Great dreams seem possible again. Expansion through the solar system, orbital colonies, cities on Mars, and the population growing to tens and even hundreds of billions off-world. Timelines seem to be collapsing and the speed of advancement seems to be exponentially increasing. Living adults might very well see the early stages of all this.

But despite the exciting technological advancements of the last few years, you might have noticed something disturbing: there just aren’t enough children in your social circle to even replace the current adults. Your extended family seems to shrink and winnow down with each generation. Just as we consider expanding off-world, we are losing the numbers to even expand on this planet.

You may have noticed a certain wider malaise, a deep and irrational pessimism about the future, or a feeling that life is a burden that perhaps should not be passed on to new generations. The sense is that no pot of gold exists at the end of the rainbow, so we can whittle away our lives in various forms of escapism, drugs, and electronic addictions. If things are meaningless, maybe we should minimize our sufferings and maximize our pleasures until we die.

It’s not just you, or even America. This effect is global in scale. Not a single developed nation other than Israel has enough native births to sustain its current population. Even Israel is only barely sustaining its core state-forming people. The result is rapid population aging and eventually population collapse as each new generation is, in the worst cases, only half or less the size of the prior generation.

If our populations continually become older and smaller, there is little hope for space colonies and futuristic mega-cities. The sheer energy and ambition for such long-term projects are not going to come from a shrinking late-middle-aged society of comfort. Even if it can somehow sustain itself, it is difficult to imagine such a society breaking into new frontiers, taking risks, and making the future happen. Such people do not go to populate orbital colonies.

Ironically, the greatest barrier to achieving a spectacular technological future appears to be a question of human nature and of understanding human morale and incentives. The educated, technologically-adept Western and Westernized populations who are the most critical to the project of technological civilization are currently immersed in a dysfunctional social milieu that does not want to survive into the future. It has made parenthood entirely optional even though it does not materially reward childbearing, does not confer any social prestige on parents, and actively discourages and stigmatizes larger families.

In order for humans to expand into the universe, this will have to change. A significant fraction of the intelligent, diligent, and technologically advanced population must disengage from the cultural commitments that are currently leading to their extinction. Instead, they must find a way to synthesize their technological creativity and drive to expand into new frontiers with an energetic desire for continued life and reproduction.

This will not happen with a fashionable cultural movement in which “we” as some abstract collective somehow decide to start valuing future life. It will not be achieved by marginal government tax policy or inducements. The problem is fundamental to the current Western way of life and universe of values, the various branches of which now dominate the whole world. The only way out is for a vanguard of people like you and me to achieve this synthesis in our own lives and social circles, even apart from and against the dying cultural mainstream.

These small-group initiatives can help us find a new sustainable mode of life. But eventually, that mode of life must aim to animate an entire society with sufficient economic scale and geopolitical sovereignty to sustain the project of technological expansion. A will to live, build, and reproduce must become normal again.

The Collapse of Modern Fertility

Nearly all technologically advanced nations have fertility rates well below what is needed to even replace their current populations, much less to populate the future.

China’s fertility rate is estimated to be as low as 1.28 children per woman, Singapore is at 1.1, and South Korea is at an incredibly low 0.8. Western developed nations such as the United States (1.8) or Italy (1.3) have sub-replacement rates as well. Despite their very high quality of life and social benefits, the Nordic welfare states do not have higher fertility; Denmark, the most fertile Nordic state, has a TFR of only 1.67. The rate needed to minimally replace the population is 2.1 children per woman.

This fall in fertility results in drastic population aging, which occurs well before the total population becomes alarmingly reduced. Current forecasts predict super-aging in much of the developed world, with massive proportions of the total population being of retirement age. Regarding aging, the United States is actually the best-off among developed countries. But even in the U.S., seniors will be 22 percent of the population by 2050. Places like Japan, Germany, Italy, and Spain are predicted to have over 30 percent of their total populations over the age of 65 by the year 2050.

And even more than the absolute decline, the particular shape of the decline is extremely alarming. When American Community Survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau is graphed, we see that fertility forms a U-shape. Fertility is about replacement among the very poor, falls below replacement at incomes of above $50,000 per year, and steadily declines thereafter until reaching its nadir in the upper-middle class at household incomes of between $150,000 and $199,000.

The most solidly and securely middle-class or upper-middle-class families have the very lowest number of children. But families in this bracket are key to the project of industrial civilization; we could stereotype them as conventional, educated, hard-working people. They are the rank-and-file engineers and managers of modernity. Thus the decline is specifically concentrated in the most educated and productive sectors of society, the core “moderns.”

The very people who would build the future are the ones disappearing. And societies around the world are aging to the point where they simply will not have the excess resources or sheer vitality to do much of anything except try to keep the old comfortable. The world is becoming a retirement planet.

A Question of Values

Why are the most affluent societies that have ever existed on Earth unable to perform the most basic possible task of maintaining their numbers? The explanation is simple and you already know it. Humans seek status and wealth, and current Western or Westernized societies do not confer either one for having children.

Outside of ideal settings, the decision to have children faces both subtle and explicit forms of social opposition. A woman who marries young and has five children instead of going to college has “missed out.” A couple that raises a large family in an apartment or small home, using bunk beds and shared rooms, has a “bad quality of life.” Not many older parents are excited at the thought of “early” grandchildren if the parents aren’t financially independent.

Those who still have children young can tell stories about negative comments from friends and relatives, as well as pressure to limit family size. And truly larger families of four or more often receive stares in public and negative comments from complete strangers. By and large, children cost money and often reduce one’s social status.

Polls support this rather pessimistic assessment of the dominant values around children. In a recent Wall Street Journal survey, respondents were asked a series of questions designed to elicit their life priorities. Rather shockingly, children came near the absolute bottom of the list.

When asked “How important are each of the values to you personally,” 94 percent of respondents stated that “hard work” was very or somewhat important, 90 percent put “money” in this category, 91 percent for “self-fulfillment” and 80 percent for “community involvement.” However, only 65 percent stated that “having children” was very or somewhat important. Having children accompanied “belief in God” (65 percent) and “religion” (60 percent) as the least important values in the survey. An incredible 78 percent of respondents indicated that they were “not confident” that “life for our children’s generation will be better than it has been for us.”

Another study approached the same values question through the lens of what current parents want for their own children. Results were similar, with respondents showing much more concern with the careers and earnings of their children than with having grandchildren. Approximately 90 percent stated that “it’s extremely or very important to them that their children be financially independent when they are adults.” 90 percent also stated that “it’s equally important that their children have jobs or careers they enjoy.”

And again, marriage and children came in at the absolute bottom of priorities. Only 20 percent stated that they placed a lot of importance on their children eventually becoming parents and only 21 percent placed a lot of importance on their children getting married. In addition to the generally low priority placed on both children and grandchildren, recent studies suggest that approximately 22 percent of American adults do not wish to ever have children under any circumstances.

Another strong indication that the fall in fertility is at its core a matter of values and priorities, not wealth or other material factors, is provided by the much higher fertility shown by certain religious groups living within the developed world. These groups, which maintain replacement fertility and higher, are essentially outliers who create their own pro-natalist subcultures. In their social worlds, early marriage is normal, large families are prestigious, and childlessness is a misfortune.

Simply practicing any religion, with weekly attendance at services, raises fertility to about replacement level. Women who attend services weekly have a TFR of 2.1, while women who report never attending church have an extremely low TFR of only 1.3. So even within the same economic and social setting, having an active religious practice provides a change in values and social environment which raises fertility from a very low level to replacement.

