Thank You for Being Late

by Thomas L. Friedman

  I am a baby boomer, born in 1953, and that makes me part of a very unusual cohort. Not since Adam met Eve and gave birth to Cain and Abel has any generation been able to say what I and my fellow baby boomers can say: the population of the world doubled in our lifetimes. Indeed, if we eat enough yogurt, exercise well, and practice yoga, we could live long enough to see it triple. It was three billion in 1959 and six billion in 1999 and, as I said, is now expected to hit 9.7 billion in 2050.

  I use the phrase “now expected to hit” to underscore the point emphasized by the Population Institute in its 2015 report: it’s true that the world generally is undergoing a demographic transition from high mortality and high fertility to low mortality and low fertility; in many parts of the world that transition is well under way. In Europe, North America, and much of Latin America and East Asia, mortality and fertility rates have fallen so far so fast that they are now at, or below, the replacement rate, and population is actually declining in countries such as Taiwan, Germany, and Japan. But that is not the whole story.

  “On the other side of the global ‘demographic divide,’” the Population Institute notes, “mortality and fertility rates remain relatively high, but mortality rates have fallen faster. As a consequence, population is rising, and in some cases, rapidly. At current rates of growth, nearly forty countries could double their population in the next thirty-five years” (italics added).

  It has not gotten much attention, but the U.N.’s population agency—the Department of Economic and Social Affairs’ Population Division—keeps quietly increasing its global population projections. On July 29, 2015, it issued its “World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision”—revising upward its projections of just two years earlier. It stated that the current world population of 7.3 billion is expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030 (the previous projection was 8.4 billion), 9.7 billion in 2050 (up from 9.55 billion), and 11.2 billion in 2100—up from the previously estimated 10.8 billion.

  Said the U.N.:

  Most of the projected increase in the world’s population can be attributed to a short list of high-fertility countries, mainly in Africa, or countries with already large populations. During 2015–2050, half of the world’s population growth is expected to be concentrated in nine countries: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, United Republic of Tanzania, United States of America (USA), Indonesia and Uganda …

  China and India remain the two largest countries in the world, each with more than 1 billion people, representing 19 percent and 18 percent of the world’s population, respectively. But by 2022, the population of India is expected to surpass that of China.

  Currently, among the ten largest countries in the world, one is in Africa (Nigeria), five are in Asia (Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan), two are in Latin America (Brazil and Mexico), one is in Northern America (USA), and one is in Europe (Russian Federation). Of these, Nigeria’s population, currently the seventh largest in the world, is growing the most rapidly. Consequently, the population of Nigeria is projected to surpass that of the United States by about 2050, at which point it would become the third-largest country in the world. By 2050, six countries are expected to exceed 300 million: China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the USA …

  With the highest rate of population growth, Africa is expected to account for more than half of the world’s population growth between 2015 and 2050.

  During this period, the populations of 28 African countries are projected to more than double.

  The Population Institute notes that much of the projected population increase

  will occur in countries already struggling to alleviate hunger and severe poverty. Many countries with rapidly growing populations are threatened by water scarcity or deforestation; others are struggling with conflict or political instability. While progress is not precluded, rapid population growth for these countries is a challenge multiplier. Their populations are demographically vulnerable and more likely to suffer from hunger, poverty, water scarcity, environmental degradation and political turmoil.

  In other words, if you go from high mortality to low mortality and don’t also go from high fertility to low fertility, you create enormous strains. If a woman has twenty kids and the twenty kids all live and have twenty kids, you have four hundred grandchildren—in one family. And that is actually happening in places like Niger. The countries whose populations continue to balloon because of continued high fertility but lower mortality “are also those with the highest levels of gender inequality and child marriage,” explained Walker. “Niger is number one in total fertility.” Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan are right up there, too. It is not about a lack of contraceptives. It is about a lack of modern gender norms and persistent male religious opposition to birth control. The blessing “May you have seven sons and seven daughters” is alive and well in these countries. And so is poverty and the lack of sufficient schooling and infrastructure.

  That combination was never good. But when Moore’s law and globalization accelerate at their current rates and your country falls behind on education and infrastructure, it falls behind at an accelerating rate as well. So you have more people who are less able to participate in the global flows. And then they have more kids as social security. And then climate change kicks in and undermines agriculture. And that can foster so much more disorder (as we will explore shortly)—when you have so many more people and governments less equipped to dig out of the hole. It is a frightening vicious cycle that is already under way in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and West Africa.

  Adair Turner, a former chairman of the United Kingdom’s Financial Services Authority and currently chairman of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and author of the book Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit, and Fixing Global Finance, put this problem succinctly in an August 21, 2015, essay published on Project Syndicate. He noted that while it is true that the U.N.’s latest population projections indicate that Europe, Russia, and Japan face considerable aging problems owing to low fertility rates, that is a manageable problem.

