DEMOGRAPHY REDUX
My grandmother had eight siblings, my mother, two, and I, none. This familiar pattern is indicative of the demographic transition that every society on earth has gone or is going through— from a regime of high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates. Since death rates tend to plummet first, societies experience a surge in population growth rates, after which they stabilise or even turn negative, as in Japan, where death rates now outstrip birth rates.
The empirical regularity of this phenomenon has attracted the attention of demographers for nearly a century and made its way to the general public, usually in apocalyptic terms. In 1973, Paul R. Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb warning against the consequences of rapid population growth, then being experienced around the world. More recently, in Dan Brown’s novel, Inferno (2013), a villain plans to inject a virus to control global population growth. Shouldn’t something be done about controlling population growth in the real world?
In Empty Planet, Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson, one a social researcher and the other a journalist, set out to banish all such doomsday scenarios and turn Ehrlich’s thesis on its head. Global population, they claim, will start declining just after the middle of the 21st century. They argue that among the projections put forward by the United Nations, the ‘low’ variant is most likely, i.e. the global population, currently around 7.6 billion, will peak at 8.5 billion around 2050 and rapidly start declining to around seven billion by the end of the century. The UN’s main forecast is for the population to increase to around 10 billion by 2050 and stabilise at 11.2 billion by 2100. Empty Planet is about proving the UN’s main forecast wrong, by emphasising the rapid strides in urbanisation and female education around the world that are driving fertility rates down faster than the UN estimates predict. The text, racier than Brown’s novel, is peppered with anecdotal evidence and interviews with women (through translators) in selected cities around the world. In order to brace for the coming decline in population, the Canadian authors advocate a Canadian solution—more immigration and multiculturalism to even out global imbalances in demography. The book is essentially a forecast and one needs to wait 30 years to see if its argument meets the same dismal fate as Ehrlich’s.
Paul Morland’s The Human Tide, on the other hand, provides a history of the demographic transition, since it first occurred in Britain in the 19th century. This in itself would have been a major achievement as the author, a demographer, takes the reader through all the major regions of the world to show the similarities and differences in the timing and pace of the demographic transition, or what he calls the human tide. Unfortunately, the book has an awkward subtitle— How Population Shaped the Modern World—despite several pages in the book confirming the causality in the reverse direction, including this sentence: ‘only when modernisation, however defined, commenced did populations follow a more or less uniform and predictable path’. The book, therefore, overreaches in its claims on how virtually everything from the world wars to the Arab Spring is tied to the demographic transition, like the link between the demographic transition and violence is no ‘proven link’ as the author claims and hinges on one small-scale research study with limited external validity. As a general narrative, however, the book excels, especially in the sections on the demographic experiences of Russia and Israel.
Together, the two books are an antidote to the grandstanding claims on exploding populations or deliberate ethnic demographic engineering often heard in India today. Both highlight that fertility is falling virtually everywhere in the world and across social groups. Which may not be such a bad thing. ■
Chinmay Tumbe is the author of India Moving: A History of Migration