Among relatively large religious groups, Mormons report the largest family size, at 2.8 children, followed by Muslims at 2.76 children per woman. Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic Christians all fall around 2.1, which is at least replacement-level fertility.

Smaller groups with an even more powerful pro-natal attitude have even more children; Ultra-orthodox Jews have birthrates of up to 7 children per woman, even in the middle of major Western cities. The Amish also show the dramatic effects of a pro-natal subculture. While rural women, in general, have a TFR of around 2.08, Pennsylvania Dutch-speaking women without a phone have an incredible rate of 7.14. This is a fertility rate higher than Niger while living in the United States.

Taking everything together, it appears that most Americans drastically prioritize the related values of career, money, and personal fulfillment above having both children and grandchildren. It is popular to cast the issue as a result of various economic hardships, but this is absurd since we can observe a wide variety of religious groups who prioritize the family and are quite able to raise large families in the American economy. They can do so because they actually want to and it gives status within their relevant communities.

National-level data also refutes the common explanations that the fall in fertility is due to high housing prices, lack of jobs, immigrant pressure, lack of benefits, or various other specific cultural or racial factors. China, Italy, the United States, and Finland have little in common with each other except for a high level of material development and low birth rates. If anything, a higher standard of living and a safer, more stable, and homogenous society appears to make the problem worse, as shown by Finland, Singapore, and South Korea.

Immigration Is Not a Solution

To date, the default proposed solution to the population situation appears to be mass immigration, but this is untenable for multiple reasons.

Immigrants generally do not retain any heightened fertility once assimilated into Western society. As soon as they are actually transformed into assimilated and working citizens, they begin to dwindle away themselves. Immigrant fertility seems to fall even faster than for native-born Americans: “In 2008, immigrant women had a TFR of 2.75 children; by 2019 it had fallen to 2.02—a 0.73-child decline. For native-born women, it declined from 2.07 to 1.69—a 0.38-child decline.”

The propensity of immigrant fertility to converge with that of natives requires a continual flow of new first-generation, non-Westernized immigrants. By their very nature, these migrants are not prepared to simply take their places as workers in an industrialized economy. The most developed countries obtain immigrants specifically from the very least developed, least Westernized, and least literate societies on Earth since countries rapidly cease producing excess population once they modernize.

For instance, in the early twentieth century, the U.S. accepted mass immigration from Italy. In 1900, Italy had a TFR of 4.6, similar to modern-day Mozambique. Today Italy is fully modern and has a fertility rate of 1.3. Italy can’t maintain its own current population, much less export immigrants.

As development and Westernization continue, low fertility continually trickles down. For instance, Iran’s current TFR is estimated to be as low as 1.6 children per woman. Cuba also has a sub-replacement rate of 1.6. Caribbean nations like Trinidad and Tobago are around 1.7, while El Salvador is at 1.8. Even major immigrant source countries such as Mexico (1.9) or India (2.05) are below replacement and falling.

In the next 50 years, the only sources of mass immigration will be those nations that still retain a total fertility rate markedly above replacement. Outside of Sub-Saharan Africa, the list is short and includes Afghanistan (3.9), Yemen (3.5), Iraq (3.5), Pakistan (3.5), Tajikistan (3.4), Palestine (3.4), and Egypt (2.9). In Africa, the list includes nations such as Niger (6.6), Somalia (5.7), DR Congo (5.5), Mali (5.5), Chad (5.4), and Angola (5.2).

It is reckless to assume that industrial civilization in its current form can be maintained indefinitely simply by the mass importation of new workers from some of the world’s least developed countries, while its founding populations are allowed to endlessly dwindle. There is also no guarantee that such developing countries will actually continue to produce large numbers of emigrants indefinitely. The pattern to date has been that modernization has spread faster and farther than anyone predicted and has shown the ability to reduce birth rates in the most unlikely places.

An Industrial Natalism

We have a deep paradox. Like the ancient god Saturn, who devoured his own offspring, industrial modernity as we know it shows an extraordinary propensity to consume those most central to its own functioning. Modernity eats its own children, both native and adopted, both in its original lands and everywhere it spreads. It has become a self-limiting process.

At the same time that technological evolution seems poised for a quantum leap, the very same system that produced these marvels appears to be burning up its crucial human capital like fuel in a furnace. Industrial society is evolving to a state where its original populations are super-aged, shrinking, and mostly extinct. Those who remain are increasingly only concerned with importing and managing labor from the remaining underdeveloped reservations, in an attempt to keep the lights on a bit longer and assure some degree of comfort.

No matter how this decay plays out, humanity itself will go on. There are groups both inside and outside the West who are already ideologically resistant to the most unsustainable aspects of modernization. But this suggests a long-term selection effect: by default, the groups most fully committed to and compatible with the project of technological civilization rapidly dwindle, while those groups who reject it continually increase their share of the population. As these resistant groups become dominant, the industrial modernity that drives the demographic decline will itself cease to be dominant. Both its triumphs and ills will fade into history.

The default outcome is one where modernity simply burns itself out. Some people may welcome this. They may wish to see it all end and return to the endless cycle of sun and muscle-powered agricultural civilization, or some other post-industrial decay state. Or they may not care at all about anything that happens after their own death.

But some of us want to see the continuation of technical modernity as something truly new in history. There is some greater destiny in the possibility of technological civilization reaching its full potential, which seems a worthy mission for an intense whole-of-society effort. There are wonderful—or at least, interesting—possibilities before us that have never before had a chance to play out. We want to see where this future can go, and even more importantly we want our children to participate in it and contribute to it as well.

For decades, we have been absolutely deluged by prophecies of doom and dystopia. From the nuclear threat of the Cold War and the “Population Bomb” of the 1970s, to claims that “Peak Oil,” climate change, and artificial intelligence will render the future a living hell, there has been a constant drumbeat of pessimistic visions of the future. These forecasts regarding material disaster are typically exaggerated, understate the system’s ability for an adaptive response, and have been consistently proven wrong in retrospect.

But what is notable is what they imply about our relationship with the future. They assert that the default future is some accelerationist apocalypse or dystopia, and the only way to get a good world is to avoid building, avoid reproducing, and avoid too much vitality. Our agency in these views is only in ceasing to act. It’s no wonder that the decades and demographics dominated by these kinds of visions have also been those that have seen a collapse in fertility.

But the reality is the opposite of these pessimistic views of human agency: it is the default future where no one bothers to build, reproduce, or fight that is the pessimistic decay back into post-civilized misery. It is the great dream of expansionary technological civilization that requires us to go out of our way and make sacrifices, change our lifestyles, and develop a will.

Human beings have a biological instinct for sex and even for parenting, but seemingly not for reproduction as such. Because sex can and has been de-linked from reproduction, and child substitutes like dogs can provide an outlet for the parenting instinct, within an advanced civilization the question of reproduction is ultimately an ideological one. The imperative to continue to live and build must become a living practice, motivated by strong ideological and religious commitments, for a significant fraction of the core demographics of industrial civilization. Otherwise, that civilization as we know it will cease.

Psychologists sometimes dub the base population of modern Westernized societies the “WEIRDs:” Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic. Broadly speaking, it is the WEIRDs who are sustaining civilization. But they are also bearing the brunt of its demographic extinction pressure. For technological civilization to continue its great mission, these WEIRDs must change behavior to become sustainably fertile, and even assertive and expansionary again.

Fortunately, WEIRD society is not uniform. It contains many patches that already resist the pressure against reproduction by creating a social fabric to support offspring and family life. The same data set that showed fertility bottoming out in the upper middle class also showed a much different effect at the far right hand of the income distribution.

