Why Demography Matters

Danny Dorling, Stuart Gietel-Basten

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780745698441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Demography
• Index: Social Sciences

Demography is not destiny. As Giacomo Casanova explained over two centuries ago: 'There is no such thing as destiny. We ourselves shape our own lives.'

Today we are shaping them and our societies more than ever before. Globally, we have never had fewer children per adult: our population is about to stabilize, though we do not know when or at what number, or what will happen after that. It will be the result of billions of very private decisions influenced in turn by multiple events and policies, some more unpredictable than others. More people are moving further around the world than ever before: we too often see that as frightening, rather than as indicating greater freedom. Similarly, we too often lament greater ageing, rather than recognizing it as a tremendous human achievement with numerous benefits to which we must adapt.

Demography comes to the fore most positively when we see that we have choices, when we understand variation and when we are not deterministic in our prescriptions. The study of demography has for too long been dominated by pessimism and inhuman, simplistic accounting. As this fascinating and persuasive overview demonstrates, how we understand our demography needs to change again.

1
Introduction

There is no such thing as destiny.We ourselves shape our own lives.

The ticking time bomb of ageing.

The population explosion (and implosion).

The migration bomb.

Demography appears to promise more bombs and explosions than a Hollywood blockbuster. To continue the movie metaphor: the demographic future is presented like Die Hard (and its four sequels), as an endless fight against explosion after explosion; the best we can hope for is to emulate the cast of The Hurt Locker, trying (sometimes in vain) to defuse all these ticking time bombs. This, so the traditional alarmist narrative goes, is why demography matters. It matters because China’s ageing population means its future economic growth might soon be checked, with disastrous consequences worldwide. It matters, some say, because migration into the UK will inevitably lead to its public services being overwhelmed. It matters because the tremendous population growth in much of sub-Saharan Africa, coupled with climate change, could lead to conflict, drought, mass relocation and disaster. This could happen, and some might claim that it already partly has. But this is not to say that it will. Indeed, what will happen in terms of numbers of people is far from certain; and what will happen as a result of whatever level our population eventually reaches is even less predictable.

I think we’re fucked.

There are not many lines in books on demography that our undergraduate students can directly quote, but this one from Stephen Emmott’s recent study of the environmental consequences of population growth is certainly a contender. In Ten Billion, Emmott sets out the challenges that have accompanied rapid population growth in the twentieth century, and offers a vision of how they will progress in the current century. His conclusion is profoundly pessimistic. The passage at the end of the book that precedes the line above is as follows: ‘We urgently need to do – and I mean actually do – something radical to avert a global catastrophe. But I don’t think we will’ (Emmott 2013: 202).

Ten Billion is just one of a huge number of books, articles and press headlines describing the potentially negative consequences of population change. We began writing this book during the build-up to the UK’s referendum on EU membership. The ‘Brexit’ campaign presented horror stories of an ‘out-of-control’ immigration system, a ‘break down of public services’, projected overwhelming population growth soon to be hitting our ‘crowded island’ leading to the building over of the English greenbelt, and much more besides. In the aftermath, one key aspect of demography – immigration – was presented as the single most important reason to explain why the UK voted to leave. There was also a rise in fear, hatred and racist attacks. It became apparent that control over immigration was the main factor shaping debate over the process of how to withdraw from the EU. When the vote was analysed demographically the results showed that it was the old who voted for Brexit in the largest numbers, the old who ‘feared’ the migrants most, or who thought that limiting immigration would somehow help younger generations (see Dorling, 2016a).

If fertility in the UK had been higher in the past then there would have been more young voters. Had UK society not become so individualistic over the last four decades more of the young might have turned out to vote, and economic inequalities might not have risen so high. We would have been a very different population and had a very different political and demographic make-up had we had a few more children in the 1930s or a few more emigrants in the 1990s. Demography shapes our politics. Politics shapes our demography.

