The global population isn't predicted to expand as much as once thought. Photo / Getty Images
Why would commentator Lyman Stone proclaim that we "now face the looming demographic calamity of global population collapse"?
The narrative about talent and population in New Zealand just keeps changing. Over recent decades we've seen waves of migrants, then waves of Kiwis leaving for Australia, and sometimes both at the same time. We've seen resentment directed at new New Zealanders from the UK, the Pacific Islands, and Asia. But we've also seen various initiatives to attract talent, and calls for a larger population.
Over the past year, the narrative has started to gyrate. In the depths of Covid-19 the headline was a fear of widespread unemployment, but outside of tourism and hospitality this hasn't happened – with exceptions such as Pasifika, as I discussed in an earlier article.
Then it became about the "brain gain" as we heard about ex-pats and other talented people looking to move to New Zealand's safe haven. There have been calls from employers to open the border for talent across professionals, trades and of course horticultural workers hired under the Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme.
With the Australian economy looking like it might boom, the talk has shifted to predictions of another exodus of Kiwis across the Tasman. More broadly, an international post-Covid boom is looking increasingly likely, intensifying the competition for talent.
New stories about populations
People have always moved around, but some migration patterns are new and unexpected. California just had its first-ever drop, losing 182,000 people in 2020 – nearly 0.5 per cent of its population. Covid deaths materially contributed to this, but other factors like constant bush fires, homelessness, and remote working have all contributed to what blogger MG Siegler describes as "the deceleration of the Bay Area flywheel".
A longer-running and more familiar story is about population declines in places like China and Germany. Have a closer look though and there are stories that might surprise you. Take Turkey for example, a country that provided a migrant workforce for Germany and other parts of Europe for decades.
Turkey's birth rate declined by 5.5 per cent in 2020 (Stratfor, 6 May), a severe drop that was probably because of parents delaying having children because of the pandemic. But this was just making a long-term trend worse – the fertility rate has been dropping since 2000 and shows no sign of changing despite various government attempts to reverse it.
Turkey's non-working population is on a path to exceed those in paid employment, meaning higher health care costs and less spending power for younger people. Sound familiar?
There are varying signals about what is happening to the Chinese population. A recent 10-year census will show it dropping below 1.4 billion, higher than 2010's 1.3 billion in but lower than 2019's 1.41 billion (Economist, 1 May; BBC, 5 May).
There is debate about the trend in China, but apparently the birth rate in 2019 was the lowest since 1961. Planners are assuming a fertility rate of 1.8, the World Bank is assuming 1.5, and a working paper released by China's central bank assumed no more than 1.5.
Lyman Stone has described to the Wall Street Journal how in China (and also Brazil), "astonishing numbers of women opt for permanent sterilisation well before the end of their fertile years".
As in Turkey, China's demographics will skew to the old, with perhaps fully a third of people in their 60s or older by 2050. Also like Turkey, there are attempts to incentivise parents to lift birth rates, but evidence from 50 countries trying the same thing shows it's difficult.
It's well-known that Japan's population is declining sharply, but South Korea's death rate also just passed its birth rate for the first time – ominous given they already have the world's lowest birth rate (BBC, 1 May). Recognising the challenge of lifting birth rates, some countries are more aggressively targeting immigrants: Canada has set a goal of 1.2 million new residents – 3 per cent growth – by 2023 (Economist, 24 April).
Let's take a step back and look at the global picture.
In the 1960s the narrative was all about Malthus and the coming catastrophe of over-population, starvation, and environmental degradation. The Jeremiahs missed a couple of things though, like the Green Revolution in India where new technology enabled a huge rise in food production.
Another thing they missed is explored in a 2019 book called Empty Planet that I read over summer. Social researcher Dr Darrell Bricker and journalist John Ibbitson pull together lots of signals into a provocative thesis that the world population is about to decline, and that prosperity will largely depend on how successful countries are in attracting migrants.
Bricker and Ibbitson are not tentative in their analysis of the data and social trends:
"The great defining event of the twenty-first century – one of the great defining events in human history – will occur in three decades, give or take, when the global population starts to decline. Once that decline begins, it will never end. We do not face the challenge of a population bomb but of a population bust — a relentless, generation-after-generation culling of the human herd. Nothing like this has ever happened before.
"If you find this news shocking, that's not surprising. The United Nations forecasts that our population will grow from seven billion to eleven billion in this century before levelling off after 2100. But an increasing number of demographers around the world believe the UN estimates are far too high. More likely, they say, the planet's population will peak at around nine billion sometime between 2040 and 2060, and then start to decline, perhaps prompting the UN to designate a symbolic death to mark the occasion. By the end of this century, we could be back to where we are right now, and steadily growing fewer."
