As Nicholas Eberstadt and Apoorva Shah of the American Enterprise Institute point out, over the past three decades, the Arab world has undergone a little noticed demographic implosion. Arab adults are having many fewer kids.
The speed of the change is breathtaking. A woman in Oman today has 5.6 fewer babies than a woman in Oman 30 years ago. Morocco, Syria and Saudi Arabia have seen fertility-rate declines of nearly 60 percent, and in Iran it’s more than 70 percent. These are among the fastest declines in recorded history.
The Iranian regime is aware of how the rapidly aging population and the lack of young people entering the work force could lead to long-term decline. But there’s not much they have been able to do about it. Maybe Iranians are pessimistic about the future. Maybe Iranian parents just want smaller families….
Brooks is way behind the curve. Spengler of Asia Times Online has been talking about the Iranian and greater Arab demographic implosion for years and its consequences for geopolitics in the Middle East.
I believe the only region where there isn’t an implosion is sub-Saharan Africa (even South America is starting to implode). As the narrator of a PBS series said many years ago: “The face of humanity is not always white.”