Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

PREFACE

It was a girl.

On Sunday, October 30, 2011, just before midnight, Danica May Camacho entered the world in a crowded Manila hospital, bringing the human population of our planet to seven billion. Actually, the scales could have tipped a few hours later, in a village in Uttar Pradesh, India, with the arrival of Nargis Kumar. Or it might have been a boy, Pyotr Nikolayeva, born in Kaliningrad, Russia.¹

Of course, it was none of them. The birth that took us to seven billion people was attended by no cameras and ceremonial speeches because we can never know where or when the event occurred. We can only know that, according to the United Nations’ best estimates, we reached seven billion sometime around October 31 of that year. Different countries designated certain births to symbolize this landmark in history, and Danica, Nargis, and Pyotr were among those chosen.

For many, there was no reason to celebrate. Indian health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad declared that a global population of seven billion was not a matter of great joy, but a great worry…For us a matter of joy will be when the population stabilizes.² Many share Azad’s gloom. They warn of a global population crisis. Homo sapiens is reproducing unchecked, straining our ability to feed, house, and clothe the 130 million or more new babies that UNICEF estimates arrive each year. As humans crowd the planet, forests disappear, species become extinct, the atmosphere warms.

Unless humankind defuses this population bomb, these prophets proclaim, we face a future of increasing poverty, food shortages, conflict, and environmental degradation. As one modern Malthus put it, Barring a dramatic decline in population growth, a rapid decrease in greenhouse gas emissions, or a global outbreak of vegetarianism—all of which are trending in the opposite direction at the moment—we’re facing nothing less than the end of plenty for the majority of the earth’s people.³

All of this is completely, utterly wrong.

The great defining event of the twenty-first century—one of the great defining events in human history—will occur in three decades, give or take, when the global population starts to decline. Once that decline begins, it will never end. We do not face the challenge of a population bomb but of a population bust—a relentless, generation-after-generation culling of the human herd. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

If you find this news shocking, that’s not surprising. The United Nations forecasts that our population will grow from seven billion to eleven billion in this century before leveling off after 2100. But an increasing number of demographers around the world believe the UN estimates are far too high. More likely, they say, the planet’s population will peak at around nine billion sometime between 2040 and 2060, and then start to decline, perhaps prompting the UN to designate a symbolic death to mark the occasion. By the end of this century, we could be back to where we are right now, and steadily growing fewer.

Populations are already declining in about two dozen states around the world; by 2050 the number will have climbed to three dozen. Some of the richest places on earth are shedding people every year: Japan, Korea, Spain, Italy, much of Eastern Europe. We are a dying country, Italy’s health minister, Beatrice Lorenzin, lamented in 2015.⁴

But this isn’t the big news. The big news is that the largest developing nations are also about to grow smaller, as their own fertility rates come down. China will begin losing people in a few years. By the middle of this century, Brazil and Indonesia will follow suit. Even India, soon to become the most populous nation on earth, will see its numbers stabilize in about a generation and then start to decline. Fertility rates remain sky-high in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East. Even here, though, things are changing as young women obtain access to education and birth control. Africa is likely to end its unchecked baby boom much sooner than the UN’s demographers think.

Some of the indications of an accelerating decline in fertility can be found in scholarly research and government reports; others can only be found by talking to people on the street. And so we did. To gather research for this book, we traveled to cities on six continents: to Brussels and Seoul, Nairobi and São Paulo, Mumbai and Beijing, Palm Springs and Canberra and Vienna. There were other stops as well. We talked to academics and public officials, but more important, we talked to young people: on university campuses and at research institutes and in favelas and slums. We wanted to know what they were thinking about the most important decision they will ever make: whether and when to have a baby.

Population decline isn’t a good thing or a bad thing. But it is a big thing. A child born today will reach middle age in a world in which conditions and expectations are very different from our own. She will find the planet more urban, with less crime, environmentally healthier but with many more old people. She won’t have trouble finding a job, but she may struggle to make ends meet, as taxes to pay for health care and pensions for all those seniors eat into her salary. There won’t be as many schools, because there won’t be as many children.

But we won’t have to wait thirty or forty years to feel the impact of population decline. We’re feeling it today, in developed nations from Japan to Bulgaria that struggle to grow their economies even as the cohort of young workers and consumers diminishes, making it harder to provide social services or sell refrigerators. We see it in urbanizing Latin America and even Africa, where women are increasingly taking charge of their own destinies. We see it in every household where the children take longer to move out because they’re in no rush to settle down and haven’t the slightest intention of having a baby before they’re thirty. And we’re seeing it, tragically, in roiling Mediterranean seas, where refugees from wretched places press against the borders of a Europe that is already starting to empty out.

