Tag Archive for: USA

The Luckiest Country

“There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children, and the United States of America.”
Otto Van Bismarck

America, the proverbial lucky fool, remains, despite itself, the world’s leading military power and largest economy. This has little to do with the genius of our leadership, but largely despite them. This failure is reflected in part by the fact that most Americans reject the political establishment forcing them to choose between unpopular President Joe Biden and his equally despised likely opponent, Donald Trump.

Mike Barone, arguably the most knowledgeable political commentator of the last half century, suggests we are experiencing a political “doom loop” of historic proportions. But despite this, the U.S. is so powerful, compared to its key geopolitical rivals, it could even survive four more years of Joe Biden (or God forbid, Kamala Harris) or even the vengeful incoherence of Donald Trump. Indeed despite  these poor leaders, the U.S. increasingly dominates as the largest recipient of foreign investment.

Notions of inevitable American decline, of course, remain popular, particularly in Europe, where such notions have been popular since at least the early seventies. Yet it is not Europe, or even China, that threatens American preeminence, but our self-absorbed and increasingly feckless elite class, extending from Wall Street and Silicon Valley to academia, the media, the arts, public school education, and the state bureaucracy. All hold a generally disdainful view of the country, its heritage, as well as its prospects.

Why America remains on top

America’s long-term prognosis turns on three things:  the self-correcting nature of the Constitution, its enormous physical endowment, and the innovative nature of its people. The political system may get bent by the depredations of the federal nomenklatura or the iconoclastic impulses of the Left, but the courts, Congress, and public opinion usually work to restrain the the worst excesses of would-be authoritarians.

Much of our providential advantage rests also on physical resources. America dominates the physical world—largest oil and gas producer, a nation blessed with natural ports, and large reserves of freshwater. It has the world’s largest expanse of arable land and a variety of climates that allow for a remarkable range of economic activities from the icy north to the semi-tropical south. In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. resources base, for example providing fossil fuels to Europe, has become ever more critical.

Then there is the human edge. Despite all our well-recognized flaws in education, declining life spans, depressed teenagers, and widespread social unrest, Americans still churn out innovations at a level unmatched anywhere. America is home to all seven of the world’s top tech firms and all but five of the top 25. In terms of venture capital investment, a key factor in creating new companies, the U.S. leads easily, with over four times as much as China, and almost ten times as much as third-place Britain. No large country comes close to the U.S. in creating “super entrepreneurs.”

Confronting “monsters”

Early in its history America did not seek to impose itself on other countries. As Secretary of State John Quincy Adams suggested in 1821, America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” But over the last century, America’s leaders have felt compelled to confront “monsters,” sometimes necessarily, as in World War Two, but also stupidly, as with the First World War, Vietnam, and the most recent interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

America still confronts genuine threats, but we sometimes fail to recognize that our biggest rivals are plagued with fundamental weaknesses far more profound than our own. Over the past century America has seemed, and has been widely portrayed, as overmatched by competitors like Germany, Russia, Japan, and now China. Yet in each case, the U.S. turned out to be far stronger and resilient. To paraphrase Mark Twain, news of America’s demise is often declared far too prematurely.

Europe has often been seen by many American intellectuals, both right and left, as superior and to the U.S. Yet today Europe’s pretense of world leadership is something of a sideshow, even as leaders like France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz seek influence in “a multipolar” global order. The dirty secret is that Europe is getting weaker; Germany, its dominant economic power, has awful demographics and, largely due to energy policies, is experiencing a self-inflicted industrial collapse. France appears to be on the verge of anarchic collapse. Nor can Europe count on emerging industries. The continent is home to only one of the world’s 25 most valued tech firms, and boasts a barely functional space program. After trailing the European Union’s economy as recently as 2008, the U.S. economy is now almost one-third larger.

Similarly, Russia, a specter for generations, has turned out to be a far weaker than expected, both during the old Soviet Union and the current neo-Tsarist Putin regime. Russia’s weakness has been particularly evident in the botched invasion of Ukraine, its shrinking population intensified by the current mass out-migration of talented people from that troubled country. Russia, with a GDP smaller than South Korea’s and barely a tenth of China’s, is today more an irritant than a global rival, outside its nuclear arsenal.

Finally, there’s Japan, the great bogeyman of the late twentieth century, now retreating on the global stage. Not only has its economic growth slowed, but it has been relegated to the backbenches of the digital age. Indeed the country now boasts not one of the top 25 tech firms by market value. Its future prospects are clouded by a demographic implosion that will see rapid aging and a shrinking labor force, something also eclipsing the prospects of Japan’s close followers, South Korea and Taiwan.

Read the rest of this piece at American Mind.


Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Win-Chi Poon via Wikimedia under CC 2.5 License.

North America Has An Opportunity to Lead the World

For generations, pundits the world over have insisted that the future will be forged elsewhere — Europe for some, Japan for others and, more recently, China. Yet, in reality, the United States and Canada may well be best positioned for a changing world, if our leaders can leverage our natural advantages.

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The Unexpected Future

We are entering an unanticipated reality—an era of slow population growth and, increasingly, demographic decline that will shape our future in profound and unpredictable ways. Globally, last year’s total population growth was the smallest in a half-century, and by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to see population declines while the world’s population is due to peak sometime later this century.

Slowing population growth creates an unexpected future

Chart credit: Our World In Data under CC 4.0 License.

This kind of long-term global demographic stagnation has not been seen since the Middle Ages. World population has been growing for centuries, but the last century has dwarfed previous rises. About 75 percent of the world’s population growth has occurred in the last hundred years, more than 50 percent since 1970. But now, population growth rates are dropping, especially in more developed nations, according to the United Nations (all subsequent references to UN research in this essay are drawn from these data).

