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Huge population reduction arriving
Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment
- The story: While strong growth in human population was a cause of concern till 2010, now a different worry haunts policymakers. Countries are now confronting population stagnation and a 'fertility bust', a reversal unmatched in history that will make infant birthday parties a rarer sight than funerals.
- First change: The first visible change will be the strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees. It will change how societies are organised, as today the core notion is that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old.
- Physical signals visible: Maternity wards are shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea cannot find enough students, and in Germany, thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks. The new demographic forces, pushing toward more deaths than births, seem to be expanding and accelerating.
- Is everyone reducing: No. Some countries are seeing their populations grow, especially in Africa, but fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else. Demographers predict that by the latter half of the century or possibly earlier, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time. For India, the present total fertility rate is 2.1, the replacement rate, and after peaking in 2050s, its population is likely to sharply reduce.
- That will be good, or not: An Earth with fewer people could ease pressure on resources, slow the destructive impact of climate change and reduce household burdens for women. Census announcements in May 2021 from China and the United States showed the slowest rates of population growth in decades.
- Imagine entire regions where everyone is 70 or older. Imagine governments laying out huge bonuses for immigrants and mothers with lots of children. Imagine a gig economy filled with grandparents!
- Nations may need a paradigm shift, and countries need to learn to live with and adapt to decline.
- East Asia and Europe: From Hungary to China, from Sweden to Japan, governments are struggling to balance the demands of a swelling older cohort with the needs of young people whose most intimate decisions about childbearing are being shaped by factors both positive (more work opportunities for women) and negative (gender inequality and high living costs).
- When numbers exploded: The 20th century presented a very different challenge. The global population saw its greatest increase in known history, from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000, as life spans lengthened and infant mortality declined. In some countries — representing about one-third of the world’s people — those growth dynamics are still in play. By the end of the century, Nigeria could surpass China in population; across sub-Saharan Africa, families are still having four or five children. But nearly everywhere else, the era of high fertility is ending. As women have gained more access to education and contraception and as the anxieties associated with having children intensify, more parents are delaying pregnancy, and fewer babies are being born. Even in countries long associated with rapid growth, such as India and Mexico, birthrates are falling toward or are already below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per family.
- Take in more immigrants: Some countries, like the United States, Australia and Canada, where birthrates hover between 1.5 and 2, have blunted the impact with immigrants. But in Eastern Europe, migration from the region has compounded depopulation, and in parts of Asia, the “demographic time bomb” that first became a subject of debate a few decades ago has finally gone off. South Korea’s fertility rate dropped to a record low of 0.92 in 2019 — less than one child per woman, the lowest rate in the developed world. Every month for the past 59 months, the total number of babies born in the country has dropped to a record depth. That declining birthrate, coupled with a rapid industrialization that has pushed people from rural towns to big cities, has created what can feel like a two-tiered society. While metropolises like Seoul continue to grow, putting intense pressure on infrastructure and housing, in regional towns it is easy to find schools shut and abandoned. Governments are handing out bonuses to motivate people to have more kids.
- Models show a sharp decline for China, with its population expected to fall from 1.41 billion now to about 730 million in 2100. So China would have as many 85-year-olds as 18-year-olds. In Japan, where adult diapers now outsell ones for babies, municipalities have been consolidated as towns age and shrink. In Sweden, some cities have shifted resources from schools to elder care. And almost everywhere, older people are being asked to keep working. Germany, which previously raised its retirement age to 67, is now considering a bump to 69, and has also worked through a program of urban contraction: Demolitions have removed around 330,000 units from the housing stock since 2002.
- Summary: This is the endgame. No country with a serious slowdown in population growth has managed to increase its fertility rate. There is little sign of wage growth in shrinking countries, and there is no guarantee that a smaller population means less stress on the environment.
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