The problems of liberalism are problems of success.

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If you live in a wealthy country, other things being equal, you are more likely to live alone, more likely to suffer from depression or anxiety, and less likely to have children.

One movement that believes it has the solution to these problems is national conservatism. His message is that politicians must defend the constitutional, cultural and religious traditions of the country in question.

The national conservatives are right about one thing: most of the problems the rich world wrestles with are problems of success. These range from comparatively minor inconveniences like traffic jams and crowded trains to existential threats like climate change and artificial intelligence.

But the difficulty for national conservatism and other populist movements is that addressing these issues is difficult, in part because they are so tied to things we want to keep.

One example is the rising cost of health care in the rich world. Most high-income countries have record numbers of people living over 65, and now their citizens are much less likely to die of heart attacks or strokes. Inevitably, this means higher healthcare costs, but no one wants to go back to a time when cardiovascular medicine was less effective.

Then there are the social problems whose causes are also problems of success: depression, anxiety and falling birth rates. And here the national conservatives are not entirely wrong. We have consistent evidence that religious attendance is positively correlated with higher life satisfaction. But the evidence also shows that as education levels rise, so does atheism.

Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t highly educated and financially successful religious believers. Nor should we lazily equate atheism with higher levels of liberalism and anti-populism. The UK’s major cities were, for the most part, reliable opponents of Brexit. But they are also more religious than rural areas or small towns.

Generally speaking, though, we have to assume that as people and places become more educated and technologically advanced, they will become more secular and receive fewer mental health and social benefits from religiosity.

A similar story can be seen in falling birth rates. Most countries in the rich world have birth rates below the replacement rate, that is, 2.1 children per woman. Again, this is a success problem: women have greater economic opportunities, divorce is easier, and people have better access and fewer legal barriers to contraception, both before and after conception. However, it comes at a cost: falling birth rates mean population declines and increase economic pressures on aging societies.

For national conservatives, whether the problem is the blues or birth rates, the solution to the downsides of secularism is more religion; and the antidote to falling birth rates is increased subsidies for “traditional” families and the stigmatization of people whose lifestyles deviate from the two-parent norm.

There are many objections that one can raise to this style of politics. But it doesn’t work on its own terms either. Hungary, one of the laboratories of national conservatism, still has a birth rate below the replacement ratedespite granting families aid for the purchase of new homes, as well as other tax benefits.

Nonetheless, liberals need to remember the amount of insight at the heart of national conservatism: poor mental health, loneliness, social isolation, and population decline are all real problems.

A frequently posed liberal response to population decline is simply to increase immigration, which works in the short run. But countries, like the UK, that integrate immigrants well quickly discover that the children of immigrants experience and struggle with the same problems as those who have been in the country for generations. Ethnic minority Britons are, on average, more religious than white Britons: but the mixed-race children of both are more liberal and more likely to be of “no religion” than any other group in the UK.

Not worrying about falling birth rates in the rich world in 2023 because you can fix the problem through immigration is a bit like being chill about climate change in the 1970s because no one in the developing world is going to buy a second car that consumes a lot of gasoline. It’s true now, but it won’t stay that way for long.

Sooner or later, the success problems of the rich world will become universal problems. Our difficulties in tackling climate change and other successful past problems should make liberals more focused on trying to identify solutions to new problems before they become global challenges.

stephen.bush@ft.com