Reader TTS

John Stuart Mill is the closest the international liberal class gets to a secular saint. He was not only the great advocate of our current liberal economic and cultural order but was an

early feminist. Surely there is nothing more modern than a male feminist. (Ask Justin Trudeau.) Mill is the grandfather of our age. Yet he was not an actual grandfather. He did not have any

children (that we know of), unlike most Victorians who had many children: Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin, for example, had ten each. In this respect, we have followed Mill’s example

rather than that of his contemporaries. The lack of children is the fatal flaw of the Western liberal order Mill helped to create. The liberal economic system that dominates the USA, Europe,

Japan and other advanced countries has led to birth rates that mean the populations of the West are going to contract at a rate never seen before in history. They will doom the current

liberal order in the process. The migrants that will come to the West to prop up the economies will bring their own, very different values: economic and cultural. You can see it in Western

political leaders. Olaf Scholz is the second German Chancellor in a row to have no biological children. President Macron and former Prime Minister Theresa May are both childless. The USA is

the exception, in terms of Presidents. But whereas the American birthrate used to buck the Western trend, it has now come crashing down.  It is estimated that the birthrate of the United

States is now 1.7, below France, at 1.8. One of the reasons that fewer people in Western societies are having children and those that do have fewer of them lies in liberalism’s two great

gifts to the world, especially over the past forty years: income inequality and sexual equality. The huge inequality in modern Western societies means that many low- and middle-income people

feel they can’t afford to have children. If they do it is likely to be one, or at most two. A country needs a replacement rate of 2.1 to maintain its population; anything below it means a

contracting population — without immigration. In the case of sexual equality many women feel their opportunities in society and the workplace mean they don’t want to have children, or they

delay so long that they rob themselves of the option. This is added to a liberal society, where the concept of motherhood is often denigrated. The liberal order dismisses anything that

cannot be given an economic value. So, a woman who is a high-powered lawyer is rewarded economically and celebrated socially. Her university contemporary, who is just as able, but decides to

devote herself to a family of three or four children immediately disadvantages herself economically, her efforts for her children do not appear in the economic statistics and she is looked

down upon by her university friends and wider society. It is no wonder that there are so many childless, highly able women who can afford to have children, but don’t. The supporters of the

liberal order say birthrate does not matter. Immigration will pick up the slack, providing a cheap labour force for the wealthy to exploit and keep the Ponzi scheme going. The trouble with

this is that — as Brexit has shown — mass immigration meets large scale political opposition. Even when it continues, as under the current Conservative government, the people coming to

Western countries bring their own values. These tend to be very different from those of Western liberals. Britain had a small taste of this in Birmingham in 2019, when Muslim parents

objected to LBGT lessons in a local school. The more immigration there is to compensate for collapsing birthrates, the more of these culture clashes are likely to take place. The forces of

liberalism continue to delude themselves over the demographic problem. Liberalism’s house journal, the _Economist,_ argues that the West just needs to adopt Scandinavian-style child support

policies and all will be well. It published an article in 2022 saying that more working women and more babies go together. The trouble is that the two largest countries it quoted to support

this, Sweden and France, were still below the replacement rate, with Sweden at 1.6, even if not as bad as, say, Spain at 1.2.  Of course, the article ignored the fact that both countries

have less inequality than the UK, the USA and Spain, which may well make working couples think they can afford to have children, and both now have large migrant populations which boost

birthrates. South Korea, whose economic dynamism the _Economist _no doubt applauds, has huge inequality of income and a replacement rate of less than 0.8. It also has no history of inward

migration. People should enjoy K-Pop while they can, because soon there won’t be many South Korean teenagers to produce it. The fact that the forces of Left- and Right-wing populism are

assailing the present liberal order gets lots of publicity and causes hand-ringing from the Davos crowd. Yet it is the relentless power of demography that will do for our Western liberal

order before Marine Le Pen (mother of three) or the second coming of Donald Trump (father of five). When it comes to economics and culture, demography is destiny. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE

_We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue

publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation._