The Human Tide

by Paul Morland

  In any case, Africa’s population explosion is remarkable even within the story of the human tide. If the biggest global news story of the last forty years has been China’s economic growth, the biggest news story of the next forty years will be Africa’s population growth. It arises out of the very same factors as elsewhere, and yet what may be the greatest variable in the history of demography since 1800 is how fast fertility rates fall in Africa. For most of the planet, we can be pretty sure from here onwards, short of any real shocks, how things will turn out: lifespans will gradually lengthen, particularly where they are already short (they are in fact below sixty almost nowhere else outside sub-Saharan Africa) and fertility rates will be either below or converging towards replacement level. The detail will matter, particularly locally: fertility rates of Israelis and Palestinians may well determine the outcome of their struggle; the convergence of Latino with majority US fertility rates will help to determine how large the Latino minority grows. From a global perspective, then, the future is largely in the bag. This is not so for Africa, where huge and (short of calamity) inevitable demographic momentum means that even if fertility rates fall fast, there will still be very many young women bearing children and relatively few old people dying of natural causes, meaning big population growth regardless. Moreover, the pace at which fertility falls will have huge implications for the peak population of the planet.

  Sub-Saharan Africa has more than quintupled its population since the 1950s, from around 180 million to close on a billion. There is powerful evidence that at the earlier date Africa was under-populated, the victim not only of a difficult geography but of centuries of Arab slave-trading and a shorter but more intense period of European and American slaving, which left it denuded. The Atlantic slave trade alone is estimated to have taken 12 million people.32 The Islamic slave trade may have taken as many as 14 million, although some estimates are much lower.33 It is certainly striking to realise that in the continent as a whole in 1950 there were far less than half as many people as there were in Europe, a fact all the more striking when you realise that Africa is three times the size of Europe. Today, Africa’s population is around a third larger than Europe’s, and by 2100 it is likely to have quadrupled again, while Europe’s will have shrunk. That, at least, is the mainstream prediction of the United Nations; much will depend on the pace of falling African birth rates and on inflows of immigration.

  One particular source of this incredible growth is Nigeria. Today, Nigeria has around 180 million people–sub-Saharan Africa’s entire population in the middle of the twentieth century. At the time of its independence from Britain in 1960, Nigeria had a population of around 45 million, a figure which was lower than that of its colonial master: now its population is nearly three times the size of the United Kingdom’s. The UN medium fertility projection has Nigeria’s population at around 800 million by the end of the current century. If that turns out to be the case, Nigeria would have gone in the space of a century and a half from being 1.5% of the world’s population to 7%.

  Meanwhile, Nigeria has urbanised rapidly. Lagos has seen a rise in population from 1.5 million in 1970 to over 20 million forty-five years on. Life in this mega-city, as in other African mega-cities, is not attractive from the perspective of someone from a developed country. As one correspondent describes it:

  A thick layer of acrid, blue smoke hovers just above the waterfront slums that skirt Lagos lagoon, filtering out sunrise and sunset. This man-made mist that clings to the rusted shack rooftops comes from the countless fish-smoking cabins that drive the slum economy. There’s an uninterrupted view of the city’s dramatic sprawl of poverty from the road bridges that carry daily commuters between the islands and the mainland.34

  Yet the rural poor keep coming, escaping the more grinding prospect of rural poverty in an ever-more crowded countryside. Few would have guessed that one-time colonial outposts would by the dawn of the twenty-first century dwarf the capital of the imperial metropolis. Lagos is foremost of the mega-cities which are now dotted not only across Africa but throughout the developing world and which could only have come into existence with the recent vast population growth, which the countryside was unable to absorb.

  As with India and China, countries growing on this demographic scale can only fail to be important players on the world stage if they lag behind. Nigeria has many challenges, but its economy has certainly started to stir. It is an oil power, and this has helped to get it started, although in some ways oil has been a curse, cultivating a rentier mentality and corruption at every level in society and the economy. There is some confusion about whether the South African economy or the Nigerian is the largest in Africa–it depends on the assessment method used and prevailing exchange rates as well as the precise timing of the calculation. Nevertheless, it is clear that Nigeria has the potential to emerge as at least a regional superpower. As ever, demography is not all of destiny, and much will depend on whether Nigerian energy and creativity can be channelled into economic progress or whether corruption will stymie developments. Nigeria already has a large military budget, much of which is currently required to counter the domestic Islamist threat, although the country is also a major contributor to UN peacekeeping missions. It faces internal security challenges and always the prospect of fragmentation, as nearly happened with the Biafran war in the 1960s. That Nigeria’s population will grow enormously is almost guaranteed; that this provides it with the potential to play a large regional and global role is certain. Whether it can realise this potential will have vast ramifications for the region.

