VISIONS: Biology –
In leading nations, a population bust?
By David E. Sanger
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Shanghai,” said China’s president, greeting leaders of the world’s powers as they gathered on January 1, 2100. “A century ago, our predecessors worried that the world was headed for a Malthusian meltdown – that we could not feed, clothe or find enough energy for an overpopulated earth. This city was a symbol of their fears.
“Now we know the truth: there is a population crisis, but not the kind they had in mind. We are simply running out of educated, capable workers. In fact, in the places around the world that matter most to our prosperity and political stability, there are just too few babies.”
Far-fetched? Maybe so. After all, demographers and environmentalists spent much of the 20th century worrying that unrelenting growth in the world population would ignite social and political upheaval.
But in crunching the numbers, it seems possible that the ticking population bomb of 2100 could indeed be a people shortage in the most advanced countries, even as the nations that now rank among the poorest continue to grow. And that prospect is driving a rethinking of the economic destiny of nations and speculation about who will best be able to exercise global power in a century.
It is a humbling exercise. “Just about everybody got it wrong in 1900,” said Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer who has spent his professional life trying to figure out what population projections portend for the world. A century ago, when there were roughly 1.65 billion souls, almost no one predicted the near quadrupling of the world population, he noted.
The projections for 2100 are equally susceptible to the unpredictability of plagues, wars and enthusiasm for procreation. “Yet it seems pretty safe to say now that the population surge is almost over,” Mr. Eberstadt said. “A lot of countries are going to start shrinking soon – Japan, Europe, China in 30 years or so. And that means that sooner than we think, we could be headed into the end of surplus manpower.”
Such conclusions fly in the face of all our experience. The story of the last half-century has been a terrifying acceleration in population growth. In 1850, there were slightly more than one billion people on earth, and by 1950 the figure had barely passed 2.5 billion. But then came the post-World War II explosion, in which another billion people were added to the world’s population roughly every dozen years. These trends have a momentum of their own, and the United Nations estimates that in 50 years, the world population will surge another 50 percent, to roughly nine billion.
But dig a little deeper into the estimates, and you find some surprises. Like stock markets, populations tend to peak and then decline. And the birth boom over the next 50 years will probably be a bit like a sonic boom – loud and scary, but localized.
The poorest nations will continue to grow the fastest. Africa’s population is expected to double in the first half of the 21st century, assuming that the AIDS epidemic does not take an even more devastating toll there on life expectancy. By 2050, India seems likely to edge out China as the world’s most populous nation. Pakistan – now broke, unstable but nuclear-ready – is predicted to challenge the United States for third place, up from sixth place. By midcentury, each is projected to have about 350 million people. The World Bank and others warn of continuing hunger and health crises among the half of the world’s population that still lives on less than $2 a day – crises that can fuel both internal and territorial conflict.
But the big economic and political news for the next century is that many nations worldwide, including almost all of today’s most powerful, will lose population. Europe as a whole will shrink by 100 million people and become a mere 5 percent of the world’s population, down from 13 percent. Japan’s population will sink like a stone. Among the big industrial powers of 2000, only the United States is expected to keep growing.
The picture drawn by these projections is far more complex than the doomsday scenarios of the 1960s, when “The Population Bomb” by Paul R. Ehrlich became the handbook of imminent disaster. But it also raises issues that so far have been largely missing from the population debate.
Consider China. Until now, its big issues have concerned scarcity: Will the country run out of fuel as ever-richer Chinese hop behind the wheels of new sport utility vehicles? Will it depend on the rest of Asia for rice, and on the United States and other countries for grain? But the figures suggest different questions: What happens if China runs out of the people it needs to keep growing? Will it have enough well-trained workers and credit-card-armed consumers to sustain an economy that befits its size?
Clearly such concerns are on the minds of China’s leaders. “When you talk to Zhu Rongji,” China’s prime minister, said one of President Clinton’s top advisers, “he’s talking about fuel substitution and safety nets for an aging population.”
The lesson of the 20th century, of course, is that it takes a lot more than people power to create national power. If rising population translated into rising influence, Africa would have been on a roll over the last 20 years, and Japan would have never made a mark. Skill at exploiting natural resources proved crucial in the first half of the century, while skill at exploiting nuclear weapons, free markets and information technology mattered most in the second half.
But population and power are hardly divorced, either. It still takes a national head count of 100 million or more before the world stops, listens and heeds. So the big question is: Can countries gain strength even while their populations shrink?
The Europeans clearly worry about this; it’s one reason the European Union came together after a century of division. The Chinese know that their future depends on technology and efficiency, but nonetheless are hedging their bets, spending billions of dollars to maintain one of the world’s biggest armies. In Russia, already shrinking, it will take far more than a reversal of population trends to end the sapping of power.
All this portends well for the United States, the only industrialized power that is still demographically young. Its rivals in the developing world may have the numbers to challenge American hegemony, but they seem unlikely to have the military hardware or the economic software. And the industrialized world – Japan and Europe – will have the hardware and the software, but likely will find themselves desperate for the dynamism that is fueled by population growth.
That’s the theory, at least – unless the demographers get it wrong again.