Biden’s senility, and ours

We have met senility, and he is us.

It isn’t just poor Joe Biden who has aged ungracefully. The wealthy nations of the world are aging and the consequences will be far more painful than the passing humiliation of one Western leader.

Instead of cringing at the president’s agonizing attempts to prove his mental competence, we should look hard in the mirror. Dante couldn’t have invented a denizen of the Inferno who better metonymizes the senescence of the West.

Without an unprecedented (and practically impossible) sea-change in fertility, the working-age population of the high-income countries of the world (above US$16,000 in per capita GDP) will shrink by 20% during the present century. This will have disruptive economic consequences over time. It is already having disruptive consequences in global strategy.

Countries without children are indifferent to their future and apathetic about their present.

That is the tectonic force pushing the world into multipolarity, I argued July 10 in an essay for Law & Liberty. The working-age population of the so-called middle-income countries will continue to rise through the remainder of the century, if more slowly, and the Global South will have the preponderant share of the world’s scarcest resource: Working-age people who can be trained to perform functions in a modern economy.

As Grant Newsham reported on this site July 9, Japan failed to recruit half the military personnel it required last year. Colonel Newsham wrote: “The JSDF has never fought an actual war, but it suffered a crushing defeat last year – missing recruitment targets by 50%. The year before it was a 35% miss. And for years it has had 20% shortfalls. Thus, JSDF is something of an old, undermanned and overworked