Hey Ogler. I'm not sure I'm personalizing it that way. My argument isn't really about me. In a way, our genes have always tricked us into reproducing ourselves - by giving us a powerful sex-drive and making pregnancy automatic.  
 
Now that contraception has broken the linkage, we still get the sex, and most people don't care all that much if their genes survive or not. As long as they have fun and get to buy lots of high-tech toys. In fact fewer kids means more toys for me. Radical individualism has staged a coup d'état against the genes.  
 
So who does care? I'm focusing on the state because I see that the state is the most-natural ally of the genes. Like the genes the state is potentially immortal. Institutionally the state "needs" to preserve itself and win power struggles against other states. The state can be trusted to take the long-term view.  
 
Put it this way: I cannot guarantee that any particular state will act to save itself. But I think I can guarantee that in the long run, the states that survive will be those that did act to save themselves. Sooner or later the others will disappear by natural selection.  
 
Given time, even Western civilization would probably discard radical individualism and try to save itself. But Western civ is not alone in the world. We were the first to discover science, but the others know about it now and they are catching up fast. The real question is not whether Western civ can survive, but whether it can figure out how to survive quickly enough to retain it's lead over other civilizations. Of this I am sceptical.  
 
Of course for me genetically it makes no difference which civilization wins. As you pointed out before, if I bred with a Chinese lady, say, and if my descendents did the same, then in two or three generations my descendents would be seen as fully Chinese. This is one reason why racism has never made any sense to me. It is too easy to switch race.  
 
A really smart selfish genome, knows that it can survive in any human population, and always picks the most likely winner.

Randy,  
Maybe immigration is a factor in many of those countries that have a higher birthrate. Conservative religion plays a role in US. It's like it's purely fortuitous cultural influences pushing it this way or that.  
 
That's one of the reason's why I'd suggest that all states will probably have to regulate sooner or later. Because even if you're OK now. There's no guarantee that at some point in the future some new cultural pattern won't emerge and destabilise your precarious balance. 
 
Another reason to regulate it, is in order to maintain flexibility. What if some new plague or war emerged and we needed to raise fertility to cope with an elevated deathrate? We can't just lock it down for all time at 2.1. We need flexible, intelligent control and national fertility policies.

Randy McDonald, "that's indicative of something". 
 
It's indicative of the fact that there is no counterpart to Adam Smith's "invisible hand" guiding the optimum fertility rate, once you bypass the sex/reproduction nexus.  
 
So it tends to settle wherever the prevailing fashion of the time pushes it. Today we are in the grips of an ideology of egalitarianism that argues that women should be as free as men. Sadly that is not practical given current technology. 
 
The pill frees women from endless breeding but not from breeding altogether. The low deathrate means that we don't have to have a high birthrate any more. But we still need to replace the ones who die of old age.  
 
In order to achieve the final liberation of women, at least one of of two further technological revolutions would be necessary. 
 
1. Either eliminate death from old age. Immortals don't have to breed if they don't want to. 
 
2. Or devolop artificial wombs and make babies in a factory. 
 
Failing that, women's liberation can only be partial. Or mankind dies.

Hunter, that's a great question. 
 
There are going to be some societies, where the "spontaneous" fertility is pretty close to 2.1 and they may only need minimal management, perhaps advertising and public education, to keep them on track. 
 
But there are likely to be other societies where the values of the culture have become deeply fixated on a fertility far below 2.1. In those cases you have a very rapidly deteriorating situation once the crash starts.  
 
I am sure that natural selection would work in time, but the problem is that it cannot work fast. Meanwhile the rapid population contraction is causing huge political waves that the established order can no longer ignore. The temptation to solve the problem by state authority is overwhelming.  
 
In many instances these are not traditionally self-reliant societies. That's part of why they've gone down this road. These are already nanny-states. They are long-aclimatised to calling on the government to solve every problem. The most natural thing in the world for them, is one more layer of bureaucracy and social control. 
 