It turns out that the few households with incomes of over a million dollars a year, the financial upper class, have a TFR of at least 2.3. This is higher than any other income group. They are more likely than their middle-class counterparts to have women leave the workforce and hire substitutes for familial support structures, like nannies and tutors. The trend includes prominent members of the American political elite: Gavin Newsom, governor of California, has four children with his wife, while Nancy Pelosi has five with her husband.

But they are still insufficient. They have not innovated a distinct form of life that actually solves the contradiction of industrial fertility in a way accessible to the middle-class backbone of civilization. Instead, they seem to simply be buying their way out of its problems. Still, the high fertility proves at least an ideological willingness to live, which could be scaled up if the lifestyle could be made accessible. Despite being too few in number to directly affect the demographic crisis, they may have tremendous value in shaping the aspirations of the larger public.

Other high fertility groups take the route of being more culturally autonomous, usually by being intensely religious, like Mormons, Orthodox Jews, or traditional Catholics. These groups likewise belong to technological civilization in terms of their material contribution and careers. They do not practice the hard separatism of the Amish. However, they do maintain a softer separatism in the form of ideological and cultural sovereignty from the WEIRD mainstream.

The key lesson of these groups is that it is surprisingly easy to break away from specifically the dysfunctional ideological and social elements of mainstream society while maintaining participation in a modernized economy. You don’t need to flee into some eighteenth-century museum existence to survive modernity. You just need to maintain social institutions and ideology that make a high-fertility life both accessible and desirable. Right now, this only requires ideological sovereignty from the mainstream. In a healthier mainstream, it might not even require that.

This is doable because a healthy social fabric is not overly centralized. It is made up of many different spaces and institutions, self-governed according to the needs of their participants. It is not difficult to establish ties between groups of people working on some important practice, be it childrearing, deep technical work, material support, or transcendent religious experience.

The cultural mainstream exists mostly as a predatory tax on healthy social fabric, rather than a valuable service. The difficulty is in maintaining sufficient separation from the mainstream to avoid its pathological ideologies. Most of the cost seems to be in simply defending from the aggression of the dysfunctional mainstream. There are some economies of scale in the costs of this ideological sovereignty, which are provided by the religious frameworks, but in practice, they seem to be affordable.

Likewise, reorienting the WEIRD population away from the dysfunctional mainstream would first require that they be re-conceived beyond their utility to and dependence on the mainstream system of labor mobilization. Currently, that is not the case. The respectable WEIRD middle and upper-middle class is recognized, self-identified, and judged by their universities, prestigious jobs and affiliations, individual autonomy within the mainstream economic system, and financial success. Since these are the things they aspire to and compete for, and since these things all conflict at least partially with healthy social fabric and reproduction, it is no wonder that the WEIRDs are being demographically wiped out.

Religious groups have a healthier demographic prognosis because they have some other standard of success that does not compete as harshly with healthy social fabric and reproduction. To survive, the WEIRD backbone of civilization also needs a standard of respectability that is not tied so closely to over-investment in mainstream institutions. However, they must still maintain a high standard of real quality and ability to contribute to technological civilization, so simple abandonment of those aspirations doesn’t work either.

The current resume stack embodies mobilization and utility to the system, but beneath it are also the real traits, behaviors, and culture which make those who succeed at these metrics so valuable. Education originally stood not for degrees but for a culture of deep literacy and engagement with the cutting edge of human knowledge, and degrees are proxies for the relatively high intelligence, diligence, and creativity needed to contribute to civilization. Financial success is a proxy for the ability to effectively produce value and manage capital investments. Affiliations with impressive institutions are a proxy for the ability to do impressive work. These traits could all be more directly and efficiently rewarded with respect, and judged in whole families rather than just individuals.

Additionally, the Western middle classes, especially in America, have displayed high agency in institutional participation. Historically, it is this group that joined clubs, churches, PTAs, HOAs, committees, and political parties in the millions. This is the important virtue that is only half-heartedly proxied by the “democratic” aspect of WEIRD. The death of American “lodge democracy” is one of the most widely-discussed cultural consequences of its middle-class decline. But go to a rock climbing gym, a hackerspace, a company, or a city church today, and it is still this population that makes up them.

The hard part of social fabric is making sure it serves these people and their biological interests. You don’t want scattered projects for half-hearted participants, but a coordinated vanguard of biologically healthy industrial culture.

From Culture to State

While social fabric is the proper domain of action right now, this does not mean that the answer is building a post-WEIRD fertility ghetto to escape mainstream society. Technological civilization depends on its demographic base not just growing again, but becoming self-assertive and politically conscious. The demographic recovery and transition to a socially sustainable technological civilization will begin with a core vanguard, but it will have to incrementally expand in influence to the point of hegemony.

Industrial society has been trapped in anti-reproductive ideology before. Counterintuitively, much of the last 150 years have been spent concerned that reproduction is actually too high. Victorian Malthusians and overpopulation doomsayers have been more standard figures than industrial natalists of any kind. But this changed in the first half of the twentieth century, as governments around the developed world promoted the nuclear family in wartime and postwar construction.

Every major ideology in the early twentieth century embarked on similar projects: liberal America, Imperial Japan, Soviet Russia, the Third Reich, and democratic West Germany all glorified family life as desirable, joyful, and virtuous. The married family with several biological children was the aspirational norm reflected in the media, in the school curriculum, and so forth. All these industrial societies saw fertility rates increase for about a generation or two, an overall trend that lasted until the 1960s. The political will evaporated as political-economic conditions changed and anti-reproductive ideologies began to dominate as industrial decay set in.

Securing the possibility of technological civilization means embracing an explicitly self-assertive political agenda on behalf of the post-WEIRD industrial backbone population. Industrial society is centralized and complex, which means that ultimately such trade-offs are matters of state.

For example, rather than redistributing wealth from young to old, social welfare programs based on these interests would have to transfer wealth, respectability, and power towards young families with the traits to support advanced civilization, helping them to economically and socially compete against the childless or older persons who tend to have more disposable income. Ultimately, this also secures the long-term interests of technological civilization, since reproduction of its core demographics is the only means by which it can have a healthy future.

A demographic renaissance of the WEIRDs also translates into completely different reference points for what a fulfilling life entails. The popular narratives and assumptions about childbearing and family life that undergird anti-reproductive norms are mostly false. The ordinary risks of childbirth are quite navigable and the actual costs of children—instead of those of parental conspicuous consumption to keep up with current standards of respectability—are quite low. It is far easier to combine children with other pursuits in one’s energetic twenties than in the late thirties or beyond.

But most people do not make these decisions based on theory or argument. They do so because their friends and relatives and role models are also happily raising children around them. It doesn’t actually take a village to raise a child, but a village of people all raising children works wonders for morale and the assumptions about what is worth pursuing. Social fabric goes a long way to making it possible for many more of us to live in this way, but state power is ultimately necessary for this logic to be reflected in tax codes, political economy, education and inheritance laws, and so on.

By directly raising future generations, you tend to stop thinking in terms of abstract disembodied progress. No one has ever been motivated to do great things merely for some chronological future that will come automatically. When the pilgrims reached the New World, they did not come for “the future”—their goal was to raise their children to build their shining city on a hill.

The twentieth century repressed such bio-historical consciousness and has paid the price in stagnation and decline. In the nuclear family as currently imagined in America, the work of parenting in youth and middle age gives way to a pleasurable, high-consumption retirement, a well-earned “reward” for a life of hard work. But this only reinforces a trade-off between family life and consumer rewards.

