During the 1970s, humanity was three decades removed from the last World War, and modern medicine seemed capable of conquering one killer disease after another. The world’s birth rates and fertility rates continued their upward climb, as they had for the past seven centuries. Projecting the growth in the population, experts at the time warned of an unavoidable disaster.
In the influential book The Population Bomb, published in 1968, Paul Ehrlich asserted that if the population continued to double every 35 years as it had recently done, within 900 years the world would be overrun by 60 million billion people. Ehrlich calculated there would be 100 people on every square yard of the Earth’s surface, including the oceans.
But the calamity wasn’t really that far off, Ehrlich insisted in 1968. He warned of “mass starvation” in what was then the near-future. He wrote: “[A] minimum of 10 million people, most of them poor, will starve to death during each year of the 1970s. But this is a mere handful compared to the numbers that will be starving before the end of the century.”
Ehrlich was wrong, of course, but he wasn’t alone in making panic-stricken predictions. As a recent article in The Economist recalls, Robert McNamara, the president of the World Bank during the 1970s, announced that the consequences of the anticipated population boom could be as devastating as a nuclear war.
Looking back on the 20th century, the world’s population soared from 1.7 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000. If that growth rate continued, alarmists warned, the population would overwhelm the planet, deplete its resources, and wage endless wars for scant supplies of food.
But now, the growth has slowed, and the world faces a threat that is completely the opposite of what Ehrlich, McNamara, and nearly everyone else once feared. Today, we must confront the threat of a population implosion, or what Foreign Policy magazine termed a “global baby bust.”
Consider that if the world’s population had grown steadily throughout the past century, it would stand today at 9 billion, rather than the actual figure of 6 billion. But instead, thanks to highly effective contraceptives and the rise of the two-income household, parents have chosen to limit the size of their families, and the impact can be seen in the declining populations of nations worldwide.
Going forward, the birth rate is expected to fall even faster. According to projections from the UN’s World Population Prospects, the populations of 50 countries will actually shrink between now and 2050. For example, during the next 44 years, Russia’s population will drop by 22 percent. Ukraine will lose almost half its population, with a decline of 43 percent.
China will lose 20 to 30 percent of its population each generation by 2050, according to the book The Empty Cradle, by Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation. As soon as 2020, Longman declares, China’s labor supply will start to evaporate, and its median age will be older than the median age in the U.S.
In the book Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future, Ben J. Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute writes that this phenomenon has not been seen since the Black Plague of the Middle Ages wiped out a third of Europe. Today, Europe is losing 700,000 people each year, and will lose 3 million or more each year by 2050. Japan’s population will begin shrinking before the end of this decade.
The Economist points out that, contrary to what people might assume, shrinking populations are not a sign of depressed economies. In fact, the reverse is typically true: When a country is wealthy, its birth rate falls. Consider Japan. Its population hasn’t been keeping up with the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman for the past 30 years, which coincides with Japan’s rise as an economic power.
According to the UN, the birth rates in Japan and Europe were a mere 1.8 during the 1980s. But according to the UN projections, the rate will fall to 1.3 during this decade. That’s nearly 40 percent below the replacement level.
But even though depressed economies do not lead to shrinking populations, shrinking populations can lead to depressed economies. With fewer people, a nation can expect its total Gross Domestic Product to drop. But what’s more important to measure is the country’s GDP per capita.
Because the biggest shortfall will be in the population of people in their prime working years, it’s possible that GDP per capita will decline. But as we’ll explain when we present our forecasts, there are some very promising solutions to this problem.
It’s worth noting that a major reason for the declining birth rate is the short-sighted policy of some governments and cultures to limit the number and gender of children each family can produce. China’s notorious “one child” policy is one extreme example. Another lesser-known case is India, where according to the British medical journal The Lancet, parents have aborted half a million fetuses of girls each year for the past few decades.
As reported in The Christian Science Monitor, gender selection is a $100 million per year business in India. Mobile clinics bring ultrasound equipment to every village so expectant parents can determine the sex of their unborn children. Even though gender selection was outlawed in 1994, millions of Indians have continued to use ultrasounds to identify female fetuses ? and then they have aborted 1 of every 25 of them, according to a study of government data by The Lancet.
As a result, the 2001 Indian Census found that there were only 927 girls born for every 1,000 boys, and in some areas the ratio was less than 900 girls to 1,000 boys. In addition to the impact on India’s current birth rate, the imbalance between male and female babies will lead naturally to an even lower birth rate in the future.
And, the parents who had greater wealth and more education were more likely to abort female fetuses, perhaps because they can afford to pay for more ultrasounds. As a result, the females being aborted are primarily from the socio-economic strata that should be responsible for improving India’s economic well-being.
In the U.S., the birth rate is falling, but not as dramatically as in other countries. The fertility rate among native-born Americans is 2.01 babies per woman. While this is below the 2.1 babies-per-woman replacement level, America still ranks first among the industrialized nations.
However, as Longman points out in The Empty Cradle, the relatively low American birth rates in recent years mean that the number of U.S. workers between the ages of 25 and 54 will not grow for the next two decades, even if immigration continues at current levels. Fortunately, it’s unlikely to shrink, either. But, if U.S. birth rates were to fall to the levels seen in other industrialized countries, the U.S. could face a serious labor shortage within the next few decades.