A major problem is that only government can monitor fertility. Only government can pay the experts to model the data, migration, diseases, wars, births, deaths. All the complexities of population modelling. Also, who but the government can make sure that every woman does her share of carrying the burden of fertility? This is an issue of equity among women. Once you have a fertility target - If one woman spends her life partying and living the high life then some other woman has to have the babies she did not. Inevitably the target allows for some "spare" babies. That's why it's 2.1 not 2.0 - but they should be used to cover for those women who medically cannot have babies or whose children die. It's not there to compensate for the party-girls or the selfish career woman. Otherwise the target among the breeding women would have to soar.

Most important point: The idea that women have a right to control their own fertility is a preposterous and utterly unsustainable idea. The state must at all costs control fertility or risk destruction.  
 
The simplest way is maybe to licence contraception. No female that has not had 2 children can have access to contraception without overwhelming medical grounds. The current notion of free-for-all anarchy is unlikely to last beyond the first crash. 
 
If lifespans start to increase we may need to reduce that 2.1. If space colonization opens up we may need to increase it or start using artificial uterus technology. In the real world, fertility is critical to a society's future and what individuals think about it is irrelevant other than through setting national policy. 
 
Several nations like China and India have already gone a long way down this road of removing fertility policy from individual control. I don't see how any nation can avoid this in the long run.

"asia has the same demographic problem that europe does" 
 
No not really. Apart from the problem of China, which I am not sure how they intend to arrange their demography. I presume their planners are modelling it. Japan and Korea are likely to be shrinking. But these are very minor powers in the longer-term scheme of things. India is going to be the most populous nation in the world in a few decades I believe. It is a long way from entering its crash mode. It hasn't even stabilized yet. Major Asian nations like Pakistan and Indonesia are all well behind the Europeans and decades away from crashing. 
 
I suspect most countries will try to target 2.1 birthrate sooner or later once they see the crash emerge in Europe. I expect countries in the future will watch their female fertility with the same intensity they now watch their GDP. Policy will be aggressively targeted to raise or lower the birthrate. It will be understood that birthrates are very critical once you get too far from replacement. Changes must be made gently if you don't want to lose control.

"How much of this westrabia bull is the product of tolkien-worshiping nerds masturbating over grand good-vs-evil scenario's?" 
 
I'm more a Darwin-worshiping nerd. Good and evil are only defined for me, relative to the imperatives of my DNA. 
 
"Europe has always been... Europe... and will continue to be, it's heart, Germany, admits few, while in the rest the unalterable trend is migration barriers" 
 
I am asking myself: What is a sustainable equilibrium position in a world where Asia utterly dominates economically, scientifically, politically and militarily? Where the US Navy feels safe from overwhelming Chinese military might as long as it sails up and down the Mississippi. Where an increasingly thinly-populated bunch of Europeans are incapable of fighting to defend their vast domain across Eurasia without help from nurses to put on their Depends. How is a culture like that going to fight off the younger, leaner and hungrier hordes to the south? Who by the way would also like plasma TV's.  
Tell me why this is not the world sometime after 2050ad? 
And if you think this can't happen, I have to tell you, these are the trends. And until I know the trend will change, I believe the trend. 
 
See I figure: We abandon the Eastern hemisphere, and the Western is our future homeland. We reach a quid-pro-quo with the Asian superpowers China & India, that we have no further interest in the old world as long as they leave us alone in the new. They can sort out the political geography of their, much-larger and more-populated hemisphere, however it suits themselves.  
 
It's somewhat like a return to the Monroe doctrine, with the Asian superpowers playing the role that the European powers once did.

"Why? What does 'overextended' mean?" 
 
It means less than 10% of the world's population mid-century holding a hugely disproportionate part of the world's prime real estate.  
 
"Do you guys want to see yourselves in a civilizational struggle?" 
 
I don't know who "us guys" is. I study trends and try to see what happens if you project them. A simple trend-jockey, that's all I am.  
 
"the russian economy, since putin's flat tax revolution, is moving away from natural resource dependence" 
 
It's amazing what you can do when a rapidly renationalizing oil and gas industry underpins state finances. The Mexicans are facing the same problem as the output of their Cantarell oil field starts to decline. Who is going to finance the state without oil income? Maybe that flat tax is gonna have to go one day. Enjoy it while it lasts Vladimir.