You can only complete the synthesis between industrial culture and biological life by rejecting these trade-offs. The most important thing you can do for the future is to cultivate an active and ongoing sense of material duty towards your own children and grandchildren, as well as the next generations around you, and shape them to contribute to the larger project of technological civilization. The only future that you can improve is the one embodied in the future generations of your own people.

The consciousness necessary for civilization necessarily places the highest value on children and youth. You glorify your continued physical existence and growth into the most distant future, especially for the sake of the larger achievement your civilization represents. The most concrete and pressing threat to this future is simply the widespread and intensifying loss of the will and social structures needed to actually perpetuate industrial populations, especially in the most productive and advanced nations.

The time to change course is being rapidly burned up as we speak, but those of you who break free of the downward spiral to build a new synthesis of industry and family will become the future of technological civilization.

China was young and smart. Reaching one billion residents in 1982, the median person was in their low-to-mid 20s, making the country a perfect industrial workforce for a financializing West ready to offshore. Four decades of applying it has made China rich. But the accompanying urbanization and population control policies have had a cost, too: the median Chinese person is now 38 years old and projected to only grow older—nearly 50 years old by the mid-century. The new China is becoming old.

This spells trouble for the future because, as far as global power and prestige go, being young is at least as important as being rich. It’s also a problem faced by the entirety of the developed world, not just China. In the West, migration is the substitute for failing to raise native birth rates. Other regions remain young for now: much of Africa maintains a median age of 20 years, Southeast Asia hovers between the late 20s and early 30s, and South America is at 32. Each beats the U.S.’s median age of 38. But if birth rates plunge globally, migration is a partial solution that can only last so long, and one that would have to be competed for.

The battle for wealth and the battle for youth represent two axes of power. As far as the next few decades go, it’s already getting clear who’s going to win. 

The Axes

Using the two axes of wealth and youth, a simple model of the next few generations divides the globe into four emerging types of state economies: the rich and relatively young world of the Metropole, the rich but geriatric Old World, the older, economically stagnant Quiet World, and the relatively poor but currently high-fertility Young World.

We can intuit a number of their characteristics. With a relatively young and growing population and a high labor supply, the states of the Metropole—primarily the United States—have what it takes to be a global economic power and a locus for immigration. But high gross productivity doesn’t guarantee a particular per capita income and standard of living for its members. It only has to be relatively wealthy compared to the rest of the world to have economic power, and moving there only has to make you relatively richer than home to be a migration hook. While the United States is poised to take the lion’s share of this migration, other cities located in states with unfavorable fertility, like London or Moscow, will be regional migration hubs as well.

The so-called First World stretches both west and east of America, encompassing both Japan and Western Europe. But while they have similar levels of development, this Old World has very different migration and fertility patterns from the U.S. Migration is lower, especially in Japan. In countries with high migration, like Germany and France, assimilation does not happen as easily as it does in America, and the native populations of these countries seem to have lower fertility than the national average. 

All these countries are highly developed, and they experienced baby booms in the last century. They tend to have highly developed social welfare states and are dominant in global institutions. Collectively, these regions make up an Old World which, in the near term, appears destined for a future of population aging, labor shortage, and slow or zero growth. In parts that don’t resort to immigration, governments are already attempting to manage this via technology and mechanization. It remains to be seen whether any will succeed at increasing their fertility, but countries with cultures of social cooperation and a strong sense of identity, such as Japan, will be interesting to watch.

The Quiet World refers to the current “emerging market” states, many of which are on track to become older in median age than the U.S. itself by 2050. Rather than “emerging,” low future total fertility rates (TFRs) will likely doom places like Turkey, Ukraine, the Balkans, and parts of Central Asia to the Quiet World, in which an aging population cripples further economic development. These countries differ strongly from each other in history and culture—some had developed industrial national economies, others less so—but the fate of Europe’s post-Soviet regions loom particularly large. While some have gotten richer in the past thirty years, emigration rates are extremely high among the young, and it is unlikely that most of these countries can complete a strong development track of the sort China accomplished.

Finally, we see the rise of a massive new category: the Young World, an untapped labor workforce of billions, particularly in parts of Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and South and Central America. Much of the offshoring over the last four decades did not reach these regions—although Chinese offshoring now is. While much of the Young World now lives in urban, semi-industrialized societies, hundreds of millions still live in rural regions. 

This population will be progressively incorporated into the world system of the Metropole as its current population ages out of their roles. The integration of these regions into production networks will be a major challenge, given the extensive cultural differences, lower human capital, and lack of history with economic mobilization. Industrial socialization takes a long time—sometimes generations—to complete.

The Metropole 

Assuming current trends, the U.S. of 2050 will have a median age of 41. It will be decisively younger than China and other East Asian states and will edge out Iran, Turkey, Russia, Mexico, and even Brazil. The so-called BRICS countries built a coalition on marketing themselves as part of a young, rising world. In the battle of youth, the U.S. will beat all except South Africa. Even more importantly, the U.S. will have large and growing numbers of young workers, many more than other states of roughly similar median age. 

This will give the country a demographic edge over the so-called “emerging markets” of today, and its economic heft will only grow as its population does. From the current figure of 332 million, the U.S. population is expected to reach 400 million in 2058 at currently projected rates. The Census Bureau predicts continued growth throughout the entire twenty-first century, with the population projected to reach an immense 571 million by 2100.

The number of people reaching military age annually isn’t just a useful statistical measure of both military manpower—it’s also an indicator of annual workforce growth. In order, the top 10 countries ranked by this metric are currently India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, the U.S., Nigeria, Brazil, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and the DRC. In a practical sense, these are the largest 10 countries on Earth. In the future, the U.S. will be the only already-rich country that will still appear in the global top group on this sort of “manpower” comparison. 

The increase in both total population and young people will be heavily driven by international immigration. After 2030, net immigration is expected to overtake the natural increase of residents as the prime driver of population growth; by 2060, net immigration is expected to be double the annual natural increase, adding over one million people per year. Immigration is unquestionably the key factor in suppressing the process of population aging and workforce decline: according to the U.S. Census, “In 2016, about 78 percent of the foreign-born population was of working age, between 18 and 64 years, compared with just 59 percent of the native-born.”

This will expand the size and relative power of some demographics, such as Hispanics in the U.S. It’s likely that the current major cities will retain their place and prestige. Given that cities will attract the bulk of this migration, the battles between residents and newcomers will almost certainly magnify. Both the adversarial use of zoning—which can already be seen in current development battles—and more violent conflicts between classes and ethnic groups will likely occur. It’s also likely that current upper-middle class remnants within a number of cities will finally get pushed out, or reduced to the professional renter class. However, some cities may figure out the right mix of building and law enforcement that stabilizes them into high-growth cities with minimal or ghettoized social conflict.

In these cities, each year’s cohort of young workers will be larger than the last. The total number of persons under 18 in the United States is projected to continually increase, going from approximately 74.0 million today to 80.1 million in 2060. Many will be absorbed not only into the professional classes. One of the traits of the Metropole is that it is generally good for individual people as economic actors but generally bad for population groups in terms of fertility and cultural continuity. Migrants from the Young World will improve their own individual situations but—like previous generations of migrants—will likely see fertility decline when faced with the social and economic pressures of the Metropole cities.

Overall, this inflow will benefit the employers of large industries like agriculture that can handle high turnover, as well as those with the resources to continually retrain new entrants into not just their company, but broader U.S. professional norms. In practice, it’s likely that as cultural commonality declines, coordination within companies will become increasingly difficult to do well without an extremely strong set of internal norms and rigorous enforcement. Particularly hard to resolve will be ethnic conflict along lines that are hard for U.S. culture to perceive and regulate, such as the caste discrimination that already occurs in Silicon Valley.

