young bodies to fight the war and being forced to using "volunteers" from N. Korea and China.  They can't manufacture all of their own military hardware, and is now being attacked with drones deeper inside Russia destroying their oil and gas depots, which they had already used to  destroy the Russian Black Sea fleet.  Drones are the new military strategic horizon, giving small nations a fighting chance, and that technology is going to expand massively now, right along with laser weaponry, which I've written about. 

The reality of Russia's demographics is coming home to roost as now they're inviting immigrants from Africa and Asia to work in their factories, and that's a poison pill since it was estimated over ten years ago the ethnic population of Russia would be a minority in their own land by 2040, fifteen years away.  I've not seen any recent estimates but I wouldn't be shocked to see that's closer to eight years away now.  It's interesting to see how many are coming from the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, since they're following their own economic visions with international trade and moving closer to China.   And... Russia's economic minister is predicting a recession.  The hits just keep right on coming. 

So, back to George Friedman.  He notes this real end of the cold war has put the world's leaders in a quandary seeking an anchor to their thinking and planning, and that's moving away from Europe to the Middle East and Asia.

What the world is facing is a much higher level of  geopolitical risks than has existed for decades, none of which will go away any time soon, and those are tied in with very serious domestic political issues which are going go haunt us for decades, much of them due to the unbridled immigration the Obama/Biden cabal forced on America in order to destroy America.  And please stop foolishly believing otherwise because if you can't accept that, you can't understand anything going on.  The evidence of that was obvious to the most casual observer while Obama was President, and now it's overwhelming since Trump was reelected and everything they did is being exposed for the treason it was.  

Islam is the greatest threat to western civilization, the second and third greatest threats to western civilization is debt and an oversized state.  Economically the world is in trouble with the world's nations being in debt to almost 310 trillion dollars,  much of which can't be repaid, and most political "leaders" are averse to fixing that as they're embracing the welfare state mentality to keep their jobs, including America, which I believe the Big Beautiful Bill will demonstrate when it passes. The result is we're looking at inflation and a worldwide recession on the horizon. 

Investors are becoming more and more risk averse, and rightly so, especially the new generation coming up.   Fixed income is in jeopardy, and trade policies are shifting the world's focus on investments with no idea what to do about it.  

Do I believe there will there be less violence, enhanced with a better, safer, and more stable economic climate in the near future?  No!  

And that's the only thing I'm certain about. 

Update:  This article appeared on June 18th, America and what 250 years may mean asking, "can anyone give me a convincing argument that we are not living through the end of America?" I responded saying I’ve read three books on historical cycles, all complicated, and if there ever was a history regimen that needed an academic discipline, that’s it. All the authors have their own terminology and time frames, but all three agreed on one thing. We’re facing the end of this historical cycle, and it’s worldwide. All end cycles are filled with violence and economic downturns, but for a nation to survive it needs six (I amended my original comment) things.

1. It must be able to feed itself.
2. Fuel itself.
3. Arm itself. 
4. Defend itself.
5. Create it’s own internal market.
6. Pay off it’s national debt.

America is the only nation in the world capable of all six. Will there be serious issues? Sure, but the nation is capable of surviving intact, even if diminished. The world is not only in a domestic state of flux, it’s in a geopolitical state of flux looking for an anchor for their decision making and direction. When the new historical cycle begins things will be different, when that begins and how different it will be no one can say, but it’s my belief there are a lot of existing nations that will be broken up into smaller states, not an uncommon occurrence throughout history.

Demographic Change and Fiscal Crisis

September 19, 2024 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

I just finished a speech at a conference in Miami that looked at changing demographics and the implications for tax competition.

To elaborate, I explained how an ever-growing burden of government spending will lead to more class-warfare tax policy, which will give politicians even more incentive to attack low-tax jurisdictions.

For today’s column, I want to focus on the portion of my presentation dealing with demographics.

I started with this chart from the OECD showing the old-age dependency ratio in member nations. As you can see, Japan currently has the most old people relative to the rest of the population.

These 2023 numbers show why there is some pessimism about Japan’s fiscal outlook.

Simply stated, the number of old people receiving benefits (government pensions and health care) is very large compared to the number of working-age people paying taxes.

Which is why taxes already have increased in Japan and that worrisome trend will continue.

And that brings me to my second chart, which shows the estimated 2075 old-age dependency ratio.

At first glance, these two charts may not look that different, but notice that the vertical axis on the top chart only goes up to 60 while the bottom chart goes up to 100.

So the critical takeaway is that almost every developed country 50 years from now will have a demographic profile that is worse than today’s Japan.

If governments don’t reform their entitlement programs, it is no exaggeration to say that these numbers have grim implications.

• More spending
• Higher taxes

And when they pursue those policies, uncompetitive governments will have even greater incentives to undermine low-tax jurisdictions in hopes of reducing the freedom of people to escape bad policy.

Chinese Economic Policy, Part I: The Demographic Challenge

July 16, 2024 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

I’m in China this week, teaching about fiscal policy, convergence theory, and inequality at Northeastern University in Shenyang.

So it’s a good opportunity to write about some pluses and minuses of Chinese economic policy.

We’ll start this series by looking at demographics, which almost surely is the biggest long-run challenge for Chinese policymakers.

How big a challenge? Check out these three charts from a recent report in the Wall Street Journal by Liyan Qi and Ming Li.

In 1980, China had a relatively normal population pyramid.

But over the next four decades, people started living longer and having fewer children.

