By Bill King for RealClearWire
I regularly talk to well-informed people who don’t realize that world population growth is rapidly slowing. Currently, the UN estimates that the most likely case is that the world’s population will reach around 10 billion in 2080 and then begin a long, slow decline. Other modelers predict that the peak will be reached in 2060 at 9 billion, and then decline more rapidly. Some scenarios predict that there will be fewer inhabitants on the planet at the end of the century than there are now.
The United Nations predictions for the United States are similar, with our population reaching about 380 million by the end of the century. This is in line with Congressional Budget Office projections, which assume that the annual population growth rate for the United States over the next 20 years will drop from 0.5% to 0.2%. Without immigration, the US population would begin to decline around 2035.
Many of us grew up reading Paul Ehrlich’s bestseller “The population bomb“,, who predicted that a global apocalypse was imminent. The book, written in 1968, emphatically predicted that “The battle to feed all mankind is over. In the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people died of starvation. Of course, this did not happen and since about 2000, the researchers found there have been more obese people in the world than undernourished people.
This did not happen in part because of an explosion of agricultural technology in the 1950s and 1960s known as The Green Revolution. But Ehrlich’s prediction also didn’t come true because he missed the fact that by the time of their book, women had already started having fewer babies.
The critical measure of population growth is the average number of children women have at any given time, known as the fertility rate. Other factors, such as child survival and longevity, also affect population growth, but the fertility rate is the main driver. It takes a fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman to maintain a stable population, called the “replacement rate”. Anything above that and the population will rise and below that it will fall.
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When “The Population Bomb” was published, the fertility rate was staggeringly high at 5. This astronomical rate would cause the world’s population to double just 40 years later. But what was not obvious to the author at the time was that the fertility rate had peaked about five years earlier at 5.3. It started a steady decline to 2.3 today, barely above replacement level.
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However, a decline in the fertility rate does not manifest itself immediately. It takes some time for this lower rate to work through the generational cycle, the so-called “demographic momentum”. This is why you still see a sharp 25% increase in world population in the projections before it peaks in 2080.
Many countries around the world are already beginning to feel the effects of slowing population growth. Both Japan and Russia face impending drastic population declines. China announced this year that for the first time its population had declined. Some countries have policies to encourage young couples to have more children.
Of course, there is no doubt that the decline in population growth is very good news. Without the recession, we would face the apocalypse that Ehrlich predicted as we place ever-increasing demands on the Earth’s finite resources.
But our civilization has been based on constant population growth and an astronomical population since the middle of the 20th century. Programs like Social Security and Medicare won’t work in a stable or declining population world, at least not without some substantial modification. Since lower fertility rates are correlated with educational attainment, the poorest and least educated regions of the world will experience the fastest growth. The only places in the world that currently have a fertility rate well above replacement level are Africa and Central Asia. This dichotomy will result in greater wealth disparity and conflict.
The new population paradigm will cause many headaches that our children and grandchildren will have to struggle with. Some are obvious and others probably unpredictable. It would be great if the world could start thinking about these questions now and start preparing. However, human behavior over the centuries has shown that this type of long-term planning is not one of our strengths.
Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.
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