‘We have never seen our populations fall like this before’
Demographer Paul Morland on why depopulation, not overpopulation, is the real threat to humanity.
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For decades, environmentalists have warned that there are ‘too many people’ on the planet. Apparently, the world is facing mass famine, ecological disaster and total societal collapse if the global population continues to expand. But what if the opposite is true? According to demographer Paul Morland, author of new book No One Left, it is not overpopulation, but depopulation that poses the greatest threat to mankind. All over the world, even in poorer countries, fertility rates are plummeting. Unless we reverse this demographic decline, humanity could soon struggle to sustain itself.
Morland joined Brendan O’Neill for last week’s episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss how we can defuse this depopulation bomb. What follows in an edited extract from their conversation. You can listen to the full thing here.
Brendan O’Neill: What has happened to fertility rates in recent years?
Paul Morland: In Britain, we traditionally had high fertility rates like the rest of the world. Most women would give birth to at least five children. But because of high infant-mortality rates, and the reality of limited resources, massive global population growth never happened. After good harvests, populations would go up – but then they would get knocked back down again. We had a very, very slow rise in the ability of the world to support people.
This all changed during the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. Suddenly, humanity opened up new approaches to food production that meant we could now support millions of people. In Britain, people were still having five-plus children up until the 1870s, but the mortality rate fell dramatically. As a result, Britain’s population more than doubled in the late 19th century.
By the time of the First World War, however, middle-class people in the West started having only two or three children. After this spread to the rest of society, we started to become low-fertility, low-mortality nations. Since the 1970s, people all over the world have gone from having a couple of children to having one or none at all. For cultural reasons, people are having very small families.
This leads to all sorts of problems. Take the old-age dependency ratio, which measures how many retirees society has for every one worker. This number has been getting dramatically higher across the globe. In Japan, there were seven or eight working-age people for every retiree when its population reached 100million the 1960s. Japan’s population is now in decline, and when it drops to 100million again around 2050, there will be roughly one worker for every retiree based on current trends. With an ageing population and smaller tax base, governments have to borrow more to maintain basic services. Everything gets difficult.
We are moving towards a Japan-style population decline on a global scale, and we can only begin to imagine what the world will look like when it happens.
O’Neill: Is there a danger that all this talk about population decline is becoming alarmist?
Morland: I’m not given to hyperbole, but this is a problem we need to take more seriously. You’re absolutely right, of course, that we need to choose our words carefully. We shouldn’t panic. But the solution that is so often treated as obvious – that technology will eliminate the need for human labour – is just not feasible.
If you said to someone in 1800 that, by 1900, a very small share of the population would be working in agriculture, they wouldn’t have believed you. That was the only world that they could imagine. If you went further ahead and told someone in 1900 that, by 2000, very low numbers of people would be working in industry, they would have had a similar reaction. We overcame both these obstacles, because we’re always inventing new needs for labour.
That’s why in Britain we don’t have a huge amount of agriculture or industry anymore. But the robots we used to replace these sorts of jobs are not going to replace everything. This suggestion is no different than when everyone said that laptops and the internet are going to end the need for human labour. Yet here we are in 2024 facing labour shortages. There is simply no scenario I can see where humanity doesn’t need people to work. If our societies keep getting older and fewer people are working, there is no innovative way out of this problem.
O’Neill: What is the solution to this crisis?
Morland: I can’t see a way out of this beyond the supposedly crazy notion that people should try to have more kids. We should be looking at an average of two to three children, like we had in the 1960s. That doesn’t seem impossible to me.
While I certainly don’t want to be alarmist, the truth is that we’ve never seen anything like this kind of population decline before. The Black Death wiped out perhaps a third of Europe, but we’ve never seen an inverted population pyramid like the one we have today. Modern, developed societies are voluntarily cutting the size of each succeeding cohort. That is alarming and it’s worth spelling it out.
After I made these points in The Sunday Times a few years ago, I was called all sorts of horrible things. I was accused of practically being a Nazi. The late chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, later pointed out to me that the first injunction in the Bible is to be fruitful and multiply. I was simply repeating the thesis of the Judeo-Christian morality.
This is particularly surprising to me, because there is actually a long tradition of pro-natalism on the left. Karl Marx wrote quite brilliant critiques of doomsday economist Thomas Malthus. In the Soviet Union, Stalin gave women medals for having many children. I am not saying that we should all become Stalinists, but I am saying that there’s a rich, lively and intelligent pro-natalist tradition on the left. Leftists should be fighting this battle. We cannot allow wokeness to colonise the left’s attitudes to children.
Fundamentally, there is also a deeply human case for having children. My book focusses a lot on economics and on the numbers and ratios, because that’s what counts in the public discourse. But I’m not making my case for these reasons. I think that human life is wonderful. If I were a poet and not a demographer, I would write about the joys of being a parent and grandparent – and how sad it is that people are depriving themselves of so much joy.
The inherent value of human life is a difficult thing to quantify and demographers tend to purge it from their writing. But we should not lose sight of the fact that human life is a miraculous and wonderful thing.
Paul Morland was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here:
Picture by: Paul Morland.
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