“Japan is evolving into a type of society whose contours and workings have only been contemplated in science fiction.”

There is a population bomb. It is the implosion of population in many parts of the world. It is going to change societies profoundly and irrevocably, and many cultures will cease to exist.

Ross Douthat has a remarkable essay in ground zero of demographic collapse-- Japan.

Excerpt:

Japan is facing such swift demographic collapse, Eberstadt’s essay suggests, because its culture combines liberalism and traditionalism in particularly disastrous ways. On the one hand, the old sexual culture, oriented around arranged marriage and family obligation, has largely collapsed. Japan is one of the world’s least religious nations, the marriage rate has plunged and the divorce rate is higher than in Northern Europe.... 

Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world, and there were rashes of Internet-enabled group suicides in the last decade. Rental “relatives” are available for sparsely attended wedding parties; so-called “babyloids” — furry dolls that mimic infant sounds — are being developed for lonely seniors; and Japanese researchers are at the forefront of efforts to build robots that resemble human babies. The younger generation includes millions of so-called “parasite singles” who still live with (and off) their parents, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of the “hikikomori” — “young adults,” Eberstadt writes, “who shut themselves off almost entirely by retreating into a friendless life of video games, the Internet and manga (comics) in their parents’ home.” 

The tragic irony is that the overpopulation nuts are ignoring the actual crisis facing civilization. Population  decline is the real danger, and this catastrophe is happening, particularly in Europe and Japan. It may not be reversible, and it is almost certain to cause the extinction of entire civilizations over generations. Population implosion reaches a point in which it is an anti-Malthusian feedback mechanism-- you end up with too few young people to reverse the loss of young people.

Douthat notes that in the U.S. population implosion is mitigated by two factors-- brisk immigration and out-of-wedlock births. Indeed these are checks on implosion, but they will cause-- are causing-- demographic and cultural changes that we are only beginning to understand.

Julian Simon, nemesis of overpopulation nut Paul "the battle to feed humanity is over" Ehrlich, got it right: human beings are the most important resource.

We need to protect and nourish and grow our most important resources, which are people.