We may see it, very soon, influencing the global contest for power. Population decline will shape the nature of war and peace in the decades ahead, as some nations grapple with the fallout of their shrinking, aging societies while others remain able to sustain themselves. The defining geopolitical challenge in the coming decades could involve accommodating and containing an angry, frightened China as it confronts the consequences of its disastrous one-child policy.

Some of those who fear the fallout of a diminishing population advocate government policies to increase the number of children couples have. But the evidence suggests this is futile. The low-fertility trap ensures that, once having one of two children becomes the norm, it stays the norm. Couples no longer see having children as a duty they must perform to satisfy their obligation to their families or their god. Rather, they choose to raise a child as an act of personal fulfillment. And they are quickly fulfilled.

One solution to the challenge of a declining population is to import replacements. That’s why two Canadians wrote this book. For decades now, Canada has brought in more people, on a per capita basis, than any other major developed nation, with little of the ethnic tensions, ghettos, and fierce debate that other countries face. That’s because the country views immigration as an economic policy—under the merit-based points system, immigrants to Canada are typically better educated, on average, than the native-born—and because it embraces multiculturalism: the shared right to celebrate your native culture within the Canadian mosaic, which has produced a peaceful, prosperous, polyglot society, among the most fortunate on earth.

Not every country is able to accept waves of newcomers with Canada’s aplomb. Many Koreans, Swedes, and Chileans have a very strong sense of what it means to be Korean, Swedish, or Chilean. France insists its immigrants embrace the idea of being French, even as many of the old stock deny such a thing is possible, leaving immigrant communities isolated in their banlieues, separate and not equal. The population of the United Kingdom is projected to continue growing, to about 82 million at the end of the century, from 66 million today, but only if the British continue to welcome robust levels of immigration. As the Brexit referendum revealed, many Brits want to turn the English Channel into a moat. To combat depopulation, nations must embrace both immigration and multiculturalism. The first is hard. The second, for some, may prove impossible.

Among great powers, the coming population decline uniquely advantages the United States. For centuries, America has welcomed new arrivals, first from across the Atlantic, then the Pacific as well, and today from across the Rio Grande. Millions have happily plunged into the melting pot—America’s version of multiculturalism—enriching both its economy and culture. Immigration made the twentieth century the American century, and continued immigration will define the twenty-first as American as well.

Unless. The suspicious, nativist, America First groundswell of recent years threatens to choke off the immigration tap that made America great by walling up the border between the United States and everywhere else. Under President Donald Trump, the federal government not only cracked down on illegal immigrants, it reduced legal admissions for skilled workers, a suicidal policy for the U.S. economy. If this change is permanent, if Americans out of senseless fear reject their immigrant tradition, turning their backs on the world, then the United States too will decline, in numbers and power and influence and wealth. This is the choice that every American must make: to support an open, inclusive, welcoming society, or to shut the door and wither in isolation.

The human herd has been culled in the past by famine or plague. This time, we are culling ourselves; we are choosing to become fewer. Will our choice be permanent? The answer is: probably yes. Though governments have sometimes been able to increase the number of children couples are willing to have through generous child care payments and other supports, they have never managed to bring fertility back up to the replacement level of, on average, 2.1 children per woman needed to sustain a population. Besides, such programs are extremely expensive and tend to be cut back during economic downturns. And it is arguably unethical for a government to try to convince a couple to have a child that they would otherwise not have had.

As we settle into a world growing smaller, will we celebrate or mourn our diminishing numbers? Will we struggle to preserve growth, or accept with grace a world in which people both thrive and strive less? We don’t know. But it may be a poet who observes that, for the first time in the history of our race, humanity feels old.

ONE

A Brief History of Population

We came so close to not being at all.

There were only a few thousand humans left, maybe fewer, clinging to the shores of southern Africa, on the brink of oblivion.⁵ The catastrophic eruption of Mount Toba in Sumatra 70,000-odd years ago—there’s been nothing its equal since—spewed 2,800 cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere, spreading from the Arabian Sea in the west to the South China Sea in the east, and giving the earth the equivalent of six years of nuclear winter. Toba is considered by some scientists to be the most catastrophic event the human species has ever endured. ⁶Homo sapiens was already in trouble; although we had mastered tools and fire during our 130,000-year history to that point, the earth was in a cooling cycle that had wiped out much of the food supply. Now Toba made things much, much worse. We foraged for tubers and harvested shellfish in the last inhabitable African enclaves. One more bit of bad news, and that might have been the end of us.

This, at least, is one theory held by anthropologists and archeologists; there are others who suggest humans had already migrated out of Africa by this time and that the impact of Toba is exaggerated.⁷ But it’s hard to abandon the thought of a bedraggled humanity on the cusp of extinction struggling to nourish its few remaining young in a hardscrabble world, before the skies cleared, the earth wobbled, and the sun once again warmed the land.

