The Demographic Winter - How Bad Will It Be?
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Many people are now vaguely aware of the concept of the ‘demographic winter’ and the fact that it is a very serious problem for a modern advanced nation. Elon Musk in particular has repeatedly raised the issue, although his ideal “solution” appears to be importing millions of India tech workers and their families.
But few understand just how serious the issue really is. Before we even begin to examine possible solutions of any worth, it is therefore necessary to explain that the ongoing birth rate crash is not a matter of us all facing a shortage of care workers in nursing homes; it is an existential crisis.
Opponents of immigration already grasp the threat posed by the combination of below-replacement level of all European nations with continued Third World immigration and the higher birth rates of certain ‘minorities’. But even those who talk about the “Great Replacement” seem to have little grasp of the fact that the driving force of this looming catastrophe is not really “their” numbers growing so much as the fact that ours are going to crash.
Strip out the higher birth rates of recently arrived immigrants and a (shrinking) number of ‘minorities’ and the average birth rate in most European countries (Britain included) is no more than 1.5.
The non-Hispanic white total fertility rate (TFR) in the United States is likewise now barely above 1.5 children per woman.
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Total fertility rate is the average number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime. A TFR of 2.1 is required to maintain a stable population. At 1.5, the non-Hispanic white population - the historic majority that built America - is reproducing at a rate far below replacement level. This is not a temporary dip but part of a decades-long trend driven by a toxic cocktail of factors, including the drive to entice and push women into work, economic hardship and the Long War against white nations and Christian values.
If this TFR remains constant, the consequences in the UK, USA and Europe over the next 100 years will be catastrophic. A population with a TFR of 1.5 halves roughly every two breeding generations – a mere 50 years.
100 million people today would shrink to about 50 million by 2075 and 25 million by 2125. Not a drop of a quarter but a collapse to a quarter.
To put this into historical perspective, the notorious Black Death of the 14th century killed about one-third of the entire population of Europe. The Great Dying, now irrevocably baked into the demographics of the entire industrialised world, is going to kill a bigger proportion of the population than two Black Deaths.
Demographic change takes place geometrically, not arithmetically. Exponential decline, or growth, compounds over time. If you borrow money from a bank, secured against your home, and do not have enough income to pay back the interest, it will mount up until it becomes completely unrepayable. Sooner or later, you will lose your home.
When the same awesome power of geometric progression is at play with a slow-breeding majority and a fast-breeding minority, the shrinking majority will eventually lose their country.
Even maintaining a TFR of 1.5 becomes increasingly difficult as the population ages. Economic pressures - such as stagnant wages, housing costs, and childcare expenses - already deter young couples from having children.
Smaller cohorts of young people mean fewer marriages and births, creating a negative feedback loop pushing the TFR down towards 1.0, as seen in countries like South Korea and Singapore.
The shrinking population feedback loop reduces the tax base, limiting government revenue for infrastructure, defense, and social programmes. Schools close due to fewer students, communities hollow out, and rural areas—often strongholds of traditional values—become ghost towns.
This process is already well-advanced in Japan and China, where lack of immigration means that the problems are not temporarily hidden by influxes of newcomers, as they are in Britain, the USA and other Western nations.
Faced with the growing realization that shrinking TFR is a civilisation-wrecker, some particularly forward-looking nations are now making increasingly bold – one could say ‘desperate’ – efforts to reverse the decline. Japan, South Korea, Poland and Hungary are particularly notable for introducing measures to boost their birth rates without recourse to mass immigration, a short-termist “solution” which in fact only speeds up the rate at which the native-born are replaced.
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Demographic basket case South Korea is another place where government efforts to turn things around have failed to counter the toxic effects of feminism, capitalism and the deification of all thigns material - aks the worship of Mammon
The problem is that financial incentives and other government-sponsored efforts to boost birthrates tend primarily to bring forward the time at which young families are formed and have children. They are much less effective at encouraging those who would otherwise have remained childless to change their minds and have children. Thus, they tend to produce temporary baby-bulges, which quickly drop off again.
The experience of Hungary is an example. In 2011, the country’s TFR was down to 1.23. While still significantly higher than the figure for indigenous Greeks, Italians and Spaniards, this is a catastrophically low figure. Sustained over 100 years, it would see the population crash by around 85%.
The Orban government responded by introducing successive rafts of measures, including marriage support, tax benefits, generous subsidies for houses and cars for families, and even financial support for grandmothers to retire early and help to look after grandchildren.
After spending huge sums on all this, the government was rewarded by a rise in the TFR to 1.59 by 2021. From there, however, it slipped back to 1.51. Further major spending efforts have now pushed it back up to 1.56, but it is a clear case of diminishing return on investment.
Nationalists elsewhere who point to Hungary as an example of action turning things around are missing the point very badly. Because all the effort and all the expenditure, which will soon have been going on for 15 years, have not turned things around in any seriously meaningful way. To be blunt, they have done little more than stabilise the situation at a level of ‘catastrophic’, rather than ‘suicidal’.
To ‘turn around’ even Hungary’s improved TFR of 1.5, once it has been sustained for a few decades, would take increasing it to 3 – and keeping that doubled rate of childbirth going for 75 years. That is the terrifying reality of the perilous situation created once even one generation of low breeding has slashed the number of females under the age of 35.
The TFR of the non-Hispanic white population of the USA has probably been below replacement rate since the early 1970s. Britain is in the same boat. That’s more than two breeding generations of compound decline. Many European nations are even worse off.
This is a civilisation-wrecking catastrophe. Not a possible one, or a threatened one, but one happening right now, all around us. For very special reasons, there is only one Western nation which might just be able to fend off this impending disaster.
That nation is the United States of America, but a serious move to save the USA would only make the situation for the rest of the white world even worse.
We will look at what could be done by a government which was really serious about moving from Demographic Winter to Spring in my next article. Don’t miss it, subscribe for free!
This essay is based on an article of mine published in the American Free Press. American readers especially should take a look:
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