I read in a press agency that a few months ago, a learned European visited an African village and explained to a Kenyan villager that the European birth rate was at rock bottom, and that the lowest was the Spanish situated precisely in 1,3 children per woman. The surprised and amazed villager responded with his age-old logic: Well, those countries must be very poor."

The European white man was certainly a learned one, because indeed, according to a recent publication of Eurostat (the statistical office of the EC) the birth rate in Europe is below the threshold of generational replacement (2,1 children per woman) since 1975. In Spain already in 1989 it was in last place with 1,3 children per woman. This rate continues to decrease meaning that immigrants will be indispensable.

However, the villager's age-old economic logic was also very learned because it coincides a hundred per cent with the Theory of Population explained by Hayek, the Nobel Prize for Economy, in his last book Fatal Arrogance before dying last year. In it he gave an 180º turn to the relic of Malthus's Theory of Population, which has been appealed to so many times in the last few decades. Malthus makes very interesting contributions but that Malthusianism of the Theory of Population according to which food would grow in arithmetic progression while the population, in a comfortable economic situation, would grow in geometric progression, has been revealed as a great pessimistic foolishness.

Hayek however observes that the necessities of more and more numerous populations have been met and that Nature is generous if we know how to dominate and work on it respecting its rules. Our difficulties come from our ignorance and from shortcomings in human organization. This contemporary economist that has been one of the most outstanding pioneers in the prediction of impoverishment and failure of the communist and socialist economic systems, explains that demographic increase favours a more elaborated differentiation and specialization giving rise to subsequent economic strengthening due to the natural tendency of people to learn and practice those new abilities. Those societies can take advantage of human economic resources, which before were nonexistent and in this way notably increase the productivity of the system. Simple peaceful coexistence alone gives rise to greater exploitation of the available resources of a larger and more dynamic population.

We can contribute two pieces of significant data:

1) At the dawn of this 20th century that is now dying, Europe represented a quarter of the total population of the planet. Today it is 6% and in the year 2025 it will be about 3%. Then it is calculated that more than half of the population will live in Asia.

2) If Spain had the same density as Belgium, about 160 million Spaniards could live in its homeland.

It does not appear that the density of Belgium is an obstacle for it to be among the countries where one can live most comfortably. But many will say what an atrocity! - with so much unemployment and poverty that is the limit. Well I sincerely believe like Hayek that exactly the opposite would occur. A rise in the population increases the objective necessities of goods and especially services. Consequently their demand grows and that implies an incentive to try and satisfy it. All demand is in short work demand, and work is better guided and stimulated if its fruits are destined to advance physically and intellectually those who we know and see grow. I do not know if official unemployment statistics would end up diminishing but I am sure that theoretically unemployed would work like crazy in the black economy blowing noses, teaching how to play marbles, hide and seek or changing dirty nappies, the latest in perfection and absorbent softness.

Infantile pranks and the purity of ingenuous vitality and youthful riot would then cause, as if by the art of enchantment, the necessary upheaval for the transformation from sad passive, comfort-loving and routine boredom into hopeful joie de vivre. Economics does not just consist of cold and tedious figures. The voluntary negation of love in the age-old classic style of surrender so forgotten and rejected, and the hatred and conscious blocking of offspring, helps us go on through the world with no more horizons than staring self-absorbed at our own personal navel. Our Kenyan friend would probably think that we are diminished; that we do not possess, nor exist, nor know, nor have ability.

Joking aside and summarizing: widespread aging causes economic depression and continuous youth predicts a new and better economic rebirth.

Joseph John Franch Menéu
Diario 16, Wednesday September 15th 1993