Razib,  
 
I wouldn't describe my position as "unconcealed glee".  
 
I do think that Western Civ is seriously overextended though, given our hold on the Americas, Australasia and Northern Eurasia. I am expecting some major consolidation in the coming century all else being equal. I think this is likely given economic trends (the rise of Asia) as well as demographic trends, (European demography leading the world down). I consider the Americas to be the most defensible position for a greatly diminished West.  
 
In a sense I am anticipating a continuation of the contraction of the West that started with the fall of the European Empires.  
 
I believe that radical technological change in the form of say, greatly extended lifespans, and technological singularity a la Kurzweil, is the greatest unknown that could totally transform this picture. 
 
To bring this back closer to topic: the "Putin revival" of Russia seems to me to be predicated on a single variable - the massive income-boost that oil & gas exports from the Russian republic have made possible. Russia is for now a bigger producer than Saudi Arabia (Excel File) . KSA is a bigger exporter though due to the larger domestic consumption in Russia. My expectation is that this oil & gas boom will not last all that long - a couple of decades. But that would take us way OT.

If anyone wants to see what the striking European demographic curve actually looks like you can download a pdf file here. If you skip through to the bottom of page 5 you can see a nice curve.  
 
Note the curve for 2004 is the blue line.  
The rest are all forecasts assuming various things about fertility and immigration.  
 
Also note that the blue line is total European population. If one only counted native Europeans, then the curve for those under 40 would decline somewhat more steeply, due to large-scale immigration since the end of imperialism, and the young average age and higher birthrate of immigrants.  
 
Note the peak at 40 years of age. This is the peak of the baby boomers indicating that the peak birth year was ~1964 across Europe. This is plausible. The pill started to really impact after this. If we assume that the life expectancy will continue to be around 80 years, then that implies we can expect the peak deaths to occur around 2044.  
 
The thing that always fascinates me about these population studies is the huge focus on "OMG how are we going to cope with the vast numbers of elderly?" which everyone seems to worry about so much. I prefer to focus on the other end of the curve - The growing shortage of (especially native) children. Note the implicit bias in all these studies: They only consider the dependency ratio of the elderly. Of course the growing numbers of elderly-dependents is offset by the falling number of child-dependents. The total number of dependents per worker varies less than people think.

"It _does_ matter, certainly if you've been referring to data which talk about specifically Muslim patterns which are relevant only to a minority of the immigrant population". 
 
True.

Ogler,  
just to clarify if my previous message was not clear.  
 
The Brussels Journal quote above only refers to " those under-18".  
It is not referring to total population. 
That is why it is evidence of demographic inversion.

ogler, 
 
One day I would like to see Mankind living in space, then the Earth could be left in peace as a natural laboratory.  
 
For all we know it may be the only planet in the Galaxy that has evolved life. If that turns out to be true then its scientific value vastly exceeds its practical use to us as a homeland.  
 
Man and nature's other creatures can live in Space Colonies of the O'Neill type anywhere. In orbit around any stable star. 
There may be only one Earth.

I also love Chinese cinema. I recently saw a beautiful Chinese film by one of my favorite directors.

Thank you for your recommendation.There is much that I admire about the Chinese.  
For instance I am a passionate fan of the Daodejing. Laozi is my favorite ancient philosopher.

"Dan, maybe you can go to Holland and start some kind of European breeding society?" 
 
Ogler, I can breed with any human female. I am indifferent to race. There are beatiful women in all races.

ogler, also don't conflate "total population" and "under-18".  
 
Anyway. It doesn't matter if they are muslim or something else. If you are talking about the replacement of the Native Europeans then the ecological consequences for them are the same. 
 
I am really more detatched about this than you might imagine. In a way it is a fascinating natural experiment in human evolution. I am a European, but I am also a man of reason. I try to learn from everything I see.

