News Brief by Kip Hansen – 6 April 2022
NATURE magazine published a Book Review of a new book out from Jennifer D. Sciubba titled: “8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World”.
Quoting the Nature review:
“Japan is ageing so rapidly that if current trends continue, the nation could eventually disappear altogether”, writes Jennifer Sciubba in her data-packed book 8 Billion and Counting.
Almost eight billion people live on Earth; their futures are highly divergent, argues Sciubba, a senior associate at Washington DC think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The twenty-first century “is less a story about exponential population growth than it is a story about differential growth — marked by a stark divide between the world’s richest and poorest countries”, she writes.”
In Latin America and the Caribbean, eastern and southeast Asia, Europe and North America, Australia and New Zealand, the total fertility rate (TFR), or average number of children a woman is likely to have in her lifetime, was below replacement level (around 2.1 children per woman) in 2020. By contrast, sub-Saharan Africa’s population is set to increase sixfold this century; its TFR is 4.72, down from 5.88 two decades ago. In Nigeria, children and adolescents are half of the population. In rural towns in South Korea, primary schools are closing for lack of pupils, whereas urban areas of Lagos ring “with the sounds of children playing”….
The book is fascinating, but no real surprises are to be found for those who actually follow population trends. [ I certainly hope that the book reviewer is misquoting the book author about Japan “eventually disappearing.” ]
You might be interested in seeing some of the actual data:
Two things of interest stand out: 1) This is the actual number of births. Focus on the right -hand side of the graphic and on the width of colored areas. Asia we see is responsible for the largest number of total births but the width of the bar is narrowing – there are fewer births each year. The opposite is true for Africa, the blue band is getting wider and wider, more and more births. It is harder to see, but Europe is narrowing with fewer births, with North America remaining more or less stable. Latin America and the Caribbean births are increasing.
The second interesting thing is that births dipped sharply in the 1970s and in the 1990s. One might speculate that the spreading use of the birth control pill after 1965 caused the first dip. The 1990s dip is best explained by this chart of regional fertility:
In this study, we see plummeting fertility rate in East Asia dropping below the replacement level through the 1990s. Note that Africa is not on this chart. China’s “one child policy” was not implemented until 1980.
Our World in Data offers this speculative version:
The top two traces are Africa which is the obvious outlier with TFR above 4 while the rest of the world is 2.5 and below. The breakout box shows the number of regions that are already below the replacement level which include both North and South America and Europe.
One more then readers can discuss the news:
Here we see that world population growth (the upper-most trace) mirrors Asia growth (the dark red, second trace down). However, the sharp decline in Asian growth is being clearly offset by rising growth in Africa, which is the only region shown to be rising substantially.
And for World Total Population? The numbers are rising and will continue to as human life spans increase and reproduction does not stop. The United Nations predicts it will peak out at about 11 billion around 2100.
What are the reasons for this pattern? What are the causes for the rises and falls in population?
# # # # #
Author’s Comment:
Don’t ask me – I don’t know. I do know that birth rates fall as standard of living increases, at least historically.
Worldwide, births have leveled off. Regionally, births are falling except in Africa. Many advanced nations have birth rates that fall below replacement and these nations can be shown to be importing workers from other less fortunate nations. The agricultural sector of the U.S. economy has been doing so for decades and is now doing so for the lower skills of the building trades.
I haven’t the slightest idea what this all means for human society over the next 50 years – but it is as obvious as noonday sunshine that there is no Ehrlich-ian Population Bomb going off.
Include the name the person to whom you speaking in your comment – if not just a general statement.
Thanks for reading.
# # # # #
Macro-Statistics can point to trends, new questions and new variables but it can never get at the the actual phenomena or corelating clusters of phenomena driving the trend. Larger anecdotal questions have to be asked in order to be pointed to other data sets to determine that may be propelling the macro phenomenological trends that are concerning us. We can make all sorts of traditional macro-categorical assumptions about what is driving the declining birth rate. The annual rate of growth graph… the 2nd to the last demonstrates a big drop after 2008 as the world logged into the internet with hand held devices. All the old traditional assumptions about fertility goes out the window as a entire new set of behaviors take hold, especially for those born since 1990. Time for someone to do some serious social-psych micro research into the sexual behavior of people under age 35….especially men..
Jeff ==> I fear you are making far too much of a date — that coincides with hand-held computers/phones — that is not apparent in the data. The regional graph (second to last) shows only Asia and Africa — contradicting one another — affect the overall global trend.
thanks Kip, I will take a closer look.
