Move, page 4
But the future won’t give us the luxury of following one neat, predictable path. Plausible scenarios are never mutually exclusive; reality takes a zigzagging path, with elements of all four visions undeniably present. For example, environmental restoration may occur through conscious planning in a Northern Lights scenario but also via mass death in the New Middle Ages. Some degree of innovation, fragmentation, and inequality pervades all scenarios.
Importantly, we must never think that the collision of so many variables will play out evenly, either geographically or chronologically—which is why, as disparate places lurch across these scenarios, we move in search of a better life. Indeed, within a single vast country such as America, one can easily imagine elements of all four scenarios coming to pass in different regions at different times. This begs the question as to whether we can continue to rely on “the nation” as the anchor of our future. What matters more: places or people?
I. The gap between wages of people in cities and regions continues to grow and now stands at about 1.5 times higher in core cities. William Gbohoui et al., “A Map of Inequality in Countries,” International Monetary Fund Blog, November 6, 2019.
II. Georgetown environmental historian J. R. McNeill has methodically documented this “great acceleration” of the man-technology-nature nexus.
CHAPTER 2 THE WAR FOR YOUNG TALENT
Welcome to “peak humanity”
On October 16, 1975, national security advisor Henry Kissinger presented a memo to President Gerald Ford seeking approval for NSSM-200: “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests.” The proposal called for enhanced support for family planning and other population control measures in a dozen countries, such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil. The White House hoped to steer the world population to 6 billion by 2050, “without massive starvation or total frustration of developmental hopes.” Those countries clearly never got the memo. When the world population did reach 6 billion (in 1995), the United Nations still forecast nearly perpetual growth toward 15 billion.
Today, however, the outlook is different. We can now foresee with confidence that the world population may peak as soon as 2045 and perhaps never reach 9 billion. How could we have miscalculated so badly? The answer is that we were wrong because we were right: Warnings about the economic and ecological perils of overpopulation are what prompted poor countries with high fertility to take measures to curb their breakneck population growth. Were it not for this feedback loop, world population may already have crossed 10 billion.
Even getting to 9 billion actually hinges on what are likely erroneous predictions of a continued population explosion in highly fertile countries such as Nigeria, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Congo, and Egypt in Africa, and India, Pakistan, and Indonesia in Asia. Instead, rapid urbanization, female empowerment, and depleting water supplies will surely impact family planning in those places. Parents in developing countries used to consider having more children a good investment in the future labor force. Today, it just creates more unemployment.
A Brief History of the World Population
Over the millennia of humankind’s wanderings across the planet, the total human population remained relatively constant. By the year 1 AD, it was estimated to be somewhere between 200 and 300 million people. One thousand years later, it remained about the same. Even by 1500 AD, perhaps only 100 million people had been added. Then came the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution, during which fossil fuels replaced human and animal muscle as the primary source of power. The cotton gin and wheat thresher made farms much more productive, while steam engines and railroads carried food long distances. Better sanitation curbed the spread of diseases, ensuring that people lived longer and more children reached adulthood. All of these innovations helped push the world population to 1 billion by the year 1800.
Witnessing the surging population enabled by the Industrial Revolution, the English scholar Thomas Malthus famously predicted in 1798 that an ever more crowded world would face a crisis of insufficient food supply. But better nutrition and healthcare (such as vaccinations) worked in tandem to extend our lifespan while helping more children survive childbirth and infancy, all together expanding the total global population to 1.6 billion by the end of the nineteenth century. After World Wars I and II, the Green Revolution introduced fertilizers and pesticides that massively boosted global food supply for developing countries such as India, catapulting the global population from just over 2 billion people in 1945 to nearly 4 billion by 1970.
Despite the incredible gains in agricultural output, some experts became worried that Malthus’s prophecy was finally coming true. In 1972, the members of the Club of Rome (a group of financial, political, and academic elites) published a manifesto, titled The Limits to Growth, arguing that our planet has finite resources and could not sustainably support such a fast-growing population. They advocated for stronger population control policies, such as easing restrictions on abortions and promoting contraception. This neo-Malthusian thinking was so influential that China launched a one-child policy and India began forced sterilizations of men and women.
Around the same time, contraception—in the form of condoms and diaphragms, as well as the advent of the birth control pill in the 1960s—helped drive down global fertility. The latter was also crucial to women’s empowerment in homes and schools, in communities and the workplace. Equally significant, urbanization rapidly accelerated. In 1960, 2 billion people lived in rural areas and only 1 billion in cities. Fifty years later, in 2010, the urban population eclipsed the rural. When families move to cities, women get access to healthcare, education, and jobs—but living in cramped apartments with high rental and other costs also means less money and space to have eight or more children.
And so, here we are: a planet of 8 billion people today creeping toward 9 billion—but likely not more. Instead, it turns out that our demographic destiny is no longer to multiply but to shrink.
