Humans, during the past century, were able to test the eternal belief that “more”—unlimited “more”—was what we needed. More human numbers; more food; more material goods; more wealth; more speed; more services; more years.
The test results are coming in, and regardless of the utopian dreams, it’s clear that “more” may often be counterproductive to our well-being. “More” may, in some instances, no longer be possible in ways that are beneficial. We had come to think that growth—“more”—was synonymous with progress.
Much of this thinking evolved naturally from the fact that human numbers were increasing through the past century, that per capita human wealth and caloric intake rose during the past eight decades, and that consumer goods and housing were becoming more attainable because of increases (through credit) in the money supply. Debt became a passage to obtaining “more.”
But “more” in the material sense caused us to focus on short-term, material transactionalism. “Enduring values” lost their durability. Wisdom was discarded by societies too impatient for experience-based learning. We wanted all things immediately, even when it was clear that they became less satisfying or even detrimental to our physical, mental, and economic health. We attempted to compensate with tools to improve our longevity while doing things that caused diseases, which diminished our lifespans.
“More” became addictive. And yet the core of growth—population growth—has begun to reverse itself. For some years, the major industrial societies have seen that human reproduction rates have not been at replacement levels. Thus, the continued expansion of population numbers caused by higher live birth rates and extended lifespans began to be reversed. So when the “baby boom” generation dies (and it’s now in some areas dying earlier than anticipated), the decline in the core population of industrial societies will be profound.
There has been a reluctance to accept that transformed population trends necessitate new economic models. This means that virtually all Western “advanced” societies have attempted to sustain population growth through immigration, equating economic growth with population growth. And yet, as unrestricted immigration has been encouraged in these “advanced” societies, we have seen a commensurate decline in individual productivity.
Growing prosperity and urbanization in India and Africa—the last two areas of the world experiencing core population growth—will serve, as was the case in economies elsewhere, to reduce human reproduction rates, possibly over the coming three decades or so.
The basic argument that population growth equates to economic growth is, in any event, laughable. If population size determined economic wealth and strategic power, then India and China would have been the dominant powers over the past millennium. What we see, however, is that this blind faith in population growth equating to strategic and economic power growth has undercut the core efficiencies and social cohesion of major Western societies.
This isn’t an argument that opposes immigration. It is an argument that opposes indiscriminate immigration without integrating incoming migrants into the host countries’ language, culture, and educational standards. But even that misses the point. The fundamental issue is that core population growth is, in any event, fading away. New policy models are needed to address a changing world in which “globalization,” supply chain stability, and stable currency values can no longer be assured.
The obvious key for societies in the West is not to seek massive intakes of uneducated manpower, but to use the remaining window of relative economic wealth to begin replacing declining human efficiency levels with improved automated efficiencies, new manufacturing technologies (such as 3D printing), and carefully managed artificial intelligence and machine learning. Equally, given the end of the age of unlimited growth since the end of World War II, it is critical for Western societies to abandon the bureaucratic inefficiencies that have gradually strangled marketplace innovation.
Ironically, we have seen the growth of wealth translate into the destruction of true market forces, mainly because of a marriage between big government and big business. What we see today throughout the West is not “capitalism” but a form of statism that equates to national socialism, in which entrepreneurship is constrained by the lack of opportunity and by overweening governmental compliance restrictions.
There is also the historical reality that strategic dominance has almost always been characterized by access to, and use of, unrestricted amounts of energy. Translated into current parlance, it conversely means that the decline of strategic dominance and capability is actually guaranteed by the politically correct constraint of access to traditional power sources.
In all this melee, in many areas of the world, we see the reality that the “more” preoccupation has led to the decline or blurring of more enduring forms of a social contract between governed and governors. This is a hallmark of the decline (or transformed meaning) of the brief global era of “democracy.”
As Alfred Lord Tennyson noted: “The old order changeth, yielding place to new.” We must define, then, how we structure and manage a very different strategic framework.
