“A war is slowly brewing,” Pilkington argues in a 2021 article, “Generation Against Generation.” “It pits parents against their children and children against their parents.”
As the share of the population made up of working-age men and women declines and the share of the elderly grows, Pilkington foresees a future
in which overworked young people may see nominal wage increases. But asset markets will inflate more rapidly than their incomes, and the rise in the prices of goods will outstrip their wage gains. In other words, they must run in place with lower real incomes while they rent property from older people because they are priced out of the property market. A young person in this situation might do his best to uphold the Fifth Commandment, but in all likelihood he will nevertheless see his situation as grossly unfair.
Pilkington elaborated on these themes in a 2022 article “Capitalism’s Overlooked Contradiction: Wealth and Demographic Decline,” in which he makes the argument that growing national affluence contains the seeds of economic decay.
He puts this in straightforward terms: “As capitalist growth proceeds and a society becomes wealthier, the birthrate falls; eventually, as the overall population ages and fewer people join the work force, economic growth collapses.”
Countries that were among the most successful in transitioning from agrarian poverty to advanced economies, Pilkington writes, “have experienced astonishing declines in birthrates. South Korea and Taiwan have the lowest fertility rates in the world, at around 0.8 and 1.1 births per woman, respectively. China’s fertility rate, estimated at 1.16 in 2021, has been well below replacement for years.”
Pilkington then asks, “What do the data tell us about American birthrates?” He answers his own question:
While there is no statistical relationship between regional wealth and fertility rates, there is an obvious, strong relationship between birthrates and income group. In 2017, households with an income of less than $10,000 per year had a birthrate of 66.4 children per 1,000 women, compared to a rate of 58 for households in the midrange of $35,000 — 49,999, and of 44 for the top income group of $200,000 or more.
The most striking intranational trend, however, is not class-based but cultural: the fertility rate of Americans varies significantly according to their religious affiliation. A very interesting picture emerges from the data. For one, the largest religious groups in the American population — Protestant, Catholic, ‘Nones,’ and Atheist/Agnostic — have a combined fertility slightly below replacement rate. On the other hand, ‘believing’ religious groups who adhere to traditional ways of living have birthrates far above replacement, including traditionalist Catholics (3.6), Orthodox Jews (3.3), Mormons (2.8), and Muslims (2.8), not to mention voluntarily isolating sects like the Amish.”
The implications should warm conservative hearts. “The current tendency for American culture to secularize will not last forever,” Pilkington writes:
At a certain point, groups with a more robust capacity to reproduce will replace groups with less robust capacities in a simple Darwinian manner. Currently, these groups represent a very small fraction of the American population, but because human reproduction follows a multiplicative path these groups could grow rapidly in numbers, especially as the other groups decline.
Conversely, Sarah Pachman, research and policy director at Princeton’s Center for Research on Child and Family Wellbeing, made the case in an email that Democrats have a demographic advantage “because fertility rates are higher among non-U. S. born mothers, who are much more likely to report that the Democratic, rather than Republican, party represents their views, and parents often pass their political views on to their children.”