A number of recently published books, mainly emanating from the United States, have sought to paint a bleak future for Europe based upon a convergence of problems associated with its low fertility rates, rapidly ageing population and, in some cases, the fear of some imagined vigorous growth of Islamic culture in Europe (Coleman and Basten, 2015). In China and India, population ageing leading to eventual economic decline is projected to be a core factor in shaping their relative futures, with India perceived to have an ‘in-built’ economic advantage as it already has far more children.

In Europe, demographic change is painted as being ‘responsible’ for the crises in pensions, health care and social care, the latter now especially acute in the UK. There are simultaneously too few people in some places and too many in other places, and whether they stay in situ or move, the consequences are often portrayed to be dire. The decline of the traditional family model is lamented and blamed for everything from the growing need for more housing to the lack of decent care provision for both the elderly and the young.

Given how profoundly depressing so many popular demographic views of the world are, it is a miracle that demographers are ever invited out to social gatherings at all. In truth, we aren’t invited that often – and we often lie when asked ‘so what do you do?’ at parties. Believe it or not, the authors of this book find it much easier to be thought of as geographers and sociologists (hardly test pilots or brain surgeons) respectively, rather than as demographers. But in truth, recent demographic change is on the whole far from depressing. In our lifetimes we have seen infant mortality rates plummet; health around the world improve beyond the most optimistic dreams of our forebears; increased freedom of movement; greater freedom to live how you wish to and with whomever you like; and children (on average) treated with ever greater love, compassion and respect. Ageing (which we unduly lament) is brought about by falling fertility and mortality rates, which in turn have been brought about by improvements in health, well-being, education, women’s rights and workers’ rights (which we rightly celebrate). So why is demography seen as so depressing?

This ‘depressing streak’ within demography can most easily be traced back to the earlier writings of Thomas Malthus, whose tales of impending doom became so popular at the turn of the nineteenth century. In the classic Malthusian model – which still lurks in the thinking of many writers today – population growth will inevitably outstrip food production. The suggestion is that either the population starts collectively to pull its finger out and apply ‘preventive’ checks to growth, such as marrying later, or else there will follow a ‘positive’ check (which should really be termed ‘profoundly negative’) of famine, war, pestilence and general destitution in order to ensure and maintain a balance. In 1800, when this debate began to gather steam, the world population was around 1 billion. And in fact, Malthus was not quite as grim as he is often portrayed, especially as he aged, but the ideas contained in his earlier writings have long outlived his later reflections. Ideas can have much longer life expectancies than people.

Interestingly, Malthus was not just a demographer but also the world’s first salaried economist. Economics is often referred to as ‘the dismal science’, a term first coined by Thomas Carlyle in the mid-nineteenth century. It is a common misconception that Carlyle coined this phrase in response to the writings of Malthus. This is not true, but the fact that it persists tells us something about how we perceive Malthus and how, by definition, we perceive demography as a close academic relative of economics. Demography can easily be grouped in with the more uncaring and inhuman side of the social sciences. But there is another side to demography that is more optimistic, and it is not simply the unscientific side.

Carlyle did have something of significance to say about Malthus. In his 1839 book Chartism he wrote that Malthus’s world of preventive and positive checks presented a view that was ‘dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or the next’ (1842: 109). Carlyle was insinuating that Malthus had projected Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature, wherein life is ‘poor, nasty, brutish and short’, and that this was short-sighted.

It is human nature to do as Carlyle did back in the mid-nineteenth century and write a riposte to the most gloomy vision of the future. In general, people tend to have a positive outlook and believe in their community; only a minority are not pro-social. Sometimes these more positive views will be directly based upon new evidence; at other times a different interpretation of the evidence will be in play. Some ripostes, or alternative futures, are based upon serious empirical endeavour. And some take a very long time to materialize. Demography matters because a combination of current and outdated demographic understandings often underlie so much else that we have come to believe. And, as our understanding of our demography changes in future, so too will our beliefs.

It was not until the 1980s, almost two centuries after Malthus began to devise his original dire warnings, that the Danish economist Ester Boserup (1981) was able to convincingly demonstrate that the Malthusian view of the relationship between people and land was over-simplistic, and that food production was far more elastic in terms of labour inputs. Other visions of the future, however, are based more on pessimism than on fact. Stephen Emmott, for example, offers a pessimistic view of the future based upon his interpretation of recent trends and what they might portend for the future, but others interpret these same trends differently and, as a result, view the possibilities for the future much more positively.