Despite the inevitable conflicts that will play out at the middle and lower levels of Metropole society, there are clear beneficiaries in its power structure. The U.S. economy is already set up to favor large, globalized companies with offshored production and on-shored logistics and management, and U.S. political elites share close ties with these industries. It’s the outcomes of current political battles, not economic ones—like wealthy tech billionaires versus DC regulators, or competing energy lobbies—that will determine who wins access to the resources of the Metropole. The process of creating a Metropole via demographic replacement will create strong growth of total GDP, with the related effects of strong asset appreciation and particularly the consistent growth of real estate values. This will benefit preexisting holders of power and wealth above all else. 

In contrast to the U.S., members of the Old World will generally have continually shrinking workforces, with each year’s cohort of workers being smaller than the one before. This differentiation is more radical than would be suggested merely by median age figures. Even with the much-publicized immigration and refugee influx into Germany, the German workforce is currently shrinking at the rate of 300,000 people per year due to retirements, and the annual labor shortfall is expected to reach a staggering 650,000 by 2029. Statistics like this clearly show that the U.S. is no longer even in the same category of country as many of its purported First World peers. 

The process of transition to a Metropole is frequently characterized as a national collapse by commentators who erroneously conflate the global power of a state with the disruption of individual living standards for the lower and middle classes. Indeed, it would appear that the decline of human development indicators may be an integral part of the Metropole’s power. While this process increases gross GDP and national power, large swathes of the Metropole population could, and likely will, see falling life expectancy, increased child poverty, rising crime rates, and unaffordable housing.

The Metropole begins as a First World country, with all the wealth and infrastructure that implies. However, these First World conditions appear to inevitably lead to very high labor costs and a shrinking workforce due to low fertility, population aging, and welfare programs reducing the imperative to work. The logic of the Metropole is that it dramatically short-circuits this process by implanting something resembling a lower-cost “emerging market workforce” directly into the existing structure of a formerly First World country. To a large extent, the entire economic point of this process is to maximize gross GDP and world power by reducing wage growth, which is done by compelling the native population to compete with a hungry workforce of first- and second-generation immigrants. 

An optimistic view sees this as a viable, large, moderate-cost workforce, integrated into the preexisting expertise, population, and resources of a First World country. This will allow a mix of resource exporting, a degree of high-value technical exports, and a huge amount of white-collar work in finance, logistics, software, and similar industries. The massive agricultural capacity of places like the Mississippi Basin will continue to provide huge volumes of grain for export.

A more pessimistic view would suggest that the level of disruption and population replacement involved in this process will more fundamentally erase the inherited advantages of the existing First World nation, leading to serious instability or deterioration of technical capacity. But even in relatively more pessimistic projections, it is hard to picture how a state with a population of 500-700 million and potentially the world’s largest GDP would fail to be one of the world’s preeminent geopolitical powers.

The U.S. capacity for energy independence is a particular advantage for its role as a Metropole. The considerable domestic production and reserves of oil, gas, and especially coal will fuel U.S. industry and agriculture. If current trends hold, there will not be any other large, young, and wealthy power on Earth in this century other than the United States.

The Old World

By the mid-century, the cumulative effects of aging and low fertility on currently wealthy countries in Europe and East Asia will become apparent. The Old World countries are those whose populations age and shrink due to low immigration and fertility. Their populations are on track to plunge below the levels of the period in which these countries became rich to begin with. In the decades ahead, they will face an entirely different social and economic trajectory than the United States.

Japan’s current population of 128 million is projected to drop to 86.7 million by 2060, and its already-advanced median age is predicted to increase to 53 by 2050. Germany’s population of 83.2 million will fall to 74 million by 2060, with the median age increasing from 44 to 51. Italy’s population of 60.7 million is expected to drop to 58.6 million by 2050, and 53.7 million by 2065. Its median age will increase from 43 to 50 by the year 2050. South Korea will fall from 51 million to 44 million in 2060, with a stunning increase in median age from 38 to 53 by 2050. 

By way of contrast, the U.S. median age will rise to only 41 by 2050, with France and the UK both at 42. And all three will have population growth rather than shrinkage. However, outside of their capital cities, France and the UK lack the natural resources and overall populations to match the power of the U.S. itself, making them something like bridge countries between the Metropole and the Old World proper.

Countries with median ages in the 50s are entirely unprecedented, and no one really knows how a country in this situation will continue functioning. In the most affected countries, more than 35 percent of the total population could be over 65 by 2050. Obvious effects include a drastic fall in geopolitical importance, stagnant or declining asset and real estate valuations, shortages and high prices of all forms of labor, and permanently falling or stagnant GDP.

Due to current high levels of wealth, health, education, and infrastructure, these countries will probably maintain statistically higher levels of individual human development and well-being for the foreseeable future, in a manner decoupled from their collapse in global importance. Life in these places might be quite pleasant for the younger people due to a profound lack of competition for housing stock and the ability to demand extremely high wages for non-mechanized human labor jobs.

As far as its role in the world system led by the Metropole, the most obvious role of the Old World may be recreational and aesthetic, particularly as a “playground” for the more privileged classes of the Metropole and the Young World. The beauty and natural value of these lands in the eyes of outsiders will only be enhanced by the general slowing of activity and industry. Also, much of this area has great agricultural potential as well as an increasingly vacant countryside, raising the potential of expanded export agriculture using some form of guest worker labor from the Young World. 

Further potential lies in the deep linguistic and cultural links that some of the Old World nations retain with their former colonial possessions in the Young World. A number of these Old World countries still provide managerial, financial, and more advanced manufacturing services to their former colonial possessions, acting as a sort of back office for the Young World.

However, there is a danger that life in the Old World will create a profound psychological malaise that only accelerates the process of de-growth and population collapse. What does it do to the human mind when you live in comfort but there is no apparent future and nothing for your civilization to do but curate the relics of the past? Life in many parts of the Old World will mean not hearing the voices of children in the now-empty park outside your window; most of the teens and young adults you will see on a daily basis will be tourists, immigrants, or foreign guest workers. It may be that talented young workers from the Old World emigrate to the Metropole or even the Young World due to emotional rather than economic factors—out of the sheer desire to be where “things are happening.” 

Given the high living standards for young people who do grow up in the Old World, it might seem like there should be higher migration to it from the Metropole. For those tired of a highly competitive life in the cities, a quiet existence in an aging welfare state might even sound idyllic. But while such migration happens even now, there are many barriers to American migration to Europe or East Asia. The sheer logistics of formal immigration in these countries can be difficult, and most Americans face both cultural and linguistic barriers. For countries like Japan, permanent residency is extremely difficult to achieve, and most foreigners will never become citizens. The fact is that the majority of people in any country, even those of the Young World, will never even attempt to emigrate. Those who do will be a relatively small and privileged class with the ability to overcome these barriers. The ties of language and culture are strong, and the Metropole has ample opportunity within its borders for the ambitious.

The longer game for these places is, in a sense, mysterious. Current trends are inexorably leading towards TFRs below one child per couple. Each new generation, pre-migration, is now approaching half the size of the prior. And the degree of shrinkage and aging discussed in this article appears inevitable, since even a deep cultural change to combat the momentum of this process would take decades.

One could speculate that these nations might eventually evolve a new cultural form or new subpopulations that have the ability to maintain above-replacement birth rates while living a fully technological, developed existence. But there is little evidence of this to date. One might also predict mass incursions amounting to an invasion of these weak and dormant lands from the Young World. These nations still have the power to repel mass migration, but they may not choose to do so.

