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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
May 19, 2002
Demography
I'm not going to cite any numbers in this article. This is not only because I'm hoping to keep some readers but because numbers are misleading. It is said that "statistics always lie" and as the statement comes without a statistical demonstration it may possibly be true. Numbers are useful in demolishing falsehoods but when it comes to building a new thesis they are a waste of time. For it is in the nature of numbers to supply a precision that belies the reality they describe. It is one of the weaknesses of our technocracy that we are mesmerized by numbers. We use them even to quantify "the quality of life" -- think about this for a moment. We do it because we are mesmerized because the numbers are there and we can't resist playing with them. Fortunately we play with other things too. "Guns don't kill people people kill people" -- there is a certain truth in this that a gun has no will of its own. The same remark could be made about statistics: that used in an ill way they are a lethal weapon one which like guns can be used to do great harm. It is done by extrapolating trends into the future -- creating not only the appearance of precision for wacky speculations that are the opposite of precise but also panic over non-existent threats. The future is unknowable. This is the sort of thing no statistical demonstration could prove though the opposite is perhaps disprovable. What I mean is we could prove statistically that most if not all statistical projections have been wrong. Alas whole vast areas of human enterprise are predicated on the possibility that one day one of these projections might come true -- that oil will run out that arable land will be exhausted that the global temperature will rise -- and we'll all die! (But we'll all die even if none of these things happen.) We are mesmerized by statistics and the battiest people find it hardest to step back from them. Like chickens with their beaks placed against a chalk line they will follow it anywhere even into the abattoir. This is all by way of preface to my comment on the proposition that Demography is destiny. I deny this proposition and everything that follows from it. The problems of today are enough to solve; let's leave the problems of the future to our children. One of those problems may well be how to support all us aging hippies who voted ourselves all kinds of social benefits but neglected to pay for them. A snip to solve: our kids should just cut us off. Meanwhile if the problem is laying in more money we know how to go about it. Work harder and more efficiently regardless of age. Invest wisely. Don't expect anyone you don't know to take care of you. And if you're totally cornered you can always starve. It won't cost you a penny. Such thoughts are fed by a great deal of e-mail I've received from readers distressed about Israel/Palestine and similar subjects. So many are either fretting about the demographic trends or alternatively gloating over them. My Palestinian correspondents -- I actually have a few -- make two points repeatedly. The first is to blame all their economic failures on a shortage of land. The second is to predict that Israel will be buried under their superior birthrate. This latter is an argument I have heard again and again from Pakistan through North Africa but on a grander scale: that eventually Europe and America will be conquered because the Muslims are producing so many children and the Westerners are not. Don't panic it won't happen. Little Israel has so far held the Arab world at bay with one-sixtieth of its population and the West is rather larger. The reason we are safe in the foreseeable future is because we are free and extremely productive. The reason they fail is because they are not. And the very fatalism that relies on demographic arguments is a symptom of their failure. I have never been in Gaza (which is much larger in area flatter and much less populous than Hong Kong) but as for what is called the West Bank I have walked the length and breadth of it. You have to walk to realize quite how big even the little countries of the earth are. Lots of room there; lots of open spaces. The towns are crowded but then they are low-rise; and besides towns have been crowded throughout the history of the world. As for agricultural production the not very numerous Israeli settlers are currently growing more than half the food on a small portion of this land -- much of it previously considered non-arable. It is not "demographic pressure" that feeds the growing emigration to Europe and the West or into Israel within the "green line" (aptly named for you can see it from the air: where the green ends and the desert begins right at the border). It is rather the failure of productive enterprise the fatalistic spirit that expects all wealth to be delivered without effort and as a matter of right; or seized if it is not delivered. It is not "demographic pressure" that sends emigrants from vast empty resource-rich Morocco towards crowded little Holland below sea-level. It is rather a deeper question of human ecology. For the countries of the Arab world that must live without oil live by foreign aid (Morocco especially) -- or else slide into the most abject poverty. This has nothing to do even with natural resources -- Japan has almost none of those nor Taiwan nor Denmark nor many other European countries. What they have instead is a culture of makers and traders as opposed to raiders; traditions of enterprise that took centuries to build up (and may take centuries to be extinguished). Yet the centuries are no longer required now that the precedents have been established. Little South Korea -- resourceless and desperately "overpopulated" -- pulled itself up from the bottom of the "third world" to the threshold of the first in two short generations. Islamic Bangladesh is now doing the same by small loans and enterprise at the tiny personal level. And little Palestine could also do this: take what it is given and make something of it. The first step for them is to forget all the excuses. And the way we can help is not to listen to them. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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