If you have been paying attention, you’ll know some of this already. If not, it’s going to come as a shock. Mankind’s big demographic problem is not going to be too many people, but too few. In fact in some places it already is. And the possible consequences, far from being the benign settling back into an accommodation with nature, could include a slow stagnation in which large elderly populations depend on smaller numbers of younger people to provide the dynamism they have lost. A situation you might describe as social vampirism. Doesn’t life just get you one way or the other?
It is a virtue of Paul Morland’s pithy and well-structured book and his succinct and clear writing that all but the most curmudgeonly “we’re overcrowded” anti-populationists are going to question their assumptions long before the final chapter. This concision may owe something to a fair bit of it being a popularised version of his well-reviewed 2019 book The Human Tide. It’s a hundred pages shorter, there’s no bibliography or index (which is a bit irritating), and there’s less history and more futurology.
The title’s conceit is really just a publisher’s gimmick. There are ten chapters dealing with aspects of demography from infant mortality to food and each has a single eye-catching statistic under the heading. So for example, the chapter on urbanisation begins by telling us that 121 is the number of Chinese cities with a population of over a million.
Morland’s first three chapters seem to tell the familiar tale. Infant mortality is down everywhere and dramatically down in what used it be called the developing world; population is rising fast in Africa; far more of us live in cities than used to. So it’s when we get to chapter four on fertility that the fun really begins. The omigosh number here is 1 — the fertility rate (ie births per woman) in Singapore, 2.1 being usually considered the “replacement” rate at which a population will maintain itself, down from more than 5 just half a century ago. It speaks to huge changes in reproductive behaviour. And although Singapore is at one end of the spectrum, most of the west reproduces below or well below replacement rate, as does China.
Given that people are also living longer, this makes for the prospect of an ageing population and changing social dynamics. “Globally,” Morland writes, “life expectancy has increased on average from the mid-forties to the early seventies since 1950, a stupendous and transformative achievement, but progress is patchy”.
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The author’s takeaway number for age, however, is 43, the average age in Catalonia. This number is chosen because Morland speculates (there’s quite a lot of this in the book) that, had the population been younger, they would have fought more violently and successfully for independence, although some of us may think that there never being a majority in Catalonia for full independence was also a factor. It is also unfortunate that Morland’s analysis that ageing societies are less likely to go to war than younger ones feels ill timed just at the moment when the ageing Russia has invaded its neighbour.
That doesn’t make him wrong per se, and anyway I enjoyed his story of the notice in his local parish weekly for a retired doctor who “had died aged 105, mourned not only by his great great grandchildren, but by two sisters”. Less amusingly, we learn at the beginning of the next chapter that there are 79,000 Japanese centenarians (90 per cent of them women) and that one consequence of this explosion of ancients is to replace the veneration of the elderly with an impatience that has a name, rougai.
And so we come to population decline. Africa as a whole is booming, but Bulgaria’s numbers are expected to go down by 55 per cent in the century between 1989 and 2089; there are fewer than half the number of women in their early twenties in that country than in 1980. In some countries rural areas are at critical stages in depopulation; for example, “20,000 Russian villages have been completely abandoned and another 36,000 have fewer than 10 inhabitants”, well below the level that will maintain schools and other social facilities. In half a century the population of Japan is projected to shrink by 20 per cent back to the level of the mid-1960s (and remember how old this population will be).
Things take a slightly more complex turn when Morland considers ethnic change, the big stat here being 22: the percentage of Californian school children who are white. Morland writes, “It is forecast that by 2060 less than half of all Americans will be white, and the Latino population will be more than twice the size of the black population.”
And? This is not a problem that black people seem to worry about. If black people can live with being a minority, so can I. Skin colour is not the same as ethnicity in the all-important cultural sense, yet Morland treats it as though it were. Why? Because “the United States has also long been inhabited by some people who are eager to embrace humans regardless of their origin, but these liberals have continuously rubbed up against others with a more ethno-national outlook”.
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What on earth does a “more ethno-national outlook” mean? Is that how you’d describe a segregationist? Or do we just mean people who don’t like people who are not like them? A category for which there are other words. Morland himself points out that “white” was a less meaningful category when American elites were worried about the arrival of Irish Catholics in the northeastern cities, the suggestion here being, whether Morland recognises it or not, that a desire to distinguish oneself from whoever else comes in is really at the root of this.
It is a problem that Morland is pessimistic about solving. After all, a medium-term answer to ageing and population decline is immigration from higher fertility regions and you might think that the challenge would be to manage assimilation. Yet Morland appears to rule this out as somehow impractical.
And that brings us to what I regard as his rather bizarre possible “solution” to the problem. Morland repurposes a word to use for the reluctance of people to have as many babies as they did before: egoism. He suggests this as a new technical term meaning “specifically the prioritising of personal projects above family formation”. When actually he means “large family formation”. But, of course, egoism has a wide usage as a word meaning, essentially, “selfish”.
If you investigate his footnotes you discover that this insidious notion that selfishness is at the root of low fertility is backed up by some amazingly flimsy evidence — a Singaporean online magazine or a 1978 American novel. Women, he appears to suggest, don’t like dirty nappies and prefer careers and nights out with the girls. Which is very weird of them, Morland seems to think, given that “parenthood has been the most fulfilling thing I have done”.
By this stage he has pointed out (as he has in earlier works) that certain religious minorities — ultra-Orthodox Jews, Mormons, the Amish — have very high birth rates and suggests that maybe the future lies with them. It’s a notion pioneered by the political scientist Eric Kaufmann, who on this book’s jacket says that Morland “affords a glimpse into our planet’s more distant future, which may be highly religious”.
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Yet this idea that extreme patriarchal (and very small) religious societies in which women are essentially breeding machines somehow represent a possible future for humankind is far more improbable to my mind than anticipating successful immigration.
Tomorrow’s People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers by Paul Morland, Picador, 294pp; £20