The Quiet World

In contrast with the old but rich world, there is the “Quiet World,” and the related concept of the BRICS countries. These states are generally on a track to become old before ever approaching first-world levels of wealth and development. Rather than First World equivalence, this Quiet World seems fated to spend the middle and later twenty-first century as lower-middle income countries with the average person being middle-aged. In comparison, by 2050 the United States will socially be closer to our image of an emerging market than the formerly-emerging countries of this Quiet World will be.

The demographic situations in China and Russia are well known, but it is very interesting to examine some of the smaller emerging markets, which most people casually assume to be fast-growing, youthful places. By 2050, Brazil will have a median age of 44, similar to modern-day Italy. Turkey will have a median age of 42 by 2050, similar to Spain today. Iran and Mexico will also have a median age of 42 by then. All either match or even exceed the U.S. in age by this point in time.

Parts of South and Southeast Asia may even join this category near the end of the century. Both Indonesia and India will have a median age of approximately 37 by 2050, similar to the modern United States. However, even India is projected to begin experiencing significant population loss and unfavorable ratios of pensioners to workers after 2050.

The tenor of life in this coming Quiet World is hard to predict. What might life be like in a Turkey or Mexico that has the sleepy, elderly-heavy demographics of present-day Spain or Italy but without the high incomes? The most obvious example of fairly old and poor countries existing today are some of the post-Soviet areas, such as Ukraine, with a median age of 41.2 and pre-war per capita GDP of $3,726 USD. The economic impasse of poor countries too old to generate growth will become a major global issue far beyond the old Eastern Bloc.

On the other hand, many of these countries are major exporters of petroleum and food grains, and it is possible that increasing values for such commodities combined with stable populations might allow for reasonably comfortable conditions for these aging populations. The speed of manufacturing transition towards the Young World may also become an asset for those able to integrate into the new supply chains. Given their current economies, Mexico and Turkey have the capacity to maintain—but not to increase—their manufacturing and assembly operations, particularly in complex fields such as automotive, shipbuilding, aviation, and armaments. 

But no major emerging market country has the capacity to actually emerge as a leading world power or seriously challenge the United States in the post-2030 period. With the exception of India and its delayed trajectory, their maximum geopolitical power and influence have probably already peaked.

The Young World 

As the First World plunges towards median ages in the 50s, most of Africa still has median ages under 20, with Niger the lowest at only 14.8 years. Outside of Africa, there is still a significant Young World as well, including Palestine at 18, Afghanistan at 19.5, Yemen at 19.8, Iraq at 21.2, Pakistan at 22, Guatemala at 23, Jordan at 23.5, Syria at 23.5, Egypt at 24, and Honduras at 24.

Much of this young world will retain median ages of under 30 years old to 2050 or beyond—similar to Mexico today—while traditional cheap labor countries such as Thailand and China age into their 50s, and presumably become non-viable for high-labor production. 

The new cities of this Young World will be vast, turbulent, and often violent, as has always been the lot of young and fast-growing cities. In 2050, the DRC’s Kinshasa will have 35 million, Lagos will have 32 million, and Karachi will have 31 million inhabitants. The raw demographics that compel this outcome are essentially already in place. Barring some unprecedented global collapse, the young parents of Lagos in 2040 are already alive now. 

The future of this Young World will likely be characterized by a rolling frontier of manufacturing and other high-labor enterprises, quite possibly including large agricultural and natural resource projects. This is an attractive option for current rich countries, but it also requires a workforce willing to venture into the Young World and impose the physical and logistical discipline of industrial economies in these regions—a process China is carrying out across many regions today. Creating an industrial workforce is immensely difficult; it required a full mobilization of society in Europe and America, from mass public schooling and factory discipline to negotiating institutions between employers and workers. 

The process will likely look similar to what occurred in Mexico, where a very poor, almost entirely agrarian nation gradually developed into a hub of industry and commercial agriculture, which now supplies much of America’s vegetables and assembles our highly complex computerized cars and trucks. Both U.S. and Mexican companies carried out the process with state backing.

Airports in the least-developed African states provide another example of maintaining advanced infrastructure in areas without human or physical support systems. You can fly from Omaha, Nebraska to N’Djamena, Chad within a day and a half on commercial passenger jets with no extraordinary difficulty. But the radar, control systems, jets, and everything else involved in operating a commercial airport in Chad are imported wholesale. The airport is de facto under the control of French Air Force officers, although the personnel you encounter when arriving are trained native Chadians.

The frontier is “rolling” because the Metropole and the Old World do not necessarily outsource to the least-developed, youngest, and lowest-labor-cost locations. There is very little export manufacturing in the least-developed and theoretically cheapest countries of sub-Saharan Africa due to their critical lack of infrastructure and human capital, not to mention populations that may be entirely unaccustomed to routine wage labor or mechanical processes. Rather, the goal is to strike an ideal balance between low labor costs and minimally adequate infrastructure and workforce development.

The development of this vast new economic frontier will likely move roughly in order of higher to lower median age, and higher to lower development. This is because the very youngest countries, without exception, are either extremely undeveloped, engaged in civil war and disorder of a type that precludes foreign investment, or both. Historically, as in China and India, foreign investment for export appears to gravitate towards countries with a median age in the early 20s, versus the mid-teens seen in much of Africa. 

A key example of a country that was too young is Ethiopia. Much was made in the financial press of Ethiopia as one of the next big emerging markets, but the country has recently descended into a period of open-ended civil war, with up to 500,000 total deaths to date. This is not so surprising if we consider that Ethiopia’s current median age is 19.5. This age increased from 16 due to the early stages of modernization, but Ethiopia blew up right as it approached age 20.

As costs continue to rise in India or Thailand, attention in Asia will likely shift to Pakistan or Egypt. At a certain point, conditions will suggest an extension of operations from Pakistan into Afghanistan—China is already courting its new government—and from Egypt into Yemen or Iraq. From there, the more developed African states such as Sudan and Nigeria are a logical choice; it may be late in the century before attention seriously turns to the last frontiers of labor—such as Mali, Chad, and the DRC—for ventures other than mining and resource projects. 

The New Frontier

Like nineteenth-century Europe, the U.S. seems on track for stricter internal competition for space and opportunity. California provides a rough preview of domestic conditions as it approaches 2050. By any objective numbers, California is incredibly rich, nationally dominant, and very far from “collapsing.” It has high asset prices, enormous agricultural production, and a very large population that has grown steadily over the past 50 years. It has not just the largest economy by far of any U.S. state but also the fifth-largest economy in the world, at $3.36 trillion dollars—versus Texas at $1.99 trillion and New York at $1.85 trillion. California attracts large numbers of legal and illegal immigrants from every corner of the earth, many from the Young World. The increasing amount of residences with ties to the Young World and other parts of the globe give it an outward-looking culture.

Yet California is becoming famous for exporting native-born Californians. In the midst of its affluence, many natives have fled, finding that extreme asset prices and competition with a constant stream of new immigrant workers render it impossible for them to make the sort of life they desire in their native land. California presents a situation of simultaneous immigration and displacement, even as it grows larger and richer.

As much ire as California draws, it doesn’t stop drawing people. Even many who leave end up coming back or maintaining business ties. And the Metropole has the priors for a similar kind of term-setting power in its relationship to the other spheres of the world. Rather than multipolarity or decoupling, the hard realities of age and wealth will add up to a system of global power that, in many ways, looks very familiar.

But to some, collapse can be a thrilling possibility. Keep scrolling, and you’ll eventually come across its devotees: they include backwood fundamentalists, deep green radicals, apocalyptic cults, and pessimistic online doomers, to name just a few. 

