We’ve come a long way from the doomsayers of fifty years ago who were convinced that Malthus would finally turn out to be right and we’d breed ourselves to death.

They turned out to be wrong of course, for very good reasons, but that hasn’t stopped the doomsters re-emerging.

And of course the MSM never could get enough of Paul Erlich – while hardly knowing who Norman Borlaug was (he only saved about two billion lives).

However, one thing that is stopping the population doomsters this time is the simple fact that our “overpopulation” is about to go into reverse. This was first spotted in Japan thirty years ago when their declining birth rate was projected into the future and a population drop was predicted for the 2010’s, which is exactly what happened. Amazingly a lot of lay people were still confused because the Japanese population continued to increase. Similarly for the world, which has allowed Erlich to get airtime again in the 2020’s.

But this is one forecasting model that works. mainly because it’s so simple, fewer babies now means even fewer in the next generation and so forth. Since that forecast most other nations have followed Japan’s birthrate path and as a result many will also soon join her in seeing their populations age and decline as Japan’s has done since 2010 when it peaked at 128 million. By as early as 2060 they’ll have just 70 million people.

The rest of the world is perhaps twenty years behind Japan, including the USA, and it’s finally starting to worry some people:

There are three major factors at work. Life expectancy is falling, birth rates are dropping, and immigration has been low. Government policies that could improve the situation have been inconsistent. And if we can’t grapple effectively with the underlying causes of a shrinking population, we could wind up with a country that is economically fragile.
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Taken together, the three trends driving U.S. population growth downward are self-reinforcing. A nation with a low birthrate and low immigration shrinks and gets older; an older, smaller population produces a less vibrant economy; a weaker economy attracts fewer immigrants and makes it harder for young people to have kids. Some fear this dynamic could produce a negative-feedback loop that’s impossible to escape,

That article discusses possible domestic solutions – state funded family leave, child care, health care, and tax credits – but none of them seem to have worked elsewhere in the world. Which leaves immigration, but that’s hitting all sorts of problems as well, in countries as varied as the USA, France and Sweden.

For two decades now people have been keeping a close watch on these trends, especially the birth rate in China, and forecasting serious problems: Mark Steyn famously said in 2005 that China would get old before it got rich. So it was not really that much of a surprise to such people when China recently dropped what was considered a bombshell to most of the rest of the world, with the announcement that their population has actually dropped for the first time in six decades:

… the nation’s population of 1.4 billion declined by about 850,000. Short term, this is just a blip on the radar. But China also is afflicted with a rapidly aging population, which means that China is very likely to get old before it gets rich.

“China’s demographic and economic outlook is much bleaker than expected. China will have to adjust its social, economic, defense and foreign policies,” said demographer Yi Fuxian.

“Economic growth will have to depend more on productivity growth,” added Zhiwei Zhang, chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management.

Good luck with that. Productivity ultimately depends on people being free to implement different ideas, which is tough to do in a State that’s often frightened of new ideas and takes ages to incorporate them into State policy – with the opposite being true also, as this horrific description of China’s One Child Policy shows:

Thirty years ago, Guan County, Shandong Province launched the “Hundred Childless Days” campaign under the aegis of national family planning, known in the West as the “one-child policy.” The birthplace of the “Boxers” was deemed to have too high a birth rate by the provincial government. County officials sought to correct this by ensuring that not a single baby was born between May 1 and August 10, 1991. As local accounts attest, authorities in the area went to extraordinarily inhumane lengths to be the “best” at reproducing the least.

In what some locals called “the slaughter of the lambs,” women across Guan County were rounded up for forced abortions or induction of labor; one local official claims that these “procedures” were sometimes no more than a kick in the stomach from an out-of-town mercenary. Children who did make it into the world were reportedly strangled, and their bodies tossed into open pits. The families of pregnant women were publicly shamed in reprises of the Cultural Revolution.

With the following, entirely predictable result today:

China’s birth rate last year was just 6.77 births per 1,000 people, down from a rate of 7.52 births in 2021 and marking the lowest birth rate on record. The number of Chinese women of childbearing age, which the government defines as aged 25 to 35, fell by about 4 million, Kang said.

The death rate, the highest since 1974 during the Cultural Revolution, was 7.37 deaths per 1,000 people, which compares with a rate of 7.18 deaths in 2021.

Contrast those numbers with the U.S., where our births per thousand people were 12.01 and deaths per thousand were 6.98.

 

However there is one part of the world where this is not happening: Africa:

Longer term projections are hazardous, but a world with somewhere between 9 and 11 billion total population and close to 4 billion people living in Africa is what current trends would lead one to expect. That means that by 2100 the African share of global population will likely be between 35 and 40 percent. And in 2100 the population of several African countries – Chad, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and South Sudan – is likely still to be growing.

That is something new under the sun. It means that in sheer quantitative terms Africa’s story increasingly drives world history.

Hmmm…. We’ll see about that because while population growth automatically means GDP growth the real test is growing GDP per person, and Africa has never been very good at that – something the article addresses in detail. Frankly China and India have not been very good at that either, leading to the concerns above about how increased prosperity will increasingly depend on productivity growth. Can the European Industrial Revolution of the last 250 years really be so easily transferred to other soils?

This is the Magic Dirt theory on steroids. For the last thirty years of globalisation it has certainly appeared to be possible – look at all the factories that have sprung up in China, people say. But much of that has been simple substitution by Western nations and companies; sending their factories abroad where it’s cheaper. There’s a limit to that.

For the purposes of this post it’s enough to note the strange driver of African population growth, which is happening in the face of improving wealth, healthcare and technology, especially the technology of birth control:

All the evidence suggests that men and women in Nigeria are making different choices about fertility than men and women in Thailand, for instance.
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Why do Nigerian women use so little contraception? There are no doubt many constraining factors but the clear message of the DHS data is that they use little contraception, because they want large families and they are, in their own way, quite successful at matching actual fertility to desired fertility.

Nigeria is not Africa of course, but it’s sheer size makes it a big driver for the entire continent, and the article is based on a book called Youth Quake that does go into a nation-by-nation analysis. And as the writer points out, the world is treating Africa as a bloc when it comes to applying the population growth-decline models that are accurate for the rest of the world – and hence the aid programs applied. You should also read the comments: I noted this one in particular from a frequent visitor to Ethiopia:

Venturing into the hinterlands of Ethiopia (still an overwhelmingly rural society), I found that you entered a truly confounding realm of people whose basic beliefs weren’t just the opposite of yours, but based in a whole different set of axioms that fit entirely outside of Western dichotomies. I’m not sure that demographers properly account for this “X factor” in modelling sociological behavior. Most people in the most populous African countries are more like this latter group than the former. Even in “megacities” like Lagos, you find that the majority of people are transplanted, but essentially unchanged.

Urbanization in African countries is accelerating, but there’s something quite unique about it that isn’t present in Asia, Latin America, or even North Africa: rural-to-urban migrants aren’t getting richer.

That’s not good. Before the Industrial Revolution an increasing population meant more disease, famine, and war.