The Future

by Al Gore

  THE CHANGING FAMILY

  The increased participation of women in the workforce, the dramatic changes in the education of women, and changes in social values have also led to significant structural changes in the institution of the family. Divorces have increased dramatically in almost every part of the world, partly due to new legislation making them easier to obtain, and, according to experts, partly because of the increased participation of women in the workforce. Some experts also note the role of online relationships; according to several analyses, between 20 and 30 percent of all divorces in the U.S. now involve Facebook.

  The age at which the average woman gets married has also increased significantly, and a larger percentage of men and women choose never to marry at all. Fifty years ago, two thirds of all Americans in their twenties were married. Now, only one quarter are. Many more couples are living together—and having children—without getting married. Forty-one percent of children in the U.S. are now born to unmarried women. Fifty years ago, only 5 percent of U.S. children were born to unmarried mothers. Today, the comparable figure among mothers under thirty is 50 percent. Among African American mothers of all ages, the percentage is now 73 percent.

  In the overall rankings of countries on the basis of gender equity, the four highest are Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden; the lowest rank goes to Yemen. However, the political participation of women has lagged far behind most other indicators of gender equity. On a global basis, women make up less than 20 percent of elected parliaments, with the highest percentage (42 percent) in the Nordic countries and the lowest percentage (11.4 percent) in the Arab states. The United States is barely above the global average. Only two countries in the world have a female majority in their parliaments—one of the tiniest countries, Andorra, and one of the poorest, Rwanda, which in the wake of its 1994 tragedy enacted a constitutional requirement that a minimum of 30 percent of its parliament be women. The empowerment of women in corporate governance is lower still—with only 7 percent of corporate boards in the world made up of women.

  All four of the factors that bring about a reduction in population growth rates are connected to the expansion of participatory democracy and the right of women to vote. In those countries where women vote in high percentages, there is understandably more support for programs that reduce child mortality, educate girls, further empower women, and ensure high levels of access to fertility management.

  In most wealthy industrial countries, birth rates have fallen so swiftly that some now have declining populations. Russia, Germany, Italy, Austria, Poland, and several other countries in Eastern and Southern Europe now have fertility rates well below the replacement rate. Japan, South Korea, China, and several countries in Southeast Asia have also fallen below the replacement rate. The U.S. birthrate fell to an all-time low in 2011.

  In a few of these countries, the fertility rate has fallen so low that they are in danger of falling into what demographers call the fertility trap. That is, fewer women of childbearing age will themselves have fewer children, adding up to a sudden and sharp further decline in population. Japan’s population is projected to decline from 127 million today to 100 million by midcentury, and 64 million by 2100.

  Sweden and France both adopted policies some years ago to increase fertility and avoid the fertility trap; both countries spend roughly 4 percent of their national income on programs that support families and make it easier for working parents to have children if they wish: generous maternity and paternity leave, free preschool, affordable high-quality child care, excellent child and maternal health care, protections for women returning to their career paths after having children, and other benefits. Both countries are now once again nearly at their replacement rate of fertility.

  By contrast, Japan and Italy have failed to provide such services and have not yet been able to slow their fertility declines. As a result, they will soon face great difficulty in financing pensions because of a dramatic change in the ratio of their working-age population to their retired population. Social contracts that are based on financing mechanisms that tax work to pay for retirement are far more burdensome for working people when there are many fewer of working age compared to the number who are retired.

  LONGEVITY

  To a greater or lesser degree, this new demographic reality is a major cause of the budget crises in most developed countries in the world today. Similarly, since health care is used more intensively by older people, the same demographic changes have contributed to developed country budget crises for health care programs—most of all in the United States, because of the greater per capita expense of U.S. health care compared to any other nation.

  The relative size of the retiree population is also increasing because of a significant increase in average lifespans almost everywhere. Incredibly, more than half of the babies born in developed countries after the year 2000 are projected to live past the age of 100. In the United States, more than half of the babies born in 2007 will live to be more than 104.

  This revolution in human longevity is causing dramatic adjustments throughout the world. Although statistics are hard to come by, anthropologists believe that the average human lifespan for most of the last 200,000 years was probably less than thirty years; some believe much less. After the Agricultural Revolution and the building of cities, lifespans began climbing slowly upward, but not until the middle of the nineteenth century did the average lifespan reach forty. In the last 150 years, however, average lifespans worldwide have climbed to sixty-nine—and in most industrial countries are now in the high seventies.

  Improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and health care—particularly the introduction of antibiotics, vaccines, and other modern medicines—have played the most important roles in increasing lifespans. But education levels, literacy, and the distribution of information about health care have also had major impacts. Access to information online about health and wellness has also begun to play an even more significant role. Globalization and urbanization have magnified these factors in some countries, leading to even more rapid increases in longevity. China is projected to double the percentage of its population represented by those aged sixty-five and older within the next quarter century.

