No One Left E-Book

Paul Morland

• Herausgeber: Forum
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 331

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'Highly readable ... Everything we need to know on this subject' Financial Times 'Fascinating' Geographical Magazine 'A must read for anyone wanting to understand the forces shaping our world' Eliza Filby 'A compelling argument for having more children' New Statesman A population calamity is unfolding before our eyes. It started in parts of the developed world and is spreading to the four corners of the globe. There are just too few babies being born for humanity to replace itself. Leading demographer Paul Morland argues that the consequences of this promise to be calamitous. Labour shortages, pensions crises and ballooning debt threaten to engulf us all, and sooner than we think. Unless we radically change our attitudes towards parenthood and embrace a new progressive pro-natalism, argues Morland, we face disaster.

Leseprobe

Also by Paul Morland

Demographic Engineering: Population Strategies in Ethnic Conflict

The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World

Tomorrow’s People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers

www.paulmorland.co.uk

To Claire, my co-pro-natalistAnd to our grandchildren, Leo and HallelMay they be the first of many

Contents

Part One: Extinctions and Exceptions 1 The Infertile Crescent – the Looming Demographic Armageddon 2 Paths to Low Fertility 3 Explaining Today’s Low Fertility 4 Where Fertility Persists Part Two: Objections and Solutions 5 How about Women? 6 How about the Environment? 7 How about Immigration? 8 What Technology Can Do for Us 9 What Government Can Do for Us 10 What We Can Do for Ourselves NotesAcknowledgements

Part One

Extinctions and Exceptions

Making the case for having children has never been more urgent.

Making the case for having children has never been more difficult.

Urgent – because of the impending collapse of populations in community after community, country after country, continent after continent. Overall world population continues to grow, but at an ever-slower pace. Population decline, already stalking an increasing number of the world’s nations, is now clearly in sight at a global level.

Difficult – because of changing preferences and because of a rising tide of attitudes that are combining to persuade more and more people to have fewer and fewer children, or none at all, and are making it harder to challenge anti-natalism in a growing swathe of society. Once it was material progress that drove falling birth rates. Now, in much of the world, it is ideals and lifestyle inconsistent with family formation and populations replacing themselves generation by generation.

The purpose of this book is to draw attention to the problem, understand its ideological and material causes and suggest what we might do about it if we want people to thrive or even to continue to exist. Nothing is more important to the future of humanity.

1

The Infertile Crescent – the Looming Demographic Armageddon

A spectre is haunting Europe. It is also haunting East Asia and much of North America, and before long it will be haunting most of the world. It is the spectre of depopulation. For decades this has been nibbling at the peripheries, the remote rural regions and smaller rust belt towns, and we have largely ignored it. These are not places where opinion-formers like journalists, academics or politicians tend to live, or to which they pay much attention. But now its consequences are hitting the headlines. And this is just the beginning.

We are seeing the birth pangs of a new epoch, but it’s an epoch without birth pangs. You can trace a path in a great arc from the Straits of Gibraltar at one end of the Eurasian land mass to the Straits of Johor at the other, and travel only through countries facing the prospect of population decline in a vast infertile crescent. Included are countries with Protestant, Catholic, Muslim and Buddhist majorities, rich countries and poor countries, democracies and autocracies. For some of these places the phenomenon is new, for others it is decades old. Almost irrespective of social, economic or political characteristics, these are states and nations where population decline and its consequences are being baked into the future right now.

‘Russia running out of “single-use” soldiers’; ‘UK running low on fuel, truck drivers’; ‘Staffing shortage continues to disrupt Amsterdam Schiphol’; ‘China’s factories are wrestling with labour shortages’.1 The headlines cover different countries and economic sectors. Each of these labour shortfalls has its own local and specific characteristics and causes: the Kremlin’s initial reluctance to announce a draft, the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, poor handling of the Covid disruption by Dutch (and many other) airports, a growing Chinese preference for white-collar jobs over labour on the factory floor. But underlying these stories and many others is a much bigger story, a reality that is spreading across the globe like wildfire: we are running out of people. The cracks are just beginning to show.