As a result, the population pyramid today looks more like a cylinder.

But what’s especially shocking is that the country’s population profile by 2050 will be somewhat akin to an upside-down pyramid.

Why are these population shifts a big long-run challenge for China?

For the simple reason that even a modest-sized welfare state is only feasible if there is a traditional population pyramid, featuring ever-larger cohorts of young workers to finance the benefits promised to older workers.

That’s not the case in China (or in Europe, or in the United States).

Here are some excerpts from the article.

A United Nations forecast published Thursday shows how quickly China is aging, a demographic crunch that the U.N. predicts will cut China’s population by more than half by the end of the century. …Now, slowing economic growth and demographic changes feed off each other for a gloomy outlook. …By 2050, the U.N. now projects 31% of Chinese will be 65 or older. By 2100, the share will be 46%, approaching half of the population. In the U.S., the share is expected to be 23% and 28%, respectively. …The old-age support ratio, a rough indicator of the number of workers for each retiree…, is projected to decline from more than four now to fewer than two in 2050… It will likely reach one worker per retiree by the end of the century.

The takeaway from this data and analysis is that massive demographic change is occurring and China needs “funded” systems rather than tax-and-transfer entitlements.

And, at the risk of stating the obvious, we need similar reforms in the United States.

P.S. The Chinese government has taken some small steps in the right direction.

The Answers Are All in the History Books, And The Answers Are Not Pretty

Definition leads to clarity, clarity leads to understanding, understanding leads to wisdom, wisdom leads to good decision making.

By Rich Kozlovich

There are some historians I've read a lot over the years.  Nikole Hannah-Jones and the blatant falsehoods of her 1619 Project, the leftist corruption of the FDR administration, and more.  Yet we still see society embracing the very things history proves are disastrous.  The fact is all this screaming about racism in America is a corrupt scam destroying America.  And it's provable.  

There's no reason for society and these highly educated politicians to fail to see all this.  We have the history that tells the real story, it's recorded history, and it's history that's incontestable.  Yet, they fail to act on that history. 

I think is an excellent writer and one of my favorite historians.   Recently he published this piece, The Logic in All the Madness, Biden's agendas may have fundamentally changed America for decades, saying:

Most Americans believe it is unhinged to deliberately destroy the border and allow 10 million illegal aliens to enter the country without background audits, means of support, any claims to legal residency, and definable skills.............

Most Americans poll strong support for Israel. They oppose the Biden effort to triangulate by revisiting the old Obama nihilist agendas of emboldening the Iranian/Hezbollah/Hamas/Houthis axis to play off against our traditional allies of Israel and the more moderate Arab regimes.....

.......by allowing leftist campuses to normalize anti-Semitism and pro-terrorist advocacy, and by destroying the once close alliance of Israel and the United States, the left feels it will be almost impossible to go back to the pre-Obama/Biden years. Their legacy, they hope, is a mendicant Israel utterly dependent on U.S. largess—a condition itself predicated on essentially destroying the idea of a secure Jewish state within its present borders.

• Salman Rushdie: A Palestinian State Would Be Hamas "Is this what the progressive movements of the Western Left want to create?”
• Israel Cannot Maintain The Status Quo In Gaza Sha'i ben-Tekoa If Israel, having achieved a military victory, returns control over Gaza to the same radicals who control it now, she is re-committing to slow suicide. ..... Indeed, like the Nazis, the Brotherhood’s religion has had a 1,400-year history of mass murdering Jews, starting with the decapitation of hundreds at the Khaibar Oasis, a slaughter carried out by Muhammad himself.  In every century thereafter, Muslims massacred Jews.............

We're facing some serious economic issues that will be difficult to overcome, but we're facing some serious demographic issues that may be more difficult to overcome.  The left’s promotion of the gay agenda and the denigration of a traditional heterosexual society, and the nuclear family, along with the environmentalist’s demands we have less children to save the planet is having, and will have, devastating long-term demographic consequences.   

Then we have Muslim immigration, and make no mistake,  Muslims don’t buy into any of that. They have children - lots of children - and in many western nations they’re openly practicing polygamy, and European nations are allowing it. At what point is there a point of no return? If these leftist multiculturalist schemes continue western civilization is soon to become an Islamic nightmare. 

• A Nation That Doesn't Control its Borders, Isn't a Nation
• Prominent Muslim Declares: 'We Are On The Road To The White House' - The Islamic Takeover of America Unveiled
•  Israel Cannot Maintain The Status Quo In Gaza Sha'i ben-Tekoa If Israel, having achieved a military victory, returns control over Gaza to the same radicals who control it now, she is re-committing to slow suicide. .......A self-respecting Israel must finally gird its loins (a Biblical expression), and demand its right to sovereign ownership of Gaza. And as the legitimate landlord, it will have the authority to evict squatters, who, in the last election and via every opinion poll since, have supported the Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas, whose goal is to finish Hitler’s work. Indeed, like the Nazis, the Brotherhood’s religion has had a 1,400-year history of mass murdering Jews, starting with the decapitation of hundreds at the Khaibar Oasis, a slaughter carried out by Muhammad himself.  In every century thereafter, Muslims massacred Jews. They butchered them in Toledo, Spain, in 1066; so did the rampaging Al-Muwahiddun (Almohades) in 12th-century Andalusia and North Africa. The Muslims expelled the Jews from Yemen in 1679; murdered hundreds in Algiers in 1805; and that’s just the shortlist...............

