The Sad Inevitability of Liberal Democratic Decline

The wolves are at the door.  Authoritarian regimes are multiplying.  Nativist political movements are on the rise.  A lifeboat mentality is beginning to take hold in formerly open, progressive societies.  Fear is taking hold.  Is there nothing to be done?

Perhaps the most powerful warning signal of the precarious position of our world is the recent success of the anti-immigrant, far right party in Sweden, a country that had been the bastion of liberal democracy and an example of successful efforts to form an equal, peaceful and thriving society.  But recent immigrant waves and increases in crime and gun violence have heightened tensions and created a tide of nationalism and nativism that threatens to profoundly change Swedish society.

 

The rise of populism is not recent or surprising.  The uneven balance sheet of globalization, free trade, outsourcing and technological progress over the last 30 years left much of the middle and lower middle class frustrated and resentful.  Then came the added burden of refugees from a long series of wars in the 1990’s and 2000’s as well as the ever-increasing waves of immigrants from countries with broken political systems and drug-gang infested cities.

 

But now the world is grappling with even greater threats on multiple fronts.  Three years of pandemic, a Russian war of aggression in the Ukraine, global inflation and climate change have created ideal conditions for a toxic political backlash against liberal democracies and globalization.

 

These latest crises have accelerated the refugee and immigrant flow and crippled the economies that these asylum seekers have pinned their hopes on.  There is growing resentment in the industrialized nations of these ‘outsiders’, some of it xenophobic and racist, but some of it simply a fear that there is not enough work or resources to share.

 

Refugees and immigrants can be assimilated in small numbers without destabilizing a nation, but the modern tidal wave of desperate Middle Eastern, African, Eastern European, and Central American people has overwhelmed even the most kind-hearted nations.  The developed nations that they flee to now have their own problems – inflation, a looming recession, increased political unrest and general disenchantment.  The milk of human kindness is running thin.

 

As global warming puts even greater pressure on many poor countries this flood of refugees will only increase.  This will in turn fuel the careers of power-hungry demagogues.  There is no easier target for fear-mongering than immigrants and refugees.

 

This sad progression seems inevitable at this point.   There is always hope that we will somehow maintain our civility and find a way to make the lifeboat of earth work for all of humankind.  But Sweden’s transformation may be the canary in the coalmine for a type of political change that bodes ill for us all.

Vacation Travel and a Guilty Conscience`

In Scandinavia they have a term for it:  flygskam – flight shame.  This expresses the guilt feelings and shame that many are beginning to have over the use of jet travel to indulge one’s wanderlust.  Another expression, tågskryt - train brag, is the corresponding positive feeling that one has when utilizing a more ecofriendly transportation option.  The Germanic languages have such a lovely way of encapsulating complex concepts in a single word.

Now I could argue that it is easy enough and a bit disingenuous for Europeans to indulge in such fine-tuning of conscience given the compact nature of their countries, the travel distances and their delightful train network.  But how the world travels and what impact it has on hydrocarbon emissions and global warming is a reasonable thing to ponder.

 

I won’t go into the details, but a little simple math yields the fact that an airplane is about 4 times as efficient as a car in taking people from A to B.  The average miles per gallon of an airplane is about 100, whereas it is closer to 25 for a car in round numbers.  Sounds good, right?

 

The problem is that air travel racks up the miles much, much faster than car travel.  If the average American puts 10-12,000 miles a year on his car, then a trip to Europe more than doubles that mileage.  Even a trip to California and back from the east coast increases it by half.

 

Between business travel and pleasure travel jet engines contribute about 2.5% of global emissions of CO2.  This seems like a small number, but when normalized to a per capita statistic it takes on a different meaning.  A small percentage of the world’s inhabitants use air travel.  In 2018, 11% of the global population took a flight, 4% flew abroad and 1% was responsible for half of global aviation emissions.

And private jets are the worst offenders – with a typical private jet owner emitting on average 540 times the hydrocarbons the average person will emit.  So it is not so much the total impact I and others are having through our privilege of our travel, but the unfairly disproportionate share we so blithely take as our own.

