Mar 11, 2024 05:36 PM
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articl...l-ferguson
EXCERPTS: . . . Today it is estimated to be more than 8 billion. In its most recent projection, the UNPD’s median estimate is that the global population will reach 10.4 billion by the mid 2080s, with an upper bound of more than 12 billion by the end of the century.
Yet that seems rather a low-probability scenario. The European Commission’s Centre of Expertise on Population and Migration projects 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 lower level and earlier still, at 9.7 billion in 2064.
The key word is “peak.” Nearly all demographers now appreciate that we shall likely reach peak humanity this century. This is not because a lethal pandemic will drive up mortality far more than Covid-19 did, though that possibility should never be ruled out. Nor is it because the UNPD incorporates into its population model any other apocalyptic scenario, whether disastrous climate change or nuclear war.
It is simply because, all over the world, the total fertility rate (TFR) — the number of live children the average woman bears in her lifetime — has been falling since the 1970s. In one country after another, it has dropped under the 2.1 threshold (the “replacement rate,” allowing for childhood deaths and sex imbalances), below which the population is bound to decline. This fertility slump is in many ways the most remarkable trend of our era. And it is not only Elon Musk who worries that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization.”
[...] Not many people foresaw the global fertility collapse. Nor did just about anyone expect it to happen everywhere. And I can’t recall a single pundit predicting just how low it would go in some countries. In South Korea the total fertility rate in 2023 is estimated to have been 0.72. In Europe there is no longer a difference between Roman Catholic and Protestant countries. Italy’s current TFR (1.21) is lower than England’s (1.44). Nor is there a difference between Christian and Islamic civilizations — those great historical entities whose clashes the historian Samuel Huntington worried about. The US total fertility rate is now 1.62. The figure for the Islamic Republic of Iran is 1.54.
[...] What are the drivers of the great fertility slump? One theory, according to a thought-provoking 2006 paper 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, rearing children gets short shrift because people pursue other, more individualist aims. … People find other ways to find meaning in life.” Another interpretation (see for example this paper by Ron Lesthaeghe) gives the agency to women, emphasizing that fertility drops as female education and employment rise.
Over the past century, beginning in Western Europe and North America, a rising proportion of women have entered higher education and the skilled labor force. Improved education has also given women greater autonomy within relationships, a better understanding of contraception, and greater input into family planning. Many have opted to delay becoming mothers in order to pursue their careers. And the opportunity cost of having children increases as women’s wages rise relative to their male partners.
[...] Cultural change has also played a part. One study estimated that roughly a third of the decline in fertility in the US between 2007 and 2016 was due to the decline in unintended births. My generation — the baby boomers — were more impulsive and indeed reckless about sex. By contrast, according to the psychologists Brooke Wells and Jean Twenge, millennials have fewer sex partners on average than we did.
[...] The fact that the declines in sexual activity were most pronounced among students and men with lower incomes and with part-time or no employment suggests that declining sexual activity is economically determined. However, other possible explanations include the “stress and busyness of modern life,” the supply of “online entertainment that may compete with sexual activity,” elevated rates of depression and anxiety among young adults, the detrimental effect of smartphones on real-world human interactions, and the lack of appeal to women of “hooking up.”
[...] Another key driver of declining fertility has been declining religiosity.
[...] That the main obstacles are the perceived economic costs of a larger family is borne out by the fact that many of the most successful professional women have more than two children. In the words of Moshe Hazan and Hosny Zoabi, “the cross‐sectional relationship between fertility and women’s education in the US has recently become U‐shaped. … By substituting their own time for market services to raise children and run their households, highly educated women are able to have more children and work longer hours.”
But not everyone can be a supermom with a crew of house managers and nannies. Can governments do anything to push back up fertility across the board? They are certainly trying...
[...] What Mussolini called “the battle for births” is a losing proposition. The global trend is to make abortion easier. ... A growing number of countries permit euthanasia and/or assisted suicide. Average sperm counts have fallen by more than 50% in 50 years. No one knows exactly why, but bad food, bad air and bad lifestyle are the contenders. How Mankind Chose Extinction will be an interesting read if anyone is left to write it.
Half a century ago, we worried about The Population Bomb (the title of Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller). Now that we can see “peak humanity” within our children’s lifetimes — conceivably in the 2060s — why isn’t everyone breathing a sigh of relief? I can think of three reasons.
First, the advanced countries that already have declining populations find the consequences of fertility restriction rather melancholy: low economic growth, empty schools, crowded retirement homes, a general lack of youthful vitality.
Second, because the fertility drop 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 in favor of people with darker pigmentation — as a Scotsman married to a Somali, I am doing my part for this trend — many of them Muslims. This worries many of the mostly white and mostly Christian peoples who were globally dominant from around 1750 to 2000.
Third, the peoples with the highest fertility mostly live in poor places that climate change and armed conflict are making even less appealing. So they move if they can — through North Africa or Western Asia toward Europe, or via Mexico to the US — or, to a significant extent, get involved in violent activities (crime or terrorism) where they can’t escape.
All this drives up the probability of right-wing politics in the developed world (old people vote for this and they outnumber the young), more conflict (borders can’t seriously be defended without at least the threat of violence), the more rapid spread of infectious pathogens, and no effective attempt to address the climate issue.
Yet immigration still seems to North American and European elites to be the simplest solution to the problem of falling fertility...
[...] In contemplating these and other scenarios, most pundits struggle to grasp that, when the human population begins to fall, it will do so not gradually, but almost as steeply as it once rose...