Whatever the particular conditions of a time and place, whatever the other causal factors, these shortages of people would not be occurring if, 20 to 30 years ago in the countries concerned, people had been having two to three children instead of one to two. The UK government’s 2023 budget, for example, focused on pension reforms to get early retirees back into the labour force, no doubt a laudable and possibly achievable goal in its own right. But the demographic imperative would not be there at all if the population of people in their early twenties still outstripped those in their late sixties by 1.6 million, as it did in the mid-1980s. Today, there are just 170,000 more people in their early twenties than in their late sixties.2 The net inflow into the workforce is therefore down nearly 90 per cent.

The robots and other technological devices have been promised, but if we want our dripping tap fixed, our supermarket shelves filled or our elderly parents cared for, machines are not about to charge over the horizon to save us. We still need people to do things, just as we always have. We are already short of them, and it is only going to get worse.

This seems a bold claim when the world’s population has just reached 8 billion, its highest ever level, and is continuing to grow. But scratch beneath the surface and a very different picture emerges. Yes, the number of people on the planet is still growing, but the rate of growth has halved since the 1970s and is continuing to fall. And while the overall number of people is gently peaking – the upward slope ever flatter, the impending zenith ever closer – humanity is rapidly ageing. More and more of the global rise in human numbers is about delaying death, while less and less is about the creation of new life. Reduced mortality is eclipsing new life as the driver of population growth, but death can only be delayed for so long.

Taking a global view obscures much more dramatic occurrences at national and local levels. It is nationally and locally that people in Asia, Europe and North – and, eventually, South – America will lack everything from plumbers to surgeons. As their countryside empties out and their suburbs are abandoned, as their schools shut and their villages rot, any compensatory population growth in Burundi is of little comfort and less use. Immigration is a possibility, but its effects can at best only be partial and temporary, as we shall see. And not every country with a population shortfall is rich enough to attract or fully willing to accept large-scale immigration from those ever-rarer parts of the world where birth rates remain high.

In a small number of countries, the total population is already falling. In a growing number of countries, the working-age population is in decline, while those reaching retirement age are ballooning in number. There are fewer and fewer young people ready to enter the workforce, now that much of the world has experienced half a century of ‘sub-replacement fertility’, which is what happens when couples have on average fewer than 2.1 children. In the UK, for example, we have not had above-replacement fertility since the early 1970s. In Russia, you would have to go back to the 1960s. Despite technological innovation, our economies continue to be addicted to endless inflows of fresh workers. When these inflows seize up, so too do the petrol supplies and the airport luggage trolleys.

The great global population implosion will have major geo-strategic implications, just as the great population explosion had from the nineteenth century. First-off-the-blocks Britain was able to dominate vast tracts of the globe by settling them with its burgeoning number of people, transforming places from San Francisco to Sydney. The same will be true on the way down: some places will see their populations crash faster than others, and this will shape the history of the next century.

The impact will also be felt at the most intimate level. I have recently been paying regular visits to an old-age home in London. It is almost entirely dependent on a staff of recently arrived immigrants. For those who cannot afford their services, or for countries unable to attract them, there will be nobody there to care for the elderly. And the entire economic system will creak and perhaps collapse as those too old to work grow in number while those of working age shrink. Great powers will wane. The elderly will die unattended and alone. And everything between the geopolitical and the personal will change, and not for the better.

Stages of decline

To maintain a stable population, the fertility rate, which is the number of children born during the lifetime of the average woman, needs to be slightly above two. Previously that number was much higher, because as many as a third of children died before the age of one, and perhaps two-thirds of people died before completing their own fertile years. But in most of the world, where a vanishingly small proportion of babies now die before the age of one, and a very small number of people die before the age of 50, slightly more than two children per woman is enough to keep things on a long-term even keel.3

Population decline comes in three stages. First, the number of births per woman falls below replacement level. If there has been earlier population growth, there will be plenty of young women giving birth and relatively few old people dying, so population growth will continue, for a time. This is known as ‘demographic momentum’. Second, the large cohort of low child-bearers starts to die, and their own, less numerous offspring bear few children, so deaths start outstripping births.4 ‘Natural decline’ sets in, although in countries that are attractive to migrants, immigration can temporarily stave off an absolute reduction in the population’s size. In the final, third stage, the absolute number of people declines despite ongoing inflows of migrants.

