What To Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
A little hard for me to rate this one. On the one hand, this was a quick read that sparked new thoughts for me and great discussion with my friends. For the first time, I no longer feel like the only social reason I have to offer for my 4 kids is my religion. Now I can unabashedly say, "my children will pay for your retirement."On the other hand, I clearly did not agree with everything the author asserts. In particular, I think he confuses causation when citing the correlation between highest degree and number of children a woman has. I also wish he had addressed the earth's finite size and if there is a carrying capacity. He suggests that whatever it is, the human population will not reach it, but does not give any sort of rigorous assessment.Overall, this book worked great for book club. I would have liked it less without a group of friends to hash through his arguments. This is a quick, entertaining introduction to one of the most important trends of our time: declining fertility throughout most of the world. In a short time this will profoundly affect social welfare programs everywhere (not enough young people to support things like Social Security and Medicare); not too long after that it will cause actual population decline, with mostly unforeseen consequences, though Jonathan Last tries to outline a few.Most people are unaware of the 'Gray Tsunami'; those who know about it sometimes like to imagine it as a first-world problem. In fact fertility is declining almost everywhere except tropical Africa. The author of this book is obviously a social conservative, but avoids doctrinaire positions when it comes to the topic at hand. For example, he notes that immigration is really the only thing sustaining population growth in the US; rather than seeing immigration as a threat he believes that in a few years we may be begging for immigrants to sustain our aging population with their labor and taxes. And immigrants may not be easy to find: fertility is declining rapidly in Latin America and Asia.At times I wished that there were more numbers and graphs in this book, though I realize that it's meant to be a popular introduction to an issue that's hard to present without a lot of charts that many people will be unable or unwilling to spend time on.Jonathan Last tries to be unsensational and hopeful in his exploration of the possible effects of this great demographic transition. But he makes clear that we're really going into historically uncharted terrritory. Some of the short-term effects are understandable and don't look at all good; for many, though, there's just no way to know. Last spends some time on countries' efforts to stop or reverse decline: Japan and Russia, for example, are aware that this is a crisis, but have not been able to affect the trend.As an Orthodox Christian, I was interested to read that the nation of Georgia was actually able to do something about falling population, through the intervention of Patriarch Ilia, who promised to personally baptize every infant born to a Georgian family that already had two children. I doubt that this would have an effect in many modern countries, though: Georgia is a highly religious country (most young people go to church!); as the author notes, it's hard to think of an intervention by a religious leader that would have the same effect here or in Europe.All in all, though this is an entertainingly-written book, it ends up being grim reading. I was left with one question whose answer might have cheered me up a bit: while it's obvious that a declining population will have many wrenching effects in the years to come, might it be that a stable, smaller population would be better for all of us once we've gotten there? We don't know, but I would have appreciated some discussion of it here.
What do You think about What To Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster (2013)?
Very interesting. If his predictions are correct the world will look very different in 2100.
—jessbby09
Excellent book. A bit number heavy but very clear presentation and important ideas.
—dina
The book contains many ideas and occurrences I haven't encountered before.
—67890
