Daily Mail, 4 February 2006

This week, Britain passed a historic milestone. Some time around the middle of Wednesday, its population clocked up a total of sixty million souls currently crammed into this sceptred but overcrowded isle.

The rise in Britain’s population resembles a speeded-up film. Although the birth rate went down during much of the last century, improvements in the standard of living and medical care mean that people now live longer. So during the past thirty years – a mere blink of an eye -- the population shot up by ten million, and is projected to rise by a further ten million by 2070.

Meanwhile, the world’s population of six billion is projected to rise by half again to about nine billion by the middle of the century. Almost all of it will occur in the third world while Europe’s population stagnates and declines.

Such eye-popping population pronouncements come bristling with health warnings because prediction is impossible. Who knows how people are going to behave, or how the world may or may not progress? All demographers can do is make projections – that is, say what is likely to happen if current trends continue. And on that basis, the implications for all of us are as immense as they are unpredictable.

The subject of population change is intensely controversial because its scale and sheer unknowability lend themselves to apocalyptic prophecies. Thus mankind is generally either about to be wiped out through famine or about to wipe out all other life on Earth through a massive and unsustainable population explosion.

The Victorians spent most of the 19th century in a blue funk about being overrun by the poor who were held to breed and multiply like rabbits. Britain’s population leapt during this period because of dramatic improvements in sanitation and nutrition and advances in medicine.

This enormous rise created a receptive mood for the dire prognostications of Thomas Malthus, a Christian clergyman who in his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 had set out his bleak mathematical calculation that the population would always outstrip the food supply. This would mean such an increase in dire poverty that only disasters like war, pestilence or famine could maintain the balance of nature.

It was this pitiless and anti-human dogma that gave rise to the Social Darwinist doctrine of ‘the survival of the fittest’, and the policy of weeding out the ‘unfit’ specimens of the human race through eugenics.

So was Malthus right? Can planet Earth feed all these projected extra billions of mouths? How will Britain cope with millions of new inhabitants when it can’t provide decent public services for the people it has already got? And to what extent will demographic change alter the very character of Britain and the wider world?

The projected picture is immensely complicated. Lots of different things will be happening together. In addition to the rise in numbers there will be changes in fertility and life expectancy and in the proportions of young and old. There will also be vast differences between countries and regions. Stagnant Europe is likely to experience the greatest transformation to its internal character, with the indigenous populations of Britain and other countries no longer replacing themselves and using mass immigration instead to fill the job vacancies.

Far from solving this country’s problems, such a policy is likely to add to them. England is already one of the most densely populated countries in the world. According to MigrationWatch UK, it has nearly twice the population density of Germany, four times that of France and 12 times that of the US. Yet if the current rate of immigration continues, its population will rise by more than 7 million over the next quarter of a century -- with more than 80 per cent of the increase coming from immigration.

These numbers will pile more and more pressure on already creaking public services such as housing, hospitals or schools. They will necessitate building the equivalent of two cities the size of Cambridge every ten years. Since most immigrants gravitate towards the honey-pot of London, the economy of the south-east will continue to overheat and unbalance the rest of the country.

The policy will also change the face of Britain. With most population growth drawn from immigrants, and most of those from the undeveloped world, Britain’s traditional culture will be increasingly difficult to sustain and social cohesion will diminish as the country becomes progressively Balkanised. Last week, the Office of National Statistics produced experimental figures showing that indigenous Britons were leaving the country and steadily being replaced by non-European immigrants, who were increasing by an annual average of 3.8 per cent compared to -0.1 per cent for the indigenous inhabitants.

The country is dramatically changing in other very important ways too. The British are having so few children that they are only just reaching their replacement rate -- without which a society would eventually die out altogether. Since people are living longer, the imbalance means that the population overall is ageing, with implications for diminishing economic productivity and an increasing burden of caring for the infirm.

At present, fertility rates are higher among some immigrant groups but that too may change as they become more assimilated. For the reason people are having fewer children is affluence. In our self-centred, consumerist world children are an expense and a responsibility; and women’s aspirations have changed, with so many choosing to work and delaying marriage and motherhood.

The amazing thing is that Malthus actually predicted that such a change would happen. In his later book The Principles of Political Economy, he modified his earlier gloomy prognosis and suggested instead that the world could support a growing population after all. With astonishing prescience, he suggested that if people were educated their interests and their behaviour would change. Developing new tastes for a higher standard of living, they wouldn’t want so many children; and at the same time, technical progress would increase the ability of such societies to sustain themselves.

