Rough Notes
Paul Truesdell dot Com
When a nation loses its people, it loses everything else shortly thereafter. This is not philosophy or political commentary. This is arithmetic. An economy requires workers to produce, consumers to purchase, and taxpayers to fund the infrastructure that makes commerce possible. Remove the people, and the entire system unravels like a cheap sweater.
History offers no shortage of examples, and they are worth examining because the patterns repeat with uncomfortable regularity.
Start with the American West. The ghost towns scattered across Nevada, California, Colorado, and Arizona tell the same story over and over again. Rhyolite, Nevada, exploded into existence in 1904 when gold was discovered nearby. Within three years, the population swelled to somewhere between five and ten thousand people. They built a train station, a stock exchange, an opera house, and a three-story bank made of concrete. By 1920, the population was fourteen. The gold played out, the miners left, and everything they built became a monument to impermanence. Bodie, California, followed a similar arc. At its peak in 1879, nearly ten thousand people lived there, making it one of the largest towns in California. Today it sits frozen in time, a state historic park where tourists wander through buildings that housed saloons, churches, and general stores. The people vanished because the economic engine that brought them there sputtered and died. Centralia, Pennsylvania, offers a more recent and peculiar example. A coal mine fire started in 1962 and never stopped burning. The underground fire made the town uninhabitable, and the government relocated nearly everyone. A town that once had over a thousand residents now has fewer than ten. The economic foundation literally went up in smoke, and so did the community.
Florida has its own collection of forgotten places. Marion County saw several small commercial centers rise and fall before modern development patterns took hold. Ocklawaha was once a busy steamboat landing on the Ocklawaha River, a genuine hub of commerce when waterways were the highways of their day. When the railroads came and the steamboats became obsolete, Ocklawaha faded into obscurity. Fort King, the original reason Ocala exists at all, was a military outpost that sparked settlement in the region. When the Seminole Wars ended, the fort closed, and the original settlement patterns shifted. Dunnellon provides an interesting case study in survival. The town boomed when phosphate was discovered in the 1880s, and for a brief moment it was one of the wealthiest small towns in America per capita. When the phosphate played out, Dunnellon could have become another ghost town. Instead, it stabilized at a modest size and maintained its city character. Today they celebrate Boomtown Days as a nod to that history. The town sits near the Withlacoochee and Rainbow Rivers, and while the surrounding area has grown considerably, Dunnellon itself never recaptured that original boom. It found equilibrium at a smaller scale, which is more than most boom towns manage.
The ancient world offers examples on a grander scale. The Aztec Empire collapsed not primarily because of Spanish military superiority but because European diseases decimated a population with no immunity. Smallpox, measles, and typhus killed millions. Some estimates suggest that ninety percent of the indigenous population of Mexico died within a century of contact. You cannot maintain an empire, collect taxes, field armies, or sustain an economy when ninety percent of your people are dead. The Spanish did not so much conquer the Aztecs as inherit the ruins of a civilization that disease had already destroyed.
The Roman Empire took centuries to decline, but population loss played a significant role. The Antonine Plague in the second century killed millions. The Plague of Cyprian in the third century killed millions more. Armies could not be recruited, farms could not be worked, and tax revenues collapsed. Rome did not fall in a single dramatic moment. It bled out slowly as its population dwindled and its economic capacity declined in parallel.
The Black Death that swept through Europe in the fourteenth century killed somewhere between thirty and sixty percent of the entire population. The economic consequences were staggering. Labor became so scarce that the feudal system began to collapse. Peasants who survived could demand higher wages because there simply were not enough workers to go around. Entire villages disappeared. Trade routes that had functioned for centuries were disrupted. The economic map of Europe was redrawn by a bacterium.
The United States experienced its own population shock with the influenza pandemic of 1918, which arrived on the heels of World War One. Estimates suggest somewhere between fifty and one hundred million people died worldwide, with about 675,000 deaths in America. The pandemic killed disproportionately among young, working-age adults, which made its economic impact more severe than the raw numbers might suggest. Cities shut down, businesses closed, and the economic disruption was substantial, though the nation recovered relatively quickly because the underlying demographic structure remained intact.
COVID-19 moved the needle but did not fundamentally alter the demographic trajectory of most nations. The deaths were tragic, concentrated among the elderly, and the economic disruption from lockdowns and behavioral changes was significant. But COVID did not produce the kind of civilizational population collapse that the Black Death or the diseases that destroyed the Aztecs caused.
China presents a different and more instructive case. The demographic crisis unfolding there is not the result of plague or war. It is the consequence of deliberate government policy. The one-child policy implemented under Deng Xiaoping and maintained for decades has produced a demographic time bomb. For forty years, the government told families they could have only one child, enforced through fines, job losses, and in many cases forced abortions and sterilizations. The policy worked. Birth rates collapsed. And now China faces the consequences.
The population is aging rapidly while the working-age population shrinks. The official numbers suggest China has about 1.4 billion people, but serious analysts question whether those figures are accurate. Local governments had incentives to inflate population counts because funding and political standing depended on those numbers. The actual population may be significantly lower. Meanwhile, the real estate sector, which has accounted for roughly thirty percent of Chinese economic activity, is imploding. Massive apartment towers sit empty in cities across the country. Developers have defaulted on hundreds of billions in debt. Young people who were supposed to buy those apartments and fill those cities are not being born in sufficient numbers.
When a nation finds itself short of people, history suggests there are limited options. You can try to encourage higher birth rates, but that takes a generation to produce results. You can import workers through immigration, but that requires a society willing to accept outsiders. Or you can take people from somewhere else.
Taiwan looks very different through this lens. The island is not merely a semiconductor manufacturing hub or a symbolic challenge to American power in the Pacific. Taiwan has twenty-three million people who speak the same language and share significant cultural heritage with mainland China. If demographic math is driving strategic calculations in Beijing, Taiwan represents a potential solution to a population problem that grows more acute every year.
This is not so different from the logic that drove conquest throughout human history. Genghis Khan did not conquer ...