Cyborg consciousness induced by smartphone usage interwoven with sexual arousal and autoeroticism facilitated by said device is the elephant in the living room of population decline. The study below is interesting but a bit flimsy social/psych study but it at least opens up the the issue and provides some useful vocabulary to talk about our world in 2021…beyond the traditional macro population statistical categories.
https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/bitstream/handle/1805/5317/srinivas-smartphone.pdf?sequence=1
Jeff ==> That study may strike your interest but it is far too small and measures things not subject to measurement — not likely to have a significant meaningful result applicable to the wider world.
Thanks for linking to it tough, I’ve put it in my files for future reference.
I will do some more digging. My position is obviously not provable or popular because it points internal micro-variables rather than external macro-variables that public policy can be formed around. Libertarianism is the air we breath. There would be no support for censorship or educating men about the dangers of not preparing themselves whole heartedly to be husbands. But this is the issue, young men are not thinking of themselves as future husbands. They think of themselves of fitting into the flow as consumers of what ever experience that is flowing at them next…. that experience impacts consciousness phenomenologically. It shapes who they are. It makes them perfect consumers. Educating women is a nice idea and might help. Unfortunately, in too many cases women are left without men well into the 2nd decade of their fertility unless they settle for serial short-term monogamous contracted sexual arrangements with men who should have already been married. I have known several young women 16 and 18 started early to find their future spouse, out of fear if they waited too long they end up without and living a life in the flow. In 1995 only 10% of men never married now it’s 23%, in 5 years it will be close to a 3rd of men will never marry. That is a huge demographic shift that points to individual behaviors…and this is what makes the article I sent you relevant even if it is small does not address the issue directly. We need to have a better understanding of cyborg (flow) consciousness and it’s impact on human behavior before we venture out to conclude traditional macro-categories and solutions and miss the micro-ground swell. Finally, many of the factors young people site for not getting married and having children are nothing more than lame blame shifting. school debt, fear of the future—climate change and pandemics, fear of divorce. I don’t think the really know why exactly why……… they’re too much in the flow to know.
BTW don’t listen to the Oil Engineers that post here…. there is plenty of hydrocarbon fuel for a huge 500 year baby boom LOL!. What I need is CNG baby!
LOL
Good to see Africa’s birth rate rising. A factor is modern medicine with less dying in child birth both parent and child.
amac ==> Hmmm — birth rate and falling child mortality are not the same thing.
Child mortality in Africa has been plummeting, as it is everywhere.
INFANT mortality worldwide, in advanced countries, is below 12/1000. Most of Africa is 25-75/1000, Sub-saharan Africa runs at the high range of that, with the exception of South Africa. https://childmortality.org/
Child mortality (ages 1-5) runs as high as 50/1000 and as low, in some countries, as 12-20.
Interesting to see that the end of century population graph is a UN prediction.
If that was in the book it is disappointing that a Think Tank would not be able to come to a conclusion themselves but parrots an organization which habitually puts out wrong predictions.
If you are going to be wrong anyway it is better to quote someone else’s wrong data to hide behind.
For governments the big issue is not so much the ageing population in % or number terms it is the drop of the younger generation to create GDP growth. They do not only do the work, they also create the economic growth. If that falls unemployment will go up within the working generation and the Guvmints are looking at the double whammy of increasing costs of the older population, pensions and health care, plus ever increasing costs of paying out unemployment benefits. Once that spiral starts it will be hard to stop. As most countries already overspend far more on all sorts of nice to have but not necessary projects, the money is not there to pay for increased social spending without getting further in the proverbial.
(one can always mint more money of course just to kick the can down the road a bit further).
And while no government in the “more developed parts” wants to admit it, so as not to commit political suicide, they all know that they need the immigration from Africa, Asia and South America just to keep the show going. Trying to stop that tide might be helpful to maintain “cultural integrity” but that does not mean s**t if the economy stops.
Not to mention that lawyers make bad drain layers.
The more adventurous predictions have the population topping out at around 9 billion in about 20 years and then hovering at that for some time before a steady decline.
People however have a habit of not following predictions so it will be interesting to see what is going to happen.
outtheback ==> Dang! That’s the trouble with the future — we just don’t know what is going to happen. There are a lot of differing opinions, and it is hard to tell which of them have a better chance than others of coming to pass.
