GREY WINTER

monograph · The End of Childhood?

GREY WINTER

Pablo Losada
Civil Engineer. Occasional and vocational teacher. Numbers are my friends.

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– How did the results of the month go?

– We have met our budgeted targets, my General. 347 units completed vs. 340 planned. 8 could not be completed due to quality problems, the same number as in the plan.

– Excellent, excellent, complimented General Liu-Xo, in charge of the 237 Demographic Expansion Units in the Shanghai region. Any casualties in the production units?

– 37 scheduled due to physiological reasons and two unexpected deaths. But 47 new women have been added to the State Reproductive Service, so there should be no problem in meeting the births scheduled by the 19th Five-Year Plan of the People’s Republic, My General.

– Congratulations, Lieutenant. You know that after failing to achieve the desired population increase targets with the Female Labor Limitation Program in the 17th Five-Year Plan, His Excellency President Jing Xipong has placed his confidence in the SRE as the decisive tool that will enable us to resume the path of Economic Growth that we abandoned in 2030.

For many thousands of years, the human population grew slowly. Life expectancy ranged from 25 to 35 years, depending on the greater or lesser proliferation of epidemics and/or war conflicts, and approximately 1 out of every 2 human beings died before reaching puberty. The Neolithic Revolution, which allowed mankind to abandon nomadism and settle in stable communities where crafts and trade flourished, accelerated the rate of population growth. Jesus Christ was one of the estimated 200-250 million human beings living approximately 2000 years ago. Over the next 17 centuries the population tripled, although life expectancy remained at the same levels of less than 35 years, even in the most developed parts of Europe.

The development of vaccines and, above all, the popularization of the steam engine and the consumption of fossil fuels, which made it possible to move from a local, agricultural and artisanal society to an industrial and truly global civilization, led to extraordinary population growth. Infant mortality began to decrease, although still in the 1950s, 1 out of every 4 children died before the age of 15 (today only 1 out of every 25). Simultaneously, life expectancy began to grow, first slowly (it was still less than 35 years at the beginning of the 20th century), and very rapidly from the end of the Second World War (always earlier in the more developed countries, which are several decades “ahead” of the poorer countries). Only twice since 1945 has it declined appreciably: during the Great Leap Forward (Mao Tse Tung brought life expectancy in China down from 49 to 33 years during the 4 years of his first great madness) and recently due to the COVID crisis.

Thus, the global population grew from barely 600 million inhabitants in 1700 to almost 1 billion in 1800, to more than 3 billion during the 1960s, to finally reach the more than 8 billion individuals that are estimated to populate the Earth today.

From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution there were influential thinkers who, aware that natural resources and our production capacity could not be infinite, proclaimed that humanity was doomed to disaster. As early as 1798, Malthus predicted that, as population grew exponentially and, he said, food production could at best grow linearly, the world was inevitably facing an abyss of poverty, war and death over the next decades. Later, the economist William Jevons elaborated his famous paradox: the more efficient the use of a resource (he was referring to coal), the more it would be used to produce more and more things, which would eventually lead to the depletion of the resource. Neither of them were right in their crystal ball “logical” predictions. Both made the same mistake: underestimating human ingenuity and the development of new technologies. Today there are 8 times more people than when Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population, much better fed than then (food production has grown much faster than the number of inhabitants of the Earth), and there is coal left for more than 100 years of current consumption (which is more than 80 times higher than what was consumed on the planet when Jevons published “The Coal Question”).

Fortunately for the many billions of people who have lived much longer and better lives since the 18th century than then, statistically speaking, the world’s political and business leaders did not pay much attention to the apocalyptic prophecies of these great theorists, and Humanity continued on its accelerated path of Economic Growth and improved levels of well-being.

Throughout the second half of the 19th and 20th centuries, the rate of population growth continued to accelerate at a dizzying pace until the mid-1960s. In 1968, the American entomologist Paul Ehrlich achieved great success with the publication of “The Demographic Bomb”, where he predicted that population growth would lead to massive famines during the 1970s and 1980s, even in the West (of course, the opposite happened). In the same year, a group of scientists, politicians and businessmen concerned about overpopulation met in Rome to create the Club of Rome, which in 1970 was legally incorporated in Switzerland. In 1972, they published “The Limits to Growth”, in which they again stressed Malthusian ideas and proposed a halt to economic and population growth. Once again, fortunately, they were not paid much attention, neither politically nor economically, although they did receive a lot of media and academic attention. Thanks to this, today there are almost three times as many people on Earth, and they live longer, higher quality lives with a higher level of wealth than then (although the Club of Rome continues to publish updates of its best seller warning that now it is true and that the end of the world is coming due to the abuse of its resources).

