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from https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-10/global-population-collapse-isn-t-sci-fi-anymore-niall-ferguson

Global Population Crash Isn't Sci-Fi Anymore
We used to worry about the planet getting too crowded, but there are
plenty of downsides to a shrinking humanity as well.

March 9, 2024 at 9:00 PM PST

By Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is the Milbank
Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University
and the author, most recently, of “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.”

It’s getting lonely out there. Photographer: Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images

We used to imagine humanity populating the universe. In Isaac Asimov's Foundation (1952), mankind has established a vast multi-planetary empire
by the year 47000. “There were nearly twenty-five million inhabited
planets in the Galaxy,” Asimov wrote. “The population of Trantor [the imperial capital] … was well in excess of forty billions.”

In Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem (2006), by contrast, we’re a cosmic rounding error, bracing ourselves for the terrifying Trisolaran
invasion. As the trailer for the new Netflix series puts it: “They are coming, and there is nothing you can do to stop them.”

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When Asimov was born in 1920, the global population was around 1.9
billion. When he published Foundation, it was 2.64 billion. By the time
of his death in 1992, it was 5.5 billion, nearly three times what it had
been at his birth. Considering that there had been a mere 500 million
humans when Christopher Columbus landed on the New World, the
proliferation of the species homo sapiens in the modern era had been an astonishing feat.

Small wonder some members of Asimov’s generation came to dread
overpopulation and fret about an impending Malthusian disaster. This led
to all kinds of efforts to promote contraception and abortion, as
described in Matt Connelly's Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to
Control World Population (2008). Among these was China’s one-child
policy, the harshest ever government intervention in human reproductive behavior.

Superficially, these efforts were a complete failure. Frank Notestein,
the Princeton demographer who became the founding director of the United Nations Population Division (UNPD), estimated in 1945 that the world’s population would be 3.3 billion by the year 2000. In fact, it exceeded
6.1 billion. Today it is estimated to be more than 8 billion. In its
most recent projection, the UNPD’s median estimate is that the global population will reach 10.4 billion by the mid 2080s, with an upper bound
of more than 12 billion by the end of the century.

Yet that seems rather a low-probability scenario. The European
Commission’s Centre of Expertise on Population and Migration projects
that the global population will peak at 9.8 billion in the 2070s.
According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an
independent research organization, it will peak at a lower level and
earlier still, at 9.7 billion in 2064.

The key word is “peak.” Nearly all demographers now appreciate that we shall likely reach peak humanity this century. This is not because a
lethal pandemic will drive up mortality far more than Covid-19 did,
though that possibility should never be ruled out. Nor is it because the
UNPD incorporates into its population model any other apocalyptic
scenario, whether disastrous climate change or nuclear war.

It is simply because, all over the world, the total fertility rate (TFR)
— the number of live children the average woman bears in her lifetime —
has been falling since the 1970s. In one country after another, it has
dropped under the 2.1 threshold (the “replacement rate,” allowing for childhood deaths and sex imbalances), below which the population is
bound to decline. This fertility slump is in many ways the most
remarkable trend of our era. And it is not only Elon Musk who worries
that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future
of civilization.”

Our species is not done multiplying, to be sure. But, to quote the UNPD, “More than half of the projected increase in the global population
between 2022 and 2050 is expected to be concentrated in just eight
countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC], Egypt, Ethiopia,
India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania.” That is because already “close to half of the global
population lives in a country or area where lifetime fertility is below
2.1 births per woman.”

Not many people foresaw the global fertility collapse. Nor did just
about anyone expect it to happen everywhere. And I can’t a single pundit predicting just how low it would go in some countries. In South Korea
the total fertility rate in 2023 is estimated to have been 0.72. In
Europe there is no longer a difference between Roman Catholic and
Protestant countries. Italy’s current TFR (1.21) is lower than England’s (1.44). Nor is there a difference between Christian and Islamic
civilizations — those great historical entities whose clashes the
historian Samuel Huntington worried about. The US total fertility rate
is now 1.62. The figure for the Islamic Republic of Iran is 1.54.

Outside of Africa, a Shrinking Planet
Among selected countries, only Democratic Republic of Congo had a
birthrate above replacement level of 2.1 live births per woman in 2023

Source: United Nations Population Department

The timing of this huge demographic transition has varied, to be sure.
In the US, the TFR fell below 2.0 in 1973. In the UK, it happened a year
later; in Italy in 1977. The East Asian countries were not far behind:
In South Korea TFR was above 2.0 until 1984; in China until 1991.
Fertility remained higher for longer in the Muslim world, but it fell
below 2.0 in Iran as early as 2001. Even in India the TFR has now fallen
below 2.0.