  What is not a manageable problem is this, he wrote: “From 1950 to 2050, Uganda’s population will have increased 20-fold, and Niger’s 30-fold. Neither the industrializing countries of the nineteenth century nor the successful Asian catch-up economies of the late twentieth century ever experienced anything close to such rates of population growth. Such rates make it impossible to increase per capita capital stock or workforce skills fast enough to achieve economic catch-up, or to create jobs fast enough to prevent chronic underemployment.” And all of this is happening before you even factor in the rising power of machines and robots to supplant bottom-rung blue-collar and white-collar jobs in these developing countries, not to mention the developed ones.

  Turner also observed:

  By making it possible to manufacture in almost workerless factories in advanced economies, automation could cut off the path of export-led growth that all of the successful East Asian economies pursued. The resulting high unemployment, particularly of young men, could foster political instability. The radical violence of ISIS has many roots, but the tripling of the population of North Africa and the Middle East over the last 50 years certainly is one of them …

  With Africa’s population likely to increase by more than three billion over the next 85 years, the European Union could be facing a wave of migration that makes current debates about accepting hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers seem irrelevant …

  Both increased longevity and falling fertility rates are hugely positive developments for human welfare …

  Achieving this goal does not require the unacceptable coerciveness of China’s one-child policy. It merely requires high levels of female education, the uninhibited supply of contraceptives, and freedom for women to make their own reproductive choices, unconstrained by the moral pressure of conservative religious authorities or of politicians operating under the delusion that rapid population growth will dri
ve national economic success.

  Tom Burke, chairman of E3G, Third Generation Environmentalism, a green group in Britain, likes to reduce the problem to four numbers: 1, 1.5, 2.0, and 2.5. Says Burke:

  Today there are 1 billion who have arrived at middle class or above on the planet, with secure assets and high and secure incomes. There are 1.5 billion people who are in transition. They moved to the cities fifteen years ago in the emerging economies. By now they have some assets and secure incomes, but they’re beginning to feel nervous because a lot of them work in the public sector and are being squeezed by globalization and technology. There are another 2.0 billion who have just recently moved to cities and they have virtually no assets and pretty insecure incomes, and you see them sitting by the roads selling stuff. And there are 2.5 billion who are the rural poor, living as subsistence farmers and on the edges of forests, who have not joined the global economy at all. If the climate changes, some migrate and the rest die.

  If we cannot meet the expectations of the 1.5 and the 2.0—who are primarily in the cities in a hyperconnected world, where they can see everything they are missing, added Burke—they will destabilize the middle classes in all these countries. They will become the substrate for ISIS and other movements of the disaffected. Future growth and stability depend largely on creating rising real incomes for the bottom two quartiles of the urban population. They are the people who buy things when they get money, and they are the people who get hammered most by rising food prices and water prices and severe weather events. A significant number of those participating in the Arab Awakening starting in late 2010 emerged from the newly urbanized 1.5 and 2.0.

  “Just as there are climate deniers, there will always be population deniers who refuse to acknowledge the impact that population growth is having on the planet,” Robert Walker observed in a Huffington Post article first posted on January 30, 2015. “Population, in one form or another, touches upon a whole host of scientific concerns, including climate change … If world population grows as currently projected, it’s hard to imagine that we will succeed in meeting the ambitious targets that must be met to avoid the worst effects of climate change.”

  This is truly not meant to blame the developing world, although some of these countries do have certain cultural practices related to the treatment of women in particular that they should overcome for their own benefit. When it comes to climate impacts, we in the West have been much worse for much longer. We have a much greater responsibility to invent the clean energy, efficiency, and conservation models that will allow an ever more middle-class planet to stay on the right side of every planetary boundary.

  The Rain Room

  On November 1, 2015, NPR’s Weekend Edition carried a story that illuminated as well as anything could the challenge posed by the Great Acceleration in Mother Nature. It was about an unusual exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art called the “Rain Room.” In an interview, Hannes Koch, one of the artists who made the exhibit, said he and his fellow artists wanted to explore the relationships between art, nature, and technology.

  Hence they created the Rain Room, which was described by Artnet.com on October 30, 2015, as a single, large, blackened room with artificial rain and a “bright spotlight shining in one corner.” Visitors are invited to walk in and dare to believe that everywhere they stand sensors will ensure that the rain stops. Or as the article explained, they are asked “to enter a torrential downpour, trusting to science and art that they won’t get wet, even as the storm continues unabated … Only seven people can be in the room at any given time, and visits can be no longer than fifteen minutes. As frustrating as this might be to potential visitors, this is all to their benefit: Sensors that detect the presence of visitors stop the rain above them, creating a six-foot-wide dry spot. Too many people, and there would be no rain to speak of.”

