Demography
How to deal with a falling population
Jul 26th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Worries about a population explosion have been replaced by fears of
decline
THE population of bugs in a Petri dish typically increases in an S-
shaped curve. To start with, the line is flat because the colony is
barely growing. Then the slope rises ever more steeply as bacteria
proliferate until it reaches an inflection point. After that, the
curve flattens out as the colony stops growing.
Overcrowding and a shortage of resources constrain bug populations.
The reasons for the growth of the human population may be different,
but the pattern may be surprisingly similar. For thousands of years,
the number of people in the world inched up. Then there was a sudden
spurt during the industrial revolution which produced, between 1900
and 2000, a near-quadrupling of the world's population.
Numbers are still growing; but recently—it is impossible to know
exactly when—an inflection point seems to have been reached. The
rate of population increase began to slow. In more and more
countries, women started having fewer children than the number
required to keep populations stable. Four out of nine people already
live in countries in which the fertility rate has dipped below the
replacement rate. Last year the United Nations said it thought the
world's average fertility would fall below replacement by 2025.
Demographers expect the global population to peak at around 10
billion (it is now 6.5 billion) by mid-century.
As population predictions have changed in the past few years, so
have attitudes. The panic about resource constraints that prevailed
during the 1970s and 1980s, when the population was rising through
the steep part of the S-curve, has given way to a new concern: that
the number of people in the world is likely to start falling.
The shrinking bits
Some regard this as a cause for celebration, on the ground that
there are obviously too many people on the planet. But too many for
what? There doesn't seem to be much danger of a Malthusian
catastrophe. Mankind appropriates about a quarter of what is known
as the net primary production of the Earth (this is the plant tissue
created by photosynthesis)— a lot, but hardly near the point of
exhaustion. The price of raw materials reflects their scarcity and,
despite recent rises, commodity prices have fallen sharply in real
terms during the past century. By that measure, raw materials have
become more abundant, not scarcer. Certainly, the impact that people
have on the climate is a problem; but the solution lies in consuming
less fossil fuel, not in manipulating population levels.
Nor does the opposite problem—that the population will fall so fast
or so far that civilisation is threatened—seem a real danger. The
projections suggest a flattening off and then a slight decline in
the foreseeable future.
If the world's population does not look like rising or shrinking to
unmanageable levels, surely governments can watch its progress with
equanimity? Not quite. Adjusting to decline poses problems, which
three areas of the world—central and eastern Europe, from Germany to
Russia; the northern Mediterranean; and parts of East Asia,
including Japan and South Korea—are already facing.
Think of twentysomethings as a single workforce, the best educated
there is. In Japan (see article), that workforce will shrink by a
fifth in the next decade—a considerable loss of knowledge and
skills. At the other end of the age spectrum, state pensions systems
face difficulties now, when there are four people of working age to
each retired person. By 2030, Japan and Italy will have only two per
retiree; by 2050, the ratio will be three to two. An ageing,
shrinking population poses problems in other, surprising ways. The
Russian army has had to tighten up conscription because there are
not enough young men around. In Japan, rural areas have borne the
brunt of population decline, which is so bad that one village wants
to give up and turn itself into an industrial-waste dump.
A fertile side-effect
States should not be in the business of pushing people to have
babies. If women decide to spend their 20s clubbing rather than
child-rearing, and their cash on handbags rather than nappies,
that's up to them. But the transition to a lower population can be a
difficult one, and it is up to governments to ease it. Fortunately,
there are a number of ways of going about it—most of which involve
social changes that are desirable in themselves.
The best way to ease the transition towards a smaller population
would be to encourage people to work for longer, and remove the
barriers that prevent them from doing so. State pension ages need
raising. Mandatory retirement ages need to go. They're bad not just
for society, which has to pay the pensions of perfectly capable
people who have been put out to grass, but also for companies, which
would do better to use performance, rather than age, as a criterion
for employing people. Rigid salary structures in which pay rises
with seniority (as in Japan) should also be replaced with more
flexible ones. More immigration would ease labour shortages, though
it would not stop the ageing of societies because the numbers
required would be too vast. Policies to encourage women into the
workplace, through better provisions for child care and parental
leave, can also help redress the balance between workers and
retirees.
Some of those measures might have an interesting side-effect.
America and north-western Europe once also faced demographic
decline, but are growing again, and not just because of immigration.
All sorts of factors may be involved; but one obvious candidate is
the efforts those countries have made to ease the business of being
a working parent. Most of the changes had nothing to do with
population policy: they were carried out to make labour markets
efficient or advance sexual equality. But they had the effect of
increasing fertility. As traditional societies modernise, fertility
falls. In traditional societies with modern economies—Japan and
Italy, for instance—fertility falls the most. And in societies which
make breeding and working compatible, by contrast, women tend to do
both.
Demography
Demography
Cérebro é uma coisa maravilhosa. Todos deveriam ter um.