The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

by Laurence C. Smith

  4. Low and similar rates of birth and death (population stabilization at a new, higher total number).

  Most OECD countries have now passed through these stages and—except for those allowing high levels of immigration like the United States—have stabilizing or even falling populations. Most developing nations, however, are still in Stage 2 or early Stage 3. Thus, our run-up in global population is still under way.

  Once a population enters Stage 3 its net rate of growth starts to slow, and this has generally been happening, beginning at different times and to varying degrees, for most of the world. On average, growth rates in developing countries have decreased from around +2.3% per year in 1950 to +1.8% in 2007. Expressed as “doubling times” (the number of years needed for a population to double), that means we have slowed from doubling our developing world population about every thirty years in 1950 to every forty years in 2007.

  As we saw in Chapter 1, urbanization, modernization, and the empowerment of women push fertility rates downward, thus ushering in the final stage of the Demographic Transition. Put another way, the urbanization of society—if also associated with modernization and women’s rights—helps slow the rate of growth. There are, of course, exceptions to this tendency, but as these phenomena continue to expand throughout the developing world, the global population explosion so feared by Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich is expected to decelerate. Already, in late-stage, low-immigration developed countries like Japan and Italy, and in regions like Eastern Europe, populations have not only stabilized but are falling. Assuming that fertility rates continue to drop as they are now, we are heading toward a total world population of around 9.2 billion in 2050, at which point we will still be growing but about half as fast as we are today.78

  One of the most profound long-term effects of women having fewer babies is to skew societal age structures toward the elderly (the pulse of babies from population momentum is only temporary). That is precisely what has now begun, in varying stages, all around the world (improving health care, of course, also extends our life spans, thus increasing the proportion of elderly even more). Demographers agree that we are racing forward to not only a more urban world, but a grayer one. This, too, is unprecedented in the history of humankind. For 99.9% of the time we humans have existed on Earth, our average life expectancy was 30 years or less. Archaeologists have never dug up the prehistoric remains of anyone over 50.79

  This aging will hit some places faster and harder than others. With a median age of 44.6 years80 Japan is the world’s most elderly country today. In contrast, the median age in Pakistan is just 22.1 years, almost half that of Japan. Pakistan is youthful; Japan is full of geezers. But both places will become grayer during the next forty years. By 2050 the median Pakistani age will rise twelve years to 34. Japan’s will rise another decade to 55.

  When I was young I remember seeing magazine advertisements targeting people who planned to retire at 55. In forty years fully half of all Japanese will be at least that old. On the following page, a table shows how the graying trend will transpire for a few other countries over the next forty years.81

  As seen plainly on this table from just sixteen examples, there are large age contrasts around the world today and even larger ones emerging in the future. Korea, Russia, and China will join Japan as the world’s great geriatric nations. Mexicans will be older than Americans. Median ages will be higher everywhere, but Korea, Vietnam, Mexico, and Iran will age radically, by fifteen years or more. Only our poorest, least-developed countries—like Afghanistan, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo—will still have youthful populations in 2050; and even they will be somewhat older than today.

  This patchwork of wildly contrasting age patterns around the globe is especially driven by the timing of fertility transitions—when the baby booms and echoes happened, and most importantly, when fertility rates first began to fall.82 In many OECD countries this began in the late 1950s, so the graying process is nearing its end. Median ages have already become quite high today and by 2050 will average only six years older. The same process

  Some World Aging Patterns by 2050

  (median age, in years)

  (Source: United Nations Population Division)

  is now under way in developing countries, where fertility drops beginning in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s will unleash successive waves of aging over the planet for the next forty years.

  In his 1982 film Blade Runner, director Ridley Scott imagined that my home city of Los Angeles would be filled up with Japanese people by the year 2019. In light of Japan’s economic might at the time, it’s not hard to see where the idea came from. But Mr. Scott should have consulted a demographer, because I just don’t see where all those Japanese settlers will come from. Over the next forty years, Japan is going to lose about 20% of her population.

  Is an elderly population a good thing or bad? Clearly, there are some benefits: perhaps a wiser, less violent society, for example. But it also strains health care systems,83 and from an economic perspective it absolutely raises the burden on younger workers. Economists stare hard at something called the “elderly dependency ratio,” usually calculated as the percentage of people aged sixty-five or older relative to those of “working age,” between fifteen and sixty-four.84 By the year 2050, elderly dependency ratios will be higher all around the world. Some places, like Korea, Spain, and Italy, will have elderly dependency ratios exceeding 60%. That’s barely sixteen people of working age for every ten elders. Japan, with a dependency ratio of 74%, will have only thirteen.

  Elsewhere, the overall dependency ratio will be lower but the transition shock greater. Relative to 2010, dependency ratios will more than quadruple in Iran, Singapore, and Korea. They will more than triple in China, Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, Turkey, Algeria, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia. Many of these places today have large youthful workforces that attract global business in its tireless search for labor. But by 2050, the United States may find itself in the unfamiliar position of being unable to find enough migrant farm laborers from Mexico’s aging workforce.

