It’s hard to imagine but back in the 1970s one of the most-read books was Paul R. Ehrlich’s "The Population Bomb", which contained the alarming claim: ‘The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.’
Thankfully, Paul R. Ehrlich was wildly wrong (as was "global warming" and as will be "climate change" and any other Orwellian "ruling-by-fear" demagoguery), but if the future resembles any sort of dystopia at all, it will be P.D. James’s nightmarish vision "The Children of Men", a place that will feel sad and lonely, devoid of the sound of little children.
And "Children of Men" is really happening: In 2000 Thailand had 7 workers for every retiree; by 2050 that figure will be just 1.7. In Greece, 1,700 schools closed between 2009-2014, while next door North Macedonia has lost a quarter of its population to low fertility and emigration. Whole regions, such as Vidin province in the north-west corner of Bulgaria, have shrunk, with flights and other services abandoned for lack of interest. One local is quoted as saying: ‘It was if I were coming back to my grave. This is a dying city’. The village of Lumacncha in China’s Hansu province used to have 100 pupils in its school; it now has just three. In Stoke-on-Trent, 40% of bars and clubs have shut in the past twenty years, as the ratio of infants to retirees has gone from 4:1 to 1:2 in a century. In central Paris, 15 schools merged or closed between 2015-2018. This is "Children of Men" stuff.
More than a quarter of major Japanese start-ups, those worth more than a billion dollars, involve care for the elderly. The technology is impressive: at care homes, ‘workers now receive a signal when incontinent residents require attention, forewarning them of the need for urgent intervention. There are also devices that track vital signs and indicate irregular heartbeats or breathing, while robotic beds that turn into wheelchairs are also being manufactured.’
In 1990 Japan was home to 2,000 centenarians; today there are 79,000. There is even a word, rougai, to denote an annoying elderly person who gets on young peoples’ nerves, ‘whether by obstructing closing doors on the Tokyo metro or offering unsolicited advice to the diminishing number of young mothers’. Next door in China the number of over-80s has gone from 500,000 in 1950 to 7.5 million in 1990, and by 2050 there will be 150 million of them, over 8% of the Chinese population.
But even Japan is being overtaken – or undertaken - by South Korea, which recently broke all records for low fertility. The country now has a fertility rate of just 0.8, which means that ‘one hundred grandparents will produce 40 children, who will in turn create 16 grandchildren,’ so that in two generations, 84% of the population will disappear.
But Korea’s situation is actually worse than it looks on paper, because years of sex-selective abortion means that women are underrepresented in younger cohorts, and in some parts of Asia there are 125 males born for every 100 females.
In Italy the population has already begun to decline, and this will speed up in the coming years. The number of Italians below the age of 5 peaked at 4.5 million in the-mid 1960s, and is just 2.2 million or so today, after which it will fall below 2 million before mid-century. By 2050 there will be half as many Italians under the age of 25 as there were in 1980. The number of young people in South Korea will also half by 2050.
In Japan thousands die alone each week. In Germany, public health funerals doubled in Hamburg between 2007-2017, because more people depart this earth without relatives to take care of their legacy. Manfred Grosser, a clergyman in a town between Berlin and Dresden, who officiates at five funerals for every baptism, is quoted lamenting that there are ‘dark demographic clouds on the horizon’.
Wealthy countries face unpopular choices as their voters age, including the need for a sharp rise in the retirement age, something that is so politically difficult that even Vladimir Putin was defeated in his attempts. He might be the new tsar, and possess the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, but there is one force that no one can defeat: the boomer electorate. Older people tend to vote for their own self-interests, and in the case of Britain, end up controlling the government in power; voters with pensions and homes opt for lower growth and restricted housebuilding, further raising the cost of home ownership for the young and so pushing down the fertility rate still further. If we’re playing a generational blame game for the lack of children ...
Since all my readers belong to the boomer electorate, it's probably too late for you to alter the balance. Sorry to have spoilt your weekend.