In her recent, excellent and short No-Nonsense Guide to World Population, Vanessa Baird (2011) explains how population growth has actually been slowing for some time, and that our real problems concern how we treat and respect one another. It is no coincidence that her other book in the same series was the No-Nonsense Guide to Sexual Diversity. In a similar vein, Matthew Connelly’s (2010) Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population tried to place a lid on the scare stories still being told about future demographic dystopias. Those who argue that population is a problem may actually be more concerned about something else that worries them, perhaps something less politically correct, which would explain why repeated recent UN projections showing a rapid population slowdown have little influence on them. The argument can then often deteriorate into a battle between ‘pessimists’ and ‘optimists’.

But even optimists can easily be turned pessimistic by current events. In the UK, the regional distribution of both the population as a whole and its growth rates has become very unbalanced. Parts of the north continue to face depopulation, while London becomes more and more overcrowded. Couple this with decades of under-investment in infrastructure and, ironically, many people in the less densely populated areas are likely to suffer from what might feel like overpopulation. This was a key theme in the 2016 Brexit referendum, but the perceived squeeze on public services was due more to austerity and long-term under-investment than to immigration. Much the same story can be told about the contemporary United States and the 2016 presidential campaign there.

Today in the UK and US the direct and indirect effects of strict constraints on migration could be severe, for both the economy and the labour market. Unforeseen circumstances might transpire that were not raised in the political debates of 2016. At the moment, for example, much migration from the mainland of Europe into the UK and from Mexico into the US is ‘temporary’, in the sense that migrants come to work for a period of time before returning home. If a shift in migration policy led to higher levels of lifetime migration this could serve to exacerbate the ageing issue in both countries. Repatriation (voluntary or otherwise) of older UK emigrants back to the UK would only add to this, as would a further decline in fertility in the US (one outcome that restricting migration could cause).

Demographers have to consider government policies that could impact on demographic change (Gietel-Basten, 2016a, 2016b). Perhaps the most immediate issue in the UK is the crisis in the NHS and, more especially, in social-care funding, and in the US the changes being made in 2017 to the Affordable Care Act. These political changes have the potential to increase mortality rates, or at least slow down the improvements that had been seen over recent decades in the UK and which have recently been reported to have halted, or even gone into reverse, in the US (Dorling, 2017a, 2017b).

As with many debates, demographic debates can tend towards the inane (‘I am right!’ … ‘No! I am right!’), especially when they extend to estimating the potential effects of political policies. This is not least because each ‘side’ usually offers an equally superficially viable view of the future. It is a curious thing that pessimism tends to be seen as more scientifically ‘grounded’ or ‘realistic’, while optimism tends to be associated with the words ‘breezy’ or ‘fanciful’. What is perceived as optimistic when it comes to demographic soothsaying can just as easily be perceived as pessimistic in another sense – usually in terms of a trade-off between economic well-being and the environment. For example, a future of very low birth rates could be looked at ‘pessimistically’ in terms of population ageing and hence declining economic markets and growth; but it might also be portrayed as environmentally ‘optimistic’ in terms of the prospect of there being fewer people with a smaller collective carbon footprint.

Compromises are also often viable. It is not impossible that higher economic growth resulting from advanced manufacturing techniques could lead to more resources being made available for better sustainability and climate-change adaptation. Technology and ‘robotization’ could also offset some of the impact of population decline and ageing on manufacturing – but at what human cost? The future really is unpredictable, especially in times of rapid change, such as is the case today.

If you live in the US or UK it is all too easy to become obsessed with the demographic debates in these two relatively small parts of the world. However, the most significant demographic changes are taking place elsewhere, and it is these changes that will determine the size of the world’s human population over the course of the next few decades.

It is not our purpose here to get into the ‘optimist’ versus ‘pessimist’ debate about the future of world population – we don’t have a position on what would be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ when it come...