What's going to happen to Europe in five years?  It will continue to cease to exist as we know it. Violence is going to erupt all over Europe as the native populations begin to realize these leftists controlling their lives commitment to "multiculturalism" is a suicide pact with those who hate and despise everything Europe is or was. And there will be violence on the order of chaos!  

Even if the native population just sits down to die the Muslim population will translate all the violence that's going on in Muslim dominated lands to Europe, forcing all native Europeans into dimmitude, and killing the rest, including those of a different Muslim sect, whom they consider heretics. We will see the one thing we've all felt was impossible - an out and out religious war.  

Europe is breeding itself out of existence, as is Russia.  Even if they stand up against the insanity and drive Muslims out of Europe, and that's what they will finally conclude will have to be done if they're to survive (Think Spain after the defeat of the Moors) they will not have the numbers to properly rebuild their economy and America will not have the economic wherewithal to bail them out is we did after WWII, since America will be having it's own economic reality check trying to meet the financial obligations of Social Security and Medicare, not to mention the national debt.   

Europe will be on it's own and then will turn to the United Nations to provide for their security and economy, and that's a leaky vessel if there ever was one. Europe is doomed! And so is Russia!

One question remains. Currently Europe is ruled by socialists favoring internationalism. With the recent elections we're seeing a trend to turn to socialists of a nationalist flavor.  Actually, it doesn't much matter because they still won't have the population necessary to restore their economy, and even if Europeans realized the demographic time bomb they're facing and started have a ton on babies it would still take twenty years before that could make any difference. 

Russia has Putin and he's merely playing a delaying game with all his seemingly clueless actions in the Ukraine and the Middle East. Putin's trying to save the ethnic Russian people. But no matter, Europe is doomed and so is Russia! In thirty years they won't have a majority of ethnic Russians in their own country.

The same question applies to all Western countries including the United States is why do western cultures need Somalis, Afghans, Eritreans, Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians, etc?  The answer?  We don't need them and we shouldn't want them since they don't want to assimilate, they want to destroy, and the policies being carried out by the Democrats and the Biden administration actually enable that destructive behavior, and may take decades to repair, if it can be done.  

Taking a look at what the Democrats have done to the nation's major cities seems to me these major cities are doomed, and may take decades to return, if ever. 

The only thing Muslims support is perpetrating violence, robbery, rape, having slaves, having multiple wives, the end of women’s rights, the end of freedom of religion and the end of any legitimate form of democracy and dhimmitude. Dhimmitude is where non-Muslims are taxed by Muslims. We need to get this: Islam is antithetical to Democracy.  Islam isn't a religion!  Islam is a political criminal movement masquerading as a religion. Just because they've managed to go on for over 1400 years is immaterial. 

Can anyone not wonder that leftism is a form of insanity?   Everything they promote and support is anathema to Muslims and yet they stand shoulder to shoulder in support of Muslim immigration into western cultures, the destruction of Israel by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.  Make no mistake about this.  If Muslim culture dominates the west they will eviscerate the leftists who supported them.  These "Fags For Hamas" demonstrators must be insane, because they'd be among the first to be thrown off high buildings. 

• Rebels without a Clue -  Hamas had a firm grip on Gaza from 2007 until late October.  Under their rule, summary executions of Palestinian opponents, repression, the criminalization of same-sex relations, and rampant human and civil rights violations have occurred..........

This is Islam, and Islam means “submission”, and it’s not just rhetoric to Muslims. They are deadly serious about everyone submitting to Islam, and they will use any and every form of violence to make that happen, including the murder of other Muslims with whom they disagree, and that isn’t a small number.  If someone says they want to kill you, believe them.

Western civilization is descending into a leftist multicultural Islamic nightmare right out of Dante’s Inferno filled with bestial appetites, violence, perversion, fraud, malice, hatred of their fellow man and intellectual fraud.

This is the disaster leftists have made for society, and now we're going to have to deal with it.  Make no mistake about this, if western civilization is to survive it must collectively recognize Islam is a cancer that must be eradicated from their society, but that’s not going to happen as long as multicultural socialists continue to rule. 

It's time we started paying attention to history, because that's where all the questions have the correct answers, and the historical lies being promoted in America's education institutions must be attacked, and punished by suing them and ending their funding.  The "historian" liars like Zinn and Nicole Hannah-Jones must be challenged and called to task, if history is to be the firm paved walkway leading to the stepping stones of the future.  

The IMF’s Destructive Advice for Germany

June 3, 2024 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

I wrote last November that Germany is in a period of fiscal decay.

Over the past eight-plus years, the burden of government spending has grown far too fast, violating the Golden Rule of fiscal policy.

 

As a result, the share of the economy being consumed by the public sector has jumped from 44 percent to nearly 49 percent.

That’s worse than Denmark!

So what should Germany do? A rational person, especially if that person had any knowledge of economics, would urge spending restraint.

But let’s instead look at what the Keystone Cops at the International Monetary Fund are recommending. They want Germany to weaken its fiscal rule to enable even more spending.

An aging population will also adversely affect public finances as tax revenue growth slows and spending on pensions and healthcare rises. …To accommodate rising spending needs, the authorities should consider moderately easing the debt brake. …Germany’s debt brake is set at a relatively tight level, such that the annual limit on net borrowing could be eased by about 1 percentage point of GDP while still keeping the debt-to-GDP ratio on a downward path. Such an easing would allow more room for much-needed public investment and other key priorities.

And, keeping with tradition, the bureaucrats at the IMF also want higher taxes in Germany.

