Sarah Harper (1)

An interesting book. Does more or less what the title suggests ...that population change will transform the world. What I found especially interesting was the way that Sarah Harper focuses on the differences in a population composition that will drive both economic growth and population growth. She talks about the demographic dividend that some countries (like China) have benefited from: It's the combination of falling birth rates (or fertility), declining mortality rates ...which increases life expectancy and if the combination can be combined with improved education (and often/usually is) the you get an increase proportion in the productive (working stage of their lives. To benefit from the demographic dividend, countries also need to have other elements in place like good governance and appropriate infrastructure....and many countries (especially in Latin America) have missed out on these. I remember reading Malthus and thinking that he actually got his numbers fairly right. (It seems to me that most economists who decry Malthus's observations have just not read his stuff......he basically said unless there was killer diseases or widespread emigration then the UK was going to be overpopulated). And Paul and Anne Ehrlich were saying something similar in their book "the Population Explosion". As I recall they were suggesting that the world's population would reach saturation point in about 1986. (Maybe they were right and ever since we've been over-extracting and increasing our outputs of CO2 because of increasing population).
Anyway, Harper doesn't get into any debate about what sort of population the world can support. She merely makes a series of observations about declining fertility rates in nearly all countries except in Africa ...and even there the record is patchy. High birth rates tend to go hand in glove with: poverty, rural living rather than city living, low levels of education ....especially of women and poorer health outcomes ...meaning shorter life expectancy.
A couple of things had impact for me. First, Australian men at age 60 have the highest life expectancy in the world (24.08 years more...taking us to 84.08 years). Second, kids born this century have life expectancies of over 100 years (like 104 years or 107 years in the case of Japan). Third, the evidence is not especially strong but it looks like if you push out the life expectancy you still can expect around 3 years of disability at the end of your life...which is about the same years of disability as places with poor health systems. Fourth, education of women has a massive impact on birth rates ....by delaying marriage age, giving women more options and understanding about birth control etc.
There are some real basket cases in the world, and Niger is one of them with really low levels of education for women and high levels of poverty. Same with a number of the sub-Saharan African countries. I guess it's no surprise that armed gangs are kidnapping girls from schools in order to prevent them from getting an education.
There is also an interesting case study where Bangladesh introduced an educational program for birth control and it was taken up with enthusiasm ....but its counterpart country.....Pakistan did nothing about limiting population. In 1970 Bangladesh had 66 million people and Pakistan had 59 Million but by 2050 Bangladesh will have 202 million whilst Pakistan will have 309 million.
Harper is not really painting a doomsday scenario .....and she makes the point that even with a declining proportion of the population working it doesn't mean that the elderly face penury....they may be able to invest their savings etc .....or import workers as both the UK and Australia do.
Right near the end she touches on some of the other issues that will impact on demography, including, climate change, shortages of water, rising sea levels (flooding deltas and arable land) inequality .......technology (and discusses a rejuvenated US textiles industry which has largely been run by robots ...thus making the US able to compete with low wage cost countries). And artificial intelligence replacing a lot of the middle level skilled people. (The book was published in 2016.....before "ChatGPT"........so it will be interesting to see the impact that AI has on work and jobs).
I quite enjoyed the book ...though in places the editing left something to be desired (Same paragraph repeated twice on p138).......and the perennial problem of trying to show multiple lines on graphs in just black and white and shades of gray......frequently impossible to distinguish.
She concludes by saying that "while economic and political structures are important, economic growth has only occurred without the pre-requisite demographic change (the economic dividend) in exceptional circumstances". I give it four stars.… (meer)