Tag Archives: Population Growth

Arts, Britain, Economic, Government, Society, United Nations

The plunging birthrate will usher in a terrifying dystopia

SOCIETY

FOR MANY PEOPLE the cities of the future will be a landscape of glittering skyscrapers, bullet trains whizzing past green parklands, flying taxis and drones for deliveries, and limitless clean energy.

If this is the picture you envisage, then I’m afraid you may be disappointed. A century from now, swathes of the world’s cities are more likely to be abandoned, with small numbers of residents clinging to decaying houses set on empty, weed-strewn streets, much like Detroit is today.

According to a new report from the Lancet medical journal, by the year 2100, just six countries could be having children at “replacement rate” – that is, with enough births to keep their populations stable, let alone growing.

All six nations will be in sub-Saharan Africa. In Europe and across the West and Asia, the birthrate will have collapsed – and the total global population will be plummeting.

Eco-activists and environmentalists have long decried humans as a curse on the planet, greedily gobbling up vital resources and despoiling the natural world with their activities. Greens purport the message that “human population growth is our greatest worry… there are just too many of us. Because if you run out of resources, it doesn’t matter how well you’re coping: if you’re starving and thirsty, you’ll die.”

Activists seem to think that if we could only reduce the overall population, the surviving rump of humanity could somehow live in closer harmony with nature. On the contrary, population collapse will presage a terrifying dystopia.

Fewer babies mean older and ageing populations – which in turn means fewer young people paying taxes to fund the pensions of the elderly. And that means that everyone has to work even longer into old age, and in an atmosphere of declining public services and deteriorating quality of life.

If you worry that it’s hard now to find carers to look after elderly relatives, this will be nothing compared to what your children or grandchildren will face when they are old.

In modern industrialised society, it is generally accepted that the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) – the average number of children born to each woman during her lifetime – must be at least 2.1 to ensure a stable population.

By 2021, the TFR had fallen below 2.1 in more than half the world’s countries.

In Britain, it now stands at 1.49. In Spain and Japan it is 1.26, in Italy 1.21, and in South Korea a desperate 0.82.

Even in India – which recently overtook China as the world’s most populous nation – the TFR is down to 1.91.

There are now just 94 countries in which the rate exceeds 2.1 – and 44 of them are in sub-Saharan Africa, which suffers far higher rates of infant mortality.

The dramatic fall in Britian’s birthrate has been disguised until now because we are importing hundreds of thousands of migrants per year to do poorly paid jobs that the native population increasingly spurns. In 2022, net migration here reached more than 700,000. The Office for National Statistics expects the UK population to reach 70million by 2026, 74million by 2036, and almost 77million by 2046 – largely driven by mass migration.

Unless migration remains high, the UK population is likely to start shrinking soon after that point – especially as the last “baby boomer” (born between 1946 and 1964) reaches their 80th birthday in 2044. This mass importation of migrants to counteract a falling domestic birthrate spells huge consequences for our social fabric.

In years to come, Britain is set to face a pitiless battle with other advanced economies – many of them already much richer than we are – to import millions of overseas workers to staff our hospitals, care homes, factories, and everything else.

And once the global population starts to fall in the final decades of this century, it will become even harder to source such workers from abroad. At that point, we may find hospitals having to cut their services or even close.

So, while medical advancements will likely mean that people will be living even longer, we face a grim future in which elderly people will increasingly die of neglect or be looked after by robots – an idea that has been trialled in Japan already.

How has this crisis crept upon us so stealthily? It wasn’t so long ago that the United Nations and other world bodies were voicing concern at overpopulation.

For decades, self-proclaimed experts have warned – in the manner of early 19th-century economist Thomas Malthus – that global supplies of food and water, as well as natural resources, would run out. Graphs confidently showed the world’s population accelerating exponentially, with many claiming that humankind had no choice but to launch interplanetary civilisations as we inevitably outgrew our world.

They could not have been more wrong.