For countries that cannot or will not attract migrants, stage three is reached directly from stage one. Britain is moving from the first of these stages to the second: the margin of births over deaths remains positive but it is very small, and only immigration prevents labour shortages being even worse than they are. Germany is moving from the second to the third stage, with migration no longer high enough to offset the natural fall in population as deaths increasingly outstrip births. Russia and Japan have leaped directly from the first to the third stage, as has China, where the latest data show the population falling by 850,000 a year.5 Throughout these stages, the population ages and the number of those economically active declines.

Self-reinforcement

‘Demographic momentum’ may help delay the fall in population, potentially long after the point where fertility rates have gone sub-replacement. But if fertility rates ever rise back above replacement level, the reverse effect can be felt. We might call it ‘demographic drag’. A rise in fertility rates among the current generation of people of childbearing age is the only way to reverse the decline in numbers, but it takes a long time before it actually does so. This is because the cohort of potential child-bearers is simply too small and the cohort of elderly dying is simply too large. Deaths will continue outstripping births for a time. In Japan, for example, the number of women aged 15 to 45 is down by more than a quarter from its 1990 level, so even if every woman were having the same number of children as were women at that time, a quarter fewer would be born. By the end of this century the UN estimates that there will be around half the number of Japanese women of childbearing age as there are now, so again, even if their fertility rate per woman remained unchanged, the numbers born will have halved. This is how a population can, and in many cases probably will, go into a demographic tailspin.6

There are other ways in which low fertility rates can reinforce themselves. One, for example, is through the expectation and experience of family size.7 When people have small or no families, conditions for those with children are likely to become more difficult. Less thought will be given to accommodating the young in urban design or product design, making it harder to get about with buggies, or find suitably sized accommodation or cars. A second way is that societies with small family sizes set the expectations for future generations. Those from large families have historically been ready to adjust themselves to having small families, but not vice versa, creating a downward ratchet in family sizes.

A third way happens when care for ageing parents features significantly in the lives of adult offspring, and there is less time to devote to child-rearing by those who are single children with no siblings to share the burden with. In China, where many of those caring for today’s elderly are only-children married to only-children with similar responsibilities themselves, the idea of having to raise their own children while simultaneously supporting their increasingly frail parents seems daunting. ‘We are struggling to take care of our mum, but at least we have siblings that we can share this burden with,’ says one middle-aged Chinese woman. ‘A couple with an only child will need to take care of old parents from both sides, which is four old persons. Can you imagine what kind of burden our generation will become to our children?’8

The historical context

While the public may be somewhat aware of declining birth rates, they tend to think that somewhere else, for good or ill, people are still having lots of children. There is nothing new in this. In the nineteenth century, casting anxious eyes over the Rhine, the French feared that the Teutonic woman was endlessly fertile. But the generation of Mutti Merkel (despite the name, she and many of her contemporaries are not Muttis) has proved them wrong. In fact, low German fertility rates are now a century old. While it was once the case that the Germans in turn feared the endlessly fecund Slavs, in reality, Olga bore a large family for only a few decades longer into the twentieth century than Helga did. And as for the supposedly child-oriented Italian mamma surrounded by a large brood, that’s a myth now well past its sell-by date: Italian families have long been among Europe’s smallest.

We all know about the Chinese one-child policy, but now it is becoming clear that even when the Communist Party allows people to have more children, the Chinese don’t want them. The same is true of their ethnic Chinese sisters and brothers in places where they were never subject to the Communist Party’s population controls (in Taiwan and Malaysia, for example) and of other peoples in East Asia, from Korea to Thailand. Their family sizes fell sharply in the latter part of the twentieth century even without the coercion prevailing in the People’s Republic of China.

A century or more ago, conscious of Asia’s demographic weight, people of European origin (then the fastest-growing people on earth and politically preponderant) spoke nervously of the ‘Yellow Peril’. More recently, people in the developed world fretted about the loss of jobs to a China replete with vast numbers of cheap labourers. But having got used to hundreds of millions of Chinese workers meeting their every manufacturing need, Europeans and North Americans might soon come to miss their abundance and how cheap their labour was. For the first time ever, China has ceased to be the world’s most populous country. And although that title has now passed to India, all is not well south of the Himalayas either. It is a surprise to many that the average woman in Kolkata has but a single child. West Bengal as a whole has a fertility rate below the UK’s. The trend is catching on across India. In fact, the only difference between the world’s two demographic giants, China and India, is time, with India just a few decades behind China in plunging into demographic deficit. As India enters into the first phase of population decline (fertility below replacement level), China is entering the third (absolute population decline). Both countries are too poor to attract mass immigration, and too big for immigration to make much difference in any case.

