I’m not exactly sure when or how I became interested in the science of demographics. However it happened, it seems I am interested.  (Sadly for you, that means I get to blather on about population trends). Like any good science geek, I love to see projections and predictions coming out of a study of trends, and that, of course, is what demographics are all about.

In November of 2021, I reviewed projections from the UN published in “Our World in Data”, and came up with the following notions:

 global population is projected to grow by another 3 billion people or so in the next 80 years….Our World in Data predicts that most of the population growth in the remainder of this century will occur in Africa. They suggest that by 2200, about 80% of the world population will be in Africa and Asia.…. My prescription is that we should establish a very open immigration policy and accept people peacefully now, under our own terms, before they simply break the doors down. 

In April of this year I returned to this subject a little bit while I was considering Canada’s productivity puzzle, and once again I came to the same conclusion – that immigration pressure is a powerful force and we should use it to our best advantage instead of blindly resisting immigration:

There is currently a world-wide and very short-sighted opposition to immigrants… Matching skills and credentials to employment needs, not skin colour, must drive Canada’s immigration quotas. We must continue to encourage immigration, and we need to get better at recognizing and using the credentials of highly skilled workers who come to these shores.

So, imagine my confusion when I saw a news story on CBC about a book which projects that the UN is wrong. Population is not going to reach 11 billion by the end of this century. The book was “Empty Planet – The Shock of Global Population Decline” by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson, published in 2019. It’s an extensively researched and documented work. The final 100 pages of the book document the 456 references used by the authors. For a scientific tome, it’s a surprisingly good read.

This is my book report (feels like I’m back in grade 10).

Despite its attention-grabbing title, the book doesn’t actually postulate the disappearance of the human race. But it does assert that the UN is wrong in their projections and that population will peak at around nine billion sometime between 2040 and 2060 and will start to decline. (That means the peak population will be about 2 billion short of the UN prediction, and about 40 years earlier.)  

The UN demographers have had a solid history of accurate population trend prediction. How could they be wrong? Bricker and Ibbitson suggest that they haven’t updated their prediction models to incorporate the acceleration of trends that have dramatic correlation to population decline. They also suggest, without being too accusatory about it, that it’s in the interests of the UN to project continuing population expansion. They wrote “If you talk to some demographers off the record, you will hear them wonder whether the UN is keeping its population projections high to ensure the continued need for UN based aid programs.”

         Population growth over the last two centuries has been driven by a number of items that affect the death rate. Well not really death rate – we all still get one death, and that’s been pretty much a constant for centuries. But life expectancy is an elastic band, and life expectancy contributes significantly to population growth. Life expectancy drivers include:

• Development of sewage control systems
• Development of water treatment systems
• The dramatic increases in food availability offered by the “Green Revolution” in agricultural production.
• Health care and disease treatment
• Vaccination (yes Bobby K Jr, vaccines prolong life!)

All of those drivers are putting upward pressure on population. But population increase is also driven by how many babies are being born, and there is a world-wide and rapid decrease in how many babies are being born. Demographers use the term “fertility rate” which captures, within any specific population, how many babies are born per adult female. A fertility rate of 2.1 is necessary to have a stable population – this is referred to as the “replacement rate” for fertility. Many, many countries in the developed world are already reproducing at rates well below the replacement rate and are seeing declining population. What Bricker and Ibbitson identify is that the drivers of fertility rate decline are also growing rapidly in under-developed countries. 

Urbanization, female education, breakdown of “kin” cultures, breakdown of religion’s influence, widely available birth control, financial independence for women, and increased sex education all correlate strongly with reduced fertility rate. Although the United Nations predicts that by 2060, two thirds of humanity will be living in towns and cities, they don’t appear to be revising their prediction models to include the effects of increasingly urban, aware, and independent women on fertility rates. 

         Bricker and Ibbitson write about how all of these influences – urbanization, education, religious decline etc, are growing rapidly in African countries, South America and South-east Asia and they project rapidly declining fertility rates in the parts of the world that the UN model assumes  as the drivers of the 11 billion person peak. Furthermore, they note that once fertility rates drop because of those drivers, they rarely increase. 

         Ok, so what does all of that lead to, and why do we care? 

         What we’re seeing already is declining population in many rich countries. Japan, Iceland, Switzerland, Spain are increasingly older populations. Spain’s fertility rate at 1.3 is far below replacement. They expect 5.6 million decrease in population by 2080, slightly more than a 10% drop.  Japan’s population may drop 25% over next 35 years.

         With each generation successively producing fewer babies, the problem will be for those young people to produce enough to keep supporting the retired population. Japan, the oldest population on Earth, has 69 “economically dependent” persons for every 100 workers. In Canada and the United States this “Age Dependency Ratio” is hovering around 50. In a population with a fertility rate below replacement level, each generation produces fewer people than the previous one did, and so the Age Dependancy Ratio will trend to increase with time. The good news is that there are likely to be lots of job opportunities for your grandchildren. The bad news is that they might be expected to work an 80 hour week and pay exorbitant taxes to support all the people who can no longer work.

One of the problems with that older population is that we’re no longer good consumers. Most of us already have much of what we need. We don’t buy a lot of furniture, or appliances, or even clothing. We’re not accumulating new things – most of us are looking at down-sizing, not getting more “stuff”. That’s not good for the economy – we need young people to produce stuff and we need young people to produce a demand for stuff. 