This will be a change no less radical than the population explosion after the Industrial Revolution. There will be lots of benefits if we are wise enough to capture them, like eliminating famine and even hunger. Wages will rise as in feudal Europe after the Plague made labour scarce, public transport will be less crowded, and housing will be cheaper.
In New Zealand there is a long-running debate about whether low wages have hampered productivity growth – that firms find it easier to hire cheap labour now than to invest in plant for the future. The authors of Empty Planet argue that a declining global workforce will stimulate leaps in productivity as firms are forced to invest in plant for the future – and this will bring greater prosperity.
Max Kummerow, from the Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, has an optimistic take on the effects of a declining population if a country manages it well:
"… plenty of data show that fewer numbers offer our best chances for universal prosperity. An economy can actually get smaller with a falling population, even allowing individuals to enjoy higher incomes and quality of life. As population falls, land per capita increases, commodity prices decline, and damage to the planet decreases.
"The problems of an aging population can be solved by maintaining a steady savings [sic] and older people working longer and/or part-time. Need more innovative young people? Try sending everybody to college. Spend proportionately more on research and development. Increasing productivity increases production with fewer workers.
"Incomes are high and continue to rise in Germany and Japan where people are older and populations are declining. The global pattern is as follows: low-fertility countries are rich, while high-fertility countries are poor."
Of course, there are also plenty of risks, like bulging healthcare and superannuation costs, slower economic growth because of fewer consumers, as well as the population of lots of towns falling below sustainable levels, a problem we hear Japan is suffering.
The obvious question is: why will the world's population go into reverse?
There are lots of factors that can reduce human reproduction: contraception, urbanisation, women being employed, catastrophes like war, famine, and pandemics, and of course government interventions like China's abandoned one child policy. The single biggest factor though – and one that underpins choices to use contraception or enter the paid workforce – is the education of girls and women.
Bricker and Ibbitson cite Bangladesh as an example of this dynamic. Since the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 it's been branded as a place of out-of-control population growth, hunger, and a grim future. But now the country's population is growing at less than replacement rate. Yep, the population of Bangladesh is on the road to decline.
Some would reframe girls' and women's greater access to education as a function of urbanisation. Bricker and Ibbitson note that: "As a society urbanises, and women gain more power, the ties of kin, the power or organised religion, and the dominance of men declines." Of course, children are useful on a farm, but maybe a net cost in a city.
Evidence across time, cultures and locations is convincing. Bricker and Ibbitson also show that once Jeannie is out of the bottle, she won't go back – even a few years of primary education leads to fewer babies. Further, all around the world women are giving birth later in life, compounding the effect.
I asked EeMun Chen, a psychologist with a deep interest in demographics and diversity in Aotearoa, what's happening in our country and what the experts are predicting.
She pointed me to Stats NZ projections that Auckland may hit 2 million in the early 2030s, from about 1.7 million now (Stats NZ, 31 March). Auckland's population growth is fuelled by both migration and more births than deaths. On the other hand, she told me Stats NZ is predicting that regions other than Auckland, Waikato, Gisborne, Wellington and Canterbury will have more deaths than births by the late 2040s.
National and sub-national ethnic population projections haven't yet been recast using 2018 or 2020 population estimates, but projections using 2013 data indicate that the catch-all "Asian" category will almost double as a proportion of the New Zealand population, from 12 per cent in 2013 to 22 per cent by 2038. Over the same period, "Europeans" will decline from 75 per cent to 66 per cent.
Chen cautioned against generalising. No matter how much you slice and dice people by age, gender, ethnicity or region, populations and subpopulations based on those divisions will never move or behave in a single, cohesive way, and so it's difficult for the Government to influence population size, growth, distribution or composition. It's the individual differences between people – their personality, physical abilities, interests, values and self-perceptions – that ultimately influence behaviour. Any measures must take those individual dynamics into account and consider the possibility of unintended consequences.
EeMun Chen expects a tailing off of migration and along with it the recognition of the potential and talent we already have onshore. She expects New Zealand businesses to look more like their customers and consumers, and boardrooms to reflect the diverse views and experiences of our communities. Chen also expects that young people will be given more opportunities and that we'll see a thriving "silver economy" (services and products designed to meet the needs of the over-50s).
I was involved in the Population Conference held at Te Papa in 1997 when a range of issues were discussed, like whether there is an ideal number of people to aim for in New Zealand, what type of people should we seek to attract, and so on.
But whatever choices we make, we know they will be made in the context of some global megatrends in demographics, work practices and social behaviour. Remote working may become normalised, but there are plenty who are saying that people will crave being more closely connected, kanohi ki te kanohi.
Meanwhile, the real story will be about talent, whether that's investing fully in and retaining our own people including Māori and Pasifika, or global competition to attract talented new New Zealanders.
Fruit prices go bananas but vegetable costs plummet.