I cannot emphasize this point strongly enough: This is how Darwin's Law of Evolution by Natural Selection works. This is what happens when you allow your breeding rate to drop below replacement for an extended period of time.  
 
There is no good and bad about this. It is nature. 
 
You walk off a cliff; gravity pulls you down. 
You drop your breeding rate below 2.1, and after a reasonable time to correct the error, Darwin's Law starts to eliminate your kind. The only way living things can escape death in the form of extinction and ecological replacement is by outbreeding it.

In the maternity hospitals the ratios must be even more extraordinary.  
This is a form of secondary ecological succession.

ogler, 
 
"In major Dutch cities many of the young people are not of indigenous Dutch extraction. In Amsterdam 55% of those under18 are immigrants, mainly Moroccan, Turkish or Antillean (West Indian). In Rotterdam the number has surpassed 50%. Everywhere this percentage is rising dramatically. Dutch society has failed to inculcate the children of immigrants with Dutch values. Perhaps the latter was simply impossible. There are 1 million Muslims on a total of 16 million inhabitants in the Netherlands. At over 6% of the population this is proportionally the largest Muslim immigrant population of all Western nations, except for France which has 6 million Muslims on a total of 60 million inhabitants. The Muslims are younger than the indigenous population and tend to be concentrated in the cities." 
 
Fingers in the Dyke (Brussels Journal - a paleocon Euroblog) 
 
Note the extraordinary age-related impact of a normal-demographic subgroup on an inverted-demographic host community.

You are right ogler. I am a boomer.

Not yet. Men can always say that.

Sorry I left off one point. Migration.  
 
Europe is unfortunately placed wrt immigration. Stretching accross the north of the Eurasian landmass, it has huge neighbours of quite different and sometimes problematic cultures. This is because Eurasia, together with Africa, with which it forms a cluster, is the ancient homeland of human origin. History is very complex here and very deep. 
 
Japan does not allow large scale immigration. It is isolated by sea. 
 
USA and the Americas generally are fortunate in being isolated from the rest of the world by two oceans. They can regulate this aspect easier. 
For intra-hemispheric migration, they have far more similar cultures. They share many of the same roots, like Europe and Christianity; variegated only by the Native Cultures of the Americas and different origin cultures in Europe. The latter aren't nearly as different as they think they are IMHO. Immigration will make them even more similar. I don't forsee any total catastrophes, unless you consider speaking Spanish or bilingualism a catastrophe. It's conceivable we'll all be speaking Mandarin in the future anyway. The Americans are unlikely to flee to Europe if the Hispanics become too numerous.

"The concensus here is that all human populations will fall back due to urbanization, react to the environmental and economic changes and then rebound. Post evidence they will not rather than "cute" faux epitaphs." 
 
I've been thinking about this point. That is why it's taken me a while to reply. It's not evidence i'm afraid, since it concerns a future event - more like a plausibility argument. 
 
No other culture has gone as far as Europe down the road of welfare-statism, cradle to grave. This contributes to Europe independence from the family for welfare.  
 
No other culture has gone so far in implementing ideological egalitarianism between the sexes, and "anti-darwinian" measures like gay marriage, abortion, and a culture of small families (Some of these items the Japanese would be Europe's equals).  
 
Europe has gone further down the road of trivialization of sexuality - its tolerence of nudity, commercial sex etc. Its generally libertine attitude. This discourages seeing sex as a deeply important matter for a species. It has made sex into entertainment not survival. 
 
No other culture implemented almost universal subsidised access to contraception as early as Europe did.  
 
The baby-boom phenomenon was accentuated in the West by the end of WWII. People had delayed families during the war. When it ended there was a catch-up effect.  
 
Put it all together, and Europe will be among the first to go over the edge into crash mode. And the consequences will be worse there than anywhere else. 
 
The reason others will not crash quite the same way as Europe - is that they will have Europe for an example. When they see what happens to Europe it will give them earlier warning to avoid going over the edge of the "black hole" themselves. It will show them where the edge of the black hole is; and it will help them to pursuade their populations to implement measures to avoid it. 
 
For all time, Europe will be an example to the rest of humanity, of the dangers implicit in the excessive use of contraception. 
 
