#demography

By about 2084, according to the gold-standard UN "World Population Prospects," the global population will officially begin its decline. Rich countries will all have become like Japan, stagnant & aging. And the rest of the world will have become old before it ever got the chance to become rich. Oh, and did I tell you that's the good news? In reality the population is set to decline decades ahead of UN expectations. None of this is good news, but it doesn't necessarily foretell extinction. Humans are very resilient & are not dumb. We survived ice ages, plagues, famines & near-extinction bottlenecks. One way to counter the problem is massive immigration. That, of course, is a double-edged sword because nations shrink as humans are distributed. Countries can die, but the species won't. A fertility of 1.0 halves the population but never hits zero. Even a fertility rate of 1.0 still produces children—just not enough to maintain population size.

We adapt through technology & economic incentives. When labor becomes scarce, societies adapt through automation, AI labor, pro-natal policies, immigration incentives & reproductive tech such as IVF, gene editing & artificial wombs. There are risks to low birth rates. They include economic contraction (fewer workers, slower growth, shrinking tax base). A world where 40-50% of people are over 60 is mathematically unsustainable under current systems, which would strain pension & healthcare systems. There could be regional extinction. Nations, languages & cultures can disappear. Examples already underway include rural Japan, Italian hill towns, Bulgarian villages, the South Korean countryside & Baltic regions. Young people drive inventions. A world composed mainly of retirees drains the economic system & innovates less.

Two days before we left US Embassy Beijing in 2001, a friend from Wenzhou invited me to a dinner with leaders of the Wenzhou community in Beijing. It was especially interesting since Wenzhou has been one of China’s prime centers of entrepreneurship and for the stories I heard about how hard it was for members of the Wenzhou business community to get a Beijing hukou. The visit was fascinating, I…

The fall is astonishing. At its height, the global fertility rate hit 5.3 births per woman in 1963, but it has been in near-constant decline ever since. 60 years on, it is now only around 2.2. In many countries, it is far lower than the roughly 2.1 babies per woman in the world that would sustain current population sizes, known as the replacement rate. A rapidly aging population & declining birth rate are very much real. Despite this, our present population is 8.2 billion and rising. The UN expects the number of humans to peak at 10.3 billion by 2080 before it drops slightly. That figure, however, is disputed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation as well as certain European research groups predicting a global peak around 2050-2060, with population falling back towards 6-8 billion by 2100. Many countries are now facing a new issue—an aging population with fewer young people to take their place. We need young people to keep fresh ideas flowing & work jobs that elderly people struggle to do. Nearly all areas of the Earth are experiencing aging. A smaller number of people will be around to support retirees and the elderly.

Japan is grappling with an aging population by using robots. They are actually paying parents money to encourage them to have more children, while Denmark has a tongue-in-cheek campaign called "Do It For Denmark," urging people to go on more vacations to get knocked up. Iran is so concerned about their low birth rate that hospitals & clinics stopped offering vasectomies or handing out contraceptives. China is now pushing families to have 3 children, no longer encouraging only one child per family under threat of penalties. So what does a low birth rate mean? Fewer people will make & consume less stuff. There will be fewer new homes & new schools and less demand for services such as restaurants & shops. There will be less money to maintain transport & infrastructure, & military strength could decline. When people in authoritarian societies begin having more babies than those in liberal democracies, over the long haul, those people could inherit the Earth.

As you look at the chart below, the message is obvious – the US Birth Rate continues to exceed the death rate. Sure, we have smaller families, and we’ve dropped below that 2.07 births per woman that maintains a population – but the projections of more deaths than births aren’t coming into effect for another 15 years. China has already crossed the line – this chart shows when it…