Population articles by Jonathan Last

The population contraction

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By Jonathan Last

Phillip Longman is the most important man you've never heard of in Washington.

A senior fellow at the liberal New America Foundation, Longman specializes in demography. If you're a romantic, demography is the science of love, writ large. If you're a cynic, it is the sausage factory of civilization. Whatever your disposition, demography is, if not destiny, then a subject of paramount importance. In the long run, no weapon, no technology, no economic system is more powerful.

Longman has spent many years studying demographic trends, and the conclusions are unsettling. As he writes in his 2004 book, The Empty Cradle, birthrates in America and around the world are declining beneath sustainability; population growth is slowing and, unless the trends of the last 200 years change, will soon bring about population decline - and with it, potential shifts in global prosperity and power.

Forget domestic politics and international relations: Fertility is the thing. As Longman explains, it's the grand unified theory of everything. As fertility rates decline, populations, then economies, then military power, then world influence, diminish.

This is a bit counterintuitive. As Longman notes, everywhere you look there are signs of overcrowding. More traffic, more housing sprawl, more strip centers, more kids applying to college. It looks as if the world is bursting at the seams.

There's some truth to that. There are 6.5 billion people today, and that number is increasing every year. But according to demographic estimates, the world's population will peak somewhere between 9 billion and 12 billion in the next 75 years - give or take - and after that will precipitously decline, while the average age of the population gets more and more advanced.

The key concept is that of fertility rates. The "replacement fertility rate," which is to say the number of children the average woman needs to bear for a population to sustain itself, is 2.1.

Global fertility rates have been declining for a long time. Today, they're half of what they were in 1972. Fifty-nine countries (accounting for 44 percent of world population) have fertility rates below replacement levels. The United Nations projects that by 2050, 75 percent of all countries will fall below replacement levels.

Let's be clear: Even as fertility rates decline, absolute population size continues to increase because of demographic momentum. But as the fertility rate decreases, the rate of population increase slows - until you dip beneath the 2.1 line. Suddenly, the pool of potential new parents becomes too small to sustain the population. After about 30 years, the grandparents begin dying off.

"By then, the momentum of population growth is lost," writes Longman, "or, more precisely, is working in the opposite direction with compounding force."

You can already see this trend in the United States. We have the highest fertility rate in the industrialized world (2.09), but this mainly reflects the contribution of our immigrants, who reproduce at a higher rate than natives.

As Colgate economist Michael Haines has shown, American fertility rates have been falling steadily for 200 years. In 1800, the fertility rate among white Americans was 7.04; by 1998, it was 2.07. This decline was interrupted by only a single period of increase: the Baby Boom. In 1940, the fertility rate was 2.22; in 1950, it rose to 2.98; in 1960, it rose further still to 3.53. But by 1970, it fell back to 2.39 and has been headed south ever since.

The fertility rate for black Americans is in steeper decline. In 1850, it was 7.90. Blacks, too, experienced a Baby Boom between 1940 and 1960, but by 1998, their fertility rate was 2.17 and falling fast. Hispanics are the only American ethnic group significantly above the replacement level, because Latin American immigrants bring with them higher fertility rates. After a few years in the States, they begin regressing to the mean: Between 1990 and 2001, America's Hispanic birthrate fell 10 percent.

Immigration might seem like a solution to our demographic woes, but that's a mirage. As the U.N. report "Replacement Migration" explains, to keep the current ratio of workers to retirees in America, we'd need 10.8 million new immigrants every year until 2050, at which point the U.S. population would be 1.1 billion, 73 percent of whom would be immigrants arrived since 1995 and their descendants. As a sociological matter, that's an untenable situation.

(It's also unlikely. Manhattan Institute scholar Tamar Jacoby persuasively argues that falling fertility rates and rising median ages in Latin America will probably cause the source of immigration to dry up long before our need for bodies is satisfied.)

So what happens next? According to the U.S. Census, between 2005 and 2025, America's over-65 population will increase by 72 percent, because as fertility decreases, the existing population gets older. By 2050, about 20 percent of Americans will be over 65; there will be 13 million more senior citizens than there will be children under 14.

An older, contracting population is a harbinger of dark times. In the modern welfare state, the cost of caring for the elderly is largely shifted to the government. Combine an increasing population of seniors with an increasingly expensive state pension and health-care system, and you have a portion of the budget that must grow ever larger. The options: slash benefits, overhaul the system, or raise taxes. As Longman explains: "Younger workers, finding that not only does the economy require them to have far higher levels of education than did their parents, but that they must also pay far higher payroll taxes, are less able to afford children, and so have fewer of them, causing a new cycle of population aging."

In other words, the further the fertility rate falls, the greater the incentive for people to have fewer children.

