Hi, Matt!
Nope, Muslims aren't experiencing any kind of population explosion. I
know it's tempting to listen to the media and go off thinking that
Muslims are religiously or culturally tied to idea of having loads of
babies, but the driving force behind large families is only
incidentally culture. We used to worry in the West about our own
uncontrollable population growth. The wealthy looked down on the poor
and their ostensible fixation with large families, wondering what to
do about it. In the 1970s, we in the West worried about India and
claimed that poor Hindus had no idea how to use the ****ploads of birth
control pills we were sending them. I recall hearing it claimed that
they were tacking them on their front doors to ward off the evil
childbirth spirit. Such silliness, and it always boils down to racist
assumptions about how pre-modern people must think and what we can do
to help them be more like us.
In fact, prosperity is precisely your technological wonder that will
finally solve the population growth problem (which isn't really a
problem). As people become more prosperous, the economic value of each
additional child declines. Agricultural societies need those children
to work in the fields. Early industrializing societies expect them to
get jobs and work in factories to help out the family. Eventually it
turns around completely, so that each child is an economic cost. Some
societies that used to have relatively high population growth rates
are struggling with the problem of declining growth rates, which is
depriving them of needed labor. Those include, of course, only wealthy
countries. Taiwan is a good example. France also went through this.
The United States has yet to experience this because resources to
sustain families are still cheaper in the United States than in most
industrialized countries.
Here are the stats. First, the correlation between GDP per capita and
birthrate is r = -.55 (using simple linear regression; the correlation
is even stronger using a logarithmic transformation, which is more
accurate). This means that a whopping 30% (you have to square the
correlation to get this) of the variance in birth rate across
countries is the direct result of GDP per capita. This does not even
take into consideration the fact that higher birth rates will likewise
accompany higher infant mortality rates. By comparison, once you
control for per capita GDP, what is the correlation between "Muslim
country" and birth rate? It's only r = 0.18 (even less if you use the
more correct logarithmic progression noted previously). This means
that only 3% of variance in the birth rate around the world, once you
control for GDP per capita, comes from "being a Muslim country." The
fact that there is a natural lag between the growth in prosperity and
the consequent decline in the birth rate easily explains that small
percentage.
In fact, the world average birth rate is only 2.0%. The average birth
rate in Muslim countries is 2.7%. Thus, even disregarding the question
of prosperity, there is no frightening population explosion going on
in the Muslim world. That is just the product of the imaginings of the
same kind of people who once feared that all those poor, ignorant
Irish people with their bad habits, dirty fingernails, and funny way
of talking were going to overwhelm them by having too many babies.
It's just plain racism.
Cheers,
Muhâfidh
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