  Clearly, the whole concept of “retirement” is about to undergo a major overhaul. People will have to work later in life, at least part-time, and perhaps as long as they are able. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as there is some evidence that most people are actually happier with a phased retirement 85 just so long as they perceive a sense of choice in the matter.86 On the other hand, a “gray crime wave” has now begun in Japan: Arrests of struggling pensioners over age sixty-five has doubled—mostly for shoplifting and pickpocketing—and the number incarcerated has tripled to over 10% of Japan’s prison population.87 It is also apparent that some big cultural shifts will be needed in the way we treat and value our elderly. “Our society must learn that ageing and youth should be valued equally,” writes Leonard Hayflick of the UCSF School of Medicine, “if for no other reason than the youth in developed countries have an excellent chance of experiencing the phenomenon that they may now hold in such low esteem.”88

  Another thing about to undergo a major overhaul is how the countries treat and value foreign immigrants. As the world grays, skilled young people will become an increasingly coveted resource, both for direct immigration and for globalized labor pools abroad. This creates the opportunity for new economic tigers to emerge when today’s “youth bulges” mature into “worker bulges” in Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia—countries offering a reasonably educated workforce and business-friendly environment.89 A graying world also bodes well for women’s employment in places that currently discourage it, because allowing women into the labor pool is the quickest and easiest way to double it. Countries where women don’t work for religious and/or cultural reasons will experience an increasingly powerful economic incentive to abandon that tradition by 2050.

  The following point will become particularly important later in this book. In an aging world, th
ose countries best able to attract skilled foreign workers will fare best. The early signs of a migrant planet are already here. In 2008, some two hundred million people—3% of the world population—were living outside their native countries. In most OECD countries the proportion of foreign-born was over 10%, even in countries like Greece and Ireland, where emigrants used to flow out, not in.90 Foreign workers benefit their homelands as well as host economies: The World Bank estimates overseas remittances to poor countries was USD $283 billion in 2008, constituting a huge share of GDP in countries like Tajikistan (46%), Moldova (38%), and Lebanon (24%).

  What about in 2050, when the nursing homes in Mexico, China, and Iran are packed full? Who will be running the computers and caring for the residents? Unless the entire world has entered a full-blown robotic age by then, we will still need young people around to do things. Where on Earth will they come from?

  This is harder to project demographically, because those young people haven’t been born yet. But based on current population structures, the most youthful countries in 2050 will be the same ones where fertility rates are highest today—in the world’s least modernized places. Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, the West Bank and Gaza, Ethiopia, and much of sub-Saharan Africa will offer our world’s youth in 2050.

  It’s a critical but open question whether our poorest countries can convert their forthcoming demographic advantages into the new skilled workforces needed to help care for an elderly world. Just having a bunch of young people running around is not enough. Huge improvements in education, governance, and security are also required. Women will have to start attending school and working in places where this is uncommon today. Terrorism must be sufficiently quelled such that the countries that need young workers will accept immigrants from the countries that have them. I hope that these things can be achieved, and a global skilled-worker program all worked out, by 2050. I’ll be eighty-two years old—and I just can’t imagine anything lonelier than being turned over in my bed by a robot.

  CHAPTER 3

  Iron, Oil, and Wind

  All I wanna do is to thank you

  Even though I don’t know who you are

  You let me change lanes

  While I was driving in my car

  —Lyrics from “Whoever You Are” by Geggy Tah (1996)

  I nose my compact SUV out of traffic and into the Mobil gas station at Cahuenga Pass, just off the 101 Freeway in Los Angeles. Perched high above me atop the Santa Monica Mountains are the enormous white letters of the Hollywood sign. The nine letters gleam out proudly over a booming young megacity that barely existed a century ago.

  I find an open pump and hop out of the car. I swipe a credit card and tap in my ZIP code. I choose a fuel grade, lift the pump handle from its cradle, and jam it into the tank’s orifice. I squeeze the pump’s handgrip and feel its metal grow cold as fuel churns from another tank in the ground beneath me to the one in my car. It is a simple, mindless act I have repeated countless times since I was seventeen years old. I give no more thought to the process than I do to washing my hands or drinking a glass of orange juice. But I really should be more appreciative. In L.A. the elixir of life isn’t Botox: It’s gasoline.

  The average man must labor for ten hours a day, for two solid months, to perform as much physical work as one gallon of crude oil. No wonder we’ve abandoned horses and carriages in favor of oil-powered vehicles. This raw material, from which all gasolines, diesels, and jet fuels are refined, is miraculous stuff. It fuels 99% of all motorized vehicles today. And oil is so much more than just a transport fuel—it is an essential ingredient of nearly everything we make. Our plastics, lubricants, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and millions of other products all derive somehow from oil. Our food is grown with oil. So besides what I was pumping into my gas tank, I was sitting in oil while driving and was drinking oil as I sipped coffee from my cup.

