Demographics and Iran's imperial design
By Spengler
Aging populations will cause severe discomfort in the United States and extreme
pain in Japan and Europe by mid-century. But the same trends will devastate the
frail economies of the Islamic world, and likely plunge many countries into
social chaos.
By 2050, elderly dependents will comprise nearly a third of the population of
some Muslim nations, notably Iran - converging on America's dependency ratio at
mid-century. But it is one thing to face such a problem with America's per
capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $40,000, and quite another to face it
with Iran's per capita GDP of $7,000 - especially given that Iran will stop
exporting oil before the population crisis hits.
The industrial nations face the prospective failure of their pension systems.
But what will happen to countries that have no pension system, where
traditional society assumes the care of the aged and infirm? In these cases it
is traditional society that will break
down, horribly and irretrievably so. Below, I will review the relevant numbers.
In a recent essay, I argued that declining Muslim population growth rates give
the Islamists just one generation in which to strike out for their goal of
global theocracy (The
demographics of radical Islam, August 23). Muslim birth
rates are collapsing as literacy rises, that is, as the modern world intrudes
upon traditional society. Islamic traditional society is so fragile that it
crumbles as soon as women learn to read.
But the Islamists will not wait for traditional society to unravel. I grossly
underestimated Iran's new president Mahmud Ahmadinejad in a report on the
Iranian elections (Iran:
The living fossils' vengeance, June 28).
In programs made public on August 15, Ahmadinejad revealed a response worthy of
Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin to the inevitable unraveling of Iran's
traditional society. He proposes to reduce the number of villages from 66,000
to only 10,000, relocating 30 million Iranians. That is a preemptive response
to the inevitable depopulation of rural Iran, in keeping with a totalitarian
program for all aspects of Iranian society.
As Amir Taheri wrote in Arab News on August 20, "He [Ahmadinejad] wants the
state to play a central role in all aspects of people's lives and emphasizes
the importance of central planning. The state would follow the citizens from
birth to death, ensuring their health, education, well-being and leisure. It
will guide them as to what to read and write and what 'cultural products' to
consume so as not to be contaminated by Western ideas."
Reengineering the shape of Iran's population, the central plank of the new
government's domestic program, should be understood as the flip side of Iran's
nuclear coin. Aggressive relocation of Iranians and an aggressive foreign
policy both constitute a response to the coming crisis.
Iran claims that it must develop nuclear power to replace diminishing oil
exports. It seems clear that Iranian exports will fall sharply, perhaps to zero
by 2020, according to Iranian estimates. But Iran's motives for acquiring
nuclear power are not only economic but strategic. Like Hitler and Stalin,
Ahmadinejad looks to imperial expansion as a solution for economic crisis at
home.
Iran wants effective control of Iraq through its ascendant Shi'ite majority,
and ultimately control of the oil-rich regions of western Saudi Arabia, where
Shi'ites form a majority. As Pepe Escobar reported from Tehran (Iran
takes over Pipelineistan , Sep 10), Ahmadinejad wants to
make Iran a regional power not only in production but in transmission, through
a proposed oil pipeline through Iraq and Syria.
This may appear to be a desperate gamble, but conditions call for desperate
gambles. Ahmadinejad is not a throwback, as I wrote with a dismissiveness that
seems painful in hindsight. He has taken the measure of his country's crisis,
and determined to meet it head-on. Washington, from what I can tell, has no
idea what sort of opponent it confronts. Iranian dissidents were supposed to
push their country toward democratization, following the glasnost model
of Soviet deterioration, and contagion from the new democracy in Iraq was
supposed to hasten the process. Ahmadinejad's ascendancy took Washington by
complete surprise. Now there is nothing obvious the US can do to reduce Iran's
influence among Iraqi Shi'ites, or to prevent Iran from pursuing its nuclear
ambitions.
The
rising elderly dependent ratio, that is, the proportion of pensioners in the
general population, has given rise to a genre of apocalyptic literature in the
West: governments will raise taxes, debase the currency, cut pensions and flail
about hopelessly as the cost rises of supporting the rising number of aged. In
the US, pensioners now are 18% of the population, but will become 33% by 2050,
according to the United Nations' medium forecast. In other words, a full
additional 15% of the population will require support from the remaining
population.
Shifting a full 15% of the population from the ranks of the working to the
ranks of the retired will place an uncomfortable burden on American taxpayers,
to be sure. But the shift in the case of Muslim countries is much worse.
Between 2005 and 2050, the shift from workers to pensioners will comprise 21%
of Iranians, 19% of Turks and Indonesians, and 20% of Algerians. That is almost
as bad as the German predicament, where the proportion of dependent elderly
will rise from 28% in 2005 to 50% in 2050.
Each employed German worker will have to support a pensioner in 2050. A simple
way to express the problem is that German productivity must rise by 0.8% per
year between now and 2050 simply to maintain the same standard of living, for
that is the rate of productivity growth that would allow a smaller number of
German workers to produce the same amount of goods and services. That is not
inconceivable; during the 1990s, German productivity grew at such levels.
Productivity growth in the Arab world and Iran has been low or negative, and is
not likely to improve.
As I observed in my June analysis of Iran's presidential election, "From an
economic standpoint, Iran is a changeling monster, an oil well attached to an
iron lung, as it were, maintaining with subsidies a rural population that is no
longer viable. Oil and natural gas earn $1,300 a year for each Iranian, roughly
a fifth of per-capita GDP. The Islamic republic dispenses this wealth to keep
alive a moribund economy. Government spending has risen by four-and-a-half
times during the past four years, financed via the central bank's printing
press, pushing inflation up to 15% pa [per annum], while unemployment remains
at 11%."
Iran's ultra-Islamist government has no hope of ameliorating the crisis through
productivity growth. Instead it proposes totalitarian methods that will not
reduce the pain, but only squelch the screams. Iran envisages a regional
Shi'ite empire backed by nuclear weaponry. And Washington, from what I can
tell, has not a clue as to what is happening.
Apart from Iran, the population dynamics described above will lead to more
rather than fewer terrorist demonstrations. A school of thought represented by
Daniel Pipes, for example, holds that "terrorism obstructs the quiet work of
political Islamism", as Pipes wrote on August 3 in the New York Sun. "In
tranquil times, organizations like the Muslim Council of Britain and the
Council on American-Islamic Relations effectively go about their business,
promoting their agenda to make Islam dominant and imposing dhimmitude (whereby
non-Muslims accept Islamic superiority and Muslim privilege). Westerners
generally respond like slowly boiled frogs are supposed to, not noticing a
thing."
Here I think Pipes is wrong; the Islamists have to strike quickly and
decisively, not only to advance their cause in the West but also to consolidate
their power in home countries where conditions will become unstable before
long.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
for information on
sales, syndication and
republishing .)