Wendt Scholar Nicholas Eberstadt

This essay outlines some of the implications of demographic trends in the Northeast Asia region over the coming generation. These few pages will make no attempt to drum up support for the proposition that "demography is destiny"--that famous aphorism often attributed to 19th century French social scientist Auguste Comte. For strategic thinkers and other students of human agency surveying an international chessboard over a time horizon measured in decades rather than eons, Comte's dictum promises far too much and delivers too little. It offers instead what may be regarded as a more modest but also more defensible argument: namely, that demography changes the realm of the possible. Demographic trends are doing just that before our very eyes today in Northeast Asia, methodically and inexorably. Indeed, over the coming generation it is entirely likely that demographic trends are going to change the realm of the possible in the Asia-Pacific in unprecedented and absolutely revolutionary ways. . . .

Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at AEI.

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