Demographic Winter - The Decline of the Human Family

Synopsis

One of the most ominous events of modern history is quietly unfolding. Social scientists and economists agree - we are headed toward a demographic winter which threatens to have catastrophic social and economic consequences. The effects will be severe and long lasting and are already becoming manifest in much of Europe.

A groundbreaking film, Demographic Winter: Decline of the Human Family, reveals in chilling soberness how societies with diminished family influence are now grimly seen as being in social and economic jeopardy.

Demographic Winter draws upon experts from all around the world - demographers, economists, sociologists, psychologists, civic and religious leaders, parliamentarians and diplomats. Together, they reveal the dangers facing society and the world’s economies, dangers far more imminent than global warming and at least as severe. These experts will discuss how:

The “population bomb” not only did not have the predicted consequences, but almost all of the developed countries of the world are now experiencing fertility rates far below replacement levels. Birthrates have fallen so low that even immigration cannot replace declining populations, and this migration is sapping strength from developing countries, the fertility rates for many of which are now falling at a faster pace than did those of the developed countries.

The economies of the world will continue to contract as the “human capital” spoken of by Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker, diminishes. The engines of commerce will be strained as the workers of today fail to replace themselves and are burdened by the responsibility to support an aging population.

Government programs will slow-bleed by the decrease in tax dollars received from an ever shrinking work force. The skyrocketing ratio of the old retirees to the young workers will render current-day social security systems completely unable to support the aging population.

Our attempts to modernize through social engineering policies and programs have left children growing up in broken homes, with absentee parents and little exposure to extended family, disconnected from the generations, and these children are experiencing severe psychological, sociological and economic consequences. The intact family’s immeasurable role in the development and prosperity of human societies is crumbling.

The influence of social and economic problems on ever shrinking, increasingly disconnected generations will compound and accelerate the deterioration. Our children and our children’s children will bear the economic and social burden of regenerating the “human capital” that accounts for 80% of wealth in the economy, and they will be ill-equipped to do so.

Is there a “tipping point”, after which the accelerating consequences will make recovery impossible without complete social and economic collapse? Even the experts can’t tell us how far we can go down this road, oblivious to the outcomes, until we reach a point where sliding into the void becomes unpreventable.

Only if the political incorrectness of talking about the natural family within policy circles is overcome will solutions begin to be found. These solutions will necessarily result in policy changes, changes that will support and promote the natural, intact family.

Just as it took the cumulative involvement of activist organizations, policy makers, the business world and the media to create the unintended consequences we are beginning to experience, so it will take the holistic contribution of all of these entities, together with civic and religious organizations, to change the hearts and minds of all of society to bring about a reversal.

It may be too late to avoid some very severe consequences, but with effort we may be able to preclude calamity. Demographic Winter lays out a forthright province of discussion. The warning voices in this film need to be heard before a silent, portentous fall turns into a long, hard winter.



Question
What does the expression “Demographic Winter” mean?

Answer
The phrase “Demographic Winter” denotes the worldwide decline in birthrates, also referred to as a “birth-dearth,” and what it portends.

Demographer Philip Longman (author of “The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity”) observes: “The ongoing global decline in human birthrates is the single most powerful force affecting the fate of nations and the future of society in the 21st. century.”

Worldwide, birthrates have declined by more than 50% in the past 30 years (since 1979). There are now 59 nations, with 44% of the world’s population, with below-replacement fertility

Sometime in this century, the world’s population will begin to decline. (The United Nations Population Division says that, worldwide, we could achieve below-replacement fertility by 2030.) At a certain point, the decline will become rapid. We may even reach what demographers call population free-fall in our lifetimes.

Russia is losing three-quarters-of-a-million people a year. Its population (currently 145 million) is expected to fall by one-third by 2050.

The term “nuclear winter,” popularized in the 1980s, alluded to the catastrophic environmental impact of a nuclear war. The long-term consequences of Demographic Winter could be equally devastating.