  Seen with hindsight, demographic change looks like a whirlwind hitting one region after another, along with and then sometimes ahead of general social and economic development. From this perspective, many are confident that Africa’s fate will resemble that of every other region, and in the north and south of the continent this is already happening. History however is never reliable as a guide to the future. Even so, in terms of the demographic pattern the first and second phases are already in evidence across most of the region and the third has begun in most places. African parents are just as keen as any others to ensure that their children survive and that they themselves extend their lives as long as possible, and given the right material resources are as likely to devote these to those goals as all other peoples have been. It seems likely that, as they become more urbanised and educated and have access to family planning, African women will want to stop having families of six or seven, as has been true of women from Chile to China and Vietnam to Venezuela. Yet even if this process accelerates, there is still huge demographic momentum in Africa, and this means that population growth will for decades accompany falling fertility rates. Large cohorts of young women, the product of earlier high fertility rates, will collectively produce many children even if individually they produce fewer than their mothers. There will be relatively few deaths as the old are a small group relative to the population as a whole and more people are living longer. As a result, with births far outstripping deaths, populations will continue to boom even as fertility rates fall.

  Whatever Next? Colours of the Future

  Much about demography is ‘baked into the future’ and is certain to happen. And this demographic future can be summarised in three colours: more grey, more green and less white.

  Starting with ‘more grey’, society after society is becoming older through a combination of fewer births and longer life expectancy. Ageing of populations is a phenomenon which has been observed in region after region, as fertility rates have fallen and life expectancy has risen. The median age of the world’s population has already risen by around seven years since 1960. In the developed world, it has risen by more than a decade in the same period, while in east Asia as a whole it has risen by sixteen years and in South Korea, an astonishing twenty-two years. Meanwhile, outside sub-Saharan Africa there is barely a country or territory where the median age has not risen in the past sixty years. Yet the process is only just beginning.
According to the middle-range UN forecasts, by the end of the present century median man or woman will be over forty, a dozen years older than today. This means that between 1960 and 2100 the median person will have doubled in age from barely twenty to more than forty. Among the record-breakers for greater age will be Ethiopians (today on average eighteen, by 2100 aged forty-three), and Syrians (today aged barely twenty, in 2100 likely to be aged nearly forty-seven). Many countries, from Poland to Sri Lanka and Japan, will have a median age of over fifty. By the end of this century, Libya’s median age is projected to be roughly where Japan’s is now. Such aged societies have never been seen in history. Retuning to Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, when it was first produced in 1957 the median age among Puerto Ricans (in Puerto Rica rather than in New York, it is true) was around eighteen; by 2100 it will be little short of fifty-five.35 It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, to be age representative, a latter-day Bernstein would need to set his musical in an old people’s home rather than among street gangs.

  How this marked ageing will affect the world cannot be predicted with any certainty, but it is surely the case that a world in which the median age is around twenty (1960) is profoundly different from one in which it is over forty (2100), not only because of all the political, economic and technological changes that are likely to have happened, but also by sheer dint of its ageing population. The changes effected by ageing are likely to be both positive and negative. Viewed optimistically, the world is more likely to be a peaceful and law-abiding place. As we have seen, there is a strong correlation between the youth of a society and the violence and crime within it. Not all young societies are embroiled in crime and war, but almost all old societies are at peace. Not only are older people less likely to take up arms or become criminals; young people, where they are few and far between, are more valued and more heavily invested in. Mothers who have only one son are less likely than mothers with many sons to goad them to take up arms against enemies real or perceived. On the other hand, older societies are less likely to be dynamic, innovative and risk-taking. An older population is more likely to want to hold the safest sort of investment, high-quality bonds rather than equities, for example, and this will affect markets and in turn the real economy. Real estate demand will also change as more and more accommodation is required by elderly singles and less and less by growing families–these effects are already at work in much of the developed world, and are set to go global.

  While median age captures the age of a society as a whole, it is the rise in the number of elderly which tends to receive the greatest attention, not least because of the pressure this is likely to put on the welfare states of developed countries where state provision for older people is advanced. This is often expressed as a ‘support ratio’–the number of people of working age (however defined) to each older person–and as early as 2050 in Japan this figure will be approaching one to one. In Western Europe, although lower than Japan, it will be twice as high in 2050 as it was in 2005.36 Pensions in the developed world as a whole are set to double as a share of GDP without significant reform by 2050, and the greater demands of older people on health services will also be a fiscal challenge for a developed world where budgets are already under strain and debt to GDP ratios are seen by many as perilously high.37

  There will also be a sharp rise in the ‘older old’–in the UK there are 1.4 million people aged over eighty-five today, and this figure will double in twenty years and treble in thirty years as the baby boomers move from the frontiers of ageing into its more advanced stage.38 Some would argue that the welfare state as we have known it since the Second World War has the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme: it works only if each new generation of workers is larger than the last. Where old-age pensions are funded from current taxation, there is certainly something in this, and it seems unlikely that welfare states will be able to carry on in anything like their current form as societies age. Yet, at the same time, with more and more people having no children to care for them, reliance on the state will grow. The UK’s 2017 general election was in large measure fought on the issue of ‘social care’, namely who will pay for the daily assistance the elderly need–such an issue would never have gained such prominence at a time when the elderly made up only a small share of the total population. It is, however, but a foretaste of things to come.

