The World by Numbers
“Here lies
Europe, overwhelmed by Muslim immigrants and emptied of native-born Europeans,”
goes the standard pundit line, but neither the immigrants nor the Europeans are
playing their assigned roles.
by Martin Walker
Something dramatic has happened to the world’s
birthrates. Defying predictions of demographic decline, northern Europeans have
started having more babies. Britain and France are now projecting steady
population growth through the middle of the century. In North America, the
trends are similar. In 2050, according to United Nations projections, it is
possible that nearly as many babies will be born in the United States as in
China. Indeed, the population of the world’s current demographic colossus will
be shrinking. And China is but one particularly sharp example of a widespread
fall in birthrates that is occurring across most of the developing world,
including much of Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The one glaring
exception to this trend is sub-Saharan Africa, which by the end of this century
may be home to one-third of the human race.
The human habit is simply to
project current trends into the future. Demographic realities are seldom kind
to the predictions that result. The decision to have a child depends on
innumerable personal considerations and larger, unaccountable societal factors
that are in constant flux. Yet even knowing this, demographers themselves are
often flummoxed. Projections of birthrates and population totals are often
embarrassingly at odds with eventual reality.
In 1998, the UN’s “best guess” for
2050 was that there would be 8.9 billion humans on the planet. Two years later,
the figure was revised to 9.3 billion—in effect, adding two Brazils to the
world. The number subsequently fell and rose again. Modest changes in
birthrates can have bigger consequences over a couple of generations: The
recent rise in U.S. and European birthrates is among the developments factored
into the UN’s latest “middle” projection that world population in 2050 will be
just over 9.1 billion.
In a society in which an average
woman bears 2.1 children in her lifetime—what’s called “replacement-level”
fertility—the population remains stable. When demographers make tiny
adjustments to estimates of future fertility rates, population projections can
fluctuate wildly. Plausible scenarios for the next 40 years show world
population shrinking to eight billion or growing to 10.5 billion. A recent UN
projection rather daringly assumes a decline of the global fertility rate to
2.02 by 2050, and eventually to 1.85, with total world population starting to
decrease by the end of this century.
Despite their many uncertainties,
demographic projections have become an essential tool. Governments,
international agencies, and private corporations depend on them in planning
strategy and making long-term investments. They seek to estimate such things as
the number of pensioners, the cost of health care, and the size of the labor
force many years into the future. But the detailed statistical work of
demographers tends to seep out to the general public in crude form, and
sensationalist headlines soon become common wisdom.
Because of this bastardization of
knowledge, three deeply misleading assumptions about demographic trends have
become lodged in the public mind. The first is that mass migration into Europe,
legal and illegal, combined with an eroding native population base, is
transforming the ethnic, cultural, and religious identity of the continent. The
second assumption, which is related to the first, is that Europe’s native
population is in steady and serious decline from a falling birthrate, and that
the aging population will place intolerable demands on governments to maintain
public pension and health systems. The third is that population growth in the
developing world will continue at a high rate. Allowing for the uncertainty of
all population projections, the most recent data indicate that all of these
assumptions are highly questionable and that they are not a reliable basis for
serious policy decisions.
In 2007, The Times of London reported that in the
previous year Muhammad had edged out Thomas as the second most popular name for
newborn boys in Britain, trailing only Jack. This development had been masked
in the official statistics because the name’s many variants—such as Mohammed,
Mahmoud, and Muhamed—had all been counted separately. The Times compiled all the variants and
established that 5,991 Muhammads of one spelling or another were born in 2006,
trailing 6,928 Jacks, but ahead of 5,921 Thomases, 5,808 Joshuas, and 5,208
Olivers. The Times went on to predict that Muhammad would
soon take the top spot.
On the face of it, this seemed to
bear out the thesis—something of a rallying cry among anti-immigration
activists—that high birthrates among immigrant Muslims presage a fundamental
shift in British demography. Similar developments in other European countries,
where birthrates among native-born women have long fallen below replacement
level, have provoked considerable anxiety about the future of Europe’s traditionally
Christian culture. Princeton professor emeritus Bernard Lewis, a leading
authority on Islamic history, suggested in 2004 that the combination of low
European birthrates and increasing Muslim immigration means that by this
century’s end, Europe will be “part of the Arabic west, of the Maghreb.” If
non-Muslims then flee Europe, as Middle East specialist Daniel Pipes predicted
in The New York Sun, “grand cathedrals will appear as
vestiges of a prior civilization—at least until a Saudi-style regime transforms
them into mosques or a Taliban-like regime blows them up.”
The reality, however, looks rather
different from such dire scenarios. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that
while Muhammad topped Thomas in 2006, it was something of a Pyrrhic victory:
Fewer than two percent of Britain’s male babies bore the prophet’s name. One
fact that gets lost among distractions such as the Timesstory is that the
birthrates of Muslim women in Europe—and around the world—have been falling
significantly for some time. Data on birthrates among different religious
groups in Europe are scarce, but they point in a clear direction. Between 1990
and 2005, for example, the fertility rate in the Netherlands for Moroccan-born
women fell from 4.9 to 2.9, and for Turkish-born women from 3.2 to 1.9. In
1970, Turkish-born women in Germany had on average two children more than
German-born women. By 1996, the difference had fallen to one child, and it has
now dropped to half that number.
These sharp reductions in
fertility among Muslim immigrants reflect important cultural shifts, which
include universal female education, rising living standards, the inculcation of
local mores, and widespread availability of contraception. Broadly speaking,
birthrates among immigrants tend to rise or fall to the local statistical norm
within two generations.
The decline of Muslim