World population implosion?

Public Interest, Fall, 1997 by Nicholas Eberstadt

This dramatic worldwide aging would especially affect the female population. For the first time in the modern era, and possibly the first time in human experience, "women of reproductive ages" would no longer constitute the norm for humanity. In 1995, an estimated 51 percent of all women on earth were between the ages of 15 and 49. (These are designated as the childbearing years by the conventions of contemporary demography - imprecisely, but not unreasonably.) Although accurate global counts are obviously not available for earlier periods (or even today), demographic technique suggests that one-half or more of the women alive at any given time may have been within those same childbearing years. Under "low variant" assumptions, however, by the year 2050 over 55 percent of the world's women will be outside the childbearing years. In the "more developed regions," nearly two-thirds of all women would not be "of reproductive age."

Finally, consider those between the ages of 15 and 24 - the vigorous and exuberant adolescents and young adults who influence fashions and style, exemplify physical beauty, and happen to do most of the actual fighting in times of war. In the "low variant" version of the future, the size of this youthful group shrinks significantly in both relative and absolute terms. In the world as a whole, there would be 100 million fewer youths in 2050 than there were in 1995. While they had comprised 18 percent of the world's population in 1995, they would account for less than 12 percent by 2050. "More developed regions" would be especially without young people: Less than 9 percent of their population would be 15 to 24 years of age. In fact, barely one-half as many young people would be living in these countries as live there today.

A global nursing home?

It is perhaps difficult to picture exactly how population decline would affect the routines of daily life, or social dynamics, or economic patterns, or the operations of government. Yet a number of issues present themselves immediately - along with a number of still unanswerable questions.

For example, the UN "low variant" projections envision a growth in human numbers between 1995 and 2050 of just under 2 billion; 1.4 billion of this presumed increase is accounted for by the group 60 years of age and older. A significant fraction of the world's population would, in this vision, be septuagenarians, octogenarians, and nonagenarians; in results calculated for some of the "more developed" countries, in fact, persons between the ages of 75 and 85 would outnumber those between the ages of 0 and 10.

Such a gerontological drift raises basic questions about the health of the societies of this particular future. Would a depopulating planet be a planet of wheelchairs - of increasingly infirm senior citizens whose escalating demands for medical services and care seriously burden the rest of society? Or would the revolution in longevity be accompanied by a revolution in health that effectively extended the boundaries of middle age - and thereby the scope for active, vigorous, and productive existence?