I have posted all these detailed arguments bit by bit because you raised many interesting points, and they deserved serious answers. Some of them took me a while to figure out responses.

And speaking of the economic impact. We have recently seen a strong political push in the US for amnesty for illegal immigrants. This has deeply irritated many grassroots conservative circles in the US, like the conservative blogosphere. 
 
One of the inputs into this, that a lot of people aren't aware of, is the imminent retirement of the boomers over the next decade or so. This is likely to create a strong need for new labor to replace them.  
 
Market forces are strongly favoring easy immigration to hold down labor costs.

Even if you manage to turn around the total population faster than 70 years with a higher birthrate, the positive economic impact is never going to be instant because making workers biologically is a slow process. Copulation to Graduation is around 20 years. 
 
The only way to get more workers "yesterday morning" the way industry will want, is to fly them in from elsewhere.

Kindly turn off your Wagner soundtrack. 
 
It's not a Wagner Soundtrack. It's more like a "Lord Of The Rings" soundtrack. 
 
The Elves leave Middle Earth (Eurasia) forever and go to the Western Havens after they win the war against Sauron (Hitlerism-Stalinism). 
 
Elves are immortals of course. JRR.Tolkien believed Christians were immortal because of Jesus Christ.

At some point human labor will be so valuable that single provider households are once again economical in established 1st world cities 
 
This is a classical error in economic thinking. 
 
In the 19th century people lived in tiny little hovels and tenaments in western cities in order to afford keeping a family. Don't you think you could afford a house like that? they had shared toilets, sometimes an outdoor water supply. 
 
If the consumers demanded ultracheap housing so that they could afford to have 5 children, don't you think the market would provide it? We are much more efficient now. I am sure you could have ultracheap, mass-produced, high density housing with minimal amenities.  
 
Of course you could not afford a plasma TV, and you might not be able have your first car until you were in your 30s. Airconditioning and central heating might be only for the wealthy. 
 
These are the implicit choices we make. The are so invisible we are not even conscious we are making them. These are our values. They are implicit in the demand curve. The market adjusts the supply possibilities of the economy through the price mechanism until all the choices balance out.

Oh I should mention:  
 
The 70 year thing assumes a minimal plausible increase in birthrate. If every young person was willing to have 20 kids you could turn it around quicker.  
 
Just for the record. It's not going to happen without artificial wombs and without robots to rear the kids. Brave New World.

"I also see no good argument for eulgizing any community with 100+ million individuals today." 
 
That's fine Mr. Nutley 
Your vasectomy is subsidised.  
YOu can receive it along with your Darwin award. 
 
Thank you for removing yourself from the gene pool and leaving more room for the rest of us.

Take away the old age pension and see how quickly people will have children.

Anyway, I'm not sure how sensitive the birthrate is to economic incentives as opposed to ideology. Europeans have never been better paid with more help with education etc, It doesn't seem to make them want children. Perhaps putting Viagra in the water supply. Perhaps banning the pill or abortion.  
 
Earlier generations had children despite tremendous difficulties. What's changed with us? 
The pill and a highly narcicistic- individualistic culture it seems to me. And perhaps a touching faith that the government will provide?

Good luck with that Mr Nutley, I'll believe it when I see it. 
As long as the standard of living in Europe is higher than Pakistan, or Sudan, say. I am expecting immigration to continue. 
Ask the Americans for advice about keeping out illegals. 
 
I do believe in the law of supply and demand. It's complicated.  
 
Imagine you are an investor/employers advocate. Imagine you have an investment in an industry and your labor supply is tightening. Are you going to wait for demographics to fix your problems? (Remember the 70 year turnaround time I spoke about above) Or are you going to threaten the government with withdrawing investment unless they allow more immigration? 
 
It's the time-value of capital (in effect the interest rate) that makes industry so impatient. 
 
Just reminding you about the turnaround time. Once a low-birthrate crash begins, even if you start having babies today, the total population keeps falling for another ~70 years. Only immigration can change things faster than this. 
This is a consequence of the inverted demographic curve. There are so few young people able to have babies. 
 
