Surfing the Internet last week, I came across an article by Philip Longman entitled “The Global Baby Bust.” The article was posted in the on-line version of Foreign Affairs and I have no idea whether it has been at all influential, although I know Longman has written a book that presumably expands on the subject that I look forward to reading (Philip Longman, The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity And What To Do About It, Basic Books, April 13 2004). We’ll see what Longman has to say in detail but I consider his article is a fairly typical rendering of the “problems” that face the world as a result of the decline in population growth and the resulting aging of our population. I understand that he makes presentations that connect Japan’s 1990s recession to its collapsing birth rate and paint a pretty bleak picture of a future in which everyone will be an only child.
The issues arising from declining growth, according to Longman’s article are things like finding enough soldiers for the military, and enough nurses and doctors to take care of all the old folks who are becoming the majority throughout the developed world and are apparently poised to become the majority in such unlikely places as Mexico and the Middle East. As Longman notes, this stands in direct contrast to the hand-wringing of the preceding generation characterized by Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, which in 1968 posited an unsustainable future in which the planet would be overwhelmed by humans doubling their numbers every couple of decades.
Given that I would normally assert that population numbers and composition are pretty easy to predict, especially over the course of a 20 to 30-year period, this is a remarkable reversal. Although we are still looking ahead to 50 years or so of worldwide population growth, the solution to yesterday’s impending disaster is becoming the primary challenge of the future. How the heck are so few going to support so many, and how can society progress with a preponderance of doddering old fogies watching CSI re-runs at the retirement villa?
I don’t really agree with Longman, anymore than I agreed with Ehrlich in the day (when I was in high school). When the Baby Boom swept the Western world after World War II, the technology of birth control was being rapidly refined as was the sociocultural framework that subsequently encouraged its application. Mixed with other changes that have made children much less valuable if not completely irrelevant to the workforce, and women at least as valuable as workers as family caregivers, and we have an unprecedented sea change that is spreading to traditional societies that not so long ago seemed headed to Malthusian self-destruction illustrated by the graphic of world population change below. The fact that current trends may leave us a bit short on military personnel and with an admittedly major health care challenge seems minor by contrast.
World Population (logarithmic scale), 10,000 BC-
World Population (logarithmic scale), 10,000 BC-
This blog, in any case, is not about these big issues but the juxtaposition of yesterday’s and today’s issues, did make me think about macro-demographic policy, which both Ehrlich and Longman advocated or advocate. Here at Demography+ our concern is with the prediction of local populations as a basis for determining the need for local infrastructure and services. In that regard, the declining number of babies and the increasing number of elderly, as well as the increase or decrease of population, are certainly of the utmost importance but, at the same time, are not something we would expect to control or even significantly influence.
Policy and prognostication can influence demography. The writings of Ehrlich and others were most certainly a factor in the defusing of the population bomb, although I am confident that they pale by comparison to improvements in birth control and the emancipation of women in the workplace. Longman and others will likewise have an impact, although their viewpoint will battle with Ehrlich’s offspring: the wide array of environmentalists who will not be satisfied by until the global footprint of the human race is severely reduced. This includes Ehrlich himself, who has recently published The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment (Island Press, June 30 2008).
At this point, I am an agnostic. I have enough concern for the environment to be reluctant to support baby birthing programs. At the same time, I think the increasing participation of women in the paid workforce and the related tendency to smaller families that is now characteristic of most of North America and Europe, and appears to be influencing even the most traditional societies of the Third World, is here for the long-term. Octomom, aside, women who have 20 or more babies as quite a few once did are likely a curiosity of the past, as are awards for the accomplishment.
It seems to me that we are in a transitional stage to a new equilibrium. Certainly, this will create challenges but it is hard to see the care of massive numbers of seniors as any more daunting than the education of the very same group 50 years ago. The population of the world is going to continue to grow and the pace of that growth is pretty much known. Around the middle of the century, population will stop growing and the environment may well get a break, although I personally hope we will have found effective institutional and technological remedies long before that.
Where I do hope this will put individual human beings is in a position to make free reproductive/demographic choices. If we can be simultaneously satisfied that we not only no longer face a demographic catastrophe of over population, but also that we do not have to go forth and multiply to perpetuate the human race, reproductive decisions can be undertaken on the basis of individual satisfaction rather than social obligation. Child-rearing under such circumstances has to be more materially and emotionally satisfying, and a new reproductive equilibrium may well be achieved in 50 years or so. For our part at Demography+, we’ll watch like Chauncey Gardner and try to keep provisions for population in our neck of the woods in line with its numbers and form.