Question
What is replacement fertility, and why is the number 2.13 so important?

Answer
Replacement fertility is the point of equilibrium at which a country’s population is neither growing nor declining. In order to maintain current population, the average woman must have 2.13 children during her lifetime. She needs to replace herself and a man. Because some children will die before reaching maturity and having children of their own, slightly more than two children are needed – hence 2.13.

A birthrate of more than 2.13 equals population growth. A birthrate of less than 2.13 means long-term population decline.


Question
If birthrates are declining, why does the world’s population continue to grow?

Answer
If it’s already in motion, car in neutral will continue moving forward for a while, especially if it’s going downhill, even if gas isn’t being injected into the engine.

Today’s population growth is due to two factors: 1. higher fertility rates in the 1950s and 60s, and 2. people living longer than ever before.

The thing to remember is this: Declining birthrates will equal a declining population worldwide at some point in the next few decades. In the West (especially in Europe) population decline will become a reality much sooner. In some countries, such a Russia, it’s already happening.

A nation’s demographic future can be seen in its current birthrate. In Europe, the number of children under 5 has declined by 36% since 1960. Worldwide, there are 6 million fewer children, 6 and under, today, than there were in 1990. If present trends continue, the United Nations estimates that by 2050 there will be 248 million fewer children in the world then there are now.


Question
Where are birthrates lowest?

Answer
Of the 10 countries with the lowest birthrates, 9 are in Europe. Overall, the European fertility rate is 1.3, well below replacement level (2.1). No European nation has a replacement-level birthrate.

Italy’s fertility rate is 1.2. Spain’s is 1.1. That means in the not-too-distant future, absent massive immigration, these countries will lose half of their people in every generation.

Russia’s birthrate fell from 2.4 in 1990 to 1.17 today – a decline of more than 50% in less than 20 years. Each year, there are more abortions than live births in the Russian Federation.

While birthrates are also plummeting in developing nations, most still have above-replacement fertility – for the time being.

The U.S. fertility rate is just at the replacement level, due in part to higher immigrant birthrates. How long this will continue is anyone’s guess. It’s also important to note that all of the factors driving down birth rates elsewhere in the world are present here as well.


Question
What are the consequences of demographic decline?

Answer
Economist Robert J. Samuelson wrote in a June 15, 2005 column in The Washington Post: “It’s hard to be a great power if your population is shriveling.” Samuelson warned: “Europe as we know it is going out of business…. Western Europe’s population grows dramatically grayer, projects the U.S. Census Bureau. Now about one-sixth of the population is 65 and older. By 2030, that could be one-fourth and by 2050, almost one-third.”

By the mid-point of this century, 16% of the world’s population will be over 65. In developed nations, today, 20% of the population is over 60. By 2050, the proportion of elderly will rise to 36%. By then, these societies will have two elderly for every child.

If present low birthrates persist, the European Union estimates there will be a continent-wide shortfall of 20 million workers by 2030.

Who will operate the factories and farms in the Europe of the future? Who will develop the natural resources? Where will Russia find the soldiers to guard the frontiers of the nation with the largest land mass?

Who will care for a graying population? A burgeoning elderly population combined with a shrinking work force will lead to a train-wreck for state pension systems.

This only skims the surface of the way demographic decline will change the face of civilization. Even the environment will be adversely impacted. With severely strained public budgets, developed nations will no longer be willing to shoulder the costs of industrial clean-up or a reduction of CO2 emissions.


Question
What factors contribute to demographic decline?

Answer
A number of social trends of the post-war era have converged to create a perfect demographic storm.

Men and women are delaying marriage, making it less likely they’ll have more than one or two children. Today in the West, almost one in two marriages ends in divorce. The children of divorce are less likely to marry and form families themselves. More married women are putting off having children for careers. After 35, it becomes progressively harder for women to conceive.