  The larger ratio of older people in some countries represents only one illustration of how changes in societies can be driven not only by the absolute size of populations but also by changes in the distribution in different age groups. When a baby boom generation comes into the workforce, societies with an ample number of jobs to be filled can experience enormous productivity gains. Yet years later, when that same generation ages, they are sometimes less able to adapt quickly to new technology and new demands for flexibility in the workforce, as in the age of Earth Inc. If a subsequent decline in fertility leads to smaller successive generations entering the workforce to replace them, the same cohort that clamored for revolutionary change in their youth start clamoring for bigger pension checks and better health care in their old age.

  China enjoyed an economic boom for the last three decades, powered by a young workforce. Yet, within the next two years, China’s working age population will begin to decline, and by 2050 fully one third of Chinese will be sixty or older. Similarly, the percentage of the Indian population over sixty-five will double during the same thirty-seven years, though the percentage of the elderly will still be half that in China.

  Japan had a remarkable economic boom when its workforce was predominantly young, but its slowdown over the last two decades has coincided with the aging of its population. In 2012, the Japanese bought more adult diapers than baby diapers. By midcentury its median age, the world’s oldest, in 2012, at forty-three, will be fifty-six. Globally, the median is projected to increase from twenty-eight today to forty by midcentury.

  Whenever there is an unusually large generation of young people compared to the rest of a society, the so-called youth bulge can also contribute to disruptive and even revolutionary pressures if the society does not have an ade
quate number of job opportunities—particularly for males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. Demographic historians believe that the relatively large proportion of young men in France more than 200 years ago contributed to the pressures that resulted in the French Revolution. The same was true during the seventeenth-century English Civil War and the majority of the revolutions in developing countries during the twentieth century. The cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s in the United States coincided with the young adulthood of the post–World War II baby boom.

  In the 1990s, according to Population Action International, nations with more than 40 percent of its adults made up of those aged fifteen to twenty-nine experienced civil conflict at twice the rate of countries generally, and more than two thirds of civil conflicts since the 1970s have been in nations with youth bulges. Among the many factors causing the Arab Spring in 2011 was the disproportionate size of the young adult generation in most of the Arab countries. It is worth remembering, however, that it was a food vendor in Tunisia who set off the Arab Spring during a period of food price hikes around the world.

  One of the largest youth bulges in the world today is in Iran, and although the street demonstrations and the Green Revolution have been suppressed brutally, the pressures for societal change appear to be still building. Similarly, Saudi Arabia, where dissent and demonstrations are also suppressed, faces similar demographic pressures for change, because the percentage of its population made up of young men age fifteen to twenty-nine is exceptionally high, and the number of jobs available to them is exceptionally low.

  By most of these demographic measures, the United States has a more favorable outlook than many developed countries. Its median age is climbing, but will reach only 40 by midcentury. Its fertility rate is above the replacement rate, partly due to immigration and to the fertility of immigrant populations.

  MIGRATIONS

  In 2010, the United Nations reported that the world’s migrant population had reached almost 214 million people, driving the percentage of migrants in the population of developed countries to 10 percent, an increase from 7.2 percent twenty years earlier. In the last year for which statistics are available (2009), 740 million internal migrants moved from one region to another inside countries. Cities are the primary destination for these migrants—both international migrants and those who migrate within their own countries from one region to another, almost always from rural areas to cities.

  One new trend is that the number of international migrants moving from one developing country to another is now roughly equal to the number of migrants moving from a developing country to developed regions of the world. As the secretary-general of the United Nations put it, “In other words, those moving ‘South-to-South’ are about as numerous as those moving ‘South-to-North.’ ”

  Although migration has, of course, many beneficial effects—not least among them the enrichment of the talent pool in countries and regions to which they relocate—the number of international migrants has also been driving some dangerous trends in many countries. Xenophobia, with its associated discrimination and violence against migrants—particularly those with ethnicities, nationalities, cultures, and religions markedly different from the majority in the country they move to—has been most pronounced in regions stressed by high unemployment among natives and in countries where the percentage of international migrants has become seen as a threat to the majority’s culture, traditions, and future prosperity.

  In Athens, neo-Nazi vigilantes have been patrolling the streets and brutally attacking the growing number of Muslim migrants from several countries, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Algeria. In Moscow and some other Russian cities, neo-Nazis, skinheads, and other right-wing extremist groups are also brutalizing migrants—many of them from areas like Chechnya in the trans-Caucasus region, where there are significant Muslim populations.

