That, I suppose, is the converse of “magnificently right,” J. M. Keynes famous headline about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Fox News reports:
President Obama won’t put an “artificial deadline” on Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program but said Monday that the Islamic Republic’s obtaining a nuclear weapon would be not only a threat to Israel and the U.S. but “profoundly destabilizing” to the international community in general.
In talks with reporters after a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Obama said he would not let talks go on forever, but the June election in Iran will be revealing about whether there is a chance for progress with Tehran by the end of the year.
“Iran is a country of extraordinary history and extraordinary potential and we want them to be a full-fledged member of the international community, and be in a position to provide opportunity and prosperity for their people but that the way to achieve those goals is not through the pursuit of a nuclear weapon,” Obama said.
But quantifiable factors do not explain the sudden collapse of fertility. It seems that a spiritual decay has overcome Iran, despite best efforts of a totalitarian theocracy. Popular morale has deteriorated much faster than in the “decadent” West against which the Khomeini revolution was directed. In a recent paper entitled “Education and the World’s Most Raid Fertility Decline in Iran [2], American and Iranian demographers observe:The census points to a continued fall in fertility, even from today’s extremely low levels, the paper maintains.
Iran’s potential, sadly, is on a slow asymptote towards zero. The Islamic Republic has an opiates addiction rate ten times that of the US, among other widespread social pathologies. But the worst of it is that the decline in Iran’s birth rate is without precedent. As I wrote (as “Spengler”) in a recent essay,
Iran is dying. The collapse of Iran’s birth rate during the past 20 years is the fastest recorded in any country, ever. Demographers have sought in vain to explain Iran’s population implosion through family planning policies, or through social factors such as the rise of female literacy.
A first analysis of the Iran 2006 census results shows a sensationally low fertility level of 1.9 for the whole country and only 1.5 for the Tehran area (which has about 8 million people) ... A decline in the TFR [total fertility rate] of more than 5.0 in roughly two decades is a world record in fertility decline. This is even more surprising to many observers when one considers that it happened in one of the most Islamic societies. It forces the analyst to reconsider many of the usual stereotypes about religious fertility differentials.
