On Jan. 23, 2023, the most-read article on the BBC website featured a warning by the Japanese prime minister regarding his country’s birth rate. In an urgent address to the lawmakers of the National Diet, Fumio Kishida declared that Japan had reached the brink of social dysfunction. He warned that if the birth rate in this country of 125 million were not restored to a sustainable level today, Japan would cease to function as a society tomorrow.
The address was nothing new for the state of Japan, nor surprising as a global revelation; of all the countries of the world, the Japanese nation is most popularly associated with the concepts of low fertility and depopulation. Unfortunately, some of the public might believe that only Japan is affected by depopulation, just as people like to believe that punctuality is a special little attribute of Germany, or that cigars and vintage cars are affectionate quirks of Cuba. In fact, a brief foray into the digital vaults of the World Bank will reveal that Germany’s population has not grown in 50 years and Cuba’s population has been declining for almost as long as that of Japan. Neither country has had enough births to sustain itself in nearly a century.
Yet this subject of depopulation still attracts and elicits an absurd curiosity among the general population at this stage of the 21st century, when the population growth of the world has slowed to a lower annual pace than that of Japan itself in the period from 1975 to 1985. To all generations of the public, this must represent an amusingly novel source of alarmism—in 1990 a Millennial would have been born into a global birth rate of over three average births per woman; in 1970 a representative of Generation X would have been born to a global birth rate of five children per woman. Yet a baby born in 2022 would be part of a global birth rate teetering on the precipice of replacement level of 2.1 births per woman. The change in the demographic situation after 1970 extended like quiet menace, beyond the obvious line of sight, until its impending peril finally clasped the heart of government with a terrible urgency. Its clandestine conquest evaded the public spotlight, which still fixed its lamp upon antiquated, intransigent sources of authority.
Today, at 90 years old, Paul Ehrlich still overshadows the scene as a 21st century giant upon a throne of 20th-century demographic warnings. His 1960s warnings are ingrained in the popular repertoire of ecological emergencies like a knife to a rock, somewhere right between the London smog and the ozone hole; so large did his apocalyptic pronouncements loom in the public and academic spheres, in fact, that prior to the mass dissemination of climate change research in the 1990s, perhaps no other publicly-acquainted environmental peril exceeded it than the question of nuclear fallout.
The passage of time, and the total reversal of the situation in 1965 when a rising postwar birth rate originally led Mr. Ehrlich to profess an impending failure in the world’s carrying capacity, has had no effect on the venerable demographer himself. Today he still appears in interviews, most recently on CBS, as inflexible in his views as only a nonagenarian can be (although the towering Henry Kissinger is certainly an exception), insisting that only by a rejection of “growth” (left conveniently vague in order to implicate economic critiques) and an immediate imposition of population controls can an imminent planetary collapse be averted. The world instead observed no environmental collapse, but a collapse in the numbers of its children. In 1968 he was incorrect in theory; today he watches his incorrectness unfold in life.
The author of “The Population Bomb” has already lived to see the historic year at which the 20th century’s most populous country began to depopulate. One wonders that if Mr. Ehrlich should live to 100 years of age, he might observe the beginnings of population decline in parts of Latin America and the Caribbean; or, if he reaches 110 years young, he might see the end of population growth in North Africa and Southeast Asia, and the fall of the Sub-Saharan African birth rate to or below replacement level. Perhaps, if he lives to 140, he may witness the actual start of the world’s depopulation—and watch it continue, just as in Japan today, on and on unto the inevitable collapse he originally predicted. Prime Minister Kishida is predicting the same thing; will Mr. Ehrlich still believe then that population controls are the answer?
It is a fortunate relief, indicative of an increasingly concrete mainstream alignment, that his commentary was met this time with an unprecedented, overwhelming rejection. Public opinion may soon prove receptive to this consensus, just as it had followed the popularity of Ehrlichian orthodoxy in the 1960s. Yet the orthodoxy still retains some strength, even among those who concede the reality of population decline, while representing it as a necessary, stabilizing force for the environment to which humanity can conveniently adapt. If one of the world’s most successful countries cannot cope with population decline, and if the economic pains which plagued it since its population stagnated in the 1990s become impossible to endure for any longer, how will the rest of the world expect to fare? How will Italy, already as aged as Japan, or Thailand and Iran, whose birth rates have been below replacement level for decades, confront the crisis that awaits them?
The world cannot conceal or dismiss the truth any longer. The deficit in births transpires on a planetary scale and presents the most intractable structural danger of our century. The climate crisis can be resolved within a generation once the long-destined mass introduction of fusion, as an infinite, universalized source of renewable energy, becomes a market reality; prospects of great power competition and war, though equally existential, are by no means structurally preordained nor impossible to defend against. Yet the laws of demography are written into the physical mathematics of the population; the shrinkage of age cohorts, the numerical insufficiency of births relative to the population, guarantee the beginnings of global depopulation around the year 2070. Even Sub-Saharan Africa is likely to depopulate before 2100, as it rapidly converges with the remainder of the world in its demographic transition and already endures generational drops such as a reduction from six to four births per woman between the turn of the century and the present day. No developed country, as per the World Bank, has yet recovered its birth-rates from sub-replacement level rates, except Georgia, and no rich country has yet sustained multiple generations of sub-replacement level births, except Israel. No industrializing region, religion, nation and culture can resist the ubiquitous reality of the demographic transition.
There is every incentive for the world to understand this fact. The sooner the public is accustomed to the normalization and universalization of the Japanese experience, which most of eastern and southern Europe has shared since 1990, the earlier their adjustments can take effect. The purpose of this writing is not to contemplate the causes or solutions of the demographic crisis, of which not even many thousands of pages of text could conclusively examine, but to tear the world from its illusions at one modest step at a time. Even if it should begin at Brandeis University, it must continue until the world is aware and never forgets. Days before Fumio Kishida related the significance of only 800,000 Japanese births in the last year, compared to over two million per annum in the 1970s, China announced that its population had declined for the first time since the Great Leap Forward. Perhaps it had already been declining for years prior. Within months, possibly already, India will surpass China as the world’s most populous country; yet India too will begin to suffer depopulation within only a couple more generations. The world today endures on the waning fumes of its old momentum; upon the vanishment of the final embers, where will our 21st century world stand on the question of its greatest threat?
