The Fertility Cliff: Projecting Human Population

 When I was a young man books and articles were discussing fears of an ever-growing population threatening the future of human civilization.  Phrases such as “population explosion” were regularly encountered.  Today, books and articles are considering the threat of falling populations for the future of human civilization.  Phrases such as “population collapse” are appearing in public discourse. The early concerns about the food supply being unable to accommodate a rapidly growing population proved wildly inaccurate.  Today nations fear a falling population will make the status quo untenable and force changes in the way society is managed.  This seems more an inconvenience than a threat and may be providing an opportunity for significant progress.

A recent article in The Economist examined the current demographic trends, choosing as its title Humanity will shrink, far sooner than you think.  Demographers use the term total fertility rate (TFR) to quantify birth rates.  This is the average number of children born to women in a population group.  To maintain a population level TFS, or just fertility, must reach 2.1

“Fertility rates have been dropping for centuries, mostly for benign reasons. Social security systems mean that people need not rely on their offspring to pay for them in old age—and, because childhood mortality is so much lower, do not feel the need to produce spares. After the baby boom of the 1960s in America, and in many parts of the world today, falling fertility reflected the liberation of women, who began to spend more time in education and exercise greater choice over their careers and use of contraception. Teenage pregnancies have become rarer.”

Fertility has varied from society to society, and still does, but all are now seeing not only a decline, but in many cases an acceleration in the rate of decline.

“What is striking and unexpected is that the decline in fertility is accelerating. The pace of global falls doubled between the 2000s and 2010s and has doubled again in this decade, sinking, on average, by almost 2% a year. In many places the fertility rate is dropping much faster. Levels that once would have been unimaginably low are becoming routine. South Korea has had a TFR of less than one for seven years. If that is sustained, its population will shrink by more than half in a single lifetime.”

The UN Population Division is responsible for tallying demographic data and providing population projections.  The article includes some national data as well as global data on fertility and its projections.

The UN demographers clearly assume fertilities will level off eventually, and with no good way to predict when, they assume the leveling will begin immediately.  The results are predictions that look like so much wishful thinking.  Many demographers disagree with the UN and expect fertilities to continue to fall in the coming years.

“Rather than climbing until 2084, as the UN currently foresees, to 10.3bn people, it may stop growing in the 2050s and never exceed 9bn. At that point, the world’s population will start to shrink, something it has not done since the 14th century, when the Black Death wiped out perhaps a fifth of humanity.”

 It is interesting to consider the actual fertility data for Turkey, China, and South Korea.  Each country is at a different level, but there are similarities in the shapes of the curves.  All would have fertilities drifting downward from the social factors the article mentioned earlier, then is a pause where the fertilities seem to attempt to stabilize but then followed by a rapid decline.  What signals was society sending to men and women as these changes occurred?

In the 1960s when population explosion was the topic, society, using peer pressure, was signaling that men and women got married in the early 20s and marriage led to having children.  It was easy to believe that evolution provided women with an innate desire to have children.  It is more likely that evolution merely provided men and women with the desire to have sex.  That worked so well that it thought its work was done.  That maternal instinct, if it exists, does not seem strong enough to resist the calls from society that now remind people that having children is economically and socially inefficient.  Most countries have feared a falling birth rate and have tried economic incentives to encourage births.  All attempts seem to ultimately fail.  Perhaps such incentives could explain the brief flattening of the fertility rates, but what can explain the rapid decline that follows?

Is it possible that once the number of births becomes so low that encountering an infant in one’s lifetime becomes unlikely, that society begins sending messages that children are not only unnecessary, but perhaps even unwelcome?  Gideon Lewis-Kraus provided some interesting insights into the South Korean society in The End of Children: Birth rates are crashing around the world. Should we be worried?, an article for The New Yorker.  Consider these observations.

“Korea’s demographic collapse is mostly taken as a fait accompli. As John Lee, the political analyst, put it, ‘They say South Korea will be extinct in a hundred years. Who cares? We’ll all be dead by then.’ The causes routinely cited include the cost of housing and of child care—among the highest in the world. Very little in Korean society seems to give young people the impression that child rearing might be rewarding or delightful. I met a stylish twentysomething news reporter at an airy, silent café in Seoul’s lively Itaewon district. ‘People hate kids here,’ she told me. ‘They see kids and say, “Ugh.”’ This ambient resentment finds an outlet in disdain for mothers. She said, ‘People call moms “bugs” or “parasites.” If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you’.” 

“In the southern city of Gangjin, I stopped at a coffee shop and encountered a sign on the entrance that read ‘This is a no-kids zone. The child is not at fault. The problem is the parents who do not take care of the child.’ The doors of Korean establishments are frequently emblazoned with such prohibitions. The only children I saw on Seoul’s public transit were foreigners.” 

Lewis-Kraus found many demographers to talk with about fertility issues.  Here are a few interesting observations.  This from the Norwegian demographer, Vegard Skirbekk.

“Two decades ago, Skirbekk helped contrive a thought experiment called “the low-fertility trap hypothesis,” which proposed the possibility of an unrecoverable downward spiral. Ultra-low fertility meant far fewer babies, which meant far fewer people to have babies, or even to know babies; this feedback loop could even shift cultural norms so far that childlessness would become the default option.”

“This eventuality had seemed remote. Then it more or less happened in Korea. When I asked Skirbekk if other countries might follow suit, he replied, ‘Quite a few, possibly’.” 

This from a Finnish demographer.

“Rotkirch, the Finnish demographer, underscored the notion that reproductive cues are social. ‘In a forthcoming survey, I want to ask, “Have you ever had a baby in your arms”?’ she told me. ‘I think in Finland it’s a sizable portion that hasn’t’.”

South Korea, at the moment, does seem to have fallen into a fertility death spiral.  Will other nations enter the same state?  China seems a potential candidate, and perhaps Turkey as well.

It is probably unlikely that the exact population collapse occurring in South Korea will be reproduced in other low-fertility nations but falling fertility rates are universal and many societies will have to learn to live with population decline—perhaps a great decline.  It seems time for economists, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists to begin researching paths forward for nations undergoing this transformation.  Necessary change is coming.  We should prepare while there is still time.  It could provide an opportunity to fix the things that are not working well in our societies.