At the same time, the population pyramid of the richer countries will be turning itself upside down. An inevitable side-effect of slowing population growth rates is going through a period when old people outnumber the young. This is because during baby boom years, as happened in the United States right after World War II, lots of young people are added to the population. If they don’t have babies in equally copious numbers, the older people end up outnumbering the children coming up the ranks behind them, with obvious societal impacts, not least of which is that as the baby boomers grow older, there are fewer and fewer younger relatives to care for them in their old age. In addition, the workforce of people in the young to middle-age categories becomes comparatively small, hampering society’s ability to fund and staff programmes that give senior citizens the level of care and comfort they need. Such impacts can turn society upside down – for example, in Japan, more adult nappies are sold than baby nappies, a consequence of people in the fifteen-to-twenty-four age category making up only about 10 per cent of the demographic, compared to those over sixty-five, who comprise 23 per cent.
Remember, most of these population-growth impacts we’ve pointed out are a best-case scenario, which assumes that fertility rates will, within the next thirty years, fall to replacement value in all countries in which they are not already there. In this book, we’re not even going to try to imagine just how bad things will get if we don’t drop fertility rates to replacement level, fast – except to say, we suspect we’d really get to see what Ehrlich’s Hell looks like. A key point to remember, though, is that no matter which of the population trajectories we actually follow – getting to replacement rate fast, half a child below replacement rate, half a child above replacement rate, or business as usual – we’re still going to hit between nine and ten billion people by 2050. That’s the reality we’re stuck with in trying to make a viable future, and all the other issues we cover in this book are underpinned by it.
The trillion-dollar question, then, is whether it is actually possible for the human population to top out at no more than ten billion by 2050. The answer, fortunately, is a resounding yes. There are three ways to get there. One of them is a way nobody wants – some sort of global catastrophe that wipes out a large portion of the human population. We’ll elaborate on the possibility of this in later chapters – things like pandemics, or war. But the bottom line is that a global catastrophe would be the most tragic sort of population control, filled with pain and loss, dystopia for most of us. There are better ways.
China hit on one solution: the one-child policy, which was officially announced in September 1980 in response to population growth that had been encouraged after a famine cost at least thirty million Chinese lives a generation earlier. The law imposed severe penalties in the form of fines, taxes, or even property loss, for families that exceeded their allotted single child, and rewarded families that stayed below the limit. Two generations later, the success of this approach in terms of limiting population growth is undeniable – China’s population is poised to peak around 2030, after which demographic models indicate that it will fall quickly back at least to the level it was in the 1990s, about a 30 per cent decrease with respect to its peak population size. The social success is arguable. By the standards of most countries, injecting that amount of government control into the bedroom would at best be wildly unpopular, and would be viewed by many as downright draconian. It also introduced some real problems that have to be grappled with now and in the future, among them a disparity in the numbers of young men (too many) versus young women (too few), as a result of a cultural preference for boys which often led to infanticide for girl babies; the abandonment of unwanted children; and ‘Little Emperor Syndrome’, which refers to the fact that a generation of Chinese have grown up in the absence of siblings, with the result that many exhibit poor social skills, feel entitled, and are risk-averse. In addition, China is already experiencing the topsy-turvy population pyramid that other countries will soon be seeing, with simply too many old people to be cared for by the much fewer younger ones.
The third way to bring down birth rates rapidly is the one that has enjoyed the most widespread success, with the main social consequences being positive. It is, in fact, the one that has been employed in most places in the world that are now at or below replacement fertility rate. It’s deceptively simple: make sure girls have access to decent education and job opportunities, and that contraception is readily available to those who want it. Time after time, this approach has resulted not only in bringing fertility rates under control, but in raising the standards of living for families and communities. Education is particularly important: the good things that correlate with educating girls and women not only include many fewer births, but also healthier mothers, better survival of infants and children, decreased risk of sexually transmitted diseases like HIV/AIDS, and much better earning power. The economic rewards alone are big: just one year of primary school tends to add 10 to 20 per cent to a woman’s earning power later in life, and a secondary-school education gives her 15 to 25 per cent more. Which of course also means her family enjoys that much better quality of life. More than that, the country does too. Studies show that by empowering women through education, national economies benefit.
It was just such an approach that turned what is now one of the most densely populated countries in the world away from the brink of disaster. The tiny island nation of Mauritius, located about two thousand kilometres off the eastern coast of Africa, packs in more than six hundred people per square kilometre, a density one-third higher than India and four times higher than China. At about the same time that China was recognising its population-growth problem and instituting its one-child policy, Mauritius was recognising that its ballooning population was straining resources too. The local elimination of malaria, higher living standards and improved health care had brought down death rates, while birth rates continued to increase at a fast pace. Both countries integrated access to contraceptives into their health-care systems, but Mauritius emphasised education instead of laws that limited family size, including making school free by 1976, which made it much easier for families to choose between sending their sons or daughters out to work or continuing their education. But already by that time, as Ramola Ramtohul wrote in an article entitled ‘Fractured Sisterhood: The Historical Evolution of the Women’s Movement in Mauritius’, ‘Mauritius had a generation of young women, especially among the upper classes, who had had access to quality education and thus had a different outlook on life’ (Afrika Zamani 18 & 19:71–101, 2010–2011).
The result: a more than 60 per cent decline in fertility rate over the years 1965 to 1980, and a 75 per cent decline by 2010. Along with this came increasing prosperity for the country’s people as a whole – from a low-income agricultural economy in 1968 to a diversified middle-income economy over the ensuing decades. In fact, for the past few years Mauritius has ranked first among Africa’s countries (and forty-fifth worldwide) in terms of economic competitiveness, a measure that includes such things as infrastructure, education, financial market development, technology and market size.
That recipe for success is translatable to other countries that today stand where Mauritius did half a century ago, but it requires one more essential ingredient: tolerance for diversity of cultural traditions, and openness to new ways of doing things. Mauritians had those things built in through their history, with a succession of Portuguese, Dutch, French and British colonisers, who over the course of a few centuries melded with Africans (originally brought in as slaves), Indians (brought in as indentured servants when the slave trade was abolished) and Chinese settlers. Once colonial rule was removed, the resulting ‘rainbow nation’ included four ethnic and four major religious groups that had found ways to peacefully co-exist and work together to make things better. That kind of tolerance and cooperation will be absolutely essential if the Mauritius success story is to be replicated elsewhere; religious intolerance and ethnic rivalries end up being deal-breakers.
The drop in fertility rates in countries like China, Mauritius, India and others was unforeseen by