Options that could be explored include eliminating environmentally harmful…tax expenditures, …raising taxes on real estate and on goods and services (as Germany’s revenue from such sources is below the advanced-economy average), and/or closing loopholes in inheritance taxes.

Adding more spending to Germany’s fiscal burden is bad news, but adding more taxes is equally offensive.

That part of the report merits two observations.

1. If the IMF cared about growth, it would recommend lower tax rates in the many areas where Germany is above the advanced-economy average, not pushing for higher taxes in the few areas where the German government has demonstrated a bit of restraint.
2. It is utterly hypocritical for IMF bureaucrats to push for higher taxes (in Germany or elsewhere) since their generous salaries are exempt from tax. Maybe if they had to pay taxes and live by the same rules as everyone else, they wouldn’t be so quick to urge bad policies.

P.S. I can’t resist citing one final bit of economic illiteracy from the IMF.

High energy prices following the shut-off of Russian gas contributed to surging inflation during 2022-23.

This is nonsense. Higher energy prices cause a shift in relative prices. Bad monetary policy (as we recently experienced in Europe, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom) is the reason for the increase in overall prices.

P.P.S. Given this statement by the previous head of the IMF (and current head of the ECB), you’ll understand why there’s a problem with economic literacy at that international bureaucracy.

The Great Replacement is Here, Now!

This article was inspired by a speech by  Eva Vlaardingerbroek at #CPACHungary stating the establishment is losing its mind as she spoke the forbidden truth: The Great Replacement is no longer a theory - it’s reality.

By Rich Kozlovich

"White Europeans are being replaced in their own countries at an ever accelerating rate and it will mean the end of our civilization if we don’t turn things around."

What we're seeing are violent and dangerous conflicts at a level not seen before.  Why?  Because this is an imported problem.  As a result of this insane attitude regarding multiculturalism, and social responsibility we're seeing mass uncontrolled migration from failed primitive tribal societies with ethnic, cultural, and religious values which are totally antithetical to western civilization.  

This is an ethnic culture problem so massive and so pervasive, since they've brought their tribal conflicts to Europe and the United States, and these migrants are blatantly antisemitic, anti Christian, and anti white, anti-western civilization, and they and their leftist enablers are using our own values against us, and all of that is blatantly obvious to the most casual observer!  So, it that's true, and it is, why is it then western civilization seems to be indifferent to our own destruction?   We've seen murder, rape, and destruction at unrepresented levels, and nothing changes.  We're capitulated to these savages in fear of being called  racists, xenophobes, and more, all that's left to do is accept dhimmitude status and surrender totally.   

All of which has been promoted and promulgated by a corrupt globalist elite, and they're imposing destructive rules, regulations, and taxes to make it happen, and the demographics is against whites and Christians, and these misfit elite globalists are even saying that's a good thing.  

In some of Europe's nations they're either already demographically past the point of no return, or on the verge of it.  In many of Europe's major cities, the ethnic white population is substantially outnumbered by non whites and non Christians from Africa and the Middle East.  And a substantial number of them are on government dole. 

Diversity isn't our friend, it's the true viral pandemic destroying civilization.  No Muslim controlled nation in the world would tolerate the very thing they're demanding from Europe and America.    

America has been subject to the outrageous anti white lies and leftist secular religious neo-paganism of Marxism and Critical Race Theory, all of which is an organized international attack on Western civilization.  The E.U. cannot be reformed, it must be eliminated, and that goes for the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund,  the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the

David Prentice states time is running out to save Western civilization, saying:

What we face as a nation is daunting; if we do not correct our left-leaning course, we will fall into the ashbin of history.  The city on the hill.  Gone.  The U.S. is moving quickly towards a centralized state.  Our liberties, our culture, and our national greatness are being subverted.  Subverted by a corrupt, clever, twisted, amorphous blob of powerful people.  Most of the old media, the new technocratic media (i.e.,:  Facebook and Google), one entire political party, part of the other party, along with the unelected bureaucracies and spy agencies of the U.S. are all a part of this blob.   Evil that’s difficult to overcome. 

And why is all this evil difficult to overcome?  We have nitwits passing massively expensive bills like the Ukraine-Israel Aid Bill, "which includes $3.5 Billion to fast track mass migration from Middle East nations, and s $481 million to settle migrants in U.S. cities."

 

As you watch the antisemitic pro Hamas insanity taking place on America's college campuses, we must come to the realization these misfit protesters of today are America's terrorists of tomorrow, and we're coming close to the point of no return. 

 

As for the future?  Well, as has been noted over and over again, "prediction is really hard, especially about the future".  Stop trying to predict it.  Create it!

Demographic Doom and the Welfare State

September 23, 2023 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

Many nations face a slow-motion fiscal crisis because of demographics.

To be more specific, politicians last century created welfare states and social-insurance systems that take money from workers in order to provide pensions and health care to old people.

Those decisions were misguided (compared to market-based approaches), but the math sort of worked. After all, everyone assumed there would be population growth, meaning there would always be enough future workers to support future retirees.

But the world has changed. Dramatically.

Let’s look at some data from a column in the New York Times by Dean Spears, who teaches at the University of Texas.

We’ll start with this chart showing that the world’s population will peak in 2085 and then dramatically decline.

Why will the world’s population shrink?

Because birthrates have plummeted. Many nations already have reached “below-replacement fertility” and others will reach that level in the near future.

There’s nothing wrong with lower levels of fertility, of course. Families should be as big or small as people want them to be.

