A demographic bomb? Or an opportunity?

There was this story in the New York Times a few days ago, detailing the ticking demographic bomb awaiting Italy:

Italy’s population is aging and shrinking at the fastest rate in the West, forcing the country to adapt to a booming population of elderly that puts it at the forefront of a global demographic trend that experts call the “silver tsunami.” But it faces a demographic double whammy, with a drastically sinking birthrate that is among the lowest in Europe. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has said Italy is “destined to disappear” unless it changes.

(Emphasis mine,)

Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it? Japan is facing the same pressures, where by the year 2100 its population is predicted to number just 75 million, down from a peak of 128 million in 2010. China is seeing a declining population as well, its one-child policy coming back to wreak havoc on an equally expanding elderly population.

Oh, yes, China. In the Times, there was another piece, written by Dr. Wang Feng, a specialist in Chinese demographics. He begins his piece thus:

The shoe has dropped. The big one. China, the most populous country on the planet for centuries, this month reported its first population decline in six decades, a trend that is almost certainly irreversible. By the end of the century, China may have only around half of the 1.41 billion people it has now, according to U.N. projections, and may already have been overtaken by India.

The news has been met with gloom and doom, often framed as the start of China’s inexorable decline and, more broadly, the harbinger of a demographic and economic time bomb that will strain the world’s capacity to support aging populations.

That's where the doomscrolling ends, however. Dr. Wang has a far rosier picture:

But the alarmist warnings are often simplistic and premature. The glass is at least half full. Shrinking populations are usually part of a natural, inevitable process, and rather than focus excessively on concerns like labor shortages and pension support, we need to look at the brighter spots for our world.

As he goes on to write, we're panicking now in the same way we panicked in the mid-20th century with visions of an exponential Malthusian nightmare. (Soylent Green, anyone?)

In the second half of the 20th century the world was panicking about unstoppable population growth. The number of people on the planet more than tripled in seven decades, from 2.5 billion in 1950 to around eight billion in 2022. Turns out, that was a transitory phase when mortality rates fell faster than fertility rates because of improved nutrition and public health and relative peace.

This panic is what led to China's one-child policy. This policy was implemented before the Chinese economic miracle, when the Communist leaders feared that if population growth wasn't checked, endemic famines would sweep across the nation. (Of course, China did have a famine in the 20th century, but that was due to Communist agricultural policy, not population pressures.) Now, we have the likes of Elon Musk saying that depopulation will destroy human civilization, much like it was said overpopulation would do the same.

Population declines are the result of economic growth, and specifically due to women receiving educations and entering the workforce. We've seen this in the West; once women have agency, family sizes decline, as people focus on other pursuits. The traditionalists, of course, see this as contravening religious writ: women aren't meant to be independent, but to be vessels for the next generation. This view is largely behind the anti-abortion and anti-contraception movement.

However, once countries start on this path of more opportunities for their female citizens it's impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. People speak blithely about our The Handmaid's Tale future. But the thing to remember is that the book is science fiction; like all great sci-fi, it's a warning, not a prophecy. (And the book relied on the plot point of there being widespread infertility among American women as the catalyst for the creation of Gilead. Again, a warning, not a prophecy, and not quite rooted in any possible reality.) 

This isn't to say that states like Italy and Japan aren't facing problems. They are. But they're not civilization-ending. The US is projected to keep growing in population. Why? Because of immigration. Insular nations like Japan have to decide if they want to open themselves to immigration they've resisted, or struggle unnecessarily due to their declining populations. What is a nonstarter is to incentivize fertility; as Dr. Wang writes, doing so risks consigning women again to being nothing but birth machines.

And there's the ecological view:

Fewer people on the planet, of course, may reduce humanity’s ecological footprint and competition for finite resources. There could even be greater peace as governments are forced to choose between spending on military equipment or on pensions.

The "silver tsunami" is a chance for we as a species to reorient our priorities. The one thing humans know how to do is to adapt. It's how we left the cradle of Africa and came to dominate the globe. What we can't do is be reactionary; we need to embrace this inevitability, and create a new civilization where health and welfare are paramount, and power and dominance are both unaffordable and unnecessary. 

There are many ways to a Star Trek future. This is one of the paths.