World Populations Are Declining?
This is an editorial about population growth in today's NY Times. There's a condensed version below the quote.
Quote:
A generation ago, Paul Ehrlich warned in "The Population Bomb" that with demands on resources soaring, overpopulation would kill our planet. As demands on water and air soared, many thought he was right. Now it turns out that population growth rates are plummeting — for good and tragic reasons. The implications are profound.
According to a United Nations report issued recently, most advanced countries could, in effect, slowly turn into old-age homes. For example, by 2050, the median age in Japan and Italy will be over 50. Fertility rates in nearly all well-off countries have already fallen below 2.1 babies per woman, the rate at which a population remains stable.
In the developing world, fertility rates average three children, down from six a half-century ago, and the U.N. projects that the rate will dip below the replacement level in most poor countries later this century. Slower growth rates are both the cause and consequence of a higher standard of living, and of the emancipation of women.
There are also alarming reasons for the drop in the population growth rate — notably the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic. It is one of the factors the United Nations cited in revising its 2050 world population projections, from 9.3 billion people down to 8.9 billion (we're at 6.3 billion today). The U.N. estimates that there will be a half-billion fewer people in the 53 nations most afflicted by AIDS than there would have been.
For its part, Europe will decline, after accounting for immigration, from 728 million people to 632 million in 2050. Italy, meanwhile, is expected to shrink by a fifth; Estonia, staggeringly, by half.
By contrast, America's population, boosted by a higher fertility rate and immigration, is projected to be 409 million in 2050, up from 285 million today. Ours is one of eight countries expected to account for half the population increase in the next 50 years. This will improve our economic prospects. Not so for the others, which are all much poorer: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, China, Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Congo.
Aging populations will pose an economic challenge for most wealthy nations as smaller working-age populations will have to pay for the health and pension benefits of a growing number of longer-living retirees.
Even a cursory understanding of these demographic trends makes two things clear. Helping poor countries improve their economies is not a matter of charity but of intelligent foreign policy. And no matter how much progress is made, there will be large population shifts into better-off nations. The immigrants will need the jobs and the richer countries will need the workers. So increasing the orderly, legal migration of labor from poorer to richer countries in the next few decades is a global imperative. Those who oppose this trend will be embracing long-term economic suicide.
In the second half of the century, the entire world's population should start declining, if these demographic projections prevail. That could present a more affluent world with problems that are the mirror image of what Paul Ehrlich once worried about.
Basically, what the editorial says is that population growth rates are declining in almost every country on the globe other than the US, India, China, and about five others. The US is the only widely prosperous nation that will have continually high population growth.
Europe, on the other hand, will have fairly nasty population declines - 20%, 50% - think about the implications.
First, this opens up the world to the replacement of jobs by robots. If populations are declining, hen robots can take their place, lowering employment costs without causing huge unemployment rates.
This is also potentially really bad for Europe. They're going to need higher populations to sustain growth, and the only way they'll be able to maintain populations is through immigration. Not good, considering how immigration-unfriendly most of these supposedly liberal socialist countries are.