The news and entertainment media tell young adults that satisfaction comes from careers, romance, travel and “personal growth” – not from having children. It’s rare that Hollywood even portrays large families (today, more than 2 children). The culture’s message is live-for-moment and live primarily for yourself, with no sense of obligation to generations past or concern for posterity.

The growth of cohabitation also has an impact. (In Scandinavia, almost as many couples are living together as married.) Cohabitation is not conducive to childbearing or childrearing.

For the past 20 to 30 years, children have been taught that over-population (the so-called population bomb) will wreck havoc on the environment and economic development. Not surprisingly, children thus indoctrinated frequently choose to have fewer children when they reach maturity.

Religious observance has been shown to correlate with higher birthrates. The increasing secularization of Western societies has been accompanied by lower birthrates.

Thus, every aspect of modernity works against family life and in favor of singleness and small families or voluntary childlessness.


Question
Can’t the problem be fixed by increased immigration?

Answer
In a demographic sense, this is robbing Peter to pay Paul.

The host country gains people, but the home country loses. The developing world, which has seen its own birthrate cut in half since 1970 (from almost 6 to barely 4) can ill afford to lose large numbers through emigration.

Mass immigration changes the national character of the host country. Immigrants tend to have a lower education level than natives. Many never learn the language of their new home or identify with its history and heritage. (Instead of being French-Algerian, they remain an Algerian who happens to be living in France.)

Citizens of developed countries often worry about the loss of national identity.


Question
Can’t demographic winter be countered by governments encouraging people to have more children?

Answer
This is being tried in Western Europe and Russia. The Russian Federation pays families a bonus of 250,000 rubles (the equivalent of $9,200) for every child after the first – in a nation where the average monthly wage is only $330. It’s not working.

Couples decide to have children for all kinds of reasons – religious, emotional, cultural, etc. Money isn’t one of them.

Children are a life-long commitment. While governments should make childrearing easier, by lowering the tax-burden on families (out of self-interest if not fairness), cash incentives don’t work.


Question
If the United States has near-replacement fertility, why should we care?

Answer
All of the factors that are leading Europe into the depths of Demographic Winter are present in the United States as well, including high divorce rates, the rise of cohabitation, families putting off procreation to pursue careers, an anti-family culture and voluntary childlessness.

We may be a few decades behind Europe, but we’re heading in the same direction.

National economies are interconnected to such an extent that the impact of economic collapse in one country or region can be felt around the world.

The social, political and economic decline of previously stable nations can destabilize entire regions and create perils for neighbors and far-ways allies. The United States is connected to Europe economically and through multiple security treaties.


Question
What Is “Demographic Winter: Decline of the Human Family”

Answer
“Demographic Winter: Decline of the Human Family,” is an hour-long documentary which explores every aspect of demographic decline based on interviews with hundreds of academics, scholars, researchers, elected officials and civil and religious leaders from more than 33 countries.

Produced by Barry McLerran and directed by Rick Stout, “Demographic Winter” brings together a number of disciplines to examine and analyze what could be the greatest threat confronting humanity in the 21st century.


Question
What role did declining birth rates play in the current economic crisis?

Answer
Economist Harry S. Dent notes that 70% of GNP in the U.S. is consumer-driven. As the Baby Boomers aged, they began spending less, moving to smaller homes and planning for their retirement. Gen-X can’t fill the gap of the decline of spending by 81 million baby-boomers. This contributed to the slump in the housing market – when Boomers began selling rather than buying, there was a glut on the market and home sales began to decline. “Demographic Winter” predicted the financial crash of 2008 to within 18 months. The “Demographic Bomb” forecasts worse in store for our economy.


Question
Can the economic impact of declining birth rates be seen outside the United States?

Answer
Yes, in Japan, which has a birth rate of 1.25. Of the 10 nations with the lowest birth rates today, Japan is the only one outside of Europe. It also has the highest ratio elderly to children in the world. As the rising sun sets, where will the next generation of consumers and producers come from? While much of the industrialized world saw their economies grow in the 1990s, from 1990 to 2005, Japan’s stock market fell 80%. Between 1990 and 2005. Its real estate market lost 60% of its value.


