The population crash
Posted on February 1, 2010
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Europe’s population is, right now, peaking, after more than six centuries of continuous growth. With each generation reproducing only half its number, this looks like the start of a continent-wide collapse in numbers. Some predict wipeout by 2100.
Half a century ago, Europe was basking in a postwar baby boom, with 2.8 babies per woman in Britain, 2.9 in France, and 3.2 in the Netherlands. Then levels sank back. Demographers assumed that fertility would settle down at about the level required to maintain the population – slightly more than two babies per woman. The trouble is, nobody told Europe’s women.
In the real world, the swinging 60s saw a great deal of sex and not a lot of procreation. By the mid-80s, alarm bells were ringing. “Europe is entering a demographic winter,” declared demographer Gérard-François Dumont. Ron Lesthaeghe at the Free University of Brussels blamed “post-materialistic values, in which self-development becomes the primary aim”.
A resolution at the European parliament in 1984 warned that Europe’s share of the world’s population was set to halve between 1950 and 2000, and was likely to halve again as soon as 2025. This trend, it said, “will have a decisive effect on the significance of the role Europe will play in the world in future decades”.
The 20th century began with western Europe producing 10 million babies a year; by the end it couldn’t manage 6 million – 2 million fewer than it needs to maintain the population in the long term. That baby famine is now heading into a second generation; it is no longer a blip. Demographically, Europe is living on borrowed time. It already badly needs foreign hands to keep its societies and economies functioning, and should stop pretending otherwise.
Thirty years ago, 23 European countries had fertility above replacement levels; now none does, with only France, Iceland, Albania, Britain and Ireland anywhere near. And last year’s economic downturn threatens to depress fertility further. “There is a good bit of evidence that hard economic times cause people to delay having babies or not have one altogether,” says Carl Haub, from the Population Reference Bureau in the US.
In Germany, where fertility has been low for more than a generation, demographers report a large decline in the desired family size. “Today, 48% of German men under 40 agree that you can have a happy life without children. When their fathers were asked the same question at the same age, only 15% agreed,” says Europe’s top demographer, Wolfgang Lutz of the Vienna Institute of Demography. Thirty per cent of German women today say they don’t intend to have children at all.
Once a country has very low fertility for a generation, it begins to run out of young women able to gestate future generations. Germany is there already: it has only half as many children under 10 as adults in their 40s. Demographer Peter McDonald calculates that if Italy gets stuck with recent fertility levels, and fails to top up with foreign migrants, it will lose 86% of its population by the end of the century, falling to 8 million compared with today’s 56 million. Spain will lose 85%, Germany 83% and Greece 74%.
Jesse Ausubel, a futurologist at Rockefeller University in New York, fears “the twilight of the west” as Europe’s population thins and ages. “Civilisations have simply melted away because of poor reproductive rates of the dominant class . . . The question may now be whether, underneath the personal decision to procreate, lies a subliminal social mood influencing the process. The subliminal mood of Europe could now be for a blackout after 1,000 years on stage.”
Far-fetched? Maybe. But population historian David Reher told the journal Science in 2006 that, “As population and tax revenues decline in Europe, urban areas could well be filled with empty buildings and crumbling infrastructure . . . surrounded by large areas which look more like what we might see in some science-fiction movies.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/01/population-crash-fred-pearce
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3 Responses to “The population crash”
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But we want fewer people on the Planet, don’t we?
Yes; I was being open minded and reported a contrary viewpoint to that of OPT and most people. Apologies for the confusion.
Fred Pearce does tend to rather overstate the expected level of population reduction we can expect in Europe. Nevertheless, managing the economic consequences of population decline is something we need to deal with. In the short term population reduction can easily be kept to a manageable level by allowing immigration into Europe to reduce any local rate of decline. If we are successful in promoting global population reduction in the longer term then dealing with the consequences of reduction may become more problematic. It is something we need to think about, but it’s a much nicer problem to have than that caused by overpopulation.