On second thought, however, perhaps they were heeded. Since the 1990s, large supranational organizations, such as the UN and especially the European Union, have focused on the fight against Climate Change. And they have done so by making the exploitation and consumption of fossil resources (energetically very dense, easy to transport and, although volatile in price, cheap) more difficult and expensive through taxes, and by subsidizing the use of intermittent renewable sources, which is significantly increasing the cost of Energy (and therefore of EVERYTHING, since every service or product has as one of its ingredients the consumption of Energy). And making Energy artificially expensive reduces economic growth, because if we use more economic resources to obtain the same in energy terms, we will not be able to use those resources for other productive investment activities. Not in vain the growth of GDP per capita in the EU during the last 20 years is rickety compared to any other period of similar duration in its history (in Spain it is practically non-existent).

In the “less free” world, China adopted in 1982 the One Child Policy, which was slightly softened from 2013 until its complete elimination in 2021. The result? China’s population has been declining for two years, and authors such as Darrell Bricker estimate that by the end of the century it could be less than half of what it is today. And it is not China that is the exception, but the norm. The birth rate has fallen below 2.1 (considered necessary to maintain the current population) in most of the world. It is still slightly above that globally, thanks to the fact that in Africa it is still above 4, albeit falling steeply.

Yes, the global population continues to grow. But, as was the case during the COVID pandemic, when the important thing in forecasting the epidemiological and hospital future was not so much the absolute value of the incidence as the rate of growth or decline of the incidence, in the evolution of the global population the sign of the second derivative has long since changed: the population is not growing faster but more slowly, and this is mainly due to increases in longevity in areas such as India or China, which have greatly improved their economic levels over the last 20-30 years. If nothing changes drastically, the global population will peak around mid-century, probably at or below 9.5 billion, and then start to decline. And it will be difficult for anything to change radically in the absence of coercive or dystopian policies, which I would find abhorrent as I once found one-child policies abhorrent. Fortunately or unfortunately, it seems to date an almost universal truth that human beings, when their level of well-being improves, voluntarily decide to have fewer children.

If this happens (and I particularly have no doubt that “the die is cast” at least for the next 30-40 years), while the media, politicians and supranational organizations worry about overpopulation and the possible exhaustion of resources, another problem of a much more worrying magnitude will begin to cast its ashen shadow over the future of Humanity: the Demographic Winter.
It will not only be the fact that the global population will decrease (which would already pose enormous challenges to maintaining human welfare), but that the pyramid will have changed dramatically in less than a century. So much will it have changed that it will resemble a cylinder rather than a pyramid and, if nothing changes (foreseeing the future is a risky exercise), in 100 years’ time it could resemble a bus shelter more than a pyramid.

If at the beginning of the 1970s half the world’s population was under 21 years of age, today the age that separates the younger half is already 30 years, and will be 35 or more by mid-century.

In 1970, barely 8% of the world’s population was over 60 years of age, and less than 1% was over 80. Today these figures have almost doubled, and will continue to grow over the next 20-30 years, barring a war, epidemiological or economic cataclysm that is neither predictable nor desirable.

Although general health conditions have improved, the health demands of an aging population will be ever greater, and increasing resources will have to be devoted to caring for them, with the cost of health services rising rapidly. Similarly, the share of global wealth generated each year that will have to be devoted to covering the economic needs of the retired population will continue to grow. For example, in Spain, which is a small-scale laboratory of global demographics decades from now, the cost of public pensions has risen from around 9% of GDP in 2008 to the current 14%, and is expected to exceed 16% in 20 years, according to AIReF. It is difficult to anticipate that these added costs for society can simply be extracted via taxes from an ever-decreasing productive population in relative terms without the latter rebelling in some way and producing a rupture of the existing “social contract”. To make matters worse, and as I mentioned before, the “children of the world”, seen from a global perspective, are already and will be even more those born in Africa, where the level of education is currently quite deficient and does not point to major foreseeable improvements over the next two decades. And human talent IS a scarce resource, which also deteriorates with age (the great ideas that advance humanity are usually born of young brains).

In short, the world of the middle of the century will be a much older world than the current one, with a stable or declining population, with a lower percentage of the population of productive age than at present and, seen from a global perspective, with fewer children and probably less well educated in statistical terms. And it will be a world in which the less productive fraction of society will require a greater proportion of the existing wealth, thus limiting the economic resources that can be used for economic growth activities to generate new wealth.

I will not be the one to point out that we are necessarily condemned to a “Grey Apocalypse” or to a dystopian future like the one in the scene at the beginning of this article in order to avoid a great crisis that could culminate in the extinction of human beings. Nor will I be the one to rewrite “Logan’s Run,” in a new version of the 1967 novel in which instead of the young being “forced to commit suicide” to avoid overpopulation as in that one, the old are “euthanized” to control the rising costs of an aging world. I have immense confidence in human ingenuity and technology empowered by individual and economic freedoms to solve the challenges we face. Who knows, perhaps robots or incipient Artificial Intelligence will so dramatically increase productivity over the next few years that the challenges described in this text will be met without problems.

I did want to state in black and white that perhaps the trees of a supposed overpopulation are not allowing us to see the forest of imminent population decline and aging, which seems to me to be a much more dangerous and difficult threat to combat than those that usually occupy the attention of politicians and the media.