Anyway I never said that Europe's population will fall indefinitely, I said that the Native Europeans' population would fall. People have pointed to other subpopulations who will not be falling. Muslims, Christian revivalists, fanatical darwinians maybe.  
 
I would add maybe robots, cyborgs, transhuman immortals. All of these are also possibilities if technology could figure it out. We ARE talking about a century or two.

My epitaph for the Europeans: 
 
You were the greatest civilization in history. 
You discovered Science the key to the secrets of the universe. 
You could have ruled the Galaxy. 
Had you valued children more than your careers.

Razib,  
 
Interesting. I wasn't aware of that.  
Still the English are likely to have some connection to the Poles, given even a smaller Saxon-Viking component. 
 
Another way of putting that post-crash decline rate, that I estimated above, is that it would assymptote to an exponential decay curve with a half life of 72 years. So in one human lifetime you would see the native population decline by a about a half.

And incidently, Saxons and Danes, the ancestors of the English, are neighbours to the Poles. 
 
English are possibly closer to the Poles than than they are to the Welsh.

Of course the old folks hang on for a long time. It is the shortage of native children that is noticed first relative to the background breeding/immigrating, immigrant community.  
 
Then teenagers become scarce, then young adults, etc.  
 
All this is a consequence of demographic inversion.

And to get some idea of how fast it will be net;  
 
In a place where fertility is 1.5 children per female per generation then the population will shrink at a rate of around 25% per 30 years say, or about 0.75% per annum.  
 
Undetectable year to year, somewhat noticable over a decade, devastating over a century or two.

Population declines in different parts of Europe will be at different rates depending on how far below replacement the fertility rates are.  
 
Internal, that is within-civilization migration (the type of thing you can hardly detect any more after one generation to overcome language/dialect barriers) will complicate the situation. And may create local demographic anomolies.  
 
e.g. Population fall in Eastern Europe may become much faster if it is supplemented by a net migration to Western Europe. That in turn will help Western Europe to stave off population collapse for a while.  
 
Regions of economic opportunity within Europe may not notice any deep changes for decades. But the civilization is drying up like a puddle evaporating in the hot sun. Some parts dry faster than others, and there is increasing patchiness, but in the end the puddle is gone.

Omar. 
 
France. The crash isn't really underway yet. Not until after 2020. The boomers births peaked around 1950's and 1960's so they will have their highest deathrate in the 2030's. At that point the demographic curve will be at it's maximum inversion. Native population will be falling rapidly. Lots of old people, nursing homes full, very few children. All the schools seem to be full of immigrant children. 
 
Going forward, the native demography will stay much the same, but each year there will be fewer and fewer natives. The immigrants will look around and see that more and more they are seeing one another. The native Europeans are disappearing. Young Europeans leave for jobs overseas in the Americas, they don't come back. The jobs they leave behind become available for immigrants. There is a growing shortage of labor and a strong push from industry to import more immigrant labor. The jobs are increasingly immigrants working for immigrants.  
 
Poles in EU. I'd consider that internal migration rather than immigration.

Yeah the Japanese are hoping for that.  
I'd rather have the muslims and other thirdworlders.  
Perhaps because I am so horrified at a civilization that was too stupid to breed. (And I was born there) 
Whatever Islam's faults, that is not one of them. 
Anyways are you going to leave it to the robots when you die?

Heaven knows their kids aren't going to look after them cos they didn't freakin' have any.  
 
This is the tragedy of the commons, demographic style: 
 
"The state will look after me in my old age" only works if there aren't too many people with the same brilliant idea.  
 
If no-one has any kids then your only option, when the time comes, is to import poorer thirdworlders to nurse you.  
 
They then inherit your civilization when you die. Who else you gonna leave it to?

And above all I am not arguing against muslim immigration. If the Europeans can't turn the crash around this century, and especially if there is a significant native-European flight of the remaining young and productive, then immigration is going be essential to supply the workforce just to care for the old folks in their nursing homes.