First greying, then disappearing

The future looks demographically bleak across much of the world. This is showing up most visibly in the data on ageing. Within Europe, Italy is a particularly stark case. In 1950 there were about 17 under-tens for every one person aged over 80. Today the two groups are matched roughly one-to-one. But it is not just in relatively rich, developed countries like Italy that this is the case. It is also true of countries on the path to prosperity, which have made great strides but still have a long way to go. If Italy typifies Europe, Thailand typifies developing Asia. In 1950 there were more than 70 under-tens for every one person over 80. Today the ratio has slumped to three or four to one. Within a generation the over-eighties will outnumber the under-tens.9

The ageing of a population comes with some advantages: there’s generally less crime and a lower likelihood of going to war. But it also means a shrinking workforce and a declining tax base at the same time as there are rising demands on the state for pensions and healthcare. Those aged in their late eighties or older require six or seven times as much health spending as those in the prime of their lives. When the UK’s NHS was established, there were 2–300,000 such elderly people in the country. Today there are well over 1.5 million, and by the century’s end there will be getting on for 6 million.10 Small wonder that ever-higher spending on healthcare yields little by way of perceived improvements for individuals.

This is why countries like Japan and Italy, with among the world’s oldest populations, have the highest government debt-to-GDP ratios in the developed world.11 The consequences of social, economic and fiscal stress are clear. The sluggish growth of the Japanese economy since its workforce peaked more than three decades ago is very evident, with not just a relative decline of the economy as a whole, but also on a per capita basis. As the country grows older, its people get relatively poorer. GDP per head in Japan was just 18 per cent below that of the US in 1990; today it is almost 40 per cent lower.12

This is not just social change. It is complete social transformation. It has implications for everything, from crime and punishment, to war and peace, to boom and bust. Given the general shift to low fertility that seems to be almost universal, we could see rapid population decline to a quarter of the current 8 billion, or below, over the next three centuries or so. In the longer view of history, the period in which humans exceeded 2 billion people could come to be seen as a relatively brief and, in retrospect, peculiar spike.13

According to the best estimates, Japan will have lost more than 40 per cent of its population by the end of the current century, as may China. The losses thereafter may slow, but they may continue until they leave behind ever-shrinking, isolated communities, incapable of sustaining strong nations, and less and less capable of functioning. In South Korea, at current fertility rates, each cohort is about 40 per cent of the size of the last. Run that forward for just three generations and you lose nearly 90 per cent of your people. That’s what will happen, although a bit more slowly, if fertility rates in countries as different as Malaysia and Macedonia remain at their current levels for a few more generations.

In many places like China, stabilising the current fertility rate as opposed to letting it continue to fall will only make population decline gentler. For a perpetual decline not to set in, fertility rates will need to rise significantly, back to above replacement level, which would be more or less unprecedented. The self-induced population decline we are seeing today has never happened before in human history. It is time to start worrying about it. It is high time to start talking about it.

But should the population grow forever?

It might be argued that the world was a fine place with 1 billion (around 1800), 2 billion (in the 1920s) or 4 billion people (in the 1970s). Why would it matter if it went back to those kinds of levels? What would be an ideal population? Need we go on growing our numbers forever?

Of course, the world in 1800, 1920 and even 1970 was a much poorer place than it is now. A much larger share of the population lived in penury and hunger. That might seem paradoxical: after all, there was all that extra space and all those extra resources per head when there were fewer people. But as the nineteenth-century American economist Henry George pointed out, both chickenhawks and people like chickens, but the more chickenhawks, the fewer chickens there will be, while the more people there are, the more chickens. Human inventiveness is the key to additional resources, whether it involves smarter ways to produce food or more efficient forms of capturing sunlight and wind for cheap energy. A world with more people, and specifically more educated people, which is what we are achieving, is a richer world. If plenty of space and potential resources per head were all that was required for human prosperity, our ancestors would have been immensely materially richer than us, rather than immensely poorer. Singapore, with a hundred times greater density of population, would be much poorer instead of hugely richer than Burkina Faso. And Bangladesh, with a population that has more than doubled since it gained independence more than 50 years ago, would have grown much poorer instead of much richer.