The collapse of society can seem to hold an opportunity. Imagine no longer having to clock into work or pay taxes. Imagine money losing its importance when beans and bullets hold all the value. Imagine scheming lawyers and bankers getting their due when their wealth belongs to those strong enough to take it. Imagine a blank slate for those who see no place for themselves in our corrupt civilization. 

Collapse enthusiasts tend to share a basic implicit assumption: if society as we know it ceased to exist, they and their ingroup would be better off in some important way. Sometimes, social ills seem so entrenched that no other way out exists than for the system behind them to self-destruct. Others see the social order as fundamentally stacked against them, with any hope for advancement requiring its total reset.

These collapse scenarios and the restructuring of society that follows seem plausible. One might logically assume that the complex legal and economic structures that allow for property, debts, lending, and governments to redistribute resources are extremely fragile. It would certainly seem that a physical disaster sufficient to obliterate infrastructure and kill large swathes of the population would leave the survivors in an unrecognizable world of anarchy.

But collapse is not a theoretical construct. Human history has seen both natural and man-made disasters many times before: the historical record offers us examples of deadly plagues, trade collapse, total war, and the dropping of atomic bombs. And contrary to popular expectation, the record of such disasters suggests that the legal and economic systems that we live under have, in fact, displayed amazing durability. 

It is very difficult to identify natural disasters or wars that lead to the sudden end of civilization as it existed before—or even to a full collapse of everyday life. 

Pushing Paper Through the Plague 

If you heard today that a plague was coming that would rapidly kill between 30 and 50 percent of the general population, you might reasonably expect this to lead to the collapse of society. It’s hard to see how obligations and social accounting could survive such a massive event. Some might even see it as a chance for a new beginning.

But this catastrophe actually happened in the historical record, and when it did, the direct ancestor of our own society continued a remarkable level of its day-to-day functioning. The bibliography of any book about the Black Death in England is laden with references to tax receipts, court cases, and parish death records. Much of what we know about the plague comes from records generated by the continuous operations of the very institutions that one might expect to completely fall apart in a super-mortality event. 

The English law courts sat with only minimal interruptions even during the brutal first wave of the Black Death from 1348 to 1349. The Court of Common Pleas conducted its full end-of-year term in 1348, while the Court of King’s Bench sat uninterrupted at York. In 1349, the Court of Common Pleas continued regular operations at Westminster. The King’s Bench operated at Lincoln, remaining “surprisingly busy.” It appears that the courts were forced to adjourn only for May and June of 1349, the very peak of the epidemic.     

Evidently, the courts had busy dockets even as litigants, judges, and attorneys succumbed to the plague left and right. In fact, the very pace of the death was likely driving much of the litigation: property changed hands at an accelerated rate, heirs sued each other over their shares of unexpected windfalls, debtors died, and creditors disputed over who would seize the silver and furniture.

Arguments, legal nitpicking, and the cross-examining of claimants to estates went on as usual, even as the wagons of the municipal corpse collectors creaked past the courthouse windows. At the end of the process, the only result was paper in the form of writs and orders, bearing the wax seal of the court. The successful litigant would have taken these papers away, and traveled home through a surreal scene of fresh graves, shuttered homes, and people wandering the roads proclaiming the end of days. In all likelihood, the winner of the case would himself die later that year or in the next spring, and the process would repeat. 

What is missing from this grim picture is the expected widespread anarchy. If a manor house is still standing in 2022, the current occupant’s chain of title likely traces back to orderly inheritance proceedings conducted during the Black Death.

Law and governance did not just persist as usual during the Black Death. The power of both the state and the courts actively increased in response to the challenge, much as they have during modern disasters. The ancestors of today’s credit securement processes evolved rapidly during this time: “Penal bonds, punitive remedies under detinue of charters, and uses all came into vogue because their utilization encouraged more members of the upper orders to stand by their commercial obligations.” Records show that by 1352 “the use of penal bonds increased dramatically, and they were also used to enforce debts.”

The executive function of government also remained largely unimpaired by the Black Death. Between 1348 and 1349 it was recorded that many laborers, expecting the imminent end of the world, had absconded from their jobs into idleness, or were demanding greatly increased wages to do any work. 

In response to this disaster-holiday mentality, the Council of Edward III issued the Ordinance of Laborers in the June of 1349, which decreed that everyone under age 60 must work, and workers may not receive wages higher than pre-plague levels. The ordinance also imposed price controls on food and prohibited alms for able-bodied beggars. By 1351, a strengthened version of this ordinance was being actively enforced through legal prosecutions against violators, and the English state was largely successful in imposing mandatory employment, along with wage and price controls, during the remainder of the economic crisis.  

The Black Death did not bring on any great social reset—in fact, survivors experienced the very opposite. In the chaos of mass death, the state enforced obligations to work and fulfill debts with increasing stringency. Eventually, laborers did gain financially from their increased bargaining power. But this was a slower process that took a generation or two to fully make itself felt, with no immediate dramatic reordering of society. 

There was only one road to escaping financial and social debts during the Black Death, and it was traveled by plague carts carrying bodies.

A Pension Named Apocalypse

Modern states have had no more trouble than premodern ones in keeping up business as usual under adverse conditions.

At the close of the Second World War, Berlin was in ruins. Its residents underwent food rationing and the complete loss of luxuries like coffee and chocolate. Apart from a period lasting a few months, many essential employees and low-level bureaucrats continued to wake up, clock in, work, go home, and do it all again the next day. By 1946, reconstruction had put many of Berlin’s essential services back to work. 

For those who stayed in the city, many features of life went on with remarkable continuity even in the face of wartime violence and destruction. A conductor who started his job in 1935 would likely have operated the streetcar, received a paycheck, and paid rent normally up until about April of 1945, despite the bombing of Berlin and intermittent destruction of the tracks. 

If he survived and emerged from the rubble, he was almost certainly back to work by 1946, transporting workers for the reconstruction efforts. He would deposit his paycheck into his account at the same bank and likely kept paying rent to the same landlord. It is likely that our conductor never missed more than one filing, at most, for any tax year. By the 1946 tax year, revenues were stable enough that the occupation forces could run balanced budgets for domestic costs.

Despite the military defeat and a change in regimes, a number of bureaucratic bodies and obligations continued functioning after the war just as before. Pension schemes in particular have shown a surreal persistence. In 2019, the German government was still paying Third Reich-era German state pensions to foreign citizens in a number of different nations. A decree signed by Hitler in 1941 had established payments for foreign volunteers of the Waffen SS. In an example of bureaucratic persistence, the post-war German government went on to pay them for decades.

Hitler died in his bunker as Berlin burned in April of 1945, and his country suffered unconditional defeat. Yet the paper rolls of foreign volunteers were somehow preserved, transferred to the appropriate offices of Allied-occupied Germany, and in 1949 came under the jurisdiction of the newly-formed Federal Republic of Germany. Public employees somehow located thousands of foreign veterans in scores of foreign countries and began mailing out checks drawn on the West German treasury. Our hypothetical conductor likely retired in the 1970s with the same pension plan he had signed up for in the Third Reich. 

Bureaucracies and other large institutions sometimes survive because of sheer inertia. Most people do not actually have better options than showing up to work, even when the paychecks stop. Afghanistan’s civil servants continued showing up for months after the Taliban victory despite not getting paid. 

But in many cases, they also survive because they are actually performing important functions. Someone has to keep the lights on.

