World depopulation - rather than overpopulation - is the troublesome trend that should concern the entire planet.
By Phillip Longman USA Today March 24, 2009
World population will hit 7 billion by 2012, according to a recent United Nations report. Given that we just hit the 6 billion mark in October 1999, it is easy to conclude that there are just too many people in the world. How are we ever going to overcome global warming, feed the masses, get that beachfront property, let alone find parking, if the population keeps jumping by nearly one billion per decade?
The good news is that's not going to happen again. If you need another megatrend to worry about, fixate instead on the growing prospects for world depopulation and what it means for you and your children (assuming you have any).
Yes, human population is still growing in some places dramatically so. But at the same time, a strange new phenomenon is spreading around the globe, one whose very existence contradicts the deepest foundations of our modern mind-set.
Darwinism presupposes, and modern biology teaches, that all organisms breed to the limit of their available resources. Yet starting in the world's richest, best-fed nations during the 1970s,and now spreading throughout the developing world, we find birthrates falling below the levels needed to avoid long-term, and in many instances, short-term, population loss. The phenomenon has spread beyond Europe and Asia to Latin America.
Brazil, a land once known for its celebration of dental-floss bikinis and youthful carnival exuberance, is an aging nation that no longer produces enough children to replace its population.The same is true of Chile and Costa Rica. Joining them over the next 10 to 20 years, the U.N. projects, will be many other countries Americans still tend to associate with youth bulges including Mexico, Argentina, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Algeria, Kuwait, Libya and Morocco. Think we need to build a wall on the southern border? Birthrates have declined so quickly in Mexico that its population of children younger than 15 has been in free-fall since 2000 and is expected to drop by one-third over the next 40 years.
The spread of childlessness
Fertility remains high in sub-Saharan Africa, but it is falling there, too, even as infants and children die by the millions. In Sierra Leone, for example, the average woman bears more than five children, but nearly one in six die before reaching age 5 and fewer yet make it to reproductive age. Remaining increases in world population depend critically on reduced mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. But that might well not happen given the high levels of warfare, contagion and economic turmoil throughout the continent.
The U.N. projects that world population could begin declining as early 2040. Those worried about global warming and other environmental threats might view this prospect as an unmitigated good. But lost in most discussions of the subject is the rapid population aging that accompanies declining birthrates.
Under what the U.N. considers the most likely scenario, more than half of all remaining growth comes from a 1.2 billion increase in the number of old people, while the worldwide supply of children will begin falling within 15 years. With fewer workers to support each elder, the world economy might have to run just that much faster, and consume that much more resources, or else living standards will fall.
In the USA, where nearly one-fifth of Baby Boomers never had children, the hardship of vanishing retirement savings will be compounded by the strains on both formal and informal care-giving networks caused by the spread of childlessness. A pet will keep you company in old age, but it is unlikely to be of use in helping you navigate the health care system or in keeping predatory reverse mortgage brokers at bay.
Even countries in which women have few career choices are not immune from the spreading birth dearth and resulting age wave. Under the grip of militant Islamic clerisy, Iran has seen its population of children implode. Accordingly, Iran's population is now aging at a rate nearly three times that of Western Europe. Maybe the middle aging of the Middle East will bring a mellower tone to the region, but middle age will pass swiftly to old age. China, with its one-family-one-child policy, is on a similar course, becoming a 4-2-1 society in which each child supports two parents and four grandparents.
Where does it end? Demographers once believed that only as countries grew rich would their birthrates decline. And few imagined until recently that birthrates would ever remain below replacement levels indefinitely. To suppose the opposite is to presuppose extinction.
'An avoidable liability'
Yet we see sub-replacement fertility remaining entrenched among rich countries for more than two generations and now spreading throughout the developing world as well.
For the majority of the world's inhabitants who no longer live on farms or rely on home production, children are no longer an economic asset but an avoidable liability. At the same time, the spread of global media exposes people in even the remotest corners of the planet to glamorous lifestyles that are inconsistent with the sacrifices necessary to raise large families. In Brazil, birthrates dropped sequentially province by province as broadcast television became available.
As the number of women of reproductive age falls in country after country, world population is acquiring negative momentum and thus could decline even if birthrates eventually turn up. Societies around the globe need to ask why they are engaging in what biologists would surely recognize in any other species as maladaptive behavior leading either to extinction, or dramatic mutation.
Phillip Longman is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do about it. His latest book, with Ray Boshara, is The Next Progressive Era, set to be published in April.
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