Capitalism is, historically speaking, a relatively new contraption, but recent experience suggests that capitalism and falling populations don't mix particularly well. Consider Japan and Europe. Japan's fertility rate is 1.34, 17 percent of its population is over 65, and its economy is a shambles. By 2050, Japan will lose a seventh of its population, and the percentage of citizens over 65 will increase from 17 percent to 32 percent. Italy - never, and certainly not now, a model of smoothly running capitalism - will lose 13 percent of its population, while the proportion of those over 65 will double to 35 percent. In Russia, which is already losing 750,000 people a year, that future is now.

In the coming years, the United States will struggle to avoid this fate. Our declining fertility is, literally, a matter of life and death.

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Birthrate decline will be our global peril

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By Jonathan Last

Across the globe, fertility rates are falling. Most countries are already below the replacement rate of 2.1 children born to the average woman; many more will fall below that crucial mark in the next 25 years. By 2080, world population will probably have peaked around nine billion, after which it will sharply contract (for my previous piece on world population, see  HYPERLINK "http://go.philly.com/last" http://go.philly.com/last).

Why are people having fewer babies with every passing year? The answer is complicated.

Between 1990 and 2000, every region in the world saw the total fertility rate decline. Among nations with rates above the "replacement rate," only two countries saw a rise in fertility: Suriname and Israel, whose rates increased by 0.17 and 0.01 children per woman, respectively. We see the same trend in nearly every country of every size in every climate and with every conceivable political, religious, and economic system - which suggests a complicated set of factors at work. It raises at least the possibility that the root of the problem may involve modernity itself. But for our purposes, let's look at why America's fertility rate has fallen from just over 7.0 to 2.09 over the last 200 years.

In The Empty Cradle, his indispensable book about falling birthrates, Phillip Longman postulates a number of forces influencing American birthrates.

Some are obvious: the spread of abortion, contraception, divorce, and women's work opportunities. Another factor is the decline of religious belief (or at least practice) in America over the last 200 years. As Longman writes, 47 percent of those who attend church weekly "say that the ideal family size is three or more children, as compared to only 27 percent of those who seldom attend church." The birthrate in pious Utah is nearly double what it is in secular Vermont.

There are a host of other small, hidden influences. The social acceptance of homosexuality surely plays some part. And Americans have become more geographically mobile over the years. People now settle farther from their families than ever before - which cuts off a traditional source of support for day-care costs: grandparents. For a variety of reasons, American women have also been putting off childbirth until later in life. Longman notes that "recent studies show that a woman's fertility begins to drop at age 27, and by age 30 can decline by as much as 50 percent." And for practical reasons, the chances of having multiple children decline with age.

Amid the clutter of small influences, two gigantic ones loom: the evolving costs of children and the welfare state.

From the founding of America - indeed, throughout most of history - children have been an economic boon to parents. Children consumed few resources, other than food and clothing, and from a very young age contributed to the household economy by working. Children were once a prime source of nearly-free labor.

By the end of World War II, the expectations for children were beginning to change, and within a few generations, children disappeared almost entirely from the workforce. Today, children are not expected to labor for the family business - they are expected to go to school, and eventually college. Part of this change stems from evolving views of the sanctity of childhood; part of it stems from simple necessity. Small hands, so helpful during the agrarian and industrial ages, are useless in the information age.

As the economic benefits of children began to disappear, the costs of child-rearing began rising geometrically. A child born in 2001 typically cost $211,370 to raise for the first 17 years - and that assumes that both parents work full time. If a parent making $45,000 were to give up her full-time job and work part-time to raise a child, she would be forgoing $823,736 of income.

The information age comes into play here, too. As our economy matures, it takes more and more education, and higher and higher credentials, to secure successful employment. Thus, the length of children's economic dependence has also grown to include college (and increasingly graduate school). In 2001, the average four-year private college cost $23,000 per year. Instead of children helping their families economically, one child can easily cost parents $1 million. That's a sizable disincentive.

The other great economic benefit of children has typically been a delayed one - they care for parents in their old age. But that long-standing arrangement, too, has gone by the wayside with the invention of the modern welfare state. Social Security and Medicare, which are funded by the work of young people, provide for the elderly. "[W]e have largely socialized the cost of aging...," Longman explains, "but we still leave it to individuals to bear (in both direct expenses and forgone wages) nearly all the growing cost of raising the children who sustain the system, while allowing those individuals to retain a dwindling share of the value they create."

Which is to say, why bother going through the expense of having children, since you'll be provided for anyway?

In modern America a host of circumstances have combined to discourage family formation. Cultural forces have pushed the window for bearing children far past its biological optimal. Having children is more economically burdensome and less economically rewarding than it has ever been in the course of human history. We have reached a point where children are actually an impediment to economic and social success.

In short, modern American society has created - quite unintentionally - an anti-Darwinian system where reproduction is a hindrance to economic and social success. Those who thrive are almost by definition those who have few, or no, children.