  Since the Industrial Revolution oil, coal, natural gas, and metals have improved nearly every aspect of human life. Before then, a meager existence was the norm no matter what country one lived in. It is naïve to romanticize the eighteenth century as simpler, happier times—the lives of those farmers and townspeople were a constant struggle. Without fossil fuels and metals our lives would be very different. Indeed, today’s urbanization megatrend and gigantic cities would not even exist.

  The modern city survives upon constant resupply from the outer natural world, from faraway fields, forests, mines, streams, and wells. We scour the planet for hydrocarbons and deliver them to power plants to zap electricity over miles of metal wire. We take water from flowing rivers with distant headwaters of snow and ice. Plants and animals are grown someplace else, killed, and delivered for us to eat. Wind, rivers, and tides flush out our filth. Without this constant flow of nature pouring into our cities, we would all have to disperse, or die.

  This reliance of cities upon the outside natural world is a profound relationship to which their occupants give little if any thought. Unlike a hardscrabble Uzbek farmer, modern urbanites worry little about securing water and food, and instead focus on securing jobs and wealth. But a lack of awareness doesn’t make this dependency any less profound. Swedish cities, for example, import at least twenty-two tons of fossil fuel, water, and minerals per person annually.91 In a single year Portugal’s growing city of Lisbon gobbles some 11,200,000 tons of material (things like food, gas, and cement) but excretes just 2,297,000 million tons (things like sewage, air pollution, and trash).92 That’s twenty tons coming in and only four going out for every one of Lisbon’s 560,000 residents. The difference—nearly nine million tons—stays in Lisbon, mostly in the form of added buildings and landfills. So not only do cities feed on their outside natural resource base, they retain and grow from it.93

  Clearly then, our global rush to urbanize does not mean giving the natural world a break. As we saw in the previous chapter, when people move to modern cities, consumption goes up, not down. And cities import all sorts of materials besides food, water, and consumer goods. Roads, buildings, and power plants require serious tonnage of steel, chemicals, wood, water, and hydrocarbons. Even in rural areas, the departing farmers are being replaced by tractors and petrochemicals.94

  As described in the last two chapters, the developing world will experience extraordinary urban and economic growth over the next forty years. What does this portend for our third global force, demand for natural resources? Do we face oil wars and crazy steel prices? Stump forests and dried-up water wells? Are we about to run out of the raw materials our cities and mechanized farmlands so desperately need?

  Are We Running Out of Resources?

  The debate over natural resources, and whether we are running out of them, is a contentious and surprisingly ancient debate. Even Aristotle wrote about it. In 1798 Thomas Malthus’ first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population argued that the exponential growth of human population, set against the arithmetic growth in the area of arable land, must ultimately lead us to outstrip our food supply, thus inevitably dragging us toward a brutal world of famines and violence.95 Among Malthus’ more odious ideas was that social programs are pointless because they enable poor people to have more babies, thus making the problem worse.

  Not surprisingly, Malthus’ ideas angered many people in his day and since. John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin were among his vocal critics, mostly retorting that social inequity, not resource scarcity, is the root cause of human suffering. More than two centuries after the publication of this slim book the battle rages on, pitching modern-day “neo-Malthusians” like Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich against opponents like the late Julian Simon at the University of Illinois.96 The debate has now expanded well beyond food production to include all manner of natural resources. 97

  To enter this debate it is simplest to start off with finite, nonrenewable raw commodities that are essential to modern human enterprise, like metals and fossil hydrocarbons (we will take up water, food, and renewable h
ydrocarbons later). Are we running out?

  Let us tabulate estimates of known geological deposits that we have already discovered and know to be of sufficiently high grade that they could be profitably developed tomorrow if necessary. These quantities are called proved reserves, or simply reserves. It is then a simple calculation to divide the world’s total reserves by their current rate of depletion (i.e., their annual production rate) to see how many years are left until the remaining reserves run out. This simple measure is called the “R/P” (reserve-to-production) ratio or the “life-index” of a resource. On the following page are some examples of global proved reserves (both in total and per capita) and R/P ratios for twenty-two of the Earth’s especially useful nonrenewable resources.

  Two observations leap from these data. The first is that the absolute abundance of a reserve is not always a good predictor of when it might be depleted. The current world reserve of oil—despite being the second-largest at nearly two hundred billion metric tons (about twenty-four metric tons for every man, woman, and child alive on Earth)—is scheduled to run out in just 42 years at current production rates, whereas the supply of magnesium would appear to last for 4,481 more years, despite having only 1/75th the abundance of oil. Platinum would appear to have 150 years left despite being more than two million times scarcer (just 100 grams for every man, woman, and child).

  The second observation is that there is an enormous range in R/P ratios, with some reserves projected to be exhausted as soon as eight years from now and others not for hundreds or even thousands of years. The known proved reserves of magnesium, for example, appear sufficient to carry us to the year 6491 at today’s rate of consumption. Interestingly, commodity prices do not necessarily reflect this. For example, one can buy silver and lead much more cheaply than platinum, despite their having shorter index lifetimes.