Declining population—a worry for the young

Contemporary Review, July, 2005 by George Wedd

ECONOMICS used to be called 'the dismal science'. That title should now be held by demography, the science of population. As you can imagine, this science consists of a mass of statistics accompanied by an even larger mass of speculation on the reasons for the changes the statistics show. I brushed against population statistics all my working life in the Civil Service and became familiar with concepts like the percentage of people 'economically active' (and why was it so low, and was there anything anyone could do about it?) and the way the 'baby boom' of the fifties and sixties was moving through pre-school into primary and then into secondary education (and the consequences this had for public investment and the pattern of land use). But I cannot recall anyone worrying much about 'fertility rates' twenty years ago. It is only in the last decade or so that this one key statistic has come to overshadow all the others--largely, I think, because by its nature it is slow to emerge. It is the average number of children women have during their fertile lives.

It is slow to appear because it means looking at the life-histories of women in their forties, fifties and sixties and noting how many children they have had. There is a built-in time-lag in doing this, but now we can see the trends of the last two decades, and we don't like what we see. To have a stable population in a society with Western standards of peace and public health, the average woman (who does not, of course, exist) must have an average of 2.25 children, the two to replace herself and her mate and the extra quarter to allow for early deaths from disease, traffic accidents and so forth. We are not getting anything like that.

We have been 'numbering the people' in the United Kingdom since the first census in 1801, and have been doing it every ten years since--except for 1941, when we had other things on our minds--and have the best statistical base for historical study there is (although the idea of early censuses was opposed by the Church, who recalled King David numbering the children of Israel and then having to apologise to the Lord for showing a lack of trust in Him). A hundred and sixty years ago, families of ten or twelve children and more were common. By 1900, six or seven was the norm. By 2000, the fertility rate was down to 1.7, which is well below replacement levels, and falling.

The United Kingdom is not the leader in this trend. In Italy and Spain, the figure is about 1.3 children per woman, and apparently still falling. Someone has calculated that the wealthy and sophisticated city of Bologna is the epicentre of this omission to have children: the average Bolognese wife has 0.8 children. (One can discount the nearly-nil birth-rate of Vatican City!) Even in Sweden, which adopted progressive and expensive policies to support families, they have noted that, after an early surge, the number of children entering primary school is now about half what it was a few years ago: Sweden's figure is 1.4, while Japan's is a fairly frightening 1.29, and the Japanese toy industry is retrenching. For comparison, in Bangladesh the figure as fallen from 6.6 to 3.4--which, since most of those children are now surviving infancy, is still sufficient to maintain that country's image as a teeming hive of humanity. Vietnam is worried by its soaring population, but it is the only large country which is. Israel has a figure of 1.6, and is concerned about the prospect of fewer soldiers for its armed forces twenty years hence--especially since birth-rates are high among the dispossessed Palestinians, who think precisely the opposite. Over the European Union as a whole, the figure is about 1.47. One can say that de Gaulle's vision of a France of 100 million people has been indefinitely postponed.

It is worth looking at some of the possible consequences of this. Generations are not, of course, neat cohorts of people; they overlap infinitely, but if one looks ahead, say, thirty-five years, there will be two-thirds of the young Italians and Spaniards there are now. If one looks forwards sixty or seventy years, there will be less than half. This does not mean that the total population will fall by that proportion: at the other end of life, people are staying alive much longer (and, of course, there is immigration). But, overall, there will be markedly fewer workers per pensioner. In every country, pensions are a charge on current production, so the proportion of current production taken away from the workers who produce it to support the old must increase. Will the workers tolerate this indefinitely? There is also the question of caring for the large numbers of the very old--a labour-intensive business, requiring relatively few skills but also qualities of character not in over-supply in the younger generation, especially if they have learnt to regard the old as a burden. It is interesting to note than in many small town and rural communities in Britain, the very first contact the locals have with immigrants is when they see a group of Filipino or Sri Lankan care-home assistants recruited for the local care home.