Haha.
Kip I have heard of a good crystal ball gazer.
Wasn’t Paul Ehrlich (last name meaning “Honest” in English), Mann what was his name again. Sorry doesn’t come to me right now.
All UN gazings of course
UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths reported that there are 325 million people on the edge of starvation in 2022, more than double from three years ago.
Just in case some climatologists are hyperventilating on CO2.
The availability of birth control and medicines that keep kids from dying are both important. In the 60’s in India, My mom got the first Lippies Loops (IUD’s) through the Ford Foundation. Young women with 2-3 babies started coming immediately to slow family growth.
An interesting fact about fertility is, in the absence of externals, a woman will get pregnant at very constant intervals, ranging from 9-10 months to as long a 4 years. This regularity is probably driven partly by the extent to which breastfeeding blocks ovulation, the sensitivity to which varies from woman to woman.
Fran ==> Boy meets girl — girl meets boy— babies.
I’ve always disliked stacked graphs because they are often carelessly constructed, and sometimes purposely constructed so as to support a narrative.
In the case of Asia, it is the only region that looks like a Bactrian Camel from the side. It should probably have been put on the top so as not to distort the other regions and influence the general perception. Africa should have been placed second from the top. From that, a reader could easily recognize that most of the world’s regions have changed little, and that Africa is growing, while Asia is the only area having significant variations over time.
Clyde ==> Visual presentation is tricky. It looks like they use a programmatic approach which pouts the largest at the bottom and stacks them in descending order.
I would have included a few more categories — North Africa, Sub-saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, China, India and Pakistan, Eastern Europe, Europe, along that line.
Has someone sent this article to a certain Paul Ralph Ehrlich?
Joao ==>Ehrlich is a hopeless case — in that he still thinks he was right all along.
He is a hopeless case from the begining. Started to be in the news more or less when I started to study biology as a possible professional path (one or two years before entering yniversity). Hopefully in university I had a few great professors, one of them brought to his classes the then current debates, like Ehrlich, the selfish genes, the coming glacial apocalypse, the theory of everything biological being “controlled” by “genes” (now being revived in the last decade or two), etc…
It has all been said before – most notably by Hans Rosling. 10-15 years ago he was pointing this out in probably the best TED talks ever (from before the days when TED was diluted with second-rate activists).
Don’t take my word for it – find copies of his talks yourself.
A good place to start is Gapminder (https://www.gapminder.org/) where his son has continued his father’s work of pointing out the difference between perception and reality for pretty much every metric of global development. It is both eye-opening and at the same time somewhat depressing that the good news about human development is systematically ignored by almost the entire world.
Rob ==> Yes,I wrote a review of Rosling’s book FACTFULNESS here in 2018.
Bob Tisdale wrote one and put it on his blog — we were writing them at the same moment I and beat him out to post here by hours!
The UN Population Projection published here is misleading. What was presented is only one of three projections. The lower growth projection has total population n 2100 at about where it is today (7-8 billion).
posa ==> Got a link for that?
The UN’s main Population page still holds to the 11 billion around 2100. https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/comparison-of-world-population-projections
also
See Fig 2.3
https://royalsociety.org/-/media/Royal_Society_Content/policy/projects/people-planet/2012-04-25-PeoplePlanet.pdf
Kip – While some of these World population trends seem amenable to interpretations such as birth rates declining as income increases, and possibly the overall trends do reflect one or two primary governors, I have to wonder about the internal dynamics of these populations.
The future belongs to those who show up for it – a bit trite, but true. Natural selection is what it is and human populations – unless we develop some robust form of longevity and/or colonise the Universe – are subject to the same pressures as the rest of Nature. Without perturbations, populations will eventually stabilise at some level. Or at least that seems to be what happens – no populations increase forever, most don’t randomly wander to zero. (Japan did fine with much smaller populations in the past, why not in the future?).
But what happens inside those stabilising populations? Are genotype frequencies changing? I would think they must be, but I doubt it is as simple as the obvious trends (e.g. Mormons, Mexican Americans, Amish – name your favourite group with lots of kids – taking over).
Anyway, I have no answers, maybe it is phthalate poisoning or some other doomster nightmare, but I think it is probably something more interesting.
DaveW ==> Don’t disagree though it is a little bit “que sera sera” — which is trivially true, always.
Or rather ‘quien será, será’.