  In the developed world, with state welfare provision, this may still be an issue, but in the developing world the question will be more critical. Countries will have to cope with growing old before they grow rich. In the developed world, however financed, young workers from countries like Thailand and the Philippines can be drawn in to help with elderly care, at least if allowed to do so by local immigration legislation. For developing countries with an ageing population this will not be a luxury they can afford. The median Thai will hit fifty by mid-century and it is unlikely that in the few decades until then Thailand will have reached the level of development which will allow for comprehensive services for elderly care. In the past, the lucky few who survived to old age were usually cared for by multiple offspring. When there are no longer offspring and the state cannot fill the gap we face a global epidemic of elderly people going to their deaths uncared for and neglected. The only hope in this respect is technology, and here, unsurprisingly, the leader in the field is Japan (today the world’s oldest society), which has been developing robots to deliver basic elderly care, provide company and even to act as pets.39

  Accepting that almost come what may, the world is set to become more grey, there is also every chance that it could become more green. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which suggests that humanity is still in the midst of a population explosion which is wrecking the planet. There is no doubt that the great increase in human population on the one hand and the vast increase in living standards on the other has done much environmental damage. Humankind has taken over more and more of the planet for living space and farming, and modern lifestyles certainly churn out a great deal of environmentally damaging substances. Carbon emissions are not just a function of the living standard of the global population but of its sheer size, prompting some environmental campaigners to counsel smaller families, particularly in the developed world.40 On the other hand, human ingenuity and technology has played a role, and could play a still greater role, in limiting or even reversing these effects. The declining growth in human population–globally from around 2% per annum to around 1% in the last forty years or so–gives rise to a great opportunity to create a greener planet. Although the population of the world will continue to grow, perhaps slowing to close to zero growth by the end of this century, the rate of human innovation need not. And although the average human being will be older, there will also be more human beings and in all likelihood they will be ever better educated, better networked and with greater access to information. That means, for example, that with the appropriate resource allocation and investment, crop yields per hectare should be able to outpace human population growth more easily than when the latter was faster. That could mean, even if people are to be better fed than they are today, that land can be returned to nature and it will be possible to live in a greener planet.

  The same is true of other resources. If efficiency grows faster than population then sustainability can be enhanced, whether it is more fuel-efficient cars or better storage and transport of food. Where human population starts to decline, from Japan to Bulgaria, nature moves fast into the void. Because of slower than once expected decline in African fertility rates, the UN now expects the global population to exceed 11 billion and not to have stopped growing by the end of the current century; however, by then it should just about have stabilised, with growth at a tenth of that experienced today and a twentieth of that experienced in the late 1960s and early 1970s.41 To use an analogy from earlier in this book, demography is a car that first trundles along slowly, then reaches tremendous speed and most recently has decelerated so significantly that in the course o
f this century it is very likely to have ground to a halt.

  The third colour we can predict with some certainty is ‘less white’. With the great population explosion starting among the Anglo-Saxons and then moving on to other Europeans, the white population of the world experienced an extraordinary expansion both in absolute and relative terms from the start of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. This has had profound political consequences, and without it, it is hard to imagine that European imperialism could have grown so extensive or had such an impact on the world. However, the Anglo-Saxons had no monopoly on falling mortality and sustained high fertility (and hence high population growth), and neither have people of European extraction. Until recently the lowest fertility, oldest and slowest-growing populations in the world were in Europe, and it was here, too, that population decline in recent times first set in. More recently, however, the peoples of north-east Asia have begun to catch up and in some cases, on some measures, overtake Europeans, and in time no doubt others will follow. Thai women, as noted, already have fewer children than British women, although Thailand still has some ‘demographic momentum’ to enjoy.

  While some non-Europeans may be embracing the small European family, demographic momentum will remain powerful for some time to come. And as we have seen, many civilisations which have experienced the demographic transition later have experienced it more intensely, with higher population growth at some periods in the twentieth century than, say, Britain ever managed in the nineteenth. This means that the global population has grown less white and the trend is set to continue. It amounts to a ‘first mover disadvantage’: those who went through the demographic transition earliest experienced the least growth and are set to decline as a share of global population.