Earth's demographic myth

EMPTY PLANET: The Shock of Global Population Decline
 

Darrell Bricker & John Ibbitson

Hachette India

Pages 288; Rs 599

The most authoritative — and depressing — projections for world population growth made so far have been by the United Nations: Nine billion people on the planet by the year 2050, ballooning to 11 billion by the end of the century, perhaps leaving only standing room on earth. It is easy to imagine a planet devastated by overexploitation of natural resources. But are these dire predictions valid?

Darrell Bricker, CEO of the research firm Ipsos Public Affairs, and Canadian journalist John Ibbitson paint a contrarian scenario in Empty Planet, written after the two travelled all over the world, interviewing slum dwellers in Delhi, university students in Sao Paulo, Brazil, young professionals in Brussels, executives in Nairobi, and a host of others in several more cities. They also met academic demographers who have long questioned the UN’s numbers.

Bricker-Ibbitson’s thesis is that the UN forecasting model, which incorporates three variables — fertility rates, migration rates and death rates — fails to take into account the massive recent advances in female education rates or the speed of urbanisation, both of which drastically bring down birth rates. They quote Vienna-based demographer Wolfgang Lutz as saying that if the improvement in female education (and hence empowerment) and urbanisation (which makes children a liability — additional mouths to feed, as opposed to assets on a farm) are factored into the equation—the global population will peak at nine billion by 2060, and shrink to seven billion by the year 2100.

Bricker-Ibbitson polled women in 26 countries, asking them how many children they wanted, and the answer everywhere was two —representing a fertility rate below replacement level. They conclude that declines in fertility that occurred over the course of a century in the rich countries are poised to take place in the space of a few decades in the developing world: “Across the planet, birth rates are plunging. That plunge is why the UN forecasts are wrong. That plunge is why the world is going to start getting smaller, much sooner than most people think.”

Rich-country population declines — and their social and economic consequences, such as Japan’s aging-related recession induced by the declining consumption of the growing elderly population — are well-documented. Bricker-Ibbitson argue however that the prospects are encouraging for the United States and Canada, because both countries have embraced robust (though very different) immigration policies.

What is startling about their conclusions are the imminent population declines in the developing world. Fertility rates are at or below the 2.1 replacement level in China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia and Thailand, and getting there in a host of other countries as well. The UN has predicted that China’s population will peak at over 1.4 billion people around 2030 and then decline to just over one billion by 2100, while India’s will reach 1.7 billion by 2060 and then begin to gently decline. Bricker-Ibbitson counter that China’s population will not merely decline, it will practically collapse, and India’s may never reach 1.7 billion. They use Austrian demographer Wolfgang Lutz’s calculations to conclude that at a fertility rate of 1.4 or 1.5 for most of this century, China’s population will fall to around 754 million by 2100 (an astounding 630 million fewer people than are alive in China today). 

For India, Bricker-Ibbitson’s conclusions are less precise. In the Delhi slum of Srinivaspuri the two meet a group of young women who are unanimous that they want only two children, because more would be an unaffordable expense. India’s official fertility rate today is 2.4 —above the replacement rate of 2.1. However, Bricker-Ibbitson claim to have been privately told by demographers and government officials in Delhi that it has already dropped below the replacement level. If so, they point out, India’s population is unlikely to cross 1.5 billion, and will be back down to 1.2 billion by 2100.

Population declines will have economic impacts — sluggish or non-existent growth, a declining tax base, growing government debt as nations struggle to cope with growing pension burdens — that Bricker-Ibbitson suggest can only be staved off through liberal immigration on the lines of Canada’s (close to one per cent of its own population annually). Population declines will have a strategic dimension as well, and here the US seems well-placed to increase the distance between itself and its largest geopolitical competitors, China and Russia, whose fertility rates are much lower than its own.

Empty Planet is not just about population; it is strong on migration, without which, it argues, population growth in most of the developed world would already be coming to a halt: Europe’s population would have fallen between the years 2000 and 2015, had it not been for migrants. Bricker-Ibbitson observe that in the rest of the developed world, principally the US and Canada, immigration will become the sole driver of population growth from the 2020s. 

Bricker-Ibbitson’s startling conclusions, arrived at through painstaking research and good old-fashioned reporting, stand conventional wisdom on its head. The result is a highly readable if somewhat speculative account on a subject that is not necessarily very absorbing.