Also Omar don't forget the economic opportunity argument - the effect of economic growth of a falling population. The effects on investment opportunities of a shrinking market.

Omar, 
 
My point was - America is becoming Latin America at a much quicker rate than Europe is becoming North Africa, so why would Europeans want to go there? 
 
I dunno Omar. Maybe the same reason the Lebanese Christians or the Egyptian Copts try to get to the West when they find living in the Dar ul Islam too challenging. 
 
Anyhow to Europeans there's nothing special about speaking English. Latin America's still mostly Western and Christian. If they can't get to USA, maybe Argentina's an alternative. Maybe Quebec if you're francophone. Plenty of European expat communities all over Latin America. Europeans I find, feel very differently about Latin America than Anglos do. Of course especially if you're Spanish or Portuguese.  
 
DarwinCatholic 
 
However, since that sub-group of Christians is dwarfed by the 10-20x greater number of secularized and/or low reproducing Christians, it doesn't get the attention that the Muslim subset does.  
 
The muslim component is growing because of rapid immigration too, and it's much more visible culturally.

Sorry make that upward sloping total population curve of the growing population pre-pill.

I've been trying to find it. I deleted this stuff a long time ago. It's got to be a decade since I studied it.  
 
It's not that hard to create on a spreadsheet though, which is how I did it. Many countries publish their demographics and all you do is divide the curve into 80 * 1 year slices say and advance each column up the page subtracting the deaths. The births are fed in at the bottom. From memory I used curves I found somewhere on the web for UK as a starting point. Death rates I got from actuarial statistics from a someones statistical year book. I only wanted to get a general idea of how the thing worked. I found some interesting stuff though.  
 
For instance I found that an aging population doesn't necessarily cost all that much more because the number of old people practically offsets the number of missing young. The ratio of dependents to working-age stays pretty constant over a very broad range. Of course the elderly can be self-funding whereas children are a financial burden on their parents. 
 
I found it was amazingly easy to create a baby boomer phenomenon. All you do is have a sharp drop in the birth rate. (Say like when the pill hit in the early 60s) The upward sloping demographic curve of the growing population pre-pill creates a good sim of the boom part. Of course the real thing was more complicated because of the distortions induced by WWII and the Great Depression.  
 
Sorry I can't be more specific.

Omar  
Europe got along pretty ok in the past. Britain's pop was just under 6 million in 1603 
 
6 million and rising is a very different thing from 50 million and falling. And in terms of power politics 6 million in todays world would make you a very minor power indeed. 
 
The white birth rate in the US is similar to Europe's, indeed it might actually be less than the French one. 
 
The French one is I believe one of the highest in Europe (partly as a result of their own immigrants) so yes America's has varied around replacement. The immigrants are an enormous demographic safety net for America. 
 
I don't want to sound rude but that's sheer hyperbole, given that we're talking about a nation of well over a billion souls, and I severely doubt the ethnocentric Chinese would ever dream of solving the problem with mass immigration.  
 
I don't know what they will do. They have a very rapidly aging population and a shortage of women. The one child policy didn't start till after Mao I think I recall. It's true, they have 1.2 Billion or something but I was looking ahead. When they decide to stabilize, it will take 70 years to turn around a curve that's been dropping for generations and has a deeply inverted structure. You really have to plan ahead. Presumably an authoritarian system has more ability to control these things. Will the Chi-Comms still be in power in 70 years?

razib, 
the greying of the population as you call it is actually a profound danger signal. If you know how to read it. Actually it is not a surplus of old people so much as a dearth of young. It's an inverted curve caused by the birth rate dropping below replacement. In the long run this forecasts a crash as soon as the oldies start to die off and there are fewer newborn young ones to replace them as a result of the negative gradient.

The counterpart of that is the delay from the time when birth rate starts to drop till the time when the population starts to crash. The birth rate dropped in the 1960's-70's but the population crash won't start until the 2020's.

No you misunderstood me. I am using rhetorical flourishes here by the score, but the basics are there. I have in the past, run my own computer simulations on this. 
 