Remarkably, not just Britain but much of the rest of the world seems to be behaving as Malthus predicted. For although the world’s population is rising, the rate of that rise is now slowing down -- and some estimates suggest there may even be a fall in global population by the end of the century. Just like Britain, much of the rest of the planet is ageing and having fewer children. The reason populations are still rising is that previous baby booms produced large numbers of mothers who are having babies. But there are now fewer of these babies than before – a very recent change, directly related to the development of modern contraception and a general global rise in living standards.

Fertility rates are falling everywhere apart from a few countries mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. They are falling in rich countries such as Japan and Korea, less rich places such as Thailand and Sri Lanka and even in poverty-stricken Bangladesh. China, Brazil, some southern states of India, and at least seven out of the 28 provinces of Iran now have a birth rate of less than replacement level. Most of the world is arriving at the equilibrium between population rise and the means to sustain life that Malthus said was necessary, because they are practising contraception – although Malthus, who advocated abstinence, was implacably opposed to contraception – and marrying later.

But the picture is yet more complex and fragmented. In Europe, there has been a tremendous change from the high birth and death rates of traditional society to the low birth and death rates of modern cultures. Other parts of the world, however, are still at earlier stages in this evolutionary process, while the very poorest of poor countries haven’t reduced their fertility at all.

As a result, says the Oxford demographer Professor David Coleman, by mid-century very poor countries such as Angola, Burundi, Ethiopia, Congo or Somalia will be likely to have between three and a half and four times their present population. In all, the countries that have not yet started the fertility transition are likely to number almost a billion people by 2050.

Yet even today, their relatively small populations suffer problems of environmental degradation, inadequate resources, high dependency and chronic insecurity. Such huge increases in their numbers – in the absence of the democracy, rule of law and economic progress that have reduced population rises elsewhere -- will magnify those problems many times over.

The world’s massive demographic changes are also likely to transform the balance of global economic and political power. For countries in the middle of this fertility and mortality transition, says Professor Coleman, the change in the balance of the population provides a particular window of economic opportunity. For a few decades, there are many more people of working age than their dependants. If the country’s structures are sound and stable, this can give a huge boost to economic growth.

And this is precisely what is likely to happen to China and India during this century. It will be a shift of power as momentous as was the rise of the US, Germany, Japan or Russia in the previous two centuries.

In Europe, by contrast, which enjoyed this window of opportunity in the last century, decline is likely to be to be precipitous. For much of the past two millennia, Europe comprised about twenty per cent of the world’s population. Now this is projected to descend to about seven per cent by the next century. Europe will not just suffer demographic shrinkage but is also likely to become economically and militarily marginalised as a result.

But again, the picture is even more complex. Europe’s projected population decline is concentrated in eastern and to a lesser extent in southern Europe. The UN suggests that the population of Russia on its way down will be overtaken by the population of Uganda on its way up by around 2050, with Yemen not far behind.

By contrast, other parts of Europe such as Sweden, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark and the UK will grow -- but mainly through immigration. The same applies to the US whose population is projected to grow from about 300 million people to over 400 million by mid-century and over 570 million by its end. This is partly due to its higher birth rate but primarily because of mass immigration and the higher fertility of South American and other minority immigrants. But will all these countries be recognisable by the end of this process?

And will the world have sufficient resources to sustain such population increases? That all depends upon how we choose to live. Soon, China will be responsible for half the world’s energy needs. The price of raw materials will rise. Demand for airspace for leisure use will explode. Human ingenuity and adaptability know no bounds – but we are going to need them if our societies are to continue to sustain themselves.

Projecting population change and its effects, however, is a distinctly flawed science. Demographers failed to predict either the post war baby boom, for example, or its end. According to Professor Coleman, there are huge gaps in what we can ever know about how populations will behave.

There is no real consensus why people in some rich countries choose to have more children than others; there is fierce controversy over whether there are any limits to the prolongation of life, or to the retreat from marriage and from childbearing. We don’t know these things because, although increasingly we can control our biological destiny, we haven’t decided what we want to do with it.

For Britain and other countries which are now low fertility, low mortality cultures, many questions remain unanswered. Will mothers continue to want to work? Will people continue to want fewer children and multiple partners? Can any country thrive when it presides over epidemic fatherlessness – or when its national identity is destroyed?

At 60 million and rising, we are heading into the great unknown.

Posted by melanie at February 4, 2006