[...] The problem is that this precipitous decline will come a century too late to avert the disastrous consequences of climate change that many today fear — and which are another reason why people will flee Africa, and another reason why young people in Europe say they will have few or no children... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: . . . Today it is estimated to be more than 8 billion. In its most recent projection, the UNPD’s median estimate is that the global population will reach 10.4 billion by the mid 2080s, with an upper bound of more than 12 billion by the end of the century.
Yet that seems rather a low-probability scenario. The European Commission’s Centre of Expertise on Population and Migration projects 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 lower level and earlier still, at 9.7 billion in 2064.
The key word is “peak.” Nearly all demographers now appreciate that we shall likely reach peak humanity this century. This is not because a lethal pandemic will drive up mortality far more than Covid-19 did, though that possibility should never be ruled out. Nor is it because the UNPD incorporates into its population model any other apocalyptic scenario, whether disastrous climate change or nuclear war.
It is simply because, all over the world, the total fertility rate (TFR) — the number of live children the average woman bears in her lifetime — has been falling since the 1970s. In one country after another, it has dropped under the 2.1 threshold (the “replacement rate,” allowing for childhood deaths and sex imbalances), below which the population is bound to decline. This fertility slump is in many ways the most remarkable trend of our era. And it is not only Elon Musk who worries that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization.”
[...] Not many people foresaw the global fertility collapse. Nor did just about anyone expect it to happen everywhere. And I can’t recall a single pundit predicting just how low it would go in some countries. In South Korea the total fertility rate in 2023 is estimated to have been 0.72. In Europe there is no longer a difference between Roman Catholic and Protestant countries. Italy’s current TFR (1.21) is lower than England’s (1.44). Nor is there a difference between Christian and Islamic civilizations — those great historical entities whose clashes the historian Samuel Huntington worried about. The US total fertility rate is now 1.62. The figure for the Islamic Republic of Iran is 1.54.
[...] What are the drivers of the great fertility slump? One theory, according to a thought-provoking 2006 paper 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, rearing children gets short shrift because people pursue other, more individualist aims. … People find other ways to find meaning in life.” Another interpretation (see for example this paper by Ron Lesthaeghe) gives the agency to women, emphasizing that fertility drops as female education and employment rise.
Over the past century, beginning in Western Europe and North America, a rising proportion of women have entered higher education and the skilled labor force. Improved education has also given women greater autonomy within relationships, a better understanding of contraception, and greater input into family planning. Many have opted to delay becoming mothers in order to pursue their careers. And the opportunity cost of having children increases as women’s wages rise relative to their male partners.
[...] Cultural change has also played a part. One study estimated that roughly a third of the decline in fertility in the US between 2007 and 2016 was due to the decline in unintended births. My generation — the baby boomers — were more impulsive and indeed reckless about sex. By contrast, according to the psychologists Brooke Wells and Jean Twenge, millennials have fewer sex partners on average than we did.
[...] The fact that the declines in sexual activity were most pronounced among students and men with lower incomes and with part-time or no employment suggests that declining sexual activity is economically determined. However, other possible explanations include the “stress and busyness of modern life,” the supply of “online entertainment that may compete with sexual activity,” elevated rates of depression and anxiety among young adults, the detrimental effect of smartphones on real-world human interactions, and the lack of appeal to women of “hooking up.”
[...] Another key driver of declining fertility has been declining religiosity.
[...] That the main obstacles are the perceived economic costs of a larger family is borne out by the fact that many of the most successful professional women have more than two children. In the words of Moshe Hazan and Hosny Zoabi, “the cross‐sectional relationship between fertility and women’s education in the US has recently become U‐shaped. … By substituting their own time for market services to raise children and run their households, highly educated women are able to have more children and work longer hours.”
But not everyone can be a supermom with a crew of house managers and nannies. Can governments do anything to push back up fertility across the board? They are certainly trying...
[...] What Mussolini called “the battle for births” is a losing proposition. The global trend is to make abortion easier. ... A growing number of countries permit euthanasia and/or assisted suicide. Average sperm counts have fallen by more than 50% in 50 years. No one knows exactly why, but bad food, bad air and bad lifestyle are the contenders. How Mankind Chose Extinction will be an interesting read if anyone is left to write it.
Half a century ago, we worried about The Population Bomb (the title of Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller). Now that we can see “peak humanity” within our children’s lifetimes — conceivably in the 2060s — why isn’t everyone breathing a sigh of relief? I can think of three reasons.
First, the advanced countries that already have declining populations find the consequences of fertility restriction rather melancholy: low economic growth, empty schools, crowded retirement homes, a general lack of youthful vitality.
Second, because the fertility drop 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 in favor of people with darker pigmentation — as a Scotsman married to a Somali, I am doing my part for this trend — many of them Muslims. This worries many of the mostly white and mostly Christian peoples who were globally dominant from around 1750 to 2000.
Third, the peoples with the highest fertility mostly live in poor places that climate change and armed conflict are making even less appealing. So they move if they can — through North Africa or Western Asia toward Europe, or via Mexico to the US — or, to a significant extent, get involved in violent activities (crime or terrorism) where they can’t escape.
All this drives up the probability of right-wing politics in the developed world (old people vote for this and they outnumber the young), more conflict (borders can’t seriously be defended without at least the threat of violence), the more rapid spread of infectious pathogens, and no effective attempt to address the climate issue.
Yet immigration still seems to North American and European elites to be the simplest solution to the problem of falling fertility...
[...] In contemplating these and other scenarios, most pundits struggle to grasp that, when the human population begins to fall, it will do so not gradually, but almost as steeply as it once rose...
[...] The problem is that this precipitous decline will come a century too late to avert the disastrous consequences of climate change that many today fear — and which are another reason why people will flee Africa, and another reason why young people in Europe say they will have few or no children... (MORE - missing details)