But lower levels of fertility have a profound impact on social-insurance systems, as explained in Part I and Part II.

Let’s go to the Population Pyramid website and examine two countries.

We’ll start with the United States, since nearly 80 percent of my readers are American. As you can see, the USA had a population pyramid back in 1964, meaning plenty of working-age people and not that many old people to subsidize.

But that ratio is dramatically different in 2023 and it will change even more by 2050. With very grim fiscal consequences.

Let’s also take a look at Italy, since it is often viewed as a nation facing big demographic challenges.

The most shocking takeaway is that the population pyramid from 1964 is morphing into an upside-down pyramid.

So what can politicians do in response? There are three options.

1. They can try to cajole or bribe people to have more kids (i.e., more future taxpayers), but those policies don’t seem to be very effective – even in place such as Hungary.
2. They can impose massive tax increases on lower-income and middle-class households, which is the approach that is implicitly embraced by Trump and Biden.
3. They can shift to retirement systems based on private savings, like Australia, Chile, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Netherlands, the Faroe Islands, Denmark, Israel, and Sweden.

The right answer should be obvious, though some politicians want to make the crisis worse.

 

9/13

Daniel Greenfield September 11, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

As another 9/11 anniversary arrives, we are not in 9/10, a world before the fall of the towers, nor 9/12, the world that was born in the aftermath of the attacks, rather we are in 9/13.In 9/13, the attacks of September 11 are not considered especially significant. 

In 9/13, concern about Islamic terrorism ranks in the low single digits behind everything else.

In 9/13, a thousand trending concerns, some vital and some completely unimportant, have vastly eclipsed not only the barbaric mass murder of thousands, but the recognition that we are at war.

And that war is far from over.

In 9/13, the people who once specialized in talking about the threat of Islam have increasingly moved on. And it's hard to blame them. No one really wants to hear it anymore. It's yesterday's news.

America's Islamic population is growing. The open border doesn't just bring in drug dealers and gang members, but massive numbers of people from the Muslim world. The Afghan airlift and visas will probably end up importing at least a quarter of a million as family reunification kicks in. Our national demographics are being transformed with the same eventual outcome as Europe.

But it's 9/13. When I write articles about Islam, they perform worse than anything else. And I don't have the same raw feeling toward the day that I used to. The ash used to haunt my nightmares. I snuck past the law enforcement and military presence downtown to make it to the site, the twisted mess of what was left, because I needed to know up close that what I had seen was real. But it's not the same.

I hope it is for you. But I don't think it is for most of us.

Back then, afterward, I wondered how it was possible to move on and to forget. I was still young then and I concluded that the answer had to be time. With time, pain dulls, what seems fresh grows stale. Such things were abstractions then. I hadn't lived through phases of history or seen generations change.

That's no longer true. I've seen how people can change. How they can go mad. And how they can forget.

9/13 is all about forgetting.

9/13 means we've done it. We fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's time to move on now. Maybe take a day to remember the people who died in the towers, in a field, bow our heads and go on with what really matters today.

What's the alternative? Fighting a forever war?

After WWI, most people were done with world wars. But world wars weren't done with them. That's a poor analogy because the Jihad isn't some nationalistic European grudge match. It's a thousand-year assault on the rest of the world that will not stop just because we've decided to move on.

Early on WW2, wags joked that it was the Bore War because nothing seemed to be happening on the western front. The jokes made sense at the time. But they stopped being funny really fast.

We're in the Bore War now. But thousand-year-old wars don't remain boring forever.

Americans recalibrate quickly. We believe that the world is always changing. TikTok, AI, lazy girls, this week's trend. The past is... past. We quickly forgot about the airline hijackings once they became yesterday's news. We're more than ready to forget Islamic terrorism all over again.

But Islam does not forget.

Reality is what exists even when you stop paying attention to it. Ideology and opinion don't matter. Marxist ideologies claim to know the future and believe it will be dramatically different from the past. But the only reliable way to predict history, as Patrick Henry told a bunch of men long since dead, is with the lamp of experience. The best way to know the future is to know the past.

And sometimes that may even mean living in the past.

Living in the nanosecond has not served our sanity, our reality or our culture very well. But it means that we are always leaving things behind. History keeps vanishing in the rearview mirror. The outrage of the moment fills our minds. And then the next and the one after that. And all the others to come.

September 11 is not just a day. It was a wake- up call. And many of us woke up. But it's easier to wake up then it is to stay awake. And yet the war we're in isn't going anywhere. It's only getting worse.

Islamists and Islamic terrorists accomplished their main purposes which were to drag America into political and military engagements with them, ones that they were bound to win through sheer staying power, while they infiltrated our political system and spurred massive immigration into our country.

Islamic terrorism became a partisan issue. And then it ceased to be even that. Democrats have embraced Islam and Republicans, as usual, are tagging along for the ride. Even the conservative landscape is dotted with apologists, truthers, conspiracists and other sympathizers. Meanwhile we're losing.

The demographic conditions are coming into place for a next wave of Islamic terrorism which will depend not on internationally coordinated attacks, but domestic terror cells following up on the 'lone wolves' like the Boston Marathon bomber and the Pulse nightclub shooter.

Every few weeks another Islamic terror plot is broken up. I wrote about them sometimes. Sometimes someone even reads the article.

It's 9/13 after all.

Before 9/11, I had a sense of a dimly understood future rushing toward us. I still have that sense now.