The point about Vladivostok was only to indicate that Russian Europeans are likely to be affected as much as the Western parts. Russia seems to be likely to undergo its own Islamicisation. Even if the far east is more likely to come under Chinese control.  
 
Actually this question about Chinese demographics is an interesting one in its own right.  
 
The one child policy is going to have to be unwound at some point or else the future of China is just as doubtful as that of Europe. What will happen then? The fact that the Chinese policy is a planned demographic transformation obviously counts for something, but don't you wonder if it will prove more difficult to turn around than the planners imagine? 
 
The problem as I see it is that what makes these low birthrate population crashes so dangerous is the inverted demographic curve that results. You know with the aging population and very few young. That's what causes the frightening inertia when you try to turn it around. You have to wait decades for the bulge to move through the curve before the net population decline starts to turn around.

That's why they planted the trees along the Champs Elysee, so the Germans could march in the shade. 
 
For all that Randy, I've heard there never was a population crash like this one. Not since the black death.

Eoin I'd agree with that. The natural selection and the Christian revivalists and even Roman Catholic hardliners who refuse to use the pill. Whatever kind of Europe it is that one day reemerges from the crash, it's going to be very different from the Europe that went into it.  
 
But the crash itself is now unstoppable. The baby boomers are in their 50's, Whatever children they will ever have, they have already had or not as the case may be. (The females anyway).  
 
And also don't forget, many Europeans of talent are going to take one look at the collapsing situation and flee to America. This might benefit America but will further weaken Europe.  
 
I sometimes wonder though. How could rational Europe have got it so wrong? If only radical feminism had tempered itself with biological science. Population theory. This was so predictable. The intellectual classes in Europe were too much dominated by literary figures. Marxists and PoMos. Too few biologists. Yet women so dominate the life sciences.  
 
I will say this though. There is one thing that could still prove me utterly wrong: If human lifespan was to increase dramatically as a consequence of transhumanist technology. Then the falling birthrate would no longer matter.

Anyway Europe is a special case. Practically an entire continent has decided that breeding is optional. No one can save a lifeform that makes that decision. Even earthworms aren't that stupid. 
 
By 2020 many of the States of Europe will be facing the beginnings of a massive population crash as the ageing Baby-Boomers - the children of the last fertile generation - start to die without having anywhere-near replaced themselves. 
 
What we have seen of the second post-baby boom generation shows that they probably aren't going to resume breeding either. So this thing has momentum. It will take many decades at least until the death-spiral can be reversed. A generation would have to decide to breed and the bulge would have to pass through the entire 70-year demographic curve to fully halt the crash. That's not likely to happen now much before the 22nd century. If it happens at all.  
 
Remember this crash has been building since the pill became available in the 1960's. It's not long after that, when European women decided to stop having babies. By 2020's the s* is going to hit the fan. By 2030's it will be a full blown collapse. By 2040's it will be a panic. But by then there will be surprisingly few native Europeans under 50 and able to have children even if they wanted to. They'd have to be members of the third or fourth compounded scarcely-breeding generation. 
 
So the problem mankind faces is what are we going to do with the European wilderness, when the ageing humans that formerly inhabited it die off, leaving their pet dogs, cats and farm animals to inherit the earth? 
 
In a case like this, with a world that is so overpopulated elsewhere. It seems reasonable that squatters' rights prevail. The nearest available fecund population should just move in and take over the derilict real estate as it becomes vacant.  
 
Ergo the Islamicisation of Europe is really the only practical solution. 
 
If you think I'm exaggerating this I suggest you try running a computer simulation. Scary. 
 
BTW this crisis will consume, to varying degrees, the entire European heartland from Lisbon to Vladivostok. So who else if not the Muslims?  
 
I wonder if anyone has given any serious thought to the possibility that modern contraception combined with women's rights and rampant individualism could theoretically cause the extinction of the entire human race? 
 
Contraception if overused is deadly dangerous to the species. Why am I explaining this on GNXP of all places?

Aziz, that is a very perceptive comment, if I may say so.

Hi Razib, long time. 
 
I was wondering how this factor might impact all these projections.