Why Trade Never Ends

If bureaucracy is resilient, then trade is eternal. Far from being a recent development of modern technology, archeological evidence shows global trade predating the Iron Age. In the 3rd millennium BC, tin flowed from modern-day Cornwall through central Europe and the Mediterranean. The Arabian Gulf connected Mesopotamian societies with the Indus. Weights appear to have met similar standards from Britain to the Middle East, staying remarkably stable for over 2000 years. In the long run, there is no disaster in human history that has permanently ended trade between regions and continents.

What makes our society unique isn’t global trade per se, but the level to which the average person is tied into highly complex markets spanning the entire world. The collapse scenarios for this system range from a supply chain meltdown to the end of cheap energy.

These scenarios could undermine trade as we know it. But shipping containers and oil did not spark the modern era of global trade, and they are unlikely to end it. The historical shipping empires such as those of the Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese rose and fell without a drop of petroleum. They were powered by wood, canvas, and humans’ insatiable desire for global commodities like sugar, coffee, and spices. The seas were often lawless—merchantmen fitted cannons for a reason. But the insecurity of long mercantile journeys was a risk many found worth taking long before global sea powers like Britain and America could guarantee safety on the journey. 

Pre-industrial technologies persisted until relatively late in the modern economy. Later, the last great sailing ships conducted profitable world trade in bulk commodities, notably Australian wheat and wool. The famous “Cutty Sark,” one of the last merchant sailing vessels, primarily shipped wool from Australia to the mills of Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. The “Grain Races,” informal contests between sailing vessels, continued into the late 1940s and involved shipping bulk wheat by sail into Britain. In the event of any civilization-threatening energy crisis, it wouldn’t take long for the age of sail to return. In some market niches like the wine industry, sailboats are used for shipment even today.

Particular trading partners rise and fall, but trade endures throughout history. Partially, this is because trade is good at absorbing local disasters. The destruction of one territory, like Roman Judea in the first century or Iraq in the twenty-first, sends out waves of refugees that offer their labor elsewhere. The event usually entails the rise of new markets for opportunists. Expansions like those of the Mongols, Islamic armies, and European colonialists were responsible for such destruction, but also created massive new territories within which trade could take place. 

Even during active wars, trade goes on. The Russia-Ukraine conflict is one of the most recent examples. The amount of Russian natural gas flowing through Ukrainian pipelines actually increased in the weeks following the invasion, with Russia paying transit fees to Ukraine in full even as it rained missiles on the country. While conventional state-on-state warfare is reducing cities such as Mariupol to rubble, Ukrainian and Russian bureaucrats are evidently working together, and are clearing payments. These fee payments are presumably being used to purchase military equipment to use against the other. 

Despite this overall continuity, serious disruptions in global trade can create downward spirals for huge swathes of society. At a minimum, basic goods become inaccessible as prices stay high. In worse scenarios, societies might have to reorient themselves in major ways to access new markets. But often, these scenarios only reinforce existing institutions.

Following the Soviet collapse, both Cuba and North Korea underwent major food shortages, with the latter seeing between 1 to 2 percent of its population succumb to starvation. In both cases, both power structures and daily life stayed remarkably continuous. Cubans continued to work in the fields in order to survive, despite no formal jobs existing. In North Korea, food became a political tool used to reinforce state loyalty. Instead of heralding a new economic order, the historical examples of trade collapse show that they usually enforce the existing one. Rather than liberating alienated workers from their jobs, its effects usually drive them down to subsistence-level life. 

The most cataclysmic scenarios for trade are events on the scale of the Bronze Age Collapse, a period of several decades in which the collective trade networks of the entire eastern Mediterranean all melted down due to invasion, war, and new technologies. This collective disaster prevented the ability of regions to absorb shortfall or displace each other. It left entire regions of cities depopulated. The worst-hit areas, like Greece, entered nearly four centuries of stagnation, while empires like Egypt and Assyria were forced to retreat for survival. 

Events like the Bronze Age Collapse are the closest we have to expansive civilizational resets. For those who survived the invasions, the disaster entailed a contraction of daily life, enduring a harsh existence as local rulers fought to maintain themselves, and migration to other cities where life as most had known it still endured. Later generations did not view the collapse as a liberatory moment, but as the end of a golden age.

Generations later, the Mediterranean was once again a network of cities, ships, and markets. Trade has survived the collapse of civilization before, and we can expect it to do so again.

The Nuclear Option

There is one collapse scenario without historical precedent: large-scale nuclear exchange, with the casual assumption being that such an event would be the end of the world. 

Official models of a nuclear exchange, at least, suggest otherwise. U.S. government estimates predict a death toll of between 13 to 34 million people for a nuclear exchange involving 3,000 warheads, with substantial additional fatalities that would result from a lack of medical care, lack of utilities, and ensuing food shortage. But even at a final death toll of 10 to 20 percent of the total population, and infrastructure destruction similar to the situation in Germany after the Second World War, the total shock of nuclear war could likely fall within the range historically absorbed by modern economies and governments.  

It is not so difficult to imagine a very “mundane” sequel to such a catastrophe. Despite the horrendous loss of life and subsequent hardship, there would likely be no post-apocalyptic release from the mundane. 

Given that most of society would have survived the exchange, with perhaps entire regions untouched by direct strikes, many of the same patterns as in other historical disasters would likely emerge. The chaos unfolding as people tried to contact relatives, take control of property, or enter other regions as refugees would actually overwhelm institutions like courts and essential infrastructure rather than making them irrelevant.

The largest problem faced after the nuclear strike could well be job abandonment by surviving workers on disaster holiday, feeling that ordinary things don’t matter anymore. More likely than a collapse of normal economic life is a scenario similar to King Edward III’s Ordinance of Laborers: a mandatory work requirement for all able-bodied persons. 

In this scenario, it’s even unlikely that the phones and laptops go off for the last time in a nuclear conflict. Modern communications might come back online with strange rapidity due to the dispersed and durable nature of cellular networks—today, even extremely unstable regions like Somalia have cell service. Such technologies are autonomous from lower levels in the hierarchy of needs. Residents in cities that were not directly affected might well be posting on Twitter, even as they survive on thin rations of gruel unloaded from a truck each week. 

Given the enduring nature of tax and financial authorities, Americans would likely be filing 1040s and paying taxes within a year or two of the event. Just like the Berlin conductor—or the citizens of post-war Nagasaki and Hiroshima, both thriving cities once again—young survivors of the event may well retire years later under quite normal conditions in a rebuilt city, drawing on social security and 401K accounts established before the war.

What Will End it All?

It is very difficult to specify any death toll or infrastructure destruction that would, in itself, make fundamental or lasting changes to our systems of governance. Even nuclear war may not reach the threshold.

There are a number of counterexamples to the persistence of mundane economic life, property rights, trade, and governance. One might ask about the fates of East German landlords. Or pre-1949 debts in China. What about paper farm deeds in Cuba? What about French Ancien Regime estates after 1790?  

These counter-examples quite neatly answer the question of what events are actually known to radically change society. The real force that reorders society is always human action, driven by political or ideological coordination. Disaster becomes a moment for organized political actors to upset the existing order in a given place, either by foreign conquest or by revolution.

Without some human force ready to make use of disaster, neither plague nor destruction are sufficient in themselves to rewrite how society functions. Where these things occur without a strong existing revolutionary ideology, the status quo recovers with amazing speed. On the other hand, revolutions have succeeded repeatedly without requiring major physical disruptions at all, such as those of Cuba and Iran. 

In this sense, the apocalyptic cults and radical militias may actually be closer to the truth than the docile pessimist who fantasizes about getting to leave his office job. The former, at least, understand that collapse is only ever an opportunity for motivated actors whose power survives or even increases after a disaster. But such people are rarely found among society’s malcontents. As history shows, those who benefit from collapse are often already among its heights.