The Death of Europe, As We Know It?

Canadian author, Mark Steyn, is on a whirlwind media tour promoting his new book, "America Alone". Not since I was a kid did I indicate to anyone what gift I would like, but I've told my mom that I'd love this book for Christmas.

From everything I've read and heard about the book, it paints a pretty bleak picture of the future - especially if you live in Europe. Why? I'll let Steyn explain in his own words: "Yes, it is [a dire future for Europe]. And it’s an interesting…it really is an interesting point to me, because people occasionally say oh, well, you’re just making predictions. You’re just making predictions. No, I’m not. I’m actually dealing with the reality of now. In other words, if there’s only a million Italians born in the year 2006, you can’t have two million Italian 20 year olds in 2026. The most reliable twenty year indicator is the demographic one, because you know exactly who the adults are going to be in 20 years time. They’re the people who are the children now. And Europeans simply are not having children. They’re not having children. And what happens, I think, when you get to a particularly advanced kind of welfare democracy, in which every aspect of life is guaranteed for you by the state, socialized health care, cradle to grave welfare, is that life becomes like a sort of endless, Summer school vacation. And you live in a kind of permanent present tense, in which you’re sort of severed from all the kind of primal impulses of society, including the most basic one, which is having children, and thereby ensuring the future. Because you know, the public pensions liabilities…we talk about social security going bankrupt here…in Greece, the public pensions liabilities by the year 2015 are going to be 28% of GDP. Well, that’s total societal collapse, not a mild accounting problem."

This is big picture stuff, but it's important, critically important. Is it the kind of thing that a text-messaging, ADD-laden, hedonistic youth population wants to listen to? Absolutely not. But they should and so should you. Here is an MP3 file that provides an abridged version of Steyn's thesis. You can PodCast it and listen to it on your iPod!

Finally, here's a Canadian take on this subject by National Post columnist, John Robson.