Only in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa does fertility remain well
above the replacement rate. In the DRC, for example, the average woman
still bears more than 6 children. But there, too, fertility is expected
to plummet in the coming decades. The global TFR, according to the
UNPD’s medium-variant projection, will fall from 2.3 in 2021 to 1.8 in
2100. The differences in estimates of when we reach peak humanity
largely hinge on how quickly demographers think family size will shrink
in Africa.

A Global Baby Bust
Total fertility for selected countries, in average live births per woman

Source: United Nations Population Department

Note: Projections start in 2023

What are the drivers of the great fertility slump? One theory, according
to a thought-provoking 2006 paper by Wolfgang Lutz, Vegard Skirbekk and
Maria Rita Testa, is that “societies progress up the hierarchy of needs
from physical survival to emotional self-actualization, and as they do
so, rearing children gets short shrift because people pursue other, more individualist aims. … People find other ways to find meaning in life.” Another interpretation (see for example this paper by Ron Lesthaeghe)
gives the agency to women, emphasizing that fertility drops as female
education and employment rise.

Over the past century, beginning in Western Europe and North America, a
rising proportion of women have entered higher education and the skilled
labor force. Improved education has also given women greater autonomy
within relationships, a better understanding of contraception, and
greater input into family planning. Many have opted to delay becoming
mothers in order to pursue their careers. And the opportunity cost of
having children increases as women’s wages rise relative to their male partners.

Another way of looking at the problem is that, after its initial kids-in-cotton-mills phase, the industrial revolution reduced the
importance of children as a source of unskilled labor. As countries
develop economically, families invest more in their children, providing
them with better education, which increases the cost of raising each
individual child.

Cultural change has also played a part. One study estimated that roughly
a third of the decline in fertility in the US between 2007 and 2016 was
due to the decline in unintended births. My generation — the baby
boomers — were more impulsive and indeed reckless about sex. By
contrast, according to the psychologists Brooke Wells and Jean Twenge, millennials have fewer sex partners on average than we did. A 2020
analysis of responses to the General Social Survey revealed higher rates
of sexual inactivity among the most recent cohort of 20- to 24-year-olds
than among their predecessors born in the 1970s and ‘80s. Between
2000-02 and 2016–18, the proportion of 18- to 24-year-old men who
reported having no sexual activity in the past year increased from 19%
to 31%.

The fact that the declines in sexual activity were most pronounced among students and men with lower incomes and with part-time or no employment suggests that declining sexual activity is economically determined.
However, other possible explanations include the “stress and busyness of modern life,” the supply of “online entertainment that may compete with sexual activity,” elevated rates of depression and anxiety among young adults, the detrimental effect of smartphones on real-world human
interactions, and the lack of appeal to women of “hooking up.”

The most recent version of the UK National Survey of Sexual Attitudes
and Lifestyles revealed a similar marked decline in the frequency of sex
in Britain. The return of the “No sex please, we’re British” ethos
mainly affects married or cohabiting couples and — according to a
careful analysis in The British Medical Journal — is most likely due to “the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and the global recession of 2008.”

Another key driver of declining fertility has been declining
religiosity. Using data in the World Values Survey, we can identify a
clear correlation between the rise of secularization and the fall of
family size. A fascinating historical anomaly, the early decline of
fertility in late-18th century France — described by the French
demographer Alfred Sauvy as “the most important fact” of his country’s history — has been plausibly explained by the advance of secular
thinking, and therefore of contraceptive practices, in the wake of the religious strife of the previous two centuries.

Fertility can sometimes go back up — witness the Covid baby “bump.” Moreover, according to survey data, many women would like to have more children. In low-fertility countries, according to a 2019 study for the
UN Population Fund, there is “a wide gap between fertility aspirations
at younger ages and achieved fertility later in life, signaling that
many women, men and couples face obstacles in realizing their fertility plans.”

That the main obstacles are the perceived economic costs of a larger
family is borne out by the fact that many of the most successful
professional women have more than two children. In the words of Moshe
Hazan and Hosny Zoabi, “the cross‐sectional relationship between
fertility and women’s education in the US has recently become U‐shaped.
… By substituting their own time for market services to raise children
and run their households, highly educated women are able to have more
children and work longer hours.”

