Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

One of the unspoken implications of the environmentalist movement is a Malthusian sense that the planet is literally filling up with more human beings than it can hold. Since the earth is finite this assumption has a ready logic to it. Luckily for us, we are not in fact reaching carrying capacity for the planet, nor are we ever likely to do so. The great urbanization of the human race over the past century has sent birthrates around the world plummeting, as people crowd into cities where cultural and economic changes makes having tons of kids unlikely. The West and Japan were the first to modernize in this way, but the rest of the world is already progressing down the same direction. Birthrates in China, Brazil, and even possibly India are already below replacement level. In the long-term this is good news for the planet, as cities themselves are more ecologically sustainable forms of living. The more complicated reality though is that this new status quo of low birthrates may be bad news for us, since we live in societies dependent on continued economic growth for stability.

The two authors of this book are Canadian journalists who go on a mini-world tour to Brazil, China, Kenya, and India to determine what’s going on with global demographics and why it matters. Canadians are particularly proud of the success of their immigration model, which combines ruthless selection with large numbers of net annual immigrants, and these two guys take a decidedly liberal stance on the whole matter. What they find is that Brazil and China have already settled into birthrates well below replacement, the former because rapid urbanization in the 20th century and the latter due to the disastrous consequences of the CCP’s One Child policy. India is also ageing slowly but surely, whereas Africa is likely to be the youngest and most populous region of the world in the foreseeable future, though it will level off some time this century. One way or another we are not going to overfill the planet. Although some Westerners fear that their countries will be overwhelmed by immigrants in the future, it seems quite possible that the supply of foreigners may well dry up. Birthrates are tapering off in much of the Middle East, South Asia, and the more developed Latin American countries. China used to be a major net exporter of immigrants to the West. It seems likely that they won’t have people to send at all in future. The rest of the world is treading this path, slowly but surely.

Not everyone likes this new reality of low birthrates but there is also not much that can be done about it. Government policies aimed at boosting fertility rates have never met with much success. Pro-natalist programs are expensive, underwhelming in impact, and are usually the first thing to get cut first when budgets are tight. The problem is both economic and cultural. Rural people simply need children more than urban ones on an economic level – kids are more likely to be a net economic cost to city-dwellers in fact. But birthrates are also negatively correlated with female empowerment, and we are living in a modern world where women’s rights are expanding more broadly than ever. As women become more emancipated, they are far less likely to want to spend their best years pregnant and at home. To return to a world of high birthrates we’d effectively have to end modernity itself. Short of a literal apocalypse that’s not happening.

Young people consume, produce, and innovate more than the old, who by nature require expenditures to support. Countries that are old, but do not have cultures of immigration, are doomed to a future of stagnation, if not total collapse. Viktor Orban’s Hungary, beloved by U.S. right, is haemorrhaging population every year. How he plans to answer practical questions about taxation and public services with an ever-dwindling population of productive young is unclear. He can continue giving angry speeches, but man cannot live by angry speeches alone. Sovereign countries can choose whether to take immigrants or not, but they should be honest with their citizens about what is actually at stake rather than engaging in demagoguery or suggesting that they can simply have their goulash and eat it too.

Warnings about the threat of population decline are often taken as a bit of an ironic riposte by conservatives towards liberals, whose anxieties are usually more Malthusian. The reality is though that there is really something to it. We can see by the age-based population tables that there are going to be less human beings, a lot less, and more old and few young among those that remain, in many countries in the future. What that world will look like is impossible to say, but it will be unlike anything we have experienced before.