Islamic terrorism is not the only thing that matters. It's not the only thing that will determine our survival. But it is one of those things. And it's the one that we've forgotten. And one of these days we will once again wake up to blood and horror and mass death. Let us hope that this time we stay awake. 

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

 

Japan Joins the Anti-Convergence Club

July 23, 2023 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

Economists assume that poor countries should grow faster than rich countries over time, a process known as convergence.

It’s a reasonable theory, but only if poor countries and rich countries have similar levels of economic liberty.

But that’s often not the case, which is why I put together an anti-convergence club. I have dozens of examples of richer countries growing faster than poorer countries.

And not just for one or two years. Every example in the anti-convergence club is based upon multiple decades of data.

Even more important, every example shows that you get faster growth in nations with free markets and limited government.

Now we have a new member of the anti-convergence club. Here’s a chart that Mike Bird of the U.K.-based Economist shared on Twitter. It shows that Japan has been steadily losing ground compared to the United States over the past three decades.

So what’s the reason for Japan’s long-run decline?

Some of it presumably is caused by demographics. But there’s also been fiscal decline measured by both taxation and spending burdens.

And this chart on competitiveness is very depressing.

Amazingly, some people on the left think the U.S. should copy Japan. I’m guessing those people can’t answer this question.

The Dutch coalition government just collapsed

July 8, 2023  By Andrea Widburg 

It didn’t get much play in the American press, but something significant happened in Holland: The Dutch coalition government collapsed. This is the same government that sought to seize 30% of Holland’s farms in the name of decreasing “nitrogen” and slowing “climate change.” The opposition to destroying Holland’s agricultural sector was a significant factor in Holland’s March elections and is an ongoing problem, but outlets such as the AP and the New York Times want everyone to know that anti-immigrant right-wingers are the sole problem in Holland.

Last summer, people began to be aware of something very peculiar going on in the Netherlands: The government was waging war against farmers. Holland’s farmland is one of the great wonders of the world, for the industrious Dutch, over the centuries, laboriously created this land from what was once salt water from the Atlantic Ocean and Zuiderzee. This led Holland to become the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural food products. It is, in other words, one of the bulwarks against world famine.

Holland’s gift to the world didn’t matter to a government invested in the climate change fraud. It announced that the country had to reduce its nitrogen output by 30-70% to comply with EU dictates. This would require confiscating up to 30% of Holland’s farms, especially the ones with livestock. Adding insult to injury, the Dutch government planned to use the confiscated land for “asylum seekers” (i.e., illegal immigrants)..............To Read More...

Baby Muhammads Overrun the West

June 7, 2023 By Raymond Ibrahim

Newborn baby Muhammads are taking Western Europe by storm — with Berlin being the latest target...............This trend is occurring all throughout Western Europe.  Muhammad is the most popular name in the United Kingdom; in major Belgian cities — including Brussels, the E.U. capital; in Oslo, the capital of Norway; and in the Netherlands' largest cities, including Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht.  This is to say nothing of other Arabic/Muslim names, which are also topping the charts of newborn baby names...........because more numbers equate with more power and influence, many Muslims see their progeny as their contribution to the jihad — the ancient "struggle" to make Islam supreme.

A video from last year of Muslims and Danes quarreling in Denmark makes this clear.  In the video, one Muslim man can be heard yelling the following words to a Dane:

We have five children, you only have one or two. In 10 to 15 years there will be more Pakistanis than Danes in this country! ... The Danes are five million, soon you'll be exterminated.  Look at the Swedes, look at the Norwegians, look at the Finns, man!  We are multiples [of] millions, man!

The clamorous Muslim goes on to accuse Europeans of preferring bestiality to marriage — hence their dearth of children.  Soon other Muslims chime in.  One says, "I just got married and will also have five children."  Others start yelling about how the Danes' "mothers will be pregnant again," because their mothers and sisters are "whores" (who presumably sleep around with the Muslims).  Others chant, "This isn't Denmark anymore, this is Paki-land," repeated several times: "We are taking over your country."...........To Read More....

Selfish Politicians Are Setting the Stage for Fiscal Crisis

May 30, 2023 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

In a just-released interview with John Stossel, I discuss how the United States faces an entitlement crisis that will result in massive tax increases on poor and middle-class households. Or worse.

 

 

As explained in the video, there are some unavoidable facts that need to be faced.

The most unavoidable reality is demographic change. Simply stated, we are living longer and having fewer children.

But this clashes with another unavoidable reality, which is that we have pay-as-you-go entitlement programs.

 

And the combination of these two realities means a ticking fiscal time bomb. Or, to use Stossel’s analogy, the fuse is burning.

Sadly, there is one additional reality, which is that we have irresponsible politicians (both Democrats and Republicans) who lie to voters.

Those politicians claim there is no problem, but what they are really saying is that their short-run political self-interest is more important than the long-run best interests of the nation.

For all intents and purposes, they are setting the stage for massive tax increases on lower-income and middle-class households. Indeed, the honest folks on the left openly admit this is their goal.

Needless to say, I prefer genuine entitlement reform. Call me crazy, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to copy Europe’s anemic welfare states.

Israel's unexpected racial alignment tells us a lot about its current politics

April 19, 2023 By Gary Schiff

What does America’s left wing Democrat party’s racial alignment look like?  Not surprisingly, white Europeans with liberal perspectives combined with most of the minority communities. 

What does Israel’s current right wing government; e.g., the Likud party’s racial alignment look like? Surprisingly, it consists mostly of minorities. A fact that is often ignored by the anti-Israel crowd who accuse Israel of being an apartheid state, is that Israel’s majority population is comprised of Jews of color; Jews who escaped from Arab lands (Sephardic or Mizrachi), Iran, and Ethiopia. 

