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Follow the Babies
POPULATION DROUGHT, THE AFRICAN BABY BOOM, AND THE NEXT INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
A baby comes to the world not only with a mouth and a stomach, but also with a pair of hands.
—EDWIN CANNAN, BRITISH ECONOMIST AND DEMOGRAPHER
The pace of population growth seems terrifying. In 1820 there were a billion people on Earth. A century later, there were more than 2 billion. After a brief hiatus resulting from the Great Depression and World War II, the rate of growth gathered breathtaking speed: 3 billion by 1960, 4 billion by 1975, 5 billion by 1987, 6 billion by 2000, and 7 billion by 2010. “Population control or race to oblivion?” was a tagline on the cover of Stanford University professors Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s highly influential book The Population Bomb, published in 1968. Since then, governments around the world and large segments of the public have been seriously alarmed by what they think is inevitable: we’ll overrun the planet and destroy ourselves (and millions of plant and animal species) in the process.
The reality is that by 2030 we will be facing a baby drought.
Over the next few decades, the world’s population will grow less than half as swiftly as it did between 1960 and 1990. In some countries, the population will actually decrease in size (absent very high rates of immigration). For instance, since the early 1970s, American women have on average had fewer than two babies each over their reproductive lifetime—a rate insufficient to ensure generational replacement. The same is also true in many other places around the world. People in countries as diverse as Brazil, Canada, Sweden, China, and Japan are starting to wonder who will take care of the elderly and pay their pensions.
As birth rates decline in East Asia, Europe, and the Americas, combined with a much slower decline in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, the global balance of economic and geopolitical power shifts. Consider: For every baby born nowadays in developed countries, more than nine are being born in the emerging markets and the developing world. Told another way, for every baby born in the United States, 4.4 are being born in China, 6.5 in India, and 10.2 in Africa. Moreover, improvements in nutrition and disease prevention in the poorest parts of the world have made it possible for an increasing number of babies to reach adulthood and become parents themselves. Half a century ago one in four children under the age of fourteen in African countries such as Kenya and Ghana died, whereas today it’s fewer than one in ten.
These swift changes in the relative populations of various parts of the world are being driven not only by who’s having more babies but also by whose life expectancy is increasing more rapidly. For instance, back in the 1950s people born in the least developed parts of the world were expected to live an average of thirty fewer years than those born in the most developed. Nowadays the difference is seventeen years. Between 1950 and 2015, mortality rates dropped by just 3 percent in Europe but by a whopping 65 percent in Africa. The poorer countries are catching up in life expectancy thanks to lower mortality across all age groups.
Figure 3
To assess the worldwide impact of these demographic shifts, look at Figure 3. It shows the percentage of the world’s total population in different regions between 1950 and 2017, with forecasts to the year 2100 as calculated by the United Nations.
Focus your attention on 2030. By that year, South Asia (including India) will consolidate its position as the number-one region in terms of population size. Africa will become the second-largest region, while East Asia (including China) will be relegated to third place. Europe, which in 1950 was the second largest, will fall to sixth place, behind Southeast Asia (which includes Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, among other countries) and Latin America.
International migration might partially mitigate these epochal changes by redistributing people from parts of the world with a surplus of babies toward others with a deficit. In fact, that has happened repeatedly throughout history, as when many Southern Europeans migrated to Northern Europe during the 1950s and 1960s. This time around, however, migration won’t offset the population trends (see data in figure 3). I say this because too many governments seem intent on building walls, whether the old-fashioned way (with brick and mortar), by leveraging technology such as lasers and chemical detectors to monitor border crossings, or both.
But even if the walls are never built or something renders them ineffective, my forecasts indicate that the impact of migration may not have a big impact on these population trends. Given present levels of migration and population growth, sub-Saharan Africa—the fifty African countries that do not border on the Mediterranean Sea—will become the second-most populous part of the globe by 2030. Let’s assume for a moment that migration doubles in volume over the next twenty years. But twice as much migration will merely delay that reckoning until the year 2033. It won’t derail the main population trends leading to the end of the world as we know it, but merely postpone them by approximately three years.
WOMEN AND BABIES RULE THE WORLD
So what’s behind the global fertility slowdown? This is a tricky question to answer. After all, conceiving babies involves a widely known method that’s easy to use and exceedingly popular. Let me begin answering the question by telling you about my own family tree. One of my great-great-grandmothers in Spain went through twenty-one pregnancies, giving birth to nineteen babies. Her first was born when she was twenty-one, and her last when she was forty-two. As the country developed and women gained better access to education, families became smaller, all the way down to one or two children per woman.
What’s important to grasp is that in other parts of the world, including Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, there are millions of women today who give birth to five, ten, or even more babies over their lifetime. On average, however, the number of babies per woman is also falling in the developing countries as time goes by, and for the same reasons it began to plummet in the developed world two generations ago. Women now enjoy more opportunities outside the household. To seize those opportunities, they remain in school and, in many cases, pursue higher education. This, in turn, means that they postpone childbearing. The change in women’s roles in the economy and in society more generally is the single most important factor behind the decline in fertility worldwide. Women are increasingly determining what happens around the world.
Consider the case of the United States, where women’s priorities have shifted rapidly. In the 1950s, American women married on average at the age of twenty; men, on average, married at twenty-two. Nowadays it’s twenty-seven and twenty-nine, respectively. The average age of first-time mothers has also climbed, to twenty-eight. Much of this change has been driven by longer schooling. More women now graduate from high school, and more of them go on to get a college education. Back in the fifties about 7 percent of women between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine had a college degree, half the rate of men. Nowadays, the proportion of women with a college degree is nearly 40 percent, while for men the figure is only 32 percent.
OUR DECLINING INTEREST IN SEX
The evolution of human populations tends to be messy. For millennia, population growth was shaped by the availability of food, the occurrence of wars, the spread of disease, and the impact of natural disasters. Philosophers, theologians, and scientists have wrestled for centuries with the question of how many human beings can be supported by Earth’s resources. In 1798, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, a British economist and demographer, warned about what would later become known as the “Malthusian trap,” or our tendency to overbreed and deplete our sources of sustenance. During Malthus’s lifetime, the world’s population was below 1 billion (compared to today’s 7.5 billion). He thought that humans are their own worst enemies because of their unfettered sexual impulses. In his view, runaway population growth would result in famine and disease because the food supply could not keep pace with the population. Malthus and many of his contemporaries feared that the human species was at risk of extinction due to overbreeding. “The power of population,” he wrote, “is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”
With the benefit of hindsight, we can say today that Malthus underestimated the potential of invention and innovation, which has led to phenomenal improvements in agricultural yields. He also downplayed the immense possibilities for expanding the food supply through international trade thanks to faster and cheaper transoceanic transportation. He was correct, however, in emphasizing that population and food are two sides of the same coin.
Copyright © Mauro F. Guillén
