Pending Population Collapse

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In Brief: Supreme Court Gift Tally

In 2023, ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to reporting on corruption and power abuse at the highest levels of government, broke a story that should outrage everyone.

Conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was revealed to have routinely accepted lavish gifts from billionaire Harlan Crow, a megadonor to the Republican Party. These gifts ranged from all-expenses paid trips to luxury resorts in Bali, to Harlan Crow literally buying Justice Thomas’ mother a home in Savannah, Georgia.

This past week, an advocacy group called Fix The Court reported that in sum, Clarence Thomas has received nearly $2.4 million dollars worth of gifts between 2003 and 2024.

If you question why we should care about if nine of the most powerful and unelected individuals in the country are receiving gifts from billionaires, I urge you to ask your local public school teacher about the conflict of interest laws they are held too.

Suffice to say, there is very little stopping SCOTUS Justices from being more or less bribed in this fashion, besides, you know, ethics, which this court seems wholly devoid of.

Pending Population Collapse

For the larger part of a decade Japan has led the world in one of the most intriguing and alarming statistics: fertility rate.

A population’s fertility rate is the measure of the average total number of births a woman has in her lifetime. For a population to remain perfectly stable (as in, remain at the same number of people it currently has) a country’s fertility rate must be 2.1.

As of today, Japan has hit a record low fertility rate of just 1.2 births per woman. Its an astonishingly low number, but just the current bottom for a country that has been grappling with this trend for years.

It coincides with what many are calling Japan’s “marriage ice age”. In 2023 Japan saw the number of marriages fall by 5.9% to just 489,281 couples. A whole 200,000 fewer than 10 years ago. Many point to the country’s work culture as a primary source of the problem, which pushes notoriously long hours on employees. Whatever the reason, there is a clear schism of sorts occurring between men and women.

Its pushed Japan’s government to try some crazy ideas to spur, um, “interaction” between the sexes in the country. On June 7, Japan unveiled a government created dating app, called “Tokyo Futari Story" to encourage a new baby boom, and ease the future complications this trend will have on the country.

From a macro perspective, there are a mountain of challenges a declining fertility rate can create. Economically, it paints a complicated future for the country, as the declining fertility rate is leading to a lopsided population demographic; one with a larger aging population of people who no longer work, and a smaller, working-age population left to fund the country through taxes. This downward pressure on the nation’s budget will certainly have consequences if the trend does not turnaround

But Japan is not the only country facing this problem. And while there are cultural factors which influence this trend, the western world is seeing similar statistics.

Here in the US, our fertility rate has dropped all the way down to 1.66. The future isn’t exactly looking brighter here either, as a host of other trends point to this problem only worsening, rather than improving:

• Millennials and Gen Z are quite often leaving college straddled with debt, hampering their flexibility and choices during their 20’s.

• The US Census Bureau shows the median age for marriage in 2022 was 28.6 years old for women and 30.5 years old for men. A far cry from the year 2000 when those numbers were 25.1 and 26.8, respectively.

• Housing is dramatically more expensive, leading to a record 45% of people aged 18 to 29 who reported they live at home with their parents; an environment that doesn’t exactly promote having offspring.

• Male virginity is on the rise, with nearly 1 in 3 men below the age of 30 reporting zero sexual partners since the age of 18; indicating some level of social disconnect between the sexes.

• The rise of social media has certainly changed how people interact with one another, leading to a more digitally driven social environment, rather than in-person interaction.

• And then to top it off, we had a once in a generation global pandemic which dropped the equivalent of anti-social nuclear warhead on the entire US population (some of you entirely forgot how to act in public).

Suffice to say, we humans are experiencing a seismic shift in how we connect and interact in our day-to-day lives, and its having measurable impact on when, where, and how we choose to create families.