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The problem of global population stagnation is no longer science fiction

2024-03-14 21:00:00, Ekonomi CNA

We used to worry about the planet becoming overpopulated, but there are also many downsides to global population decline.

We imagined humanity populating the universe. In Isaac Asimov's book Foundation (1952), humanity has created a vast multiplanetary empire by the year 47,000.

When Asimov was born in 1920, the global population was about 1.9 billion. When he published his book "Foundation", it was 2.64 billion. By the time of his death in 1992, it was 5.5 billion, nearly three times what it was at his birth. Considering there were only 500 million people when Christopher Columbus landed in the New World, the spread of the homosapiens species into the modern era was an amazing feat.

No wonder some members of Asimov's generation feared overpopulation and worried about impending disaster. This led to all kinds of efforts to promote contraceptive methods and abortion, as described in the book "Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population" by Matt Connelly (2008). Among them was China's one-child policy, the most severe government intervention ever into human reproductive behavior.

On the surface, these efforts were a complete failure. Frank Notestein, the Princeton demographer who became the founding director of the United Nations Population Division (UNPD), estimated in 1945 that the world's population would be 3.3 billion by the year 2000. In fact, it exceeded 6.1 billion. Today it is estimated to be more than 8 billion. In the latest forecast, the UNPD median estimate is that the global population will reach 10.4 billion by the mid-2080s, with an upper limit of more than 12 billion by the end of the century.

However, this seems a low probability scenario. The European Commission's Center of Expertise on Population and Migration predicts that the global population will peak at 9.8 billion in the 2070s. According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent research organization, it will peak at a higher level lower and earlier, to 9.7 billion in 2064.

The key word is "peak". Almost all demographers now recognize that we are likely to reach the peak of humanity this century. This is not because a deadly pandemic will increase mortality much more than Covid-19, although that possibility should never be ruled out. Nor because the UNPD includes in its population model any other apocalyptic scenario, be it catastrophic climate change or nuclear war.

This is simply because, around the world, the total fertility rate (TFR) – the number of live children a woman gives birth to in her lifetime – has fallen since the 1970s. In one country after another, it has fallen below threshold 2.1, below which the population is bound to fall. This decline in fertility is in many ways the most remarkable trend of our age. And it's not just Elon Musk who worries that, "population collapse is potentially the greatest danger to the future of civilization."

But, to quote the UNPD, “More than half of the projected increase in global population, between 2022 and 2050, is expected to be concentrated in just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC], Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria , Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania.” This is because already, "nearly half of the global population lives in a country or area where the lifetime fertility rate is below 2.1 births per woman".

Not many people predicted the global collapse of fertility. No one expected this to happen anywhere. In South Korea the total fertility rate in 2023 is estimated to have been 0.72. In Europe, there is no longer any difference between Catholic and Protestant countries. Italy's current TFR (1.21) is lower than England's (1.44). There is no difference between Christian and Islamic civilizations—those great historical entities whose collisions the historian Samuel Huntington worried about. The total fertility rate in the US is now 1.62. The figure for the Islamic Republic of Iran is 1.54.

The timing of this great demographic transition has certainly changed. In the US, the TFR fell below 2.0 in 1973. In the UK, it happened a year later; in Italy in 1977. East Asian countries were not far behind: In South Korea the TFR was above 2.0 until 1984; in China until 1991. Fertility remained highest for longer in the Muslim world, but fell below 2.0 in Iran as early as 2001. Even in India TFR has now fallen below 2.0.

Only in sub-Saharan African countries does the birth rate remain well above the replacement rate. In the DRC, for example, the average woman still gives birth to more than 6 children. But even there, the birth rate is expected to decline significantly in the coming decades. Global TFR, according to the UNPD medium range projection, will fall from 2.3 in 2021 to 1.8 in 2100. Variations in estimates of when we will reach peak humanity depend largely on how quickly demographers think family size will to shrink in Africa.

Drivers of the Great Decline in Fertility

One theory, according to a thought-provoking 2006 study by Wolfgang Lutz, Vegard Skirbekk, and Maria Rita Testa, is that “societies progress up the hierarchy of needs from physical survival to emotional self-actualization, and as they do so, increasing children make the fastest decision, because people pursue other, more individualistic goals. People find other ways to find meaning in life." Another interpretation states that fertility falls as women's education and employment increase.