Question
What is the population control movement and how has it promoted demographic winter?

Answer
The population control movement includes organizations, governments and international bodies (like the United Nations), dedicated to lower birth rates. Their methods range from the voluntary to the coercive – including forced sterilization in Peru and China’s one-child-per-family policy, which has included forced abortions. Over the course of decades, population controllers have persuaded the public, through fear and hysteria, that there are too many people in the world and drastic action must be taken to curb population growth. Their fallacies have been institutionalized and become the “standard wisdom” of Western elites.


Question
Who is Paul Ehrlich and what is his relation to declining birth rates?

Answer
An etymologist by training, Paul Ehrlich is the author of the 1968 best-seller “The Population Bomb,” and the father of the modern population control movement. In “The Population Bomb,” Dr. Ehrlich argued that population would quickly outstrip resources, leading to global starvation. (“The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famine … .hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”) Ehrlich also argued that if voluntary limitations on population didn’t work, coercion would be necessary – a refrain taken up by the movement he spawned. He described human population growth as a cancer that would require drastic action to treat. Currently a professor at Stanford, Erhlich continues to argue that (absent draconian measures) population growth will doom the planet – this notwithstanding that none of his more sensational predictions have come to pass.


Question
What is “The Demographic Bomb: Demography Is Destiny”?

Answer
Released in July of 2009, “The Demographic Bomb” is the long-awaited sequel to “Demographic Winter: the decline of the human family.”

It continues the examination of rapidly falling birth rates (and both the causes and consequences thereof) where “Demographic Winter” left off. “The Population Bomb” focuses on the economic impact of declining birth rates -- especially as they relate to the current global economic crisis – and the role played by the population-control movement in this disaster in the making.

Like “Demographic Winter,” “The Population Bomb” includes input from distinguished economists, historians, demographers and other social scientists. It also includes the views of Dr. Erhlich, as well as the current and past heads of the United Nations Population Division.

About Us


Mission

Of all of the causes we have in the world today, many of which particularly capture the time and space of the media and academia, it is singularly peculiar that the disintegration of an institution as important as the human family should want for attention. Perhaps it is because the family is made up of individual people, and we have become a society obsessed with a focus on the self. Be that as it may, we have ignored this institution to our great detriment. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights got it right when it declared that “the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society”. Implicit in this inclusion in an international founding document declaring universal human rights, is the recognition that stable society’s very survival rests on the strength of this fundamental group unit.

The years have not been kind to this most important institution – the family, particularly the last four decades. Worldwide, families have broken down at a historically unprecedented pace. There are certainly records of how now-extinct societies have experienced similar declines before their demise, but what we now face is unique in that it has a global spread. This has ominous portent.

The family’s importance to basic social structures has perhaps been more explored and discussed than its importance to other aspects of our world, and certainly deserves continued study. What is probably less obvious, and therefore less examined, is the family’s impact on such things as the rule of law, democratic structures, societal and even technological advancement, education, successful commerce and economic structures. Society depends on these in order to remain stable and the family’s impact on them is profound.

When the great social experiments of the 1960’s were launched, and when concern over a “population bomb” loomed large, we did not have the social science and economic studies we have available to us today. So the world embarked unknowingly on a self-destructive course.

Demographic Winter: The Decline of the Human Family seeks to reawaken society to the importance of the stable, intact family, and engender a discussion and greater focus in the media, in academia, in the halls of policy makers, in religious circles, in the committees of civil society and in households around the world. Our hope is that all of these circles will bring to bear on the problems facing the family the tremendous contributions each can uniquely make. In this way, we hope to avert the storm that is now most surely coming on.