This is the mirror opposite of the U.S.  The darker skinned “minority” is the core base of support for Israel’s right-wing government. This minority also is deeply rooted in traditional values.

As background, Sephardic or Mizrachi Jews had been returning to Israel for the past millennium in trickles. Then came the pogroms and ultimately the unspeakable Holocaust in Europe.  The result was a huge influx of European Jews returning home in the last century and a half. The surrounding Arab nations subsequently expelled their Jews, many of whom were long established in those countries, and they, too, fled to Israel, arriving after the European Jews.  The darker-skinned arrivals were often treated as second-class citizens by some of their European Jewish counterparts.  They ended up living in difficult conditions mainly in the periphery. Most brought strong religious values and traditions.

Today 54% percent of the Israeli Jewish population is either Mizrachi, Persian or Ethiopian. ............ To Read More....

My Take - Demographics is a foundational force whether it's dealing with domestic or international politics, and in this case, it's going to alter the foundational structure of Israel's economy, government and politics, both domestic and international.  I think this is one of the most insightful pieces I've read on Israel.

 

China’s collapsing birth and marriage rates reflect a people’s deep pessimism

February 28, 2023 Nicholas Eberstadt is the Wendt chair in political economy at the American Enterprise Institute.

China is in the midst of a quiet but stunning nationwide collapse of birthrates. This is the deeper, still largely overlooked, significance of the country’s 2022 population decline, announced by Chinese authorities last month. As recently as 2019, demographers at the U.S. Census Bureau and the United Nations were not expecting China’s population to start dropping until the early 2030s. But they did not anticipate today’s wholesale plunge in childbearing. Considerable attention has been devoted to likely consequences of China’s coming depopulation: economic, political, strategic. But the causes of last year’s population drop deserve much closer examination.

China’s nosedive in childbearing is a silent alarm. It signals deep disaffection with the bleak future the regime is engineering for its subjects. In this land without democracy, the birth collapse can be read as a landslide vote of no confidence in President Xi Jinping’s rule. Official Chinese government statistics are far from perfect (Premier Li Keqiang once called China’s economic numbers “man-made”), but they offer a serviceable approximation of recent birth trends...........To Read More.....

China’s Revolution in Family Structure: A Huge Demographic Blind Spot with Surprises Ahead

By Nicholas Eberstadt | Ashton Verdery @ American Enterprise Institute February 27, 2023

Key Points

• This report maps out recent and prospective trends in China’s family structure and kinship network patterns and assesses the social, economic, and political implications of these changes. We believe this is the first such study ever undertaken for a major national population.
• The report maps out changing family patterns through demographic modeling techniques, which simulate trends in family formation based on existing demographic data.
• Because statistics on family networks are not collected in China (or almost anywhere else), this area represents a blind spot for policymakers—a potentially fateful one, as shown in this report.

Read the PDF.

Executive Summary

Researchers and decision makers in Beijing and the West pay close attention to many major Chinese population trends, including its pronounced sub-replacement fertility, its shrinking manpower totals, and its rapid population aging. Yet one momentous demographic trend in China has as yet attracted almost no interest: the transformation of the country’s family structure.

The reason for this oversight is obvious. Beijing, like other modern governments, simply does not collect information on family structure or kinship networks—so the regime does not think about the issue and its implications.

In this report, we model simulations of China’s past and prospective patterns and trends in kinship networks. We then use the results from these simulations to analyze, assess, and speculate about their implications for China’s social, economic, and political future. We believe this is the first study to think through the far-reaching implications of the results of demographic and kinship network modeling for a national population of a major economy and great power.

Our simulations show that the Chinese family is about to undergo a radical and historically unprecedented transition, as extended kinship networks atrophy across the nation and close blood relatives disappear altogether for many. This fraying of the extended family and atomization of the nuclear family come at an almost exquisitely inopportune moment in China: Social needs are soaring alongside the rising tally of elderly dependents and the shrinking ranks of those on whom the elderly can rely—two social indicators poised for inescapable collision in the years immediately ahead. Indeed, the withering of the Chinese family as we now know it will make for new and unfamiliar challenges at every stage in the life cycle, for both Chinese people and the Chinese state.

Our simulations revealed several key findings.