Over the past century, beginning in Western Europe and North America, a growing percentage of women have entered higher education and the skilled workforce. Improved education has also given women greater autonomy within relationships, a better understanding of contraception, and greater input into family planning. Many of them have chosen to delay becoming mothers in order to pursue their careers. And the opportunity cost of having children rises as women's wages rise relative to their male partners.

Another way of looking at the problem is that the industrial revolution reduced the importance of children as a source of unskilled labor. As countries develop economically, families invest more in their children, providing them with better education, which increases the cost of raising each child.

Cultural change has also played a role. One study estimated that roughly one-third of the decline in U.S. fertility between 2007 and 2016 was due to a decrease in births from unintended pregnancies.

Another major driver of the decline in fertility has been the decline in the importance of religion. Using data in the World Values ??Survey, we can identify a clear correlation between increasing secularization and declining family size.

Fertility can sometimes rise again – we remember the many babies born after Covid. Moreover, according to survey data, many women would like to have more children. In low-fertility countries, according to a 2019 study for the UN Population Fund, there is “a large gap between fertility aspirations at younger ages, and fertility achieved later in life, signaling that many women, men and couples face obstacles.”

That the main obstacles are the perceived economic costs of a larger family is proven by the fact that many of the most successful professional women have more than two children.

But can governments do anything to boost fertility across the board? They sure are trying. Since the 1970s, the number of countries aiming to increase fertility through a range of government incentives has increased roughly fivefold. But there are no examples in which pronatalist policies have actually worked. For years, President Vladimir Putin has urged Russians to have more children in order to prevent depopulation of the vast federation he governs. Although Russian fertility increased in the decade after 2000, the TFR never came close to 2, and has fallen back to 1.5.

What Mussolini called the "battle for births" is a losing proposition. The global trend is to facilitate abortion. (In the past 30 years, more than 60 countries have changed their abortion laws. All but four – the US, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Poland – made it easier to have an abortion.) A growing number of countries allow euthanasia and/or assisted suicide. No one knows exactly why, but bad food, polluted air and bad lifestyles have caused fertility and reproductive ability to decline.

Why reaching peak population is not positive

First, advanced countries, which already have declining populations, see the consequences of limited fertility: low economic growth, understaffed schools, overcrowded nursing homes, a general lack of youthful vibrancy.

Second, because fertility decline came later in the Middle East and North Africa, and has barely begun in sub-Saharan Africa, we are seeing a dramatic shift in the global demographic balance. This worries many of the predominantly white and predominantly Christian peoples who were globally dominant from 1750 to 2000.

Third, the peoples with the highest birth rates live mostly in poor countries, where climate change and armed conflicts are making them even less attractive. So they move if they can – through North Africa or West Asia to Europe, or through Mexico to the US – or, to a significant extent, engage in violent activities (crime or terrorism) from which they cannot escape.

All this increases the probability of right-wing politics in the developed world (the elderly vote for it and they are more than the young), more conflict (borders cannot be seriously defended without the threat of violence), the more rapid spread of infectious pathogens and no effective efforts to address the climate issue.

However, immigration still seems to the elites of North America and Europe, as the simplest solution to the problem of declining fertility. This is why, in high-income countries between 2000 and 2020, the contribution of net international immigration to population growth exceeded the ratio of births to deaths. It is not known what the geopolitical consequences of mass emigration will be.

Most experts struggle to understand that, when the human population begins to decline, it will do so not gradually, but almost as rapidly as it once rose.

The problem is that this sharp decline will come a century later, to avoid the catastrophic consequences of climate change that many people today fear – and which are another reason why people will flee Africa and a reason else why do young people in Europe say they will have few or no children.

For those, like Elon Musk, who still dream of building Asimov's galactic empire, such visions of human extinction are hard to fathom. He and the others swim against the tide, having five or six times as many offspring as the average male. But the reality is that a global TFR below 2.1 is a historical force more powerful than Mr. Musk./ Monitor.al - Bloomberg