Yes, of course we all worked hard for our success.  And business and tourism travel are major engines for the world economy.  A world without jet travel would be a very different world.  Nothing is simple.

 

Unfortunately, airplanes are unlikely to go electric in the near future – the battery and motor technologies are a long way from being capable of powering a large plane over any distance.  There are efforts to optimize fuel economy and there have been significant improvements, but air travel will never get close to zero emissions. 

 

As a relatively recent retiree and avid traveler, I struggle somewhat with the pangs of conscience.  But those air travel specific pangs are just part of a package of guilt that anyone who is honest and logical has for having won the lottery of birth and opportunity.  I could stop traveling, just as I could give all my money away or live in a 'tiny house' or stop taking showers or never eat meat again or spend all of my time working in homeless shelters.  But I won’t.

 

I rationalize that I will only be doing this type of extravagant travel for a few years and will eventually ramp down to domestic road trips in an electric car.  But in the meantime, I will just have to wrestle with flygskam along with all the other contradictions and paradoxes in life that confront me.

Population Growth - Too Much or Too Little?

As if the world didn’t have enough of Elon Musk’s musings, he recently made the news with the claim that population decline is a greater problem than climate change.  He was quoted as saying (which I must admit is a somewhat clever turn of phrase) "If the alarming collapse in birth rate continues, civilization will indeed die with a whimper in adult diapers." 

The global birthrate is indeed declining.  The graph below shows the change over the last 70 years.  It has basically been cut in half.  

Developed countries have seen their birthrates fall particularly quickly, as seen in the second graph. Japan has had such a rapid decline that it is predicted that their population will be cut in half by the end of the century.  They are particularly vulnerable because they do not generally allow immigration.

It is interesting to compare Musk’s dire warning with previous hysterias that have posited almost exactly the opposite point of view.  In the early 1800’s Robert Malthus developed a theory that population growth would overwhelm the world’s ability to produce food and that a natural collapse due to famine and/or war would result.  He argued that population growth is exponential whereas the growth of resources is more linear.  At the time, any curbs on fertility such as birth control were considered immoral so the birthrate would naturally approach exponential growth.  

 

Malthus described what has since been termed the ‘Malthusian Trap’ - that technological progress in agriculture and industry would allow human population to explode and eventually outpace production of food.

 

When one looks at the history of population growth in human society it is not hard to believe that Malthus was correct on the effect of technology on population.  See the graph below:

The danger of over-population was embraced and ratcheted up several notches by Paul Ehrlich in the 1970’s with his explosive book ‘The Population Bomb’.  The opening paragraph read:

 

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.

 

Paul Ehrlich appears to have been a bit hyperbolic in his prediction, but his description of the stress that a growing world population puts on resources and the environment was prescient.

 

So, who is right?  Are we facing imminent disaster from over-population or is civilization going to implode due to a declining birthrate?  Well, both!

 

The problem with a declining birthrate is that it has the potential to create nations of old people who drain resources while a diminishing number of young workers struggle to support them and keep the economy afloat.  This is a very real danger and is already having significant effect in Japan.  

 

The problem is not with a lower birthrate, but with how rapidly the birthrate decreases.  Stability is the key word here.  Given how desperate the global warming crisis is, there is no doubt that the world would be better off with less people demanding energy and using up natural resources.  There is no a priori need for world population to continue growing to prop up the economy and maintain civilization.  But if it slows down too rapidly, the economic and social/cultural effects will be de-stabilizing and possibly catastrophic.

 

The best method for stabilizing populations and gradually reducing total population would be to allow more fertile immigrants from lands where climate change, poverty and political instability are rampant into countries where lower birthrates are threatening to have destructive consequences.  This would kill the proverbial two birds, and even a third, with one stone – solve immigration problems, stabilize declining populations, and mitigate climate change.  The sad fact is that such a remedy is completely out of the realm of possibility in these times of populism, authoritarianism and governmental paralysis.  And so it goes.