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CIAO DATE: 12/03
It Will Be a Smaller World After All
On The Issues
March 2003
The United Nations has finally changed its demographic predictions. Instead of foreseeing population growth or even explosion, the new estimates acknowledge that world population is on course to shrink—with significant social, economic, and strategic implications.
Remember the number 1.85. It is the lodestar of a new demography. It should change the way we think about the environment, economics, geopolitics, culture, our current Middle East dilemma-and about ourselves.
Demographers have typically worked on the assumption that human population would level off by achieving a "Total Fertility Rate" of 2.1 children per woman. Why 2.1? Two parents have two children. Sooner or later the parents die and are "replaced" by their two children. (The .1 accounts for children who die before their own age of reproduction.) Were the projection substantially higher, the result would be wall-to-wall people. If substantially lower, before too long there would be no people at all. Either trend moves in a relatively rapid geometric progression. So 2.1 it was. Very nice, the base line of a symmetrical, perpetual, and ordered universe.
But no longer useful. For the last five years UN expert meetings have examined a trend that has been ever-more apparent for several decades: Never have birth rates fallen so far, so fast, so low, so surprisingly, for so long, in so many places. Now the United Nations has made it official, breaking demographic crockery everywhere. Its 2002 World Population Prospects uses 1.85 children per woman as the point to which human population is tending in this century.
What Do the Numbers Mean?
The United Nations divides the 194 nations of the world into two groups: Less Developed Countries and More Developed Countries. The most surprising news comes from the LDCs. An image races across our mind's eye: A population explosion and its victims. We see a row of small children trailing a weary mother in a rotten, sprawling, unmanageable city.
In the 1960s the LDC rate was six children per woman. Today it is under three. Some major nations have declined from seven to two! Huge declines have occurred in Brazil, China, Iran, India, Egypt, Turkey, Indonesia, and—attention Pat Buchanan!—Mexico.
Fortuitously, this scenario gives the LDCs a "demographic dividend." For several decades they will have relatively few old or young people to support. The bulk of their population will be working-age and ready to produce, hopefully lessening inequality in the world.
Meanwhile modern nations proceeded from low fertility to incredibly low fertility. In the 1960s European TFRs were at 2.6 children per woman. Today, the rate is 1.3, as is the Japanese. The low fertility nations face massive pension problems. In a pay-as-you-go system, who will pay the senior bees when there are so few worker bees? In Europe and Japan workers typically retire before their sixtieth birthday and do not like to hear that they might have to work until they are older. Workers have marched while politicians hide under their desks.
The United States is the outlier nation. American fertility is in the 2.0-2.1 range. And we take more immigrants than the rest of the world combined. Accordingly, in the next fifty years America will grow by more than 100 million people while Europe loses somewhat more than that.
The low fertility countries face commercial problems. A growing population requires additional housing. So builders build and furniture-makers make furniture. There is a demand for more office space. When a population is stable there are some tear-downs and renovations.
But when populations actually shrink, where are the buyers and renters? An open economic system can deal with dislocations, but it takes time. Salespeople in real estate and cemeteries both sell plots, but they are in very different businesses.
Low fertility can also yield labor shortages. There is an irony. Such shortages in low-fertility nations could be alleviated by immigration from higher-fertility nations, from poor countries to rich ones. But Europeans are mostly trying to reduce immigration and deport immigrants, especially since 9/11, especially Muslims.
While the economy faces bumpy times, the environmental future looks better. The original global warming research was based on a UN projection of 11.6 billion people, far more than we are ever likely to see. Environmentalists believe that too many people cause too much pollution. Accordingly, there will be less pollution than expected. We will not run out of oil, water, clean air, or kryptonite. There will be plenty of wilderness areas (which already make up almost half the world's surface.) We can take further solace that we have not lost upside control of our species, an idea held and popularized by some explosionists. It is a form of mindless demographic deconstruction that still undergirds too much of modern thought beyond the realm of demography.
Many environmentalists feel abandoned by the new data. But there is still plenty to do. Notwithstanding the decrease in fertility, total population will rise from a little over 6 billion to 8-9 billion before starting to shrink substantially. That is a lot of people. They will also be richer, consuming more resources, driving their SUVs. But wealthy countries have the money and have demonstrated their ability to clean up their mess.
Watch for cultural and social change. AEI demographer Nicholas Eberstadt asks us to consider children growing up without brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, or cousins—but with lots more living grandparents and great-grandparents. In China's urban areas children are already called "Little Emperors." The hot sales item in Italy is pet food not baby food. Sad potential grandmothers I have interviewed say that a pet and no grandchildren is better than just no grandchildren.
Strategic Impact
The geopolitical effects are potent. There is not a one-to-one relationship between population and power, as North Korea demonstrates. But numbers matter. Big nations, or big groups of nations acting in concert, can become superpowers. America is one. China and India are billion-plus nations that may shape the world as the years roll forward. Europe will shrink and age—absolutely and relatively.
Should the world face a "clash of civilizations," America may find itself with weaker allies, or allies with ever-greater proportions of Muslim voters. America may then be forced to play a greater role in defending and promoting the liberal, pluralist beliefs and values of Western civilization. We may have to do more, act more unilaterally, not because we want to, but because we have to.
Ben J. Wattenberg, a senior fellow at AEI, is author of The Birth Dearth and coauthor of The First Measured Century.
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