Peak Humanity
The world population is nearing its zenith and will begin to decline. The only question is how quickly.
How else can we explain our reproductive anxiety? Malthus feared population growth outstripping food supply, but today about 30 percent of the world population is obese, and only 13 percent malnourished. This is one sign that humankind is a victim of its own success. Money is also a major factor inhibiting fertility. Since the 2008 financial crisis, stability has given way to angst. In America, birth rates had been rising slightly for five years until the crisis, after which they plummeted. In fact, the entire world—rich and poor—saw fertility rates decline markedly in the decade plus since the crisis.1 Globally, as of 2020, there are more human beings aged sixty-five and older than there are children aged five and younger. Higher life expectancy also paradoxically contributes to declining fertility: Now that we consciously manipulate our biology, we must save more money to take care of ourselves during longer and more active lives.
In addition to longevity and money, there are ethical dilemmas. Even millennials who could afford to have more children tend to subscribe to postmaterialist values—the most significant of which is a focus on the climate. Gen-Z carries a self-conscious guilt about how to cope with the fragility of the planet: They’re far more concerned with civilizational survival than with having children. To many, bearing children is not only an economic luxury but is considered immoral given the volatile environment into which the children would be born and the damage each new human inflicts on our fragile ecosystems. A popular infographic circulating online shows that having one less child would save more CO2 emissions than not having a car, avoiding long-haul flights, and shifting to a plant based diet—combined. In a world that’s increasingly secular—or where eco-consciousness surpasses any religion in adherents—most youth don’t believe that it’s God’s will for them to get married and have multiple children.
The Great Baby Bust
Environmentally conscious millennials and Gen-Z take many steps to reduce their carbon footprint, but the biggest emissions reduction by far would come from bringing one less child onto the planet.
All of this was happening before the Covid-19 pandemic. With an economic contraction far more severe than the 2008 financial crisis, we can expect Gen-Z’s fertility to crash in the same way that millennial fertility did after 2008. During the pandemic, governments hoped that couples being forced to shelter in place would lead to elevated childbirth, but instead, condom sales surged early in lockdown and divorce rates spiked when it lifted. Another baby bust. The Brookings Institution estimates that as many as 500,000 fewer children were born in the US in 2021 as in 2020. And in the years ahead, should the world experience any major world war or natural disaster—or another pandemic—it would only further hasten our demographic reckoning.
Humanity has recovered from numerous instances of mass death, such as the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century and the fourteenth-century Black Death. It has also been resilient to other events that caused large-scale fatality, such as the devastation of the native peoples of the Americas by European colonialists and their exotic diseases, centuries of civil warfare across dynasties in China, the Little Ice Age of the 1600s (during which one-third of the world population perished), the centuries-long Atlantic slave trade, World Wars I and II, the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, and the politically induced famines during the time of the Soviet Union and under Mao in China.
But this time is different. Right now, millennials (born 1981–1996) and Gen-Z (born 1997–2014) represent 64 percent of all human beings. But these youth aren’t producing a larger batch of offspring: Gen Alpha (born 2015 onward) may not be as large as Gen-Z. As a result, today’s younger generations constitute most of tomorrow’s population as well. In other words, they are both the present and the future. By 2050 they’ll be thirty-somethings to sixty-somethings who still represent most of the total global population because today’s elderly will have died off and few children will have been born. When Jack Ma and Elon Musk shared the stage in August 2019, they couldn’t agree on the future of AI, but they resoundingly agreed that the greatest challenge of the next twenty years is global population collapse.
The Last Great Generation?
For nearly a century, each generation has been larger than its predecessor. But economic crises and Covid-19 may bring down Gen Alpha’s total size to slightly less than Gen-Z.
Rich countries, vanishing people
Amid US president Donald Trump’s multi-year campaign to erect a wall on the Mexican border and roll back immigration, he paused to declare, “Our country is full.” But his own chief of staff Mick Mulvaney begged to differ. At an event in early 2020, he confessed, “We are desperate, desperate for more people.” The simple arithmetic behind his statement is telling: Even if America brings in five hundred thousand new migrants per year, in 2030 its GDP will still be $1 trillion smaller than it was in 2020.2 And right now, even half a million migrants would be a big stretch. After five consecutive years of gaining more than 1 million new migrants annually, net migration plummeted in 2019 to just over two hundred thousand. America isn’t even taking in enough migrants to replace its existing workforce: More than 1 million baby boomers (out of 80 million) are retiring each year, hence almost all counties are suffering a decline in the number of workers.3 Given America’s low fertility and rapid aging, immigration is the only reason the population is growing at all.