But we moved slowly. The bravest humans in history might have crossed the straits between Southeast Asia and Australia some fifty thousand years ago. (Though there is new evidence suggesting they might have gotten there earlier.)⁸ Some might have been swept there by accident, but others must have set out with purpose onto a sea with an unbroken horizon, simply because of what they had heard from those who had made it back alive.⁹ What is now China was also being settled, and about fifteen thousand years ago humans crossed the land bridge that then connected Siberia to Alaska, beginning their long trek down the Americas. (Again, all these dates are contested.)¹⁰

Around twelve thousand years ago, first in the Middle East and then, independently, elsewhere around the world, the most important of all human discoveries extended our lives and increased our numbers. People started to notice that seeds dropped from grasses produced new grasses the next year. Instead of wandering from place to place, herding and hunting animals and gathering fruits and grains, it made more sense to stay put, planting and harvesting the crops and tending the livestock. But not everyone was needed in the fields, so labor began to specialize, which made things complicated, which led to government and an organized economy. The hunter-gatherers retreated slowly—a few are with us to this day in isolated settings—but civilization emerged. Sumer, Egypt, the Xia Dynasty, the Indus Valley, the Mayans.

Progress was uncertain. The rise and fall of empires signaled waning-and-waxing stress: the planet warming or cooling and wreaking havoc with harvests; the arrival of the latest viral or bacterial scourge. Knowledge was lost that had to be painfully relearned. At first the East lagged behind the West, because it had been settled later, but by the time of Christ, the Roman and Han empires were roughly equivalent—so equivalent that each might have brought about the downfall of the other. Each evolved their own unique combination of deadly diseases, writes Ian Morris, …and until 200 BCE these developed almost as if they were on different planets. But as more and more merchants and nomads moved along the chains linking the cores, the disease pools began to merge, setting loose horrors for everyone.¹¹

From the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia and Egypt around 3200 BCE through to the dawn of the Renaissance in 1300 CE, the story was the same: some combination of geography, leadership, and technological advance conferred advantage on this tribe or that people, who conquered all before them. In the peace that followed, roads were built, plows improved, laws passed, taxes gathered. Then something happened: bad harvests, contagion, far-off tumult that sent warriors fleeing or raiding from the periphery to the center, which could not hold. Collapse. Rebuild. Repeat.

Yet not all progress was lost, and as East or West or South declined, things got better elsewhere. Islam preserved knowledge lost to the West with the fall of Rome, even as India discovered the zero, which made so much possible. The latest plague produced the latest antibodies to resist it. In Eurasia, at least, immunity became a powerful tool of progress.

The planet’s population grew from those few thousands in the wake of the Toba eruption to between five and ten million during the first agricultural revolution. At 1 CE there were perhaps three hundred million. By 1300 CE, with China united, enlightened, and advanced under the Song Dynasty, Islam stretching from India to Spain, and Europe finally emerging from its post-Roman Dark Age, the global population had peaked at around four hundred million.¹² And then the most terrible thing happened.

Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the bubonic plague, has long been with us. One theory holds that the lands between the Black Sea and China are a plague reservoir, where the bacillus has long been, and is still, present. (There are occasional cases in the region even today.)¹³ It is not a disease that primarily infects humans; rather it is a disease of rats in which humans participate.¹⁴ Rats are infected by fleas that carry the bacterium; after the rat dies the flea looks for a new host, and if a human is nearby, that’s it for the human. But it takes from three to five days from the time a person is bitten until they become ill, giving someone plenty of time to infect others, because plague can be transmitted between humans by airborne droplets.¹⁵

There had been reports of outbreaks throughout ancient times; the first fully documented episode, the Plague of Justinian, broke out in 541 CE, crippling that Byzantine emperor’s hopes of recapturing the lost territories of the Roman Empire.¹⁶ But nothing compared to the Black Death, as it was later named. Most likely a highly virulent strain of bubonic plague, it traveled either from China or the Steppes to Crimea, arriving in 1346. According to one narrative, during the siege of Caffa, on the Black Sea, Mongol soldiers hurled infected corpses over the walls, in what was perhaps the first instance of biological warfare.¹⁷ In any event, the disease was carried by ship from Crimean to Mediterranean ports.

Europe was uniquely vulnerable. A period of global cooling had depleted harvests, leaving people hungry and with their immune systems weakened. War was also stressing local populations. But despite all the bad news, the economy and population of medieval Europe were rapidly expanding after Dark Age centuries, with unprecedented growth in travel and trade between cities and regions. For all these reasons, the disease was able to spread rapidly—two kilometers a day along major routes, with ships allowing the fleas to hopscotch into northern Europe almost immediately. Within three years, the entire continent was gripped by plague.