I especially wonder at the struggle for conformity vs independence within stabilising populations and how much these traits are genetic and will be selected for or against.
Anyway, this was a great conversation with lots of enlightening and entertaining comments. Thanks again!
DaveW ==> Hope you join us again next time…..
The “wealth gap is widening” narrative fails to mention that poverty is reducing worldwide and life span increasing. We’re doing the right things that count.
Mark ==> Yes,the wealth gap is of concern to communists and social justice warriors — but they should be cheered by general rising standards of living and decreasing numbers living in abject poverty.
Especially In the west, the wealth differences are becoming more and more dramatic. How to conceputalize individual “net worths” that increase by a hundred billion $ in short periods while so many are falling below the ability to even maintain a humble home? Can this really happen without extreme favoritism expressed through biased regulation by central government?
My grandfather, a Pennsylvania coal miner (mine worker, not owner or union official) owned (serially) three comfortable, well furnished homes, each on several acres, because my grandmother was never quite satisfied with the houses and always wanted something different. What manual laborer could do that today?
Strange that in all the discussions of what causes fertility to decline there is no mention of abortion. The published fertility rates are always after abortion. Obviously, all the factors discussed are important, but so is abortion. Without abortion, the US would have had above replacement numbers the last few decades.
Earl ==> In the US, abortion is presently erroneously considered a Contraceptive method — of course ,since it means an unborn child is killed before birth, it is not that at all. It is a birth control method as it prevents birth of a living child.
Many US states are correcting the situation.
Tradie here. Since Trump, then the lockdown, I have seen a dramatic reduction of illegals in the trades, landscaping is pretty much unchanged though.
Ruleo ==> In Upstate NY,the big building supply stores, Home Depot & Lowes, have had to hire Spanish speaking staff to be able to deal the numbers of Spanish speaking contractors and laborers.
Over-population was the crisis du jour of the 1970’s. Climate Change will go by the boards in the same way.
More information:
“Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline” by Darrell Bricker & John Ibbitson (2019)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1984823213/
“For half a century, statisticians, pundits, and politicians have warned that a burgeoning population will soon overwhelm the earth’s resources. But a growing number of experts are sounding a different alarm. Rather than continuing to increase exponentially, they argue, the global population is headed for a steep decline—and in many countries, that decline has already begun. In Empty Planet, John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker find that a smaller global population will bring with it many benefits: fewer workers will command higher wages; the environment will improve; the risk of famine will wane; and falling birthrates in the developing world will bring greater affluence and autonomy for women.”
———-
They think the decline has begun in Africa too.
=============
See also:
“Fertility, mortality, migration, and population scenarios for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100: a forecasting analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study” Murray et. al. July 14, 2020 • https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30677-2
Walter ==> Thanks for the book links!
If Dr Swan is correct, all the projections for global population can be taken with a pinch of salt. She says if the historical drop in male sperm counts continues on the same trajectory, most couples will need fertility treatment to become pregnant by 2045!
Shanna H. Swan, Ph.D., is one of the world’s leading environmental and reproductive epidemiologists and a professor of environmental medicine and public health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. An award-winning scientist, her work examines the impact of environmental exposures, including chemicals such as phthalates and Bisphenol A, on men’s and women’s reproductive health and the neurodevelopment of children.
After Skool condenses her 1.5hr talk down to 25 mins for the main points:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo-kSxHNSDQ
Food for thought.
Lurker ==> I’m afraid Dr.Swan is not right at all. The effects she refers to are very very small and very uncertain — and her dismal predictions are what I refer to as “epidemiology gone mad.”
That’s just my opinion — of course — supported by a lot of science.
Per Jordan Peterson’s population research, he believes we have hit peak population and will not exceed 9 billion for a couple of reasons. Primarily, half of the adult women in the developed world under 30 do not have any children. Of those who will get married in the late 30s, only 1 or 2 children to be likely to be born. By 2099, Nigeria will have more people than China. Fewer people being born limits the numbers of those able to produce future children.
DavidC ==> Lots of prediction out there. anyway, what’s an extra billion or two?
So in order to save the world we need to build in Africa 300 coal or gas fired power stations so they can transform their economic status to allow a birth rate similar to ours.
Acceleration of the transformation could conceivably reduce the 11B person UN trajectory to 9B and have it falling to below current levels by 2100.
The outcome would also clean the world dramatically of pollution and resource pressure.
Bill ==> The problems of Africa almost all stem from mis-governance.