The population bomb has imploded

No One Left. Why the World Needs More Children
Paul Morland
Forum
July 2024
264 pages
ISBN: 978-1800754102

---

The spectre of depopulation, this book argues, is haunting Europe and many other places and is reflected in labour shortages, ballooning government debt, growing welfare costs, pressure for rising taxes, and a lack of youth, creativity and innovation.

Making the case for children, author Paul Morland contends, has never been more urgent. While the number of people on the planet is still growing, the rate of growth has halved since the 1970s and is continuing to fall.

Morland, who is a British demographer, offers striking statistics to illustrate his arguments about population ageing. In Italy in 1950, there were about seventeen persons under ten for every one person over eighty. Today, the two groups are matched roughly one-to-one.

In the mid-1960s, Japan had more than nine people of working age to every one person of retirement age. Three decades from now, it will have barely one and a half people of working age for each retiree.

According to the author, no UK government has ever suggested, explicitly or implicitly, that the fertility rate should be higher, despite the fact that the UK has had sub-replacement fertility for half a century.

In the past, there was great anxiety about “over-population”, and this drew on the warnings of Thomas Malthus over 200 years ago. Expressions like “population bomb” and “population explosion” were used by modern Malthusians like Paul Ehrlich and concerns about population growth fuelled aggressive and sometimes coercive family planning programmes in developing countries. China developed its notorious “one-child” policy while India introduced forced sterilisation programmes under Indira Gandhi.

Perspectives have gradually changed over the years and there is now a greater focus on the risks of depopulation.

While some have acknowledged that there could be population ageing problems in the long term, Morland suggests that the “long term” has finally arrived and is reflected, for example, in estimates that Japan could face a worker shortfall of eleven million by 2040.

We can’t just “muddle through”, Morland maintains, as the crisis is deeper, wider and longer than anything in the past.

He explains today’s low fertility by reference to causes such as secularism, arguing that “there seems to be a strong connection between societies losing their faith and losing their fertility”. Other factors include a drop in fertility rates in certain ethnic groups, increasing education, leading women to pursue other interests outside the family, economics (as people get richer, they have fewer children), and worries about the impact of climate change on the future of the planet.

Morland discusses feminist concerns about “natalism” and argues in favour of “the rights women have gained over recent decades”. He adds that it is important to listen to what women actually say they want, which is often more children than they actually have today – the gap being accounted for by various barriers to having children, such as a lack of flexibility in career organisation and in the workplace. He adds that there is a need to celebrate parenthood and not just motherhood.

Abortion receives only brief attention in this book, a curious omission in an analysis of population ageing and depopulation. In Ireland alone, there were an estimated 10,000 abortions in 2023, that is, close to one fifth of the number of registered births, while similar or higher figures are reported in many other countries. Clearly, abortion involves the suppression of unique, unrepeatable unborn lives and is not only a demographic or quantitative issue.

Morland’s nuanced chapter on immigration argues that attracting immigrants to reverse the effects of population ageing is not a realistic, long-term solution. For a country like China, it is not even a short-term solution: “China’s size means it would require vast numbers of migrants, while its relative poverty, even today, ensures it is unlikely to be able to attract them.” He also mentions the problem of “biological imperialism” and the severe loss of human capital in the countries from which migrants come.

Morland devotes a chapter to environmental concerns and their possible impact on falling fertility. While endorsing efforts to reduce our carbon emissions, he expresses some scepticism about predictions of climate calamity and points to recent progress in areas such as food production and access to clean water. He also refers to The Ultimate Resource (1981 and 1996) by the American economist Julian Simon, which maintained that human inventiveness, often fuelled by population growth, is humanity’s “ultimate resource”.

The French demographer Gérard-Francois Dumont has argued recently against Malthusian pessimism and stressed the need for hope in the future. He pointed out that that the huge increase in the human population in the two centuries or so since the time of Malthus came not from disordered attitudes towards fertility but from gradual and sometimes unexpected advances, notably those in agricultural production (La Nef, June 2024).

Criticising Malthusian pessimism doesn’t mean ignoring environmental problems or the need to live simply. As Pope Francis put it in Laudato Si, “neglecting to monitor the harm done to nature and the environmental impact of our decisions is only the most striking sign of a disregard for the message contained in the structures of nature itself” (par. 117).

Morland’s book doesn’t offer any “silver bullet” solutions to population ageing and depopulation. There is a chapter on the possible contribution of governments in areas such as welfare payments and tax breaks and there are case studies on Hungary, Australia and China. The author examines the possible influence of “cultural icons” such as the Christian Churches or celebrity role models or even of big business as a purveyor of positive messages about human fertility. There is a role for all of us, he contends, in acknowledging that there is a population ageing problem.

This essay by an academic demographer sets out the issues clearly and is an important contribution to public debate on a critical issue. It is clearly aimed at a wide audience and forgoes academic tools like graphs and tables. However, as there are many statistics here, a sparing use of such tools would have been helpful in the presentation of trends over time.

The arguments covered here could be complemented and strengthened by a philosophical reflection on the importance of Christian hope. Caritas in Veritate (2009), Benedict XVI’s wide-ranging discussion of human development, maintained that development must include not just material growth but also spiritual growth and expressed concern about the “lack of hope” into which so many people fall (par. 76). He added: “The development of individuals and peoples …requires new eyes and a new heart, capable of rising above a materialistic vision of human events”
(par. 77).