We don’t have to wait until 2040 to witness peak humanity. Much of the world feels that way already. North America, Europe, and Northeast Asia—the three richest zones of the world—have sub-replacement fertility levels.I No country better exhibits the dilemma of a vanishing population than Japan. Life expectancy for Japanese born today has reached 107, but the country is losing a net of five hundred thousand per year from its current population of 125 million. It has the world’s highest dependency ratio, meaning the number of old people each working-age person supports financially. Adult diapers now outsell those for babies, and Panasonic is making hospital beds that transform into wheelchairs. South Korea’s fertility rate is even lower than Japan’s: below one child per woman. The country has built high-tech new cities, such as Songdo near its main airport at Incheon, but there are few young people interested in moving there.
China is still the world’s most populous nation with 1.4 billion people, but its population will peak and begin to decline this decade. Like Japan but with ten times the population, China is aging rapidly without enough children willing to care for the elderly. In 2020, China’s social security fund payments began to exceed its inflows, and by 2040, China could have twice as many elderly people as children under the age of fifteen. Hence some call China the “world’s largest nursing home.”
Europe’s future is also starting to look like an unplanned version of the one child policy. Europe’s median age of forty-three is ten years above the world average, and its population is projected to shrink over the course of the 2020s despite immigration. From Ireland to Slovenia and Finland to Italy, almost every European nation faces the untenable combination of rising spending on pensions and elder care and a shrinking workforce. Spain and Italy, whose citizens enjoy longevity similar to the Japanese, have similarly low fertility. Italy’s population has declined for the first time in a century and now stands at 55 million; 80 percent of Spanish towns have experienced population decline as people cluster into larger cities. By size and population, Italy and Spain are relatively large countries, yet many of their provinces are effectively vacant. Fellow Catholic countries Ireland and Poland also have birth rates below two and falling.
A declining population makes abstract economics suddenly seem worryingly finite. Who will pay taxes to fund hospitals and sanitation? Who will care for the elderly? Who will attend school? Who will go out to restaurants and shop in stores? Smaller (and poorer) populations mean less consumption and less investment (both domestic and foreign). As populations deflate, property values plummet. Demographic decline is worse than zero-sum: it’s negative-sum as communities suffer irreversible decay. Companies tend to make tangible investments where they see the potential for rising consumption. In other words, where there are people.
Come one, come all
In April 2020, Donald Trump signed an executive order to heavily restrict immigration, especially for Latinos and Asians. Ironically, at the same time, amid America’s mounting coronavirus body count, US embassies and consulates all over the world were instructed to find doctors and nurses to be fast-tracked for immigration. Thirty percent of America’s doctors and surgeons are immigrants, as well as nearly 25 percent of the overall healthcare sector. Tens of thousands of lives would easily have been saved if America’s immigration policy were guided by supply and demand rather than ideology.
Similarly, over the past decade, British citizens have grown accustomed to hearing Brexiteer Nigel Farage pontificate on “the number one issue in British politics”—immigration—and how “we have lost control of our borders.” Though Boris Johnson rode these slogans into Whitehall, it didn’t take long for euphoria to give way to brute facts: a shortage of more than a hundred thousand doctors and nurses in the National Health System, and a record 4.5 million patients on waitlists for treatments—and that was before Covid-19 struck. By mid-2020, the government had changed its tune. Boris Johnson pledged to put “people before passports,” and home secretary Priti Patel promised to fast-track visas for doctors, nurses, midwives, full-tuition paying students—basically anyone with a pulse and some skills or money.
The great irony of global migration today is therefore that countries with the largest labor shortages have had hostile anti-immigrant politics. But such populism is merely a blip compared with their overwhelming imbalance between old and young populations, and the labor shortages that need to be filled for social and economic life to function. Populism and the pandemic have hardened some borders, but they are also softening again to allow people with skills to circulate. Much as the world is in a transition from rapid population growth to decline, today’s misguided immigration policies are giving way to an all-out war for talent.II
Make no mistake: Immigration is an economic stimulus. From Washington to London to Singapore, conservatives decry an overdependence on foreign labor. But immigrants actually raise output by allowing professionals to be more efficient. They also rent and buy homes, and their children earn more and contribute more to the tax base than the native-born themselves. America’s economy is consumption-driven and dominated by activities such as retail, grocery, healthcare, and entertainment. The country’s financial titans should therefore be rabidly pro-immigration, both for the supply of cheap workers it brings as well as to import a new generation of consumers. What strategy do those opposing migration have to revive growth, since restricting migration tends to do the exact opposite? At a time when America needs a massive infrastructural overhaul, imported labor will be essential to getting it done.
It’s also a mistake to believe that innovation-driven economies need only highly skilled migrants.4 In fact, from construction and manufacturing to farming and nursing, entire industries would grind to a halt without low-skilled immigrants, while rising prices for many goods and services would drive inflation upward. Anti-immigration advocates argue that a government’s first duty is to its own citizens, but who’s the loser when hospitals are short-staffed? Rectifying America’s haphazard immigration policy couldn’t come soon enough given the need to care for the more than 10 million infected with Covid and the long-term effects that those who survive will suffer.