Eighty percent of the time the infected person died, usually within a week of the first symptoms. The progress of the disease is described in a nursery rhyme:

Ring around the rosie: buboes—a swelling of the lymph node in the groin, armpit, or neck—were ring-like and rose-colored in the center, and a sure sign of the disease.

A pocket full of posies: As the disease progressed, the body would begin to rot from within. The smell was so awful the living would carry around packets of flowers as air fresheners.

Atch-chew! Atch-chew! (or regional variations): Victims also suffered from headaches, dark rashes, vomiting, fever—and laboured breathing or sneezes.

We all fall down: Death.¹⁸

While there is much debate based on little evidence as to how much China and India were affected,¹⁹ at least a third of Europe was extinguished in the space of a few years—some estimates place the figure as high as 60 percent.²⁰ All the citizens did little else except to carry dead bodies to be buried, wrote one chronicler in Florence, where more than half of the population was wiped out in the space of a few months. The dead were thrown into pits, which were sometimes too shallow, and dogs would unearth and chew on the corpses.²¹ The plague shattered governments, undermined the authority of the Catholic Church, stoked inflation because of shortages caused by the disruption to trade, and encouraged hedonistic excess among the survivors, because why not? It took hundreds of years, in some regions, for the population to return to its former level.²²

But though it seems hard to credit, some of the consequences of the magna pestilencia were beneficial. Labor shortages weakened the bond between serf and lord, increasing labor mobility and workers’ rights, and spurring productivity. Overall, wages rose faster than inflation. Feudalism ultimately collapsed, with owners contracting the services of laborers instead. Europeans had shunned long sea voyages because of the high mortality rate. But now that mortality rates on land were also so high, the risk seemed more worthwhile. The plague might actually have helped launch the European era of exploration and colonization.²³

However, that colonization led, tragically, to even more horrific loss of life in the New World, as European explorers, pillagers, and then settlers introduced their diseases to the defenseless indigenous populations of Central, South, and North America. Again, the actual loss of life is hard to calculate, but at least half the American population perished in the wake of contact with Europeans,²⁴ making it possibly the greatest demographic disaster in the history of the world.²⁵ Some estimates of population loss reach beyond 90 percent.²⁶ Smallpox was particularly virulent and lethal.

Pestilence, famine, and war combined to keep the human population in check throughout the middle centuries of the last millennium. If there were, perhaps, four hundred million people on earth in 1300, there were not many more than six hundred million in 1700.²⁷ The world was locked in Stage One of the Demographic Transition Model, developed in 1929 by the American demographer Warren Thompson. In Stage One, which encompassed all of humanity from the dawn of the species until the eighteenth century, both birth rates and death rates are high, and population growth is slow and fluctuating. Hunger and disease are part of the problem: in medieval Europe, a typical Stage One society, about one third of all children died before the age of five, and if you did manage to grow up, chronic malnutrition meant that disease would probably carry you off in your fifties.

If, that is, you weren’t killed. War and crime were constant threats in pre-industrial societies. And prehistory was even more violent. As Steven Pinker has observed, almost all prehistoric human specimens that have been preserved in bogs, ice fields, and the like show evidence of having died violently. What is it about the ancients that they couldn’t leave us an interesting corpse without resorting to foul play? he wondered.²⁸ Hardly surprising, then, that from our first days until the Enlightenment, whether in China or the Americas or Europe or anywhere else, the population grew slowly if it grew at all.

But in eighteenth-century Europe, the curve began to bend upward. By 1800, the global population had passed one billion. The earth had added more people in a single century than in the previous four centuries combined. Europe had progressed from Stage One in the Demographic Transition Model to Stage Two: a high birth rate, but a gradually declining death rate. So why were people living longer?

Well, for one thing, the gaps between plague outbreaks were getting longer and longer, and the severity less and less, thanks to improvements in agricultural productivity that bolstered the local diet and made people more resistant to disease. (We’ll talk more about this further on.) With the end of the traumatic Thirty Years War in 1648, Europe entered a period of relative calm that would last for more than a century. Peace brought new investments in infrastructure, such as canals, that increased trade and raised living standards. Corn, potatoes, and tomatoes, imported from the New World, fortified the European diet. The coming together of the continents was a prerequisite for the population explosion of the past two centuries, and certainly played a role in the Industrial Revolution, argues historian Alfred Crosby.²⁹ But of course, the real cause of increasing lifespans was the Industrial Revolution itself: the acceleration in scientific and industrial knowledge that bequeathed the world we inhabit today. James Watt’s steam engine went into commercial use in the remarkable year of 1776. (Also in that year, Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations and the United States declared its independence from Great Britain.) Mechanized production accelerated productivity—the