Team

Rick Stout
Director/Producer

Rick Stout is an award-winning filmmaker. Though born in Southern California, he grew up in Japan where the "national pastime" was photography. Since the age of 10 years old, he had his own darkroom, and was taking pictures of everything, all the time. Perhaps even more defining for him as a filmmaker, however, was his learning to observe, synthesize, and function within multiple cultures.

Rick received a Bachelor of Arts in 1989, as well as a Masters Degree in 1991. His diverse body of studies included cultural anthropology, and using "participant observation" methods to conduct original research, and to synthesize meaning from very diverse, and complex social situations. For Rick, photography and cultural analyses became the basis for an acute style of script writing, shooting, directing, and editing of films.

Rick has focused mainly on documentary films and biographies, but he has produced award-winning training and marketing films, as well as music videos, and specialty videos for celebrities.


Barry McLerran
Producer

Barry Mclerran is devoted to developing humanitarian causes, particularly as they impact families. He is the past Director of the National Crisis Center for the Deaf and the Virginia Relay Service for the Deaf, and as Director of Humanitarian Aid for Family Action Council International, directed a quarter of a million dollars worth of tents and sleeping bags to earthquake victims in Gujarat, India and more than $60,000 worth of coats to war-time refugees in Afghanistan. He is currently serving as Executive Director of Family First Foundation, a foundation dedicated to helping organizations and efforts that strengthen the family and bring awareness of the family’s importance to the world.

Though Barry has past film experience as an actor, he most recently brings his passion for humanitarian and family causes to the making of films that do good in the world. He is Executive Producer of the feature film Christmas Jars, adapted from the bestselling book by Jason F. Wright, showing in theaters fall of 2008 – a project designed to have a tremendous humanitarian impact. As producer of Demographic Winter: The Decline of the Human Family, Barry brings his experience with Family First Foundation to film, accessing experts from many different fields to illuminate the importance of the family to the world and to warn of the dangers facing society and the economy as the family disintegrates.


Steven E. Smoot
Executive Producer

Steven E. Smoot works in financial and economic research and development as President of Excel Investment Corporation and as Owner of Sky Properties and is a member of the National Congressional Committee Business Advisory Council.

Steven Smoot is also President and Founder of Family First Foundation, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to supporting organizations and efforts that strengthen the family and bring awareness of the family’s importance to the world. Steven has represented Family First Foundation as a delegate to numerous international conferences, such as The World Congress of Families, held in Geneva, Switzerland, Mexico City, Mexico, and Warsaw, Poland.

Downloading it right now via torrent. I do consider the family to be the glue that holds this country together, and the most important unit in our society.

Ok, I haven't watched the whole thing because I really find it hard to stomach their propaganda any more. But this documentary appears to be aimed at Boomers who now realize they were conned, but it's skewing the reasons given for economic crash. One message I'm getting is, 'there are too many old people."

They're also saying that the economic crash was not a bank conspiracy...but because there is 'not enough young people' as the work force just hit it's 'expiration date.' (ie. they show a graph of Boomers increasing incomes till 2008, then suddenly they start retiring (becoming "useless eaters")).

These poor people have worked their whole lives, given-up 1/2 their labor in taxes, their pension funds were raided, now they're implicitly being told that they can no longer be supported (ie. so just go die!). I'm waiting for the Quietus commercial at the end (Quietus was the suicide pill given to the public in the movie "Children of Men").

So, the causal message that I see in this documentary is "Peak Labor", or even worse, "Peak People." In other words, we're (ie. the public) the reason for the economic decline and all that goes along with it. It's our fault! They're blaming the victims, which is what they always do.

Watched it earlier. I thought it was pretty good, except a couple of the people they interviewed were obviously socialist/communist douchebags.

I liked the fact that they point out some of the negative effects of some of these so-called cultural revolutions. Yes, perhaps traditional family values aren't so bad after all. Yes, perhaps the so-called women's rights movement is not so much about making things better for women, but controlling them and breaking up the family.