I made this point following a recent interview during which I espoused pro-natalist views and suggested that the world would face a crisis of too few people, not too many. One of the comments on the video asked whether I had ever travelled on the trains in India, the implication being that with so many people, India’s transport system was bound to be a chaotic. I answered that I had, and that doing so in the 2010s was an infinitely better experience than in the 1980s, even though India had doubled its population in the intervening years. India has better rail transport (and much better air transport) now its population is 1.5 billion than when it was 750 million. Higher population density and prosperity have made investing in infrastructure much more viable. Go back to 1800, when India had around a tenth of its current population, and of course at that point it had no railways and no air travel at all. The assumption that things get worse as the world gets more crowded simply does not hold up. People pay a lot of money to live in the most crowded places: just think of central London or Manhattan.

And the world is not that crowded anyway. It is estimated that through settlement, infrastructure and agriculture, humans have affected a little less than 15 per cent of the world’s surface.14 With current developments in agriculture, such as the cultivation of artificial meat and hydroponics, there is every chance that we will be able to feed an expanding population on less land, and give more fields back to nature. As people become more urban, they live at higher population densities, and not only take up less space but also consume fewer resources, for example by using more public transport and services, from the post to electricity to water, that can be more efficiently delivered when people live close together.

The argument here is not for a population that grows and grows forever. Nothing can keep expanding without limits. But there is still plenty of space for humans to flourish, and indeed, as they do, they tend to take up less space and use it more efficiently. Eventually the human population is bound to stop growing and even to decline. The key argument in this book is that it should not do so yet. At some point in the future, we are likely to have technologies that will be able to substitute for a lot of human labour. But, as we will see in Chapter 8, we are not there yet. To aim for a smaller global population when the robots are still largely a dream is to build dysfunction into the world. The world’s population should ideally continue growing for the foreseeable future, although not at the annual 2 per cent plus at which growth peaked 50 years ago, when much of the world was still early in its demographic transition and too few people had access to contraception. For now we need the sort of gradual, steady growth that comes when the average woman has two to three children, in a society in which very few people die before the end of their fertile years. The real problems that ageing and population decline present will be more easily handled if they are gradual. Plunging fertility rates, however, mean that they will be sudden and more disruptive.

But aiming at some absolute number of people is not really the point. ‘The world was doing fine in around 1975, when it had 4 billion people,’ it might be argued. ‘Why should it be so terrible if it returns to 4 billion?’ But what matters is the direction of travel and the consequent structure of the population. Take Japan as an example. In the mid-1960s, its total population shot upwards through the 100-million mark. Sometime in the mid-2050s, it will shoot downwards through it. The first time at 100 million, Japan had more than nine people of working age (for the purposes of this calculation, 20–65) to every one of retirement age. When it hits the same total population on the way down, three decades from now, it will have barely one and half people of working age for each retiree. If I could choose one piece of data among the many in this book to stick in your mind, it would be this one. Because the issues of the old-age dependency ratio are the most pressing.

Dependency ratios

Low fertility rates, particularly when combined with longer life expectancy, mean first an ageing and then a declining population. This creates great strains on national systems of social provision as dependency ratios – the share of workers to non-workers – decline, and there are too few people to keep basic services ticking over. When a problem emerges in a particular sector, like the shortage of tanker-drivers in the UK in the autumn of 2021, this can usually be dealt with by special measures such as pay rises, or relaxations of entry requirements, or the recruitment of workers from overseas. But this is something of a case of ‘whack-a-mole’. Labour can be rushed to certain sectors (easier where years of training are not required, harder in cases like medicine, where the pipeline of potential workers needs to be managed over a period of many years), but with labour being at a general premium, this only worsens shortages elsewhere.

Shortage of labour is fundamentally a demographic issue. You can raise the retirement age, but this usually leads to a bitter and sometimes violent reaction, as both Presidents Putin and Macron have discovered.15 You can wind back the extension of tertiary education so that people start working earlier (with the potential in the long term to make your workforce less productive). But you cannot easily counteract tectonic shifts in the structure of your population.