But not everyone can be a supermom with a crew of house managers and
nannies. Can governments do anything to push back up fertility across
the board? They are certainly trying. Since the 1970s, the number of
countries aiming to raise fertility with a variety of government
incentives has risen roughly fivefold. But there are no examples I know
of in which pro-natal policies have really worked. For years, President Vladimir Putin has urged Russians to have more babies in order to
prevent the depopulation of the vast federation he governs. Though
Russian fertility rose in the decade after 2000, the TFR never even got
close to 2, and has slumped back to 1.5.

What Mussolini called “the battle for births” is a losing proposition.
The global trend is to make abortion easier. (In the past 30 years, more
than 60 countries have altered their abortion laws. All but four — the
US, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Poland — eased access to abortion). A
growing number of countries permit euthanasia and/or assisted suicide.
Average sperm counts have fallen by more than 50% in 50 years. No one
knows exactly why, but bad food, bad air and bad lifestyle are the
contenders. How Mankind Chose Extinction will be an interesting read if
anyone is left to write it.

Half a century ago, we worried about The Population Bomb (the title of
Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller). Now that we can see “peak humanity” within our children’s lifetimes — conceivably in the 2060s — why isn’t everyone breathing a sigh of relief? I can think of three reasons.

First, the advanced countries that already have declining populations
find the consequences of fertility restriction rather melancholy: low
economic growth, empty schools, crowded retirement homes, a general lack
of youthful vitality.

Second, because the fertility drop came later in the Middle East and
North Africa and has barely begun in sub-Saharan Africa, we are seeing a dramatic shift in the global demographic balance in favor of people with
darker pigmentation — as a Scotsman married to a Somali, I am doing my
part for this trend — many of them Muslims. This worries many of the
mostly white and mostly Christian peoples who were globally dominant
from around 1750 to 2000.

Third, the peoples with the highest fertility mostly live in poor places
that climate change and armed conflict are making even less appealing.
So they move if they can — through North Africa or Western Asia toward Europe, or via Mexico to the US — or, to a significant extent, get
involved in violent activities (crime or terrorism) where they can’t escape.

All this drives up the probability of right-wing politics in the
developed world (old people vote for this and they outnumber the young),
more conflict (borders can’t seriously be defended without at least the threat of violence), the more rapid spread of infectious pathogens, and
no effective attempt to address the climate issue.

Yet immigration still seems to North American and European elites to be
the simplest solution to the problem of falling fertility. That is why,
in high-income countries between 2000 and 2020, the contribution of net international migration to population growth exceeded the balance of
births over deaths. What the geopolitical consequences of mass migration
will be is anyone’s guess. Some Russians worry that the Chinese have
designs on their vast Eurasian empire east of the Urals. That seems
unlikely if China’s population is set to halve between now and 2100. China’s problem is not a shortage of space; it is a surplus of empty apartment blocks.

In contemplating these and other scenarios, most pundits struggle to
grasp that, when the human population begins to fall, it will do so not gradually, but almost as steeply as it once rose. To quote my polymath
friend, the oncologist Justin Stebbing, “Humanity will not reach a
plateau and then stabilize. It will begin an unprecedented decline ...
If the world’s fertility rate [after 2100] were the same as in the
United States today, then the global population would fall from a peak
of around 10 billion to [less than] 2 billion about 300 years later,
over perhaps 10 generations. And if family sizes remained small, we
would continue declining.”

The problem is that this precipitous decline will come a century too
late to avert the disastrous consequences of climate change that many
today fear — and which are another reason why people will flee Africa,
and another reason why young people in Europe say they will have few or
no children.

The appropriate science fiction to read is therefore neither Asimov nor
Liu Cixin. Begin, instead, with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), in
which a new Black Death wipes out all but one forlorn specimen of
humanity. Then turn to Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), in which
the addled “Snow-man” is one of just a handful of survivors of a world ravaged by global warming, reckless genetic engineering, and a
disastrous attempt at population reduction that resulted in a global plague.

For those, like Elon Musk, who still dream of building Asimov’s galactic empire, such visions of human extinction are hard to stomach. He and
others swim against the tide, siring five or six times as many offspring
as the average male. But the reality is that a sub-2.1 global TFR is a
more powerful historical force than even the fecund Mr. Musk. It is
coming. And there is nothing we can do to stop it.

More From Niall Ferguson at Bloomberg Opinion:

If You Think World War III Is Unimaginable, Read This
The US and Europe Risk Flunking Geopolitics 101
America’s Longtime Sources of Power Have Turned Weak
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