Europe Overwhelmed
according to Alfred Sauvy
Europe Overwhelmed is published in 1987 in French by Alfred Sauvy, a french scientist and economist who started a political career on the left before WWII, and wrote seminal works on demographics after the war. His considerations apply to France and Europe (Italy, Germany), and somehow to the US too.
Demography
Demography is a simple, factual and inexorable data. So many reasons that she has little interest in politicians. They concentrate their efforts to shine in the big debates that win the elections.
The average fertility of a woman allows a maximum of 12 children. This ensures renewal when infantile mortality is high. Under optimal conditions without infant mortality, the population can be multiplied by 6 in a generation.
A strong birth rate imposes costs, because children are dependent and require specialized infrastructure: more teachers must be trained, schools must be built. There is then among these children a greater competition for training and diplomas.
A low birth rate reduces education costs. The growing aging population then reduces the active population. The elderly are dependent. They consume, but no longer produce.
It takes 2.1 child per woman to ensure the stability of the population and avoid dealing with investments and needs of services related to the increase in the young or old population.
The birth rate is well below 2.1 in developed countries since the contraceptive pill was made available, because 40% of pregnancies were not planned before its introduction in 1960.
The birth rate remains far beyond 2.1 in Africa in the Maghreb and the Sahel as in other emerging countries, while very basic public health measures have eliminated 95% of the causes of infant mortality and bring back to 2.1 the birth rate required for replacement.
This imbalance between developed and underdeveloped countries is unexpected. The development of the contraceptive pill begins with the discovery in India by Doctor Sanyal of the sterilizing power on elephants of the Pisum Sativum plant in 1951. In 1952, three American foundations (Ford, Rockfeller, Carnegie) created the Population Council, with the objective of the limitation of births in developing countries and eugenics goal. The effect, contrary to intention, was to limit the births of the most educated populations.
Children are no longer born where the best education and resources are available, and there is demographic pressure from south to north. This is purely an environmental and non-genetic causality of inequality among men. To this environmental aspect, there could be an added dysgenic effect.
Sauvy mentions that the question of genetics has become taboo since the politicization of the subject by the European far right in the 1920s to justify their nationalism. He believes that the results obtained before the war are not reliable given the political agenda of the time. He does not mention that according to American studies made after the war and since the 1970s, genetic influence dominates environmental causes for cognitive performance from the age of 13. These results have seen since 1970 are so socially undesirable that no one wants to delve into them.
Sauvy takes a world tour of developed countries. Japan does not use immigration, while France, Italy, and Germany are undergoing replacement by Africans. Spain and the United States population replacement is done by immigrants from Latin America.
For Spain, Italy and Germany, he notes that totalitarian regimes have had a natalist policy, and that the birth rate decreases sharply when the country returned to a liberal democracy.
Erroneous diagnostics
Sauvy made population forecasts in 1985 at 30 years for 2015, and it is just 10%.
When the average age advances, journalists and politicians see this as a positive linked to more longevity, while in fact, the erosion of the birth rate is the correct diagnostic.
Likewise, African politicians do not see anything wrong with a galloping demography, while too high a dependency ratio acts as a brake on development.
As he did in his 1964 book Public Opinion, he mentions again certain myths:
Myth of abundance: if Lenin provided that Soviet society would no longer need money in "a few years" to distribute the wealth produced as it would be abundant, Engels argued that this would happen as soon as the proletariat victors would happen
Myth of the Lord: If Sauvy does not explain this myth close to abundance, the State can always pay, and all its decisions can be maintained eternally
Myth of the job-eating machine: less children should be made because there are too many unemployed.
In general, myths are popular because they justify some privilege or revendication, not because of their realism. Citing a book by Francois de Closets published in the 80s: Always More, he explains that French people are less concerned with justice than to make a comfortable niche for themselves, and find scapegoats.
Sauvy as François de Closets explain that researchers do not want to do research in an area where discoveries would not be socially desirable. It is unfashionable, or even dangerous, to be the bearer of bad news.
France's four demographic defeats
Treaty of Paris in 1753: Louisiana, which represented 1/3 of the United States was then lost when a territory with 70,000 French people is sold to English who have 1 million settlers. It had been necessary to send 1000 French colonize every year, which would have cost as much as the construction of the Palace of Versailles. The Treaty of Defeat which promises the dominance of the English -speaking is the first written in French and not in Latin.
Sedan 1871: France loses a war while Germany is a young country and France is old. According to Sauvy, the difference in dynamism would have caused doubts about the sustainability of the Franco-German "couple" and led to the war of 1914.
Algeria 1954: As Graham Wallas pointed out in 1904, the United States and Australia were probably the last genocide colonizations. Sauvy also notes that Australia is now criticizing France for its treatment of Kanaks in New Caledonia, while Australians have led a colonization which makes the Aboriginal population a tiny minority in Australia. In Algeria, the development of public health ensures the 10 children by Muslim woman survived, leading to a demographic domination that Sauvy explained to General de Gaulle after the war, and which the general understood.
Pensions in 1974: the fertility rate increased below 2. 1 in 1974. Despite this, the government elected in 1981 spent the week at 38 hours and retirement at 60 years.
Conclusions
According to Sauvy, France, Europe, and the US have embarked on the path of immigration to remedy the demographic problems of erosion from the base of the pyramid of the ages. This transition is not assumed by the population. Politicians no longer speak in 1987 of assimilation, but of integration, which, according to him, indicates that the idea of a homogeneous society has been abandoned.
Given the situation of retirement funding, he wonders if these immigrants will agree to see their income confiscated in the name of intergenerational solidarity in favor of a different and richer population. This augur of social conflicts that are polarized according to the age rather than the social class.