When I joined the workforce in the UK in the mid-1980s, there were almost two people in their early twenties for every person in their late sixties. As a result, there was a fresh inflow into the workforce outweighing the number of people leaving it. That reflected the healthy fertility rate of the UK at the end of the baby boom in the early 1960s, when women were having around three children each. Today, the numbers of people in their early twenties and of those in their late sixties roughly match. The fresh inflow, thanks to the much lower fertility rate of the early years of the current century, is very much reduced, and the result is chronic labour shortages.16 Immigration has so far been the solution for the developed world – countries like Britain have been resorting to it for decades in ever-greater quantities – but, as we will explore in Chapter 7, it has significant drawbacks, isn’t possible for all countries, and is not a long-term solution for any.

The problem can most simply be captured by the old-age dependency ratio: the number of people of working age to those who are retired.17 The exact way to calculate the ratio depends on when people start and end their working lives, but let us assume that they start at 20 and end at 65. Changes to either of these ages could help, but will make relatively little difference. Using these ages, the number of elderly to working-age people in the UK has risen from below 20 per cent in the 1950s to over 30 per cent today, and it will be approaching 60 per cent in 2100. According to the UN’s ‘median’ estimates (there is a worse case and a better case, depending largely on fertility rates), the old-age dependency ratio will rise to 50 per cent (two workers for each retiree) in the 2050s.

The UK is far from the worst performer in this respect. In Italy, the ratio has already risen from around 15 per cent in the 1950s to around 40 per cent today, and towards the end of the century it is expected to rise to 80 per cent, which means that not far off one worker will be required to support one retiree. Financially, to keep such societies going, tax levels will have to be expropriatory. It would be hard to see why any young worker would stay in Italy under such circumstances. And even if young workers stayed, there would be far too few of them to keep the country functioning, let alone look after all the elderly. Italy is a bad case, but others are not much better. In Japan the ratio is already over 50 per cent and will also rise towards 80 per cent by the end of the century. If you take 65 as the retirement age in Japan, there will be just three workers for every two retirees by the mid-2050s. Thailand, where today there are about five workers per retiree, will fall to a similarly low level of three workers to one retiree by around 2070, in a clear case of a country getting old before it gets rich.18

All of this results from our laudable ability to keep people alive longer, but also from our lamentable unwillingness to reproduce ourselves. In the US, the ratio is a relatively healthy 28 per cent today (although double the level it was in the 1950s). This is thanks to the fact that fertility rates in the US have been higher than in most of the developed world for most of the last few decades. But even in the US, the old-age dependency ratio will be around 40 per cent by the mid-2040s, an enormous turnabout that will have very wide ramifications for the world’s labour market and for the US itself.

In financial terms, the result is ballooning government debt, with more and more social expenditure required and fewer and fewer workers to pay for it. In the labour market it expresses itself in shortages of people to perform the jobs that need doing. In Chapter 8 we will consider whether and when technology might come to our assistance. But while we can anticipate dependency ratios shifting sharply over the decades to come, there are many jobs that need to be done, from installing new electric sockets to collecting the bins, where it is not obvious how, in the immediate future, technology is going to make existing human labour more efficient, never mind replace it altogether. The demographic problem is more certain than the potential technological solutions.

With a lack of labour to meet the needs of an ageing population in the decades to come, a certain amount of work will not get done. Political priorities and economic signals will determine what this will mean in terms of crumbling buildings, failing infrastructure or elderly, incapacitated people left to their own devices.

This demographic transition causes problems not just because of the lack of workers relative to the population, but also due to the lack of youth and creativity. As it has greyed, Japan has seen far fewer patents filed than was the case 30 or 40 years ago. At a global level, the loss of the innovation that normally flows from young people is likely to significantly reduce economic productivity. Indeed, it may already be doing so, and is perhaps partly responsible for the productivity stagnation in many advanced countries.19 It’s worth pointing out too that large communities, able to divide intellectual labour thanks to their numbers, are better at innovating. The English-speaking world produces more innovation than smaller linguistic communities because it can share its thinking so widely. The Chinese, at the cutting edge of more and more areas of invention, share a similar advantage. But can they continue to keep pumping out innovation as their younger cohorts shrink?