Amid all the activist-esque hysteria about a “population explosion”, many failed to notice that birth rates had already started to collapse: first in a few developed countries, such as Italy and South Korea, and then elsewhere.

As societies grow wealthier and the middle classes boom, women start to put off childbearing. This means that they end up having fewer children overall. In Britain especially, there are the added costs of childcare and the often-permanent loss of income that results from leaving the workforce, even temporarily.

The striking result of all this is that the number of babies being born around the world has, in fact, already peaked.

The year 2016 is likely to go down in history as the one in which more babies were born than any other: 142million of them. By 2021, the figure was 129million – a fall of 9 per cent in just five years.

To be clear, the global population is for the moment still rising because people are living longer thanks to better and improved medical care. We are not dying as quickly as babies are born.

According to the UN, the global population reached 8billion on November 15, 2022. It should carry on growing before peaking at 10.4billion in the 2080s – although the world will be feeling the effects of the declining birth rate long before that.

On current trends, the world’s population will start to fall by the 2090s – the first time this will have happened since the Black Death swept Eurasia in the 14th century.

What, then, if anything, can be done to stop ourselves hurtling towards this calamity?

For one thing, governments must work tirelessly to encourage people to have families. Generous tax incentives for marriage, lavish child benefit payments, and better and cheaper childcare, are all a must. This would mean that many mothers wouldn’t have to stop their careers in order to start families.

Britain could, if it chose to, lead the way on this.

But that seems highly unlikely with the imminent prospect of a ruling Labour government: the statist Left habitually loathes any measures that could be seen to benefit the nuclear family or that incentivise people to have more children.

In truth, however, the scale of this problem is so vast – and the issue so widespread – that effectively counteracting it may be next to impossible.

Bar some extraordinary shift, the gradual impoverishment of an ageing and shrinking population seems the planet’s destiny. It is not an attractive thought.

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Arts, Environment, Government, Health, Science, Society, United Nations

How Can We Deal With Global Population Growth?

POPULATION GROWTH

Intro: With population numbers projected to continue to swell over the course of the twenty-first century, there are some pressing questions that remain unresolved. We should turn to science in search of solutions to Earth’s depleting space and resources.

THE subject of global population growth can be an emotive one, and many accounts of rising populations are accompanied by dire warnings of impending catastrophe. Concern about population growth is by no means a modern phenomenon, though. In 1798, the British cleric Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principles of Population, in which he addressed the potential problems that could develop due to the rapidly rising population in Britain at that time, a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. He argued that populations had the capacity to grow more quickly than food production, writing, “The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.” It would become a highly influential concept and one that would reach beyond demography alone – acknowledged, for instance, by Charles Darwin as having been one of the key ideas that led to his theory of evolution by natural selection, which described competition for resources as being one of the driving forces behind evolution.

The Population Bomb

In 1968, the American entomologist and environmentalist Paul Ehrlich wrote in Malthusian terms in The Population Bomb of an upcoming catastrophe, in which many millions of people would die of starvation. Though not the first publication to examine the so-called “population problem”, its popularity introduced the issue to a much wider audience. It was followed in 1972 by the even more widely read The Limits to Growth, a collaborative report commissioned by the political think tank the Club of Rome. Both works were relatively sober, informed assessments, but were followed by a range of sensationalist books and articles, containing various prophecies of doom – which remain a feature of environmental discussion today.

Paul Ehrlich

Paul Ehrlich, whose book brought the population problem to the attention of a much wider audience.

In The Population Bomb, Ehrlich wrote that the Earth could support two billion people before disaster ensued – a figure that had already been exceeded by more than a billion at the time the book was published. Now, almost 50 years later, the predicted catastrophic collapse has not occurred (at least not yet anyway). In July 2015, the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economics and Social Affairs in New York released the annual revision to its 2010 population census, providing estimates of the global population over the course of this century. According to this, the global population was 7.3 billion in 2015, and was expected to continue growing, reaching 10 billion by the middle of the century and 11.2 billion by 2100, by which time the rate of growth is expected to have slowed – before stabilising and perhaps beginning to fall.