• An unexpected finding: In terms of sheer quantity, Chinese networks of blood kin were never before nearly as thick as at the start of the 21st century. Due to dramatic improvements in survival, men and women in their 30s today (2020) have on average five times as many living cousins as in 1960. China’s “kin explosion” may be an important, heretofore unobserved, factor helping explain the Chinese economy’s remarkable performance since Mao Zedong’s death.
• But that kin explosion has reached its zenith, and China is now on the cusp of a severe, unavoidable, and unrelenting “kin crash,” driven by its prolonged and increasingly steep sub-replacement fertility patterns. The implosion of consanguineous family networks, in our models, means that China’s rising generations will likely have fewer living relatives than ever before in Chinese history: A “kin famine” looms.
• Population simulations also project a radical inversion within the nuclear family, with living parents and in-laws outnumbering children for middle-aged Chinese men and women. Further, due to the surfeit of baby boys under the notorious One-Child Policy (1980–2015) and declining cohort sizes, growing numbers of men in the decades ahead will enter old age without spouses or children—the traditional sources of support for the elderly.
• China’s coming revolution in family structure stands to overturn fundamental social arrangements taken for granted today. The focus of the family in China will necessarily be redirected from the rearing of the young to the care of the old. The reliability and durability of familial bonds of duty will be an increasingly crucial question—perhaps even a matter of life and death for many, including frail and impecunious elders in the Chinese hinterlands.
• Notwithstanding the looming macroeconomic implications of old-age dependency burdens, the most consequential economic impact of China’s coming revolution in family may actually concern the micro-foundations of the national economy. Since earliest recorded history, China’s guanxi networks have helped get business done by reducing uncertainty and transaction costs. Just as proliferation of blood relatives likely proved a powerful stimulant for growth during the era of China’s phenomenal upswing, the drastic coming plunge in living biological kin in China between now and 2050 may prove an economic depressant.
• The coming revolution in Chinese family structure promises to have political reverberations as well. If the waning of the family requires China to build a huge social welfare state over the coming generation, as we surmise it will, then Beijing would have that much less wherewithal at its disposal for influencing events abroad through economic diplomacy and defense policy.
• Further, our simulations indicate that by 2050, close to half of China’s overall pool of male military-age manpower will be made up of only children. Any encounter by China’s security forces involving significant loss of life will almost unavoidably presage lineage extinction for many Chinese families. Autocracies are typically tolerant of casualties—but this may not at all be the case in the only-child China of today and the coming decades.

Analysts and decision makers in China (and elsewhere) have barely begun to think about the many ramifications of this great disruption for China’s future. Inattention to Chinese family structure is a blind spot—quite possibly a fateful one.

Introduction

Dramatic demographic changes are underway in China, and they bear directly on the country’s economic, social, and geopolitical outlook for the decades ahead.¹ Beijing’s official announcement in January 2023 that deaths slightly exceeded births in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 2022² and that total population for the country fell for the first time since the Great Famine of 1959–61 that followed Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward are only the latest reminders that population trends are constantly recasting the trajectory of “China’s rise.”

Researchers and decision makers in Beijing and the West pay close attention to many major Chinese population trends and their implications—among these, pronounced and continuing sub-replacement fertility, shrinking working-age manpower, rapid population aging, and emerging surfeits of marriageable men, partly due to sex-selective abortions. Yet those convey only some of the demographic headwinds facing the world’s largest economy and most populous society. One momentous demographic trend in China has as yet attracted almost no interest: the transformation of the country’s family structure.

Inattention to Chinese family structure is a blind spot—quite possibly a fateful one. The Chinese family is already set to undergo a radical and historically unprecedented transition, as extended kinship networks atrophy across the nation and close blood relatives disappear altogether for many. This fraying of the extended family and atomization of the nuclear family come at an almost exquisitely inopportune moment in China: Social needs are soaring with the rising tally of elderly dependents and shrinking ranks of those on whom elderly can rely—two social indicators poised for collision and rapidly. Indeed, the withering of the Chinese family as we now know it will make for new and unfamiliar challenges at every stage in the life cycle, for people and for the Chinese state. We have barely begun to think about the many ramifications of this great disruption for China’s future.

The impending upheaval in Chinese family structure is by now essentially unstoppable; a new family order is all but inescapable for China’s rising young generations. Because their parents had fewer children and they had fewer siblings, their children will necessarily have few aunts, uncles, and cousins. This upheaval promises to be massive in magnitude, replete with far-reaching reverberations—and is coming surprisingly soon.

Why has such an enormous, and potentially revolutionary, demographic change gone overlooked by China’s formidable cadre of academics, researchers, and advisers—and their overseas counterparts? The answer unfortunately is obvious. Beijing simply does not collect information on family structure or kinship networks—so the regime does not think about the issue and its implications. They plan for fewer people, not fewer nieces.

Such oversight is hardly new, nor is it peculiar to China. Standing governments have never regarded data on family as relevant to statecraft or security. Empires and states have been conducting censuses for thousands of years—the earliest of them in the Mediterranean and China. But in antiquity, these population counts were designed for taxation and military mobilization—thus, the focus on households and head counts.

That ancient design still informs modern statistical authorities everywhere. Although their techniques for surveying populations may be vastly more sophisticated nowadays, and although the sheer volume of demographic data at their disposal may likewise be exponentially greater, modern governments the world over still fail to ask for information about kinship from their citizens and subjects—and thus do not obtain it. Outside those working with the closely guarded population register data in some Scandinavian countries, who must apply clever approaches to enumerate kin, the kinship systems linking whole societies remain unseen.

In this report, we attempt to illuminate this major demographic blind spot in China’s population profile through modeling simulations of China’s past and prospective patterns and trends in kinship networks. We then use the results from these simulations to analyze, assess, and speculate about their implications for the Chinese future, in the social, economic, and even political realms. We believe this is the first study to think through the far-reaching implications of the results of demographic and kinship network modeling for a national population of a major economy and great power. We hope to demonstrate the utility of such explorations and encourage similar studies for the populations of other contemporary societies.

As we will show, the story of China’s revolution in family structure is more complicated than typically thought. Scholars, pundits, and members of the public certainly appreciate that the country’s family experience is changing. China’s notorious fertility-control policies in effect from the 1970s to 2015 are well-known, for instance, and it is not a leap to reason that such policies—and the other demographic reversals discussed above—presage considerable change in family structure. But how such policies and trends fit in the context of China’s shifting family landscape, how much has changed in the past 80 years, and just how much is likely to change again in the next 80 is a largely untold story.

Read the full report.