It’s not a matter of if but when global populations will start to decline. Under the UN’s medium variant projection, the world’s population will peak in 2086, while under the low variant, the peak will occur in 2053, and by 2100, the population will be about a billion below today’s level. Demographer Wolfgang Lutz and colleagues project a global population of between 8.8 and 9.0 billion by 2050 falling to between 8.2 and 8.7 billion by 2100. The projected declines are concentrated in countries with high fertility rates, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. In the process, we will inhabit a rapidly aging planet. In 1970, the median world age was 21.5 years. By 2020, it had increased to 30.9 years, and the UN projects that it will be 41.9 years in 2100.

We are well past the time when we need to concern ourselves with Paul Ehrlich’s long-standing prophecy that humanity will “breed ourselves to extinction.” On the contrary, we need to worry about the potential ill-effects of depopulation, including a declining workforce, torpid economic growth, and brewing generational conflict between a generally prosperous older generation and their more hard-pressed successors. The preponderance of low fertility in wealthier countries also presages a growing conflict between the child-poor wealthy countries and the child-rich poor countries.

The shrinking of the rich world

Europe’s population shrank by 744,000 in 2020 and by 1.4 million last year—the largest fall on any continent since records began in 1950. Although worsened by the pandemic, this was largely an acceleration of a longstanding pattern. The EU’s population growth has been tapering for a generation, with fertility rates well below the 2.1 rate required to simply replace population The largest EU country, Germany, is forecast to drop five percent by 2050 while Italy is projected to lose 10 percent of its population. Overall, the 27-nation European Union projects that its population will drop from its 2022 figure of 447 million to 416 million by the century’s end.

European fertility has largely declined since the 1960s and the birth rate has slumped to “a 60-year low of 4 million births.” Compared to 1970, when 16.4 babies were born for every 1,000 persons, the crude birth rate dropped to 9.1 in 2020. Last year, the birth rate in England and Wales also hit a record low, with fertility rates for women under 30 at their lowest levels since records began in 1938. A fifth of all British women are childless by mid-life.

The lowest fertility rates are found in the countries of Eastern Europe, which have long been exporters of their shrinking youth populations. According to UN projections, Ukraine’s population will fall 18 percent from 2022 to 2050, even without accounting for the impact of the Russian invasion. Poland will be down 13 percent. Arch-rival Russia also faces inexorable depopulation: during 2019 (pre-pandemic), deaths were running about 50 percent higher than births there. With a 2022 population of 145 million, Russia is expected to drop to 133 million by 2050, according to the UN.

Plummeting fertility rates

Europe was the trailblazer of these new demographic trends but it is no longer an outlier. Over the past few decades, fertility has dropped precipitously in China, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Today, all are saddled with birth rates well below replacement rates. South Korea’s birth rates have fallen for so long that the country plans to reduce its armed services to about half their current size within 20 years.

Read the rest of this piece at Quillette.


Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

The End of Merit

The near hysteria, though justifiable, among conservatives concerning the imposition of racialist Critical Race Theory (CRT) in schools fails to address how this theology both reflects and contributes to the “systemic” decline of education itself.

Over time, our educational deficit with other countries, notably China, particularly in the acquisition of practical skills in mathematics, engineering medical technology, and management, has grown, threatening our economic and political pre-eminence. Our competitors, whatever their shortcomings, are focused on economic competition and technological supremacy. In math, the OECD’s 2018 Program for International Student Assessment found the United States was outperformed by 36 countries, not only by China, but also Russia, Italy, France, Finland, Poland, and Canada.

Critical Race Theory and its growing chorus of implementers—from the highest reaches  of academia down to the grade school level—have little use for such practical skills acquisition and brook little dissent from teachers and researchers who raise objections to the new curriculum of racial grievance. Woke educators, like San Francisco’s School board member Alison Collins, claim that “merit, meritocracy and especially meritocracy based on standardized testing” are essentially “racist systems.” Some among the new racial cadres even denounce habits such as punctuality, rationality, and hard work as reflective of “racism” and “white privilege”.

In a world where brainpower pushes the economy, the denigration of habits of mind can only further weaken our economic future and undermine republican institutions. Even though the vast majority of corporate executives perceive a growing skills gap, they have failed to stop educators from abandoning skills in favor of ever greater emphasis on ephemera of race and gender.

The Skills Shortage

Only 5 percent of American college students major in engineering, compared with 33 percent in China; as of 2016, China graduated 4.7 million STEM students versus 568,000 in the United States, as well as six times as many students with engineering and computer science bachelor’s degrees. “In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields,” Apple CEO Tim Cook has observed, revealing one rationale for keeping virtually all the company’s production in the Middle Kingdom.

Elon Musk disses U.S. higher education in general, saying “colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores, but they’re not for learning.” After decades of rapid expansion, the number of college students has dropped 14 percent over the past decade. Colleges are painfully dependent on foreign student tuition, which has made them vulnerable to pandemic lockdowns. Enrollment declines have been particularly acute in the most radically transformed disciplines like English and history.

The skills shortage may be even more profound on the factory floor. Due to an aging workforce, as many as 600,000 new manufacturing jobs expected to be generated this decade cannot be filled. The percentage of the skilled manufacturing work force over the age of 55 has doubled in the last 10 years to 20 percent of active workers. And there is no deep bench of talent waiting to replace retirees—50 percent of the active workers are above the age of 45. The current shortage of welders, now 240,000, could grow to 340,000 by 2024.Manufacturing employment is expanding more rapidly than in almost four decades but there are an estimated 500,000 manufacturing jobs unfilled right now.

Read the rest of this piece at American Mind.


Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: CSUF, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.