By no means do all demographers agree with the UN figures. The wide variation between experts’ population predictions is a consequence of the number of unknown factors involved, and because in reality people rarely behave exactly as expected. But, if we take the UN figures as a reasonable estimate, over the next three to four decades an additional 3 billion people will inhabit the world, and the total figure will be five times higher than Paul Ehrlich’s estimated carrying capacity of the Earth.

The Impact of Science

One of the ways science has helped to avert potential disasters is through agricultural research aimed at increasing food produce. One of the best-known examples of this is the Green Revolution on the Indian subcontinent, which began in the 1960s – a period when India and Pakistan were experiencing population booms that appeared to be outstripping the capacity of the region’s agriculture to produce enough food for everyone. New varieties of high-yielding wheat, developed by the American agronomist Norman Borlaug at a research station in Mexico, were transferred to the subcontinent, greatly increasing agricultural productivity and averting the potential for widespread famine.

Subsequent research produced new varieties of other staple crops, including rice, and these, together with the use of new technologies in the shape of farm machinery, fertilisers and pesticides, have had a dramatic impact on the amount of food produced – even if these technical advancements can come with social and environmental costs. It has become clear that new technology on its own is not a complete solution, though, and extreme poverty can lead to people remaining malnourished despite there being no local food shortages, through not having land to grow crops themselves or the means to buy enough food.

Science can also help in the field of healthcare, through the development of medical technology and drugs that address the particular problems causing high levels of child mortality, which are often encountered in those parts of the world where high rates of population growth occur. When such technologies are combined with more widely available healthcare services, the resulting reduction in child mortality often leads to lower rates of population growth. Put simply, women have fewer children in places where those children are more likely to survive into adulthood, and so population numbers gradually begin to stabilise.

Hope For The Future

The UN figures show that growth rates have already slowed down in many parts of the world. Europe, North and South America and Oceania now show no growth at all, and nor does much of Asia, with the notable exceptions of India and Pakistan. About three-quarters of the population growth set to occur over the course of this century is projected to be on the African continent, and this rise will almost all be as a consequence of people living longer, rather than an increase in the number of children being born. This statistic is key to gaining an understanding of how population growth should slow down and eventually stabilise in the future; improvements in healthcare initially lead to a rapid rise in life expectancy, so, rather than a rising population being caused by more children being born, it is actually a consequence of there being an increased number of older people. Over time, the initial rapid increase in life expectancy will tend to level off and, at this point, the population will stop rising as well.

 

IN the future, then, there will be many more people in the world, and it does appear that population growth is set to continue in the long term. The challenges ahead are to grow enough food, to alleviate extreme poverty and to provide adequate healthcare for the entire global population.

Alternative Theories

UNLIKE the doom merchants who have until recently dominated the public debate on population growth, the Swedish doctor and statistician Hans Rosling describes himself as a possibilist, believing not only that the Earth can support 11 billion people, but that all of them can enjoy a good quality of life. He appears to be on a mission to make population statistics entertaining as well as informative, making use of dynamic graphics to illustrate his lectures and enlivening proceedings with plenty of comical jokes, mostly at his own expense.

To take just one example of many, Rosling describes the washing machine as being one of the great inventions of the twentieth century because of the impact it has had on freezing women from domestic drudgery, allowing them the time to do other things, like going to university or by seeking an alternative career. As he points out, the statistics show that as women become better educated, they gain more control over their lives – over the age at which they start a family and the number of children they have. Where they have the choice, many women opt to have children later in life than their mothers and grandmothers did, and often prefer to have two or three children rather than five or six. This phenomenon has been seen around the world and has often occurred over the course of a single generation. Rosling is not trying to say that this is entirely caused by the washing machine, rather using it to illustrate the point that the empowerment of women has been one of the driving forces behind the observed reduction in population growth rates.

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