Cognoscenti of the world, procreate

Idiocracy, a little-known American movie from 2006, depicts a frightening dystopia: in the year 2505, we are all idiots. Generation after generation, educated, intelligent, and career-oriented couples continue to have less kids, if any at all, and later in life. Meanwhile their less enlightened peers happily outbreed them. The cumulative effect of this particular kind of dysgenics is a dumbing-down of human society that has less to do with the evils of television than with demographics and the gradual deterioration of our gene pool. Heady subject for a silly comedy.

Idiocracy speaks to the well-attested fact that poorer, less educated people are having larger progenies, while the rich and/or educated choose career or leisure in detriment of the reproduction of the species. This demographic time bomb is old news for many Lebanese, Israelis, or Serbs in their respective backyards, but has planetary consequences. Most of the billions of people to be added to the total of human population in the coming years will be born in the developing world. In the developed world, immigrant families gift their ungrateful hosts with both cheap labor and breeders. Most young Westerners today are empty-nesters that either can´t or don´t want to procreate to ensure that their kin doesn´t die out. In a recent Pew Research Center survey in the United States, the category "having children" ranked second to last among nine conditions for a succesful and happy marriage, taking a whooping 24-point-drop from 1990. "Sharing household chores", "adequate income", "good housing", "shared tastes", and "shared religious beliefs" were all deemed more important than children ("Agreement on politics" was the only one that scored worse than children, some forty points away from similar categories, such as shared tastes or shared religious beliefs. It spooks me that arguments about the removal of your toddler´s foreskin, which movie should win the Oscars, or which curtains look good in the living room, could be more important than the politics of your significant other. But that´s a whole other post).

Demographics and genes are also the subject of one of the most original books published this year. In Farewell to Alms, economist historian Gregory Clarks argues that the cultural and genetic transmission of capitalist values among the British population over centuries allowed it to escape the Malthusian trap and jumpstart the Industrial Revolution that moved some societies from poverty and underpopulation to relative affluence and drastic population growth. With a controversial thesis, Clark will now feature prominently in the academic debate over the rise of the West, which ranges from David Landes´emphasis on cultural values to Jared Diamond´s emphasis on environmental happenstance. And its title, a modified version of Hemingway´s famous novel, surely aims at putting it at the center of the development debate as well -more aid, says Sachs, less aid, says Easterly. To me at least, the most thought-provoking part is that these capitalist values (nonviolence, literacy, and a willingness to save and work long hours) spread and prevail due to a change in the nature of human population. In England, during the centuries preceding the Industrial Revolution, the upper classes bred more effectively than the lower classes, whose infants died in massive numbers. This resulted in downward social mobility, as the progeny of the rich and educated, moving away from privilege and idleness, gradually took over their occupations. As Clark puts it, "the modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages." The Samurai in Japan or the Qing in China, however, were strikingly unfertile.

If you are reading this and a torrent of objections to Clark streams through your thoughts, don´t rush to reply this post with your comments. First, find a mate. Be fruitful. Multiply.