Seen in this context, our plummeting fertility rate is an apparently rational response to our changing lives - and therefore is even more worrisome than it might seem at first blush. Our failing fertility is not a fad or fashion. It is the logical consequence of a culture that cannot hope to sustain itself.

*****

IS POPULATION CONTRACTION A BAD THING?

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Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 November 2006

By Jonathan Last

Fertility rates around the world are dropping for a variety of complex reasons. While population itself continues to increase - the United States, for instance, recently passed the 300 million mark - this is the product of waning demographic momentum. The rate of increase is slowing, and, by 2080, world population will peak somewhere in the vicinity of nine billion before contracting.

Which leads us to the next question: Is population contraction a bad thing?

Some think not. There is a school of thought that argues that smaller populations are good. Population-control proponents claim variously that:

We do not have the food to sustain higher populations.

Our planet already suffers from overcrowding.

The environmental impact of increased populations will bring catastrophe either through pollution or consumption of finite natural resources.

Decreased population will lead to higher wages and a better quality of life as available supplies exceed reduced demands.

These arguments seem reasonable at first, but do not withstand scrutiny.

Let's start with food. The worry about mass starvation is a remnant of Paul Ehrlich's 1968 sensation The Population Bomb. Ehrlich wrote that, in the face of expanding populations, "the world will undergo famines - hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."

As Ehrlich himself admits, this prediction proved faulty. Instead, the availability of food has greatly increased, even with growing population. Demographer Philip Longman notes that, between 1980 and 2001, the price of food declined by 53 percent. Famine, observes Longman, has become "a political problem - a matter of fair distribution, not of inadequate supply."

How did this happen? The Danish economist Ester Boserup upended the classical Malthusian model of agriculture in 1965 by proposing that population increase fosters agricultural innovation, which, in turn, spurs leaps in production. Her theories have been borne out.

What about overcrowding? Everywhere you go today, you find traffic jams and sprawl, with people packed into condominiums and crowded malls. But this is a problem of density, not population. There's plenty of land available out there. The problem is that people who used to live in the countryside have relocated to cities: There are fewer people living in the Great Plains today than there were in the 1920s.

Environmental concerns are more interesting. However, such end-of-the-world warnings are not new. In the 1970s, many scientists were concerned about a new Ice Age. But leave aside global warming, on which science is conflicted, and take the other concern principally cited by environmentalists: that the Earth has a finite supply of resources that we shall surely soon deplete.

This, too, is an argument we have heard before. As Massimo Livi-Bacci explains in his Concise History of World Population, more than 100 years ago, economists "feared that coal supplies would be used up, and about 30 years ago the Club of Rome made similar predictions regarding other raw materials." Instead, markets and human innovation stepped in to provide greater efficiency.

For instance, in the America of 1850, you needed an average of 4.6 tons of petroleum equivalent to produce $1,000 of goods and services. By 1950, you needed only 1.8 tons, and, by 1978, 1.5 tons. Markets are exceptional engines of conservation.

Which leaves us with the economy. In 1971, Simon Smith Kuznets won the Nobel Prize in economics for his theory of "tested knowledge." As Kuznets explained: "More population means more creators and producers, both of goods along established production patterns and of new knowledge and inventions."

Kuznets was codifying what others had noticed before. Adam Smith remarked that "the most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of its inhabitants." As Livi-Bacci observes, "All things being equal, population increase leads to increased per capita production."

So the proposed "benefits" of population decline are, at the very least, suspect.

On the other hand, there are worrying potential costs of population decline. Of course, this worry is theoretical because we've never seen population decline on the massive scale that's coming our way. Or rather, we've never seen it in the modern world. There are, however, two historical examples.

Between 400 B.C. and the birth of Jesus, world population increased from about 153 million to 252 million. For the next 200 years, growth slowed almost to a halt. Then, between A.D. 200 and 600, population shrank from 257 million to 208 million. It took 400 more years for the population to recover to the level it had attained in Jesus' time.

The other drop in population occurred between 1340 and 1400, when the Black Death ravaged the world. Global population fell from 442 million to 375 million. Neither of these moments were particularly pleasant periods in human history.

Or, as Mark Steyn notes in America Alone, "There is no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital."

It is impossible to predict with certainty the side effects of population decline. But there is good reason to believe it will be bad for us. Innovation will suffer as the demand for nearly everything (save health care) slackens. The welfare state is unsustainable in a contracting, top-heavy population. And instead of producing windfalls of excess supply, economies will probably contract. As Livi-Bacci observes, "Historically, areas depopulated or in the process of losing population have almost always been characterized by backward economies."

And then there is the question of national character. As the Asia Times noted recently with respect to the effect population decline is having on Europe: "A people without progeny will not accept a single military casualty. If this generation is the last, there will be no children for whom to sacrifice. Today's Europeans value their distractions and amusements more than they do prospective children."

The supposed benefits of population decline are a mirage. The real question is whether falling populations will lead Western civilization to something like the fall of Rome.