  I loved that line: Too many people, and there would be no rain to speak of.

  Such is the impact of the power of many. While Moore’s law and globalization have vastly expanded the power of machines and the power of one and the power of flows, the fact that they have also vastly expanded the power of many means that for the first time in the history of both mankind and Planet Earth, mankind has become large enough in numbers and empowered enough by the supernova to be both a force of nature and a forcing function on nature.

  Our actions today, more than ever before, can turn the rain on and turn the rain off—literally. Climate change means more extremes—more torrential storms in some regions, more extended droughts in others. This power is so new that it is hard for people to get their minds around it. “Okay,” some skeptics will say, “I will grant you that the climate is changing, but I don’t believe that humans have anything to do with it.” We are hardwired to consider nature limitless because for so many years nature seemed so limitless—and we were so relatively few and so relatively light a force upon it; how could it be that we cannot devour as much as we want? But, alas, we are now many, and the many are becoming many more and each of the many more is much more impactful and consuming much more than ever before.

  As Jeremy Grantham, the well-known global investor, once observed: we humans “are wickedly bad at dealing with the implications of compound math”—another way of saying it’s hard to recognize what a powerful impact we can have on the environment when the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law together all continue accelerating at once in the second half of the chessboard.

  To be blunt, adds Adam Sweidan, “we have reaped the rewards of technological progress without due concern for its unintended consequences.” All living things, he explained on his blog, “exist in and as ecosystems,” which are the foundation of all life and commerce. “The degradation of that foundation will eventually cause the pyramid to crumble.” And that is where the Machine is taking us, if we don’t take heed of the planetary boundaries. “The system today appears to be in runaway mode,” Sweidan added. “Increased demand for goods has led to the use of ever-advanced and more invasive technology to extract natural resources that keep the economy growing. These insult the land and degrade natural ecosystems while increasing inequalities, human population displacement, and social unrest.”

  And “it’s happened so fast,” writes Rockström in his book Big World, Small Planet. “In just two generations, humanity has overwhelmed Earth’s capacity to continue supporting our world in a stable way. We’ve gone from being a small world on a big planet to a big world on a small planet. Now Earth is responding with environmental shocks to the global economy. This is a great turning point.”

  It doesn’t have to end this way. The door to the Holocene does not have to be totally shut behind us. Or if it does, maybe it is still possible to have, as Rockström once put it to me, an “Anthropocene planetary equilibrium for us—for the world—without irreversibly pushing us to a hot-disaster state” of permanent disequilibrium.

  But what we know for certain is that this is the moment, the turning point, when our options will be decisively shaped and determined. Much is now riding on whether we make the age of accelerations our friend or deadly foe. The supernova can amplify our powers to destroy or amplify our powers to protect and preserve.

  We have to make our newfound power of one, the power of machines, the power of many, and the power of flows our friends—and our tools to create abundance within the planetary boundaries—not just our enemies. But organizing ourselves to use them that way will require a level of will, of stewardship, and of collective action the likes of which we have never seen humanity display as a whole. Every day there are new breakthroughs in solar energy, wind power, batteries, and energy efficiency that hold out the hope that we can have clean energy at a scale and price that billions can afford—provided we have the will to put a price on carbon so these technologies can rapidly scale and move down the cost-volume curve.

  As environmentalists have often noted, we have been great at rising to the occasion after big geopolitical upheavals—after Hitle
r invaded his neighbors, after Pearl Harbor, after 9/11. But this is the first time in human history that we have to act on a threat we have collectively made to ourselves, to act on it at scale, to act before the full consequences are felt, and to act on behalf of a generation that has not yet been born—and to do it before all the planetary boundaries have been breached.

  This is the challenge before humanity, now, right now, and it is for this generation. We could rebuild Europe after World War II, rebuild on the site of the World Trade Center, and even rebuild the economy after the 1929 and 2008 crashes, but if we cross Mother Nature’s planetary boundaries, there are things that can never be rebuilt. We cannot rebuild the Greenland ice sheet, the Amazon rain forest, or the Great Barrier Reef. The same is true of the rhinos, macaws, and orangutans. No 3-D printer will bring them back to life.

  That’s why the only way to confront these compounding threats before they tip the wrong way is with a compounding commitment to stewardship, a compounding willingness to act collectively to do compounding research and make compounding investments in clean energy production and more efficient consumption, along with a willingness, at least in America, to impose a carbon tax to get compounding investments in clean power and efficiency, plus a compounding commitment to women’s education and an ethic of empowerment everywhere. Without compounding, multiplicative commitments along all these fronts that are commensurate with the magnitude of the challenge we face, we stand no chance—zero—of preserving a stable planet when there will be so many more people, armed with so many more powerful tools, propelled by a supernova.