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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Pejman Yousefzadeh and Kevin Holtsberry are joined by David P. Goldman to discuss demographic changes in the Muslim world, their impact on policies, and how the US can best deal with evolving Islamic societies.
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'How Civilizations Die'
Forget About Exploding Populations: The Worldwide Decline in Birthrates Leads to the Decline of Nations
Forget About Exploding Populations: The Worldwide Decline in Birthrates Leads to the Decline of Nations
Most people have read something somewhere -- or more likely heard it on TV -- about the declining populations of European countries, with each year seeing fewer young people in the workforce to sustain the welfare state safety net of health care and pensions that keep the retirees of Germany, France, Great Britain and the Scandinavian countries so prosperous.
Thanks to continuing declining birthrates, much of Europe is on a path of willed self-extinction, says David P. Goldman in "How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)" (Regnery, 331 pages, notes, index $27.95). Not only that, but Muslim countries -- contrary to popular belief -- are experiencing similar declines in birthrates, he says, with educated Iranian women, for instance, who grew up with five or six siblings giving birth to one or two children.
Goldman, author of the widely read "Spengler" column in Asia Times Online and a contributor to other sites, writes that the story the mainstream media isn't covering is that birthrates in Muslim nations are declining faster than anywhere else — at a rate never before documented. He says that Europe, even in its decline, may have the resources to support an aging population, if at a terrible economic and cultural cost. But in the impoverished Islamic world, an aging population means a civilization on the brink of total collapse— something Islamic terrorists know and fear.
David P. Goldman
Muslim decline poses new threats to America, he writes, "challenges we cannot even understand, much less face effectively, without a wholly new kind of political analysis that explains how desperate peoples and nations behave."
Goldman borrowed his pseudonym from Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), a German historian and philosopher who is best known for his 1918 book "The Decline of the West" (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), which posits a cyclical theory on the rise and decline of civilizations. The Nazis initially approved of Spengler's German hegemony in Europe, but he was ostracized after Hitler came to power in 1933 for his pessimism about Germany and Europe's future and his refusal to support Nazi ideas of racial superiority. More Here
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