The Population BustSeptember/October 2019 219in Japan, whose population has already
crested, and in Russia, where the same
trends, plus high mortality rates for men,
have led to a decline in the population.
What is striking is that the population
bust is going global almost as quickly as
the population boom did in the twentieth
century. Fertility rates in China and India,
which together account for nearly 40
percent o the world’s people, are now at
or below replacement levels. So, too, are
fertility rates in other populous countries,
such as Brazil, Malaysia, Mexico, and
Thailand. Sub-Saharan Africa remains an
outlier in terms o demographics, as do
some countries in the Middle East and
South Asia, such as Pakistan, but in those
places, as well, it is only a matter o time
before they catch up, given that more
women are becoming educated, more
children are surviving their early years,
and more people are moving to cities.
Morland, who, unlike Bricker and
Ibbitson, is a demographer by training, is
skeptical that humanity is on the cusp
o a tectonic reversal in population
trends. He agrees that the trends have
changed, but he is less prone to the
blanket certainty o Bricker and Ibbitson.
This is not because he uses dierent data;
he simply recognizes that population
expectations have frequently been con-
founded in the past and that certainty
about future trends is unreasonable.
Morland rightly points out that even i
fertility rates fall dramatically in Africa,
there will be decades left o today’s youth
bulge there. Because he is more measured
in his assessment o the ambiguities and
uncertainties in the data, Morland tends
to be more circumspect in drawing
dramatic conclusions. He suggests, for
instance, that China’s population will peak
short o 1.5 billion in 2030 and thenIbbitson explain, “The is employing a
faulty model based on assumptions
that worked in the past but that may not
apply in the future.”
Population expectations aren’t merely
o academic interest; they are a key
element in how most societies and
analysts think about the future o war and
conict. More acutely, they drive fears
about climate change and environmental
stability—especially as an emerging
middle class numbering in the billions
demands electricity, food, and all the
other accoutrements o modern life and
therefore produces more emissions and
places greater strain on farms with
nutrient-depleted soil and evaporating
aquifers. Combined with warming-
induced droughts, storms, and shifting
weather patterns, these trends would
appear to line up for some truly bad
times ahead.
Except, argue Bricker and Ibbitson,
those numbers and all the doomsday
scenarios associated with them are likely
wrong. As they write, “We do not face the
challenge o a population bomb but a
population bust—a relentless, generation-
after-generation culling o the human
herd.” Already, the signs o the coming
bust are clear, at least according to the
data that Bricker and Ibbitson marshal.
Almost every country in Europe now has
a fertility rate below the 2.1 births per
woman that is needed to maintain a static
population. The notes that in some
European countries, the birthrate has
increased in the past decade. But that has
merely pushed the overall European
birthrate up from 1.5 to 1.6, which means
that the population o Europe will still
grow older in the coming decades and
contract as new births fail to compensate
for deaths. That trend is well under way23_Karabell_pp3_Blues.indd 219 7/22/19 5:55 PM