The Cold War’s mutually-assured destruction has given way to a one-sided assured destruction: Russians are dying off.

Not only are birth rates far below the replacement level, but the living are drinking, smoking, poisoning, and murdering themselves to early graves.  While most rich countries have managed to reduce deaths from chronic diseases (heart attacks, cirrhosis, etc.) from already low levels, Russians have managed to increase their deaths from higher levels to yet even higher levels.  The average Russian life expectancy today is lower than that of 1950.

Low birth rates and shorter lives are leading Russia to a population decline much faster than those of Germany, Italy, and Japan, which all enjoy long life-expectancies.  Yet unlike Germany, Italy, and Japan, Russia is rich in land and resources, making it an attractive option for investors of the next century.

How does a country manage its population decline smartly?  As the age distribution places a greater portion of people into retirement, per-capita GDP may decline as there are fewer workers.  Additionally, the elderly will require greater care, thus diverting a greater portion of national wealth to their own care.  To compensate for this strain, a slowly dying nation might consider the equivalent of a reverse mortgage, selling off parts of itself to foreign powers and corporations interested in its resources.

Global warming will make Siberia a much more attractive buy over the next few decades and Russia might consider selling parts of it to pay for its increasingly elderly and debilitated population.  China seems like the natural buyer, desperate as it is for oil resources, but perhaps timber companies will place offers, too.

The more interesting question involves what to do with a nation when its citizens have gone entirely extinct, having died off naturally.  The government will have dissolved already, but what will the international community do with the “estate”?

We obey.

The American Prospect writes that globalization’s western hallmarks such as IBM, Google, Cisco, and Yahoo! are not globalizing democracy as many techno-utopians had expected, but are frequently enabling authoritarian governments, especially China’s, to suppress domestic dissent.  In order to win and maintain their contracts, these companies curry favor with authoritarian governments by apologizing for their clients’ behavior.

Like nearly every western media outlet, the American Prospect is critical of the practice of enabling authoritarianism.  However, if certain societies are more docile, compliant, and welcoming of authoritarianism than most, why should western companies try to change that?  Thus, the modern western liberal is conflicted: in standing for human rights (or at least the western notion of human rights), he is likely to criticize these companies for their complicity in Chinese oppression.  The multiculturalist in him, however, must defend the authoritarian leanings of cultures that have never known anything else.  Among the western Left, their notions of human rights usually trump multicultural tolerance.  Thus, the western Left really needs to admit what it really believes: that multiculturalism is dead and that western ideas of human rights should triumph over all else.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, demographers predicted that mass startvation would ensue in the coming dcades as the world faced overpopulation.  High birthrates, particularly in poorer countires, would spark this population bomb, as it was called.

Then the world changed.  Birthrates all over the world, particularly in poorer countries, started to decline, some to rates below replacement level (2.1 children per woman, the rate at which the population stabilizes).  Several European nations have birthrates far below replacement levels and this is cause for alarm, as the New York Times reports in a lengthy article on the subject:

According to a paper by Jonathan Grant and Stijn Hoorens of the Rand Europe research group: “Demographers and economists foresee that 30 million Europeans of working age will ‘disappear’ by 2050. At the same time, retirement will be lasting decades as the number of people in their 80s and 90s increases dramatically.” The crisis, they argue, will come from a “triple whammy of increasing demand on the welfare state and health-care systems, with a decline in tax contributions from an ever-smaller work force.” That is to say, there won’t be enough workers to pay for the pensions of all those long-living retirees.

The solvancy of the modern welfare state is premised on population growth.  When the population declines, the numbers start to look grim as it takes greater per capita tax contributions to maintain benefits levels with each passing year.

Ménage à Deux

The attitudes of modernity are partly to blame, but so are gender roles.  Though it may seem that countries with higher rates of women participating in the workforce would susequently suffer from lower birth rates, this is not so.  In countries in which a greater share of housework falls to the women, the fewer children those women have:

women who do more than 75 percent of the housework and child care are less likely to want to have another child than women whose husbands or partners share the load. Put differently, Dutch fathers change more diapers, pick up more kids after soccer practice and clean up the living room more often than Italian fathers; therefore, relative to the population, there are more Dutch babies than Italian babies being born. As Mencarini said, “It’s about how much the man participates in child care.”

Furthermore, countires that have reacted with policies that presume women will want to continue their careers after childbirth tend to have higher birthrates.  Nations such as Sweden, France, and the U.K, subsidize childcare and maternity leave such that having a child does not end a mother’s career.  Even still, the United States provides fewer benefits for childbirth, yet has a birthrate of 2.1, much higher than any European nation.  The answer, some suspect, is that our labor market flexible enough to allow for mothers to return to the workforce.

So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. Aassve put it to me this way: “You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted.”

By this logic, the worst sort of system is one that partly buys into the modern world — expanding educational and employment opportunities for women — but keeps its traditional mind-set. This would seem to define the demographic crisis that Italy, Spain and Greece find themselves in — and, perhaps, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other parts of the world.

It looks as though only the fully modern will inherit the earth.