  Migrants now make up 20 percent or more of the people in forty-one countries around the world; three quarters of them have less than one million people. There are now thirty-eight larger countries where cross-border migrants make up 10 percent of the population or more.

  India will soon complete construction of a 2,100-mile-long, 2.5-meter-high iron fence on its border with Bangladesh. As the nation most affected by the early impacts of climate change, Bangladesh has experienced a surge of internal migration from low-lying coastal areas and offshore islands in the Bay of Bengal, where four million people currently live. The overall population of Bangladesh is expected to increase from 150 million today to 242 million over the next few decades.

  Bangladesh has also been the destination for a large number of international migrants from Afghanistan since the U.S. invasion. The presence among these migrants of many jihadists and Taliban members has given rise to concerns by India about an upsurge in Islamic extremism on the Bangladesh side of the border. But the continuing economic stress in Bangladesh is the principal source of pressure for trans-border migration toward India and through India to other destinations.

  Even in the United States, where immigration has been a historic success story, the surge of legal and undocumented migrants in the early part of the twenty-first century created social stress. Twenty percent of all international migrants now live in the United States even though it has only 5 percent of the world’s population. During the twelve-month period that ended in July 2011, the number of “non-white” babies born outnumbered Caucasian babies for the first time. The concern over illegal immigration from Mexico and other countries during the same period is cited by domestic terrorism experts as a major factor causing the surge of hate groups.

  A RECENT STUDY by the Brookings Institution indicates that “minorities accounted for 92 percent of the nation’s population growth in the decade that ended in 2010.” The number of white children in the U.S. declined by 4.3 million as the number of Hispanic and Asian children increased by 5.5 million. Already, more than half of U.S. cities are minority majority, with the two largest groups represented by Hispanics at 26 percent and African Americans at 22 percent. Hispanics now represent the largest minority group in the United States.

  U.S. domestic terrorist groups actually peaked in the 1990s just prior to the bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City. The number declined sharply for more than twelve years until the inauguration of Barack Obama, which appeared to trigger a renewed upsurge in 2009–12 to levels far higher than the previous peak. The Southern Poverty Law Center links the increase to the changes in America’s demographic makeup: “This very real and very significant change is represented in the person of Barack Obama. We’ve of course seen the most remarkable growth in the radical right since 2008, precisely coinciding with Obama’s first three years as president.”

  Ironically, net immigration from Mexico fell to zero in 2012, though immigration from several other countries has continued. Flows of Asian immigrants to the U.S. overtook Hispanics in 2009. And according to the Brookings study, “Even if immigration stopped tomorrow, we will achieve a national minority majority child population by 2050 (by around 2023 if current immigration trends continue).”

  The relatively higher birth rate in the Palestinian territories, compared to the Jewish birth rate in Israel, is causing changes in the political analyses by both Palestinians and Israelis of how to evaluate potential options for resolving, or at least managing, the tensions in the region. The same differential birth rate has led to a sevenfold increase in the Arab minority population inside Israel’s borders since the modern state was founded, leading to oft-expressed concerns by some Israelis that demographic trends could one day force a choice between the Jewish nature of the state of Israel and the democratic principle of majority rule.

  There are also often negative consequences in countries where large numbers of migrants are leaving. Chief among them is the problem caused by a brain drain when highly trained professionals—such as doctors and nurses—leave their countries of origin, in part because their skills make it much e
asier for them to find lucrative employment and higher standards of living in developed countries. When middle-class families migrate, there is often diminished support in their countries of origin for continued investments in public goods like education and health care. At the same time, the increasing percentage of migrant and domestic minority populations in developed countries has sometimes appeared to weaken the social contract supporting the provision of public goods—particularly public education—when phenomena such as white flight to private schools results in less support for public school budgets.

  Nevertheless, many destination countries have adopted policies designed to attract higher-skilled migrants. And the need for low-wage workers in many developed countries with smaller than optimal workforces has also led to a significant expansion of temporary worker programs—particularly in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Colleges and universities have also significantly increased their recruiting of migrant students from foreign countries.

  Many of the nations and regions from which migrants originate also experience some positive benefits, particularly in the form of remittances, especially from migrants leaving lower-middle-income countries. The remittances sent by migrants back to their families totaled $351 billion in 2011 and are projected to reach $441 billion in 2014.

  The amount of remittances sent back to their communities of origin by internal migrants is believed to be much larger. In China, internal migrants from rural areas send an average of $545 per year back home from the cities where they work. In Bangladesh, the Coalition for the Urban Poor calculates that migrants from rural areas to the capital city of Dhaka routinely send back home as much as 60 percent of their income. Indian migrants from the poor states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal routinely send money orders from Mumbai back to their home communities in amounts that make up the majority of money flowing into those three states.