Based on all of this evidence, we offer the following five forecasts:
First, given current trends in birth rates and immigration, Europe’s population will plunge by more than 100 million, and the U.S. population will climb by more than 100 million by 2050. The UN projects that there will be 400 million Americans by 2050, an increase from 283 million in 2000. Meanwhile, Europe is expected to be losing 3 million people a year by 2050. The impact on the economies of the European nations will be enormous, because there will be fewer domestic consumers for European products, and less overseas investment in European companies.
Second, the negative per capita GDP brought about by shrinking working-age populations will be offset by advances in other areas. For example, as the size of the workforce falls, companies will automate more jobs, implement new information technologies, and send more jobs off-shore to the few economies experiencing rapid population growth. The resulting gains in productivity per worker will more than make up for the decline in the number of workers. In other words, with fewer workers, many businesses can potentially produce just as much, or more, than they do today.
Third, workers in the U.S. and many other industrialized countries will delay retirements so they can remain in the workforce. In wealthy countries, the average person lives 10 years longer than they did in 1960. Studies of today’s American workers already reveal that most workers plan to spend that extra time on the job rather than on the golf course. As we pointed out in our January issue, according to the Merrill Lynch New Retirement Survey,11 four of every five Baby Boomers plan to keep working after they turn 65. BusinessWeek reports that these older, highly skilled, and experienced workers could add 9 percent to the GDP by 2045, providing a $3 trillion a year boost to economic output, in today’s dollars.
Fourth, companies that make continuous learning a high priority will enjoy a tremendous competitive advantage over the next 30 years. Older workers will need to update their skills as their employers increasingly turn to new technologies to boost their productivity. By constantly upgrading their knowledge, these veteran employees will become even more valuable to their companies.
Fifth, as the global population implodes, there will be less pressure on natural resources. For example, pessimistic scenarios about the supposedly dwindling supply of oil usually assume that the world’s population will keep growing and that demand per capita will soar. However, in a world with a falling birthrate, this fear is misplaced. Similarly, environmental activists’ claims that housing developments will eventually displace virtually all of the world’s forests are misguided; because more and more adults are having, at most, one or two children, there may actually come a day in many countries when there are too many existing homes for future generations to occupy. And forget Paul Ehrlich’s warnings about “mass starvation” due to food shortages: Even the poor nations of India and China have been able to use new agricultural technologies to boost their grain yields by 60 percent in recent decades, due to new varieties of rice that were developed with funding from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
References List : 1. THE POPULATION BOMB by Paul R. Ehrlich is published by Buccaneer Books. ⓒ Copyright 1968, 1971 by Paul R. Ehrlich. All rights reserved. 2. THE ECONOMIST, January 5, 2006, “Incredible Shrinking Countries.” ⓒ Copyright 2006 by The Economist Newspaper. All rights reserved. 3. FOREIGN POLLCY, March 2001, “The Population Implosion,” by Nicholas Eberstadt. ⓒ Copyright 2001 by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. All rights reserved. 4. THE EMPTY CRADLE: HOW FALLING BIRTHRATES THREATEN WORLD PROSPERITY AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT by Phillip Longman is published by Basic Books. ⓒ Copyright 2004 by Phillip Longman. All rights reserved. 5. FEWER: HOW THE NEW DEMOGRAPHY OF DEPOPULATION WILL SHAPE OUR FUTURE by Ben J. Wattenberg is published by Ivan R. Dee. ⓒ Copyright 2004 by Ben J. Wattenberg. All rights reserved. 6. THE ECONOMIST, January 5, 2006, “Incredible Shrinking Countris.” ⓒ Copyright 2006 by The Economist newspaper. All rights reserved. 7. THE LANCET, January 21, 2006, “Low Male-to-Female Sex Ratio of Children Born in India: National Survey of 1.1 Million Households,” by P. Jha, R. Kumar, P. Vasa, N. Dhingra, D. Thiruchelvam, and R. Moineddin. ⓒ Copyright 2006 by Elsevier Limited. All rights reserved. 8. THE CHRISTLAN SCIENCE MONITOR, January 13, 2006, “India’s ‘Girl Deficit’ Deepest Among Educated,” by Scott Baldauf. ⓒ Copyright 2006 by Elsevier Limited. All rights reserved. 9. THE LANCET, January 21, 2006, “Low Male-to-Female Sex Ratio of Children Born in Indea: National Survey of 1.1 Million Households,” by P. Jha, R. Kumar, P. Vasa, N. Dhingra, D. Thiruchelvam, and R. Moineddin. ⓒ Copyright 2006 by Elsevier Limited. All rights reserved. 10. THE EMPTY CRADLE: HOW FALLING BIRTHRATES THREATEN WORLD PROSPERITY AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT by Phillip Longman is published by Basic Books. ⓒ Copyright 2004 by Phillip Longman. All rights reserved. 11. To access Merrill Lynch’s “New Retirement Survery,” visit their website at: www.ml.com/index.asp?id=7695_7696_8149_46028_46502_46635. 12. BUSINESSwEEK, June 27, 2005, “Old. Smart. Productive,” by Peter Coy, with Diane Brady. ⓒ Copyright 2005 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
