The Extremists Are Being Born Where Nobody Is Allowed to Argue With Them

There is a demographic fact that Thomas Friedman puts at the centre of Hot, Flat, and Crowded, and once you hold it next to a political fact it stops being a statistic and becomes a danger. I want to lay the two side by side.

The Demographic Fact

The population of the world is going to grow substantially through the middle of this century; the standard projections put it in the region of nine billion. That growth is not evenly spread. The rich democracies are roughly flat or shrinking. The growth is concentrated in a set of poorer countries, some of which are expected to double or triple.

And the growth is young. A country whose population is doubling is a country whose median age is falling, whose cities are filling with men in their teens and twenties, and whose economy has to find something for them to do faster than any economy has ever managed.

None of this is controversial. It is the arithmetic of birth rates that have already happened.

The Political Fact

Now look at where those countries are on the map of political systems. Most of the growth is in countries governed by autocrats, where there are no civil liberties to speak of. Places where you cannot publish a newspaper, form a party, hold a demonstration, or tell the government it is wrong without paying for it.

So the population surge is not landing in societies that have mechanisms for absorbing grievance. It is landing in societies whose only mechanism for grievance is suppression, and whose rulers have every reason to point the grievance somewhere else.

Why This Is Non-Linear

A representative democracy would struggle with a doubling of its young population. Schools, housing, jobs, and patience would all run short. But a democracy has release valves. The young can vote, organise, protest, argue in public, and occasionally win, and the arguing itself absorbs energy that would otherwise go elsewhere.

An autocracy has none of those valves, and it has something worse: an incentive. A regime facing millions of young men with no work and no voice can do one of two things. It can reform, which means giving up power. Or it can supply an enemy, which costs nothing. History is unambiguous about which one regimes choose. The enemy is a neighbouring country, a religious minority, the West, or whoever is convenient, and the surplus young are trained to hate it.

That is why the danger is not proportional to the numbers. A million angry young men in a free country are a political problem. A million angry young men in a country whose government profits from their anger are an army waiting for a use. Double the population and you do not double the risk; you multiply it by whatever the regime decides to do with it.

The Part That Is Our Doing

It would be comfortable to treat this as a problem of other countries, but a good deal of it is a product of ours.

The autocrats who will be managing these populations are, in many cases, the autocrats the free world trades with, arms, and props up, because a stable dictator is a convenient trading partner and a democratic transition is unpredictable. I have written about the Nash equilibrium that keeps dictatorships in place: no single democracy gains from breaking ranks and refusing to deal with them, so none does.

The consequence is that we are subsidising the exact regimes that will have the strongest incentive to radicalise the largest number of young people in the coming decades, and we are doing it in the name of stability.

What Follows

I do not think the demographic fact can be changed on any relevant timescale. The children who will be twenty in 2050 are, for the most part, already being born.

The political fact can be changed, though not easily. Every country that moves from autocracy toward something with functioning release valves before its demographic peak is a country whose young will argue instead of march. Every country that does not is a problem we will meet later, at a much higher price. Which means the free world's policy of preferring the stable dictator is not merely cynical; it is a bet against arithmetic, and the arithmetic is not on our side.

Friedman's book is mostly about energy and climate. This is the passage I remember, because it is the one that is not about technology at all. It is about how many people there will be, where they will be, and whether anyone will be allowed to disagree with the person telling them whom to blame.