Of course, the ‘dependency ratio’ – rather than just the ‘old-age dependency ratio’ – should take account of all those of working age to all those not of working age: both those over the normal retirement age and those too young to work. In a modern economy, a large share of the population is in full-time education until at least age 20, and although some argue that people could work from a younger age, it seems unlikely that a modern economy could really function successfully if fewer of its young people had the benefits of a tertiary education. As the number of children shrinks, the total dependency ratio (that is the ratio of workers to both the elderly and to children) will be slightly positively affected. Yes, more capital and labour will need to go into building old-age homes and staffing them, but fewer resources will be required by nurseries and schools. Manufacturers of children’s nappies can reallocate their plant and workers to making incontinence pads – Japan supposedly already uses more of the latter than the former each year.20

But solving the total dependency ratio by having fewer children is clearly the worst way of addressing the problem. Children do require resources from society and don’t immediately put anything back, at least in economic terms. But they are the workers of the future. To invest in the care of an elderly person is compassionate and morally correct. To invest in the education and development of a young person is strengthening the seed corn for the future functioning of society. If we do succeed in increasing the fertility rate, the overall dependency ratio of society will initially worsen. Still, it would be far better to make that investment and commitment now, before elderly dependency ratios are so dire that adding the additional burden of looking after and educating more children simply becomes untenable. Having fewer children today so that we can deal more easily with the pressures of an ageing population ensures that these pressures will only continue to worsen in future.

The long term is now

For a long time, after surveying persistently low fertility rates, concerned pundits would say that ‘in the long term’ there would be problems. But the long term has finally arrived. The way it is manifesting itself, as we have seen, is through labour shortages across the economies of the developed world. The prime minister of Japan has spoken of societal collapse. Elon Musk foresees civilisation crumbling.21

It is worth reminding ourselves just how serious the situation is by looking at a few recent news reports. In Germany (sub-replacement fertility since 1970): ‘Experts say the country needs about 400,000 skilled immigrants each year as its ageing workforce shrinks. The national labour agency said earlier this month that an annual analysis showed 200 out of about 1,200 professions it surveyed had labour shortages last year, up from 148 the previous year.’22 In Japan (sub-replacement fertility since 1958): ‘Japan to face 11 million worker shortfall by 2040, study finds.’23 In China (sub-replacement fertility since 1991): ‘The great people shortage hits China: the country’s shrinking population is a grim omen for the rest of the world.’24 The latest Chinese data suggest a fertility rate not much above one child per woman, meaning each cohort will be about half the size of the last – a phenomenon worsened by the fact that, in the childbearing age groups, women are under-represented because of selective abortions a generation ago. By the end of the century, China’s population is forecast to fall by more than 45 per cent, and its over-65s to rise from 14 per cent to 40 per cent of the population.25

Since fertility rates have fallen in the last couple of decades, and since it takes a couple of decades for a newborn to enter the workplace, and as no general upturn is on the horizon – in fact, the opposite – we can only expect things to get worse. Labour shortages are showing up in every area, from restaurants and pubs cutting their opening hours because of a lack of staff, to children being taught by unqualified teachers due to a dearth of qualified educators, to infrastructure projects being abandoned or not even started for want of labour. This situation will continue and indeed deteriorate in the next couple of decades, because the underlying reason – too few people – is built into the system. If the fertility intentions of Generation Z are anything to go by, it is going to get worse still after that.

It is true that labour shortages have their upsides. Those of us who recall the years of mass unemployment in the 1980s would not wish for them to return. And a shortage of workers places upward pressure on wages. It would be no bad thing if workers across much of the industrialised world were to receive a greater share of the pie after so much of the additional product has been taken by senior management and shareholders. But once inflation is triggered, there is no guarantee that real wages will rise (that is, that wages will rise faster than inflation). Companies often find it easier to raise prices than workers do to get a pay rise. And a shortage of workers also means that many key tasks simply don’t get done, which will affect everyone. In a tighter labour market, the better-off will still be able to pay for the services they require. It is those lower down the economic pecking order who will find they cannot afford a plumber or a carer in old age.

Manifestations of the toll of labour shortages in an historically low-fertility country like Japan can already be seen. Four thousand elderly people in Japan are estimated to die alone each week, and a whole industry has emerged from the need to fumigate apartments where bodies have been found long after the end of life. This is the sad ending which invariably comes at the termination of years of loneliness and solitary struggle. ‘The way we die is a mirror of the way we live,’ laments the chairman of a residents’ council in a large housing complex outside Tokyo.26