Population decline and its implications for the future
This past August, I wrote a column about a 1974 Saturday Review issue that assembled a group of luminaries to forecast what America and the world would be like 50 years hence in 2024.
Writer after writer warned of the challenges of over-population and the strain it would place on the planet’s resources.
What a difference 50 years makes.
Writing in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs, political economist Nicholas Eberstadt warns us that we have already entered an era of depopulation.
He writes that not since the Black Death in the 1300s has the population of the planet declined. This time it is not happening because of disease but because of choice.
The world’s population essentially quadrupled in the 20th century from 1.6 billion to 6.1 billion, principally because of modern medicine and sanitation. The average life expectancy globally in 1900 was 32 years. By 2021 it was 71 years.
Now, according to the U.N., two-thirds of the world’s population lives in countries with birth rates below the level of replacement (2.1) including the United States (1.6). By 2050, a generation away, 130 countries could experience more deaths than births.
Even in the Middle East, where demographers assumed that the Muslim faith would help sustain birth rates, the trend is the same. Iran has been below replacement for 25 years. Only Africa (4.3) remains solidly above replacement levels. But sharply falling birth rates are happening there, too.
Government programs, including handouts, have not done anything to reverse this trend. Women around the globe have decided that they do not want large families, and there has been what demographers call “the flight from marriage,” which is being delayed or avoided altogether.
Consider that demographers both within and outside of China believe that China, once the most populous nation, could see its population fall by 50% or more by the end of this century, a legacy of the one-child policy. What are the economic and foreign policy implications of that?
Europe and Russia, of course, have been below replacement for years. Russia’s population peaked at 149 million in 1993 and has fallen to 142 million or less.
It is not only that there are fewer births. Societies are getting older. The over-65 population is exploding but not as fast as the 80-plus cohort, a group that will need more — expensive — care because of dementia and other maladies.
The United States is a bit of an outlier. Yes, its birth rate is well below replacement level, but because of immigration — people want to come here — our population has continued to grow along with our economy.
Eberstadt warns that the implications are many and serious and that policymakers cannot delay in addressing these challenges. Of course, the caveat is that demographers were wrong 50 years ago. They could be wrong again, but what if they are not?
Pay-as-you-go pension and healthcare systems like Social Security and Medicare will not work anymore because the ratio of workers to retirees will become too narrow. People will have to save for their own long retirements.
Industrial nations could find themselves in a situation where they are competing to attract migrants. At a moment when we are talking about mass deportations, that seems almost incomprehensible. Eberstadt sees other implications. If families have but one child, will they support sending them off to war?
The Social Security and Medicare trust funds could be insolvent in less than a decade and we cannot get our leaders to address the issue. Getting them to take on a problem that might never happen seems impossible.
But the nations that address it first would no doubt come out on top
• Keith Peterson, of Lake Barrington, served 29 years as a press and cultural officer for the United States Information Agency and Department of State. He was chief editorial writer of the Daily Herald 1984-86. His new book “American Dreams: The Story of the Cyprus Fulbright Commission” is available from Amazon.com.