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NewSecurityBeat

The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
  • Guest Contributor  //  On the Beat

    Where Have All the Malthusians Gone?

    November 9, 2010 By Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba
    Forget youth bulges and population bombs; lately, the population story has been all about the baby bust. The cover of this month’s Foreign Policy features “Old World: The graying of the planet – and how it will change everything,” by Phillip Longman, and author Ted Fishman recently appeared in The New York Times and on NPR to talk about his book, Shock of Gray: The Aging of the World’s Population and How It Pits Young Against Old, Child Against Parent, Worker Against Boss, Company Against Rival and Nation Against Nation. Nicholas Eberstadt covered similar issues in Foreign Affairs with his article, “The Demographic Future: What Population Growth – and Decline – Means for the Global Economy.”

    To the extent that policymakers take away a sense of urgency to reform retirement institutions and potentially reevaluate military strategy, the recent spate of publications about aging is useful. But policymakers should not be misled into thinking that the population tide has turned and resources for education, development, and family planning are no longer necessary. While global population growth is slowing, it has not stopped, and the political and economic consequences of continued growth and youthful age structures across most of the Global South will be dire.

    A Population Bomb…of Old People

    Eberstadt, Fishman, and Longman argue for the need to prepare for a future where there are large proportions of elderly dependents and relatively few workers to support them, and they chronicle the many challenges that may result, including political resistance. The October protests in France against raising the pensionable age from 60 to 62 — which, despite the hullabaloo, fall far short of the levels needed to improve France’s long-term economic position — are but one example of the reform resistance they warn about.

    The concern is that while the Global North – Europe and Japan in particular – scramble to meet the needs of their older citizens and preserve the health of their economies, their powerful positions in the international system are at risk. As Fishman states, “It now looks as if global power rests on how willing a country is to neglect its older citizens.” China, a country on the cusp of aging, has thus far chosen neglect over meaningful investment, stoking more fear that the Global North may fall behind.

    Though a focus on economic health is useful, other aspects of their arguments do a disservice, particularly those that start from the premise that the days of Malthusian angst over the planet’s ability to support a rapidly growing population are long gone.

    Echoing Fred Pearce in his The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet’s Surprising Future, Longman argues without reservation that dangerous population growth is a thing of the past, and instead, the world faces a “population bomb…of old people.” He even goes so far as to claim that “having too many people on the planet is no longer demographers’ chief worry; now, having too few is.”

    I have to ask: what demographers did he talk to? Articles published over the last year in the field’s top journals — Demography, Population and Development Review, and Population Studies — certainly explore low fertility, but they also cover a range of youth- and growth-related issues and topics such as mortality, teen parenthood, and immigration. And within the field of political demography in particular there is still quite a lot of attention being paid to the implications of population growth and youth bulges on civil conflict and human security. Even Foreign Policy, in which Longman’s article appears, publishes an annual Failed States Index that argues there is an important relationship between demographic pressure and state collapse.

    As studies like the Failed States Index and the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends project show, contrary to Pearce et al., carrying capacity arguments are not completely outmoded. Regardless of how extreme the impact of an aging population will be on developed nations in the near future (although the United States will almost certainly be less affected than others), in many parts of Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, population growth is straining local water and land resources and creating instability — issues that will likely be exacerbated by climate change.

    Geographic Bias

    If there really is more attention being paid among demographers to low fertility it may well be due to institutional and geographic bias. After all, most of the funding for demography comes from Western nations concerned with their own decline. Likewise, all the top journals are American or European.

    Though it is correct that most advanced industrial states are aging because of low fertility, for a large part of the world, population growth is still the number one issue. Declining fertility in most countries of the world means that populations are getting older, but this is not the same as saying they have a problem with aging. Between 1980 and 2010, the median age of the less developed countries, excluding China, rose from 19 to almost 25 and the world’s least developed countries saw a rise from 17 to 20 years. Median age in more developed countries, however, went from 32 to 40 — a level twice that of the least developed countries.

    Many of the low-fertility countries Longman cites — Iran and Cuba, in particular — are exceptions among developing countries, rather than the rule. The UN Population Division estimates that sub-Saharan Africa will gain 966 million people by 2050 – more than the current population of all of Europe – and, as Richard Cincotta and I have both argued on this blog previously, the total fertility rate (TFR) projections used in those estimations are likely low. Rapid population growth in sub-Saharan Africa has already exacerbated many countries’ abilities to meet the growing needs of their populations, causing civil conflict and instability, and will continue to do so in the future.

    Why is it Important to Get it Right?

    Alarmism is useful when it grabs the attention of policymakers and a public that is overloaded with information, but it is also risky. Both Pearce and Longman take jabs at Paul Ehrlich because his “population bomb” never exploded. What they fail to note is that Ehrlich’s predictions could have proven right, except that he was successful at scaring a generation of policymakers into action. Funding towards population programs increased greatly in the wake of such research. If those of us who write about the dangers of aging are successful, perhaps we will be so lucky to look as foolish as Ehrlich one day.

    If these warnings fall on deaf ears and policymakers do not act to reduce the burden of entitlements, certainly budgets will be strained beyond capacity and the dire future predicted by Fishman, Pearce, and Longman may well become a reality. On the other hand, if policymakers similarly disregard carrying capacity issues in the developing world, conflict and misery are sure to continue in these places and may well worsen.

    Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba is the Mellon Environmental Fellow in the Department of International Studies at Rhodes College. She is also the author of a forthcoming book, The Future Faces of War: Population and National Security. Follow her on Twitter at @profsciubba for more on population-related issues.

    Sources: Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, NPR, National Intelligence Council, The New York Times, Population Reference Bureau, Reuters, UN.

    Photo Credit: Adapted from “Protest/Manifestation,” courtesy of flickr user lilicomanche.
    Topics: aging, climate change, conflict, demography, foreign policy, Guest Contributor, livelihoods, media, On the Beat, population, security, youth
    • http://www.populationaction.org Elizabeth Leahy Madsen

      Thanks, Jen, for such a comprehensive rebuttal to some of the rather skewed treatments of population we've seen recently in the media. Here are some additional thoughts I had after reading the Longman piece in Foreign Policy.

      Focusing on aging neglects the fact that the true defining characteristic of world population trends is divergence. Population trends are heading in different directions simultaneously, and as you note, there is a geographic bias at work. The scale of aging as it's currently happening does not compare to that of population growth. For example, the population of Eastern Europe (including Russia) is the same today as in 1980. In that time period, sub-Saharan Africa has almost doubled in size.

      While aging is certainly going to require some economic cutbacks, countries with the highest rates of population growth are generally facing a much bigger set of challenges. Many of the countries experiencing the lowest fertility rates—Italy, Spain, South Korea, Japan—enjoy high incomes and high standards of living with generous social protection schemes. Aging is likely to force adjustments to these welfare programs, but aging occurs over decades and can be much better anticipated and planned for than many other economic factors, such as the recent global economic crisis. For the one billion people living in countries where populations are on track to double in less than 40 years, governments are much less equipped to meet economic needs. Even the developing countries where fertility rates have dropped to replacement level, Iran among them, have much more advanced economies than those whose populations are growing by three percent a year.

      Last year, about 100,000 new jobs were generated in Uganda. Even if fertility rates decline slightly from the average of nearly seven children per woman, Uganda’s economy will need to produce 1.5 million new jobs annually by the late 2030s to compensate for population growth. Demographic trends seriously compound such economic pressures, diminishing the opportunities and prospects for growing numbers of young people, and magnifying the risk for conflict and instability.

      Thanks also for pointing out that the assumptions built into the UN's population projections are, for some countries, unrealistic. It is tempting to assume that the world's population “will” reach 9.1 billion by 2050, as Longman states. However, to reach 9.1 billion, all countries would have to track towards a universal fertility rate of less than two children per woman. This would require that fertility rates in sub-Saharan Africa decline three times faster in the coming 45 years than they did in the previous 45. If every country’s fertility rate stayed constant at current levels, the world’s population would top 11 billion by 2050. Demographic trends respond to the opportunities for health care and education that are available to women and families, showing that projections for the future depend on the policy choices we make today.

    • http://womanstats.org Valerie Hudson

      Excellent article, Jennifer, and excellent comment about divergence, Elizabeth.

      I could not help but wonder how that fact that the population of our planet now has an overall sex ratio of 101.3, rather than the expected 98 or 99, factors into this discussion of security demographics? We used to casually say that women were half of the world's population, but that is no longer the case. Women are now distinctly less than half of humanity–and there are identifiable regional divergences here, also. Do these trends have security implications?

    • http://www.blogger.com/profile/18370458560135965232 Jay Ulfelder

      Thank you for this thoughtful post, Prof. Sciubba. The one point on which I would like to push back is your assertion that the inclusion of demographic pressures in the Failed States Index (FSI) is evidence that those pressures do, in fact, affect prospects for state collapse. As the methodology makes clear, the roster of factors used in the FSI is not based on (new) empirical analysis, but is based instead on experts' prior beliefs about the causes of state failure. So, the inclusion of that variable in the FSI only tells us that the consulted experts believe that demographic pressures matter, and that belief in itself is not a very powerful piece of evidence.

    • http://www.blogger.com/profile/18337694112852162181 Geoff Dabelko

      Thanks everyone for their excellent comments. Valerie, can I throw your question back to you since you've done so much research on sex ratios and conflict/security including your Bare Branches book a few years back? And I understand a new one is on the way? Can you tell us about that and the publication date?

    • http://www.populationspeakout.org/ GPSO 2011

      From the advocacy and public awareness side of things, everyone is invited to participate in the Global Population Speak Out, February 2011.

      http://www.populationspeakout.org/

    • http://womanstats.org Valerie M. Hudson

      Hi, Geoff, thanks for your question. Yes, we do believe that sex ratios indicative of the culling of women from the human population, whether through active means (such as sex selective abortion) or passive means (such as higher malnutrition for women and girls), have important security implications. And yes, we do have a book that we hope will be in print next year, called "Sex and World Peace: Roots and Wings of International Relations," which will discuss the overall linkage between the societal treatment of women and the security of the nation-states in which they live. We hope this understanding will become a conventional viewpoint within the field of Security Studies as we amass empirical research findings to corroborate it. Our online, freely accessible database, the WomanStats Database, might be a resource for some of your readers interested in this topic: http://womanstats.org .

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