Fertility rates are declining around the world and most of what is written about this trend casts it in a positive light. The cover story of last November’s Economist magazine carried the headline: “Falling Fertility – How the Population Problem is Solving Itself.” It claimed that countries like China are enjoying a “demographic dividend” over the coming decades. As positive as an end to human population increase might be for the planet, the question that is not getting much attention is, “what next?” After population reaches an inflection point and begins to decline, what will society be like? I won’t live to see this, but my grand daughter who was born last month certainly will.
My good friend John sent me a link to the IIASA website (International Institute for Applied System Analysis) where it is possible to download data from their models of global demographic trends (I’ve made some graphs of that data). Most such models stop at 2050 but this one goes out to 2100. If these models are correct, there are some major challenges ahead for humanity. The most immediate is how to feed the population that will continue to increase until about 2060. The next is how to deal with a population that is getting very old. If you are an American, the trends in the following graphs should be seriously unsettling. We have a dysfunctional, hyper-partisan-dominated, political establishment that is chronically unable to find reasonable solutions to the challenges of medical costs, Social Security insolvency or immigration reform, and yet addressing these very issues will become even more critical in the future pictured in these graphs.
Fewer and Fewer Children
The first thing that strikes me (see graph above) is the declining proportion of children. This global trend is well under way in the developed world and is only slightly less so in North America because of immigration. I wonder at what point colleges will start competing for the few remaining students?