There are really only two ways to get more young people into your population mix. The first is to produce them directly. Many of the developed nations are now travelling down the road of trying to encourage their native populations to have more children. Japan, China, Russia, Hungary, Italy, Germany, France, Poland – the list goes on and on. 

Bricker and Ibbitson discussed in detail the Swedish program for population renewal, which includes 480 days of parental leave, with two months leave for each parent a requirement. There is a generous family allowance benefits with a per-child payment that actually increases with each child born. So you might get $100 per month for Sven, but you’ll get $300/month for Sven and Ingrid. (The numbers are made up.) Parents with children in strollers ride public transit for free. If you stay home with a sick child, you get a paid day off from most employers. But despite these enticements, Sweden’s fertility rate is below replacement at about 1.9. The authors conclude that natalist policies like these in all countries are showing very limited ability to move the needle.

The second way to get more young people is to import them through immigration. We’d like to encourage younger immigrants, for three reasons. First, they will add to our work force and be productive for years. Second, they will be busy building that house-full of stuff that they will sell in garage sales when they’re 90, so they will be good consumers. And third, if they’re young, they might reproduce and generate more babies. 

Remarkably, despite the recognition that population decline is a threat to their economies, many countries are still adamantly opposed to immigration. Japanese policy makes citizenship very difficult for those without Japanese ancestry. And, say the authors, “Japan is not alone in rarely granting citizenship to outsiders. China, Korea, Taiwan also accept virtually no immigrants or refugees.”  

 “Hungary does not need a single migrant for the economy to work” says Viktor Orban. The authors’ response to that statement is “Really? A nation of just under ten million, Hungary is losing more than thirty thousand people per year, and aging rapidly.” 90% of Hungary’s population is still composed of their two major ethnic groups, Hungarians and Maygars.

Bulgaria’s Prime Minister sings from the same song-sheet as Orban, saying, “Bulgaria doesn’t need uneducated immigrants. They have different culture, different religion, even different daily habits. Thanks God Bulgaria so far is one of the most well-defended countries from Europe’s immigrant influx”. Bulgarians, says the authors, “would rather disappear than live among strangers”. Bulgaria, by the way, has shrunk from almost nine million in 1989 to just over 7 million.

         The Bulgarian leader’s comments reflect one of the primary components of nativist anti-immigration sentiment, and that is the fear of “Other”. Hungarian, Bulgarian, Japanese, Chinese and Korean policies are, bluntly, primarily racist and xenophobic.  Many other nations are in the same boat.

         Another fear is that immigrants will cause job losses among the native population. A multi-national poll revealed that three quarters of respondents believed that immigrants would compete with them for available jobs. Those fears are ill-founded. “A 2016 study…concluded that legal immigrants to the United States created jobs through their entrepreneurial drive and rarely created competition for jobs between the immigrants and the native-born.”

         One of the triggers for this article was my seeing a guy being interviewed at an anti-immigrant rally in the UK. The guy wore no shirt and had his bulging, flabby torso painted with a Union Jack flag. “They’re taking all our jobs” he complained. “What qualifications do you have?” he was asked. There was a pause, a brief and awkward silence and then “None. They’re taking all our qualifications too”. I’m sorry, but I have no sympathy at all for a guy who drapes himself in a flag, claiming some sort of patriotic virtue, but has more time to whine and complain than he does to go and get some sort of friggin’ qualification. 

         If these authors are right, one of the impacts of declining fertility rate may be a competition for, and a slowdown in the availability of, immigrants. Countries like China, which in 2004 allowed 70,000 babies to be exported for adoption, are no longer so generous. “Today, virtually all Chinese babies available for adoption are special needs.” Russia banned all foreign adoptions in 2012. As jobs become available in home countries, reverse emigration becomes an issue.

This book, written in 2019 (before Trump 47) postulates that the United States is still well-positioned to dominate the competition for immigrants. However, they warn, “The great danger is that the United States will throw away the very tool that has been the secret to its greatness. Nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment plagues the republic today as it has so often in the past. Will the United States close its borders to illegal immigrants who are vital to the construction and service sectors? Will it deprive itself of the software engineer in Shanghai who has the Next Big Thing in his head? A United States walled off from the world will suffer an unhappy fate and it will deserve that fate.” These days, with the orange idiot in charge, The USA is throwing away a critical competitive advantage.

Canada is very well positioned to compete for immigrants and to fill the void left by America’s racist anti-immigrant feeling. “Canadians embrace refugees and immigrants, not because Canadians are particularly nice, but because they have learned it is in Canada’s own interest to welcome them… With Canada’s openness to new arrivals and its accommodative culture, the 21^st century beckons as the nation’s golden age.”

It’s a bit of a paradox actually. Declining population might be a good thing globally speaking – less demand for resources, for energy, less impact on greenhouse gas emissions.  However declining fertility and declining population are an economic issue because of what those trends do to local economies and to local demographic trends. And those local economy reasons bring me right back to where I was in November of 2021. This country needs immigrants and it is in our own best interests to welcome them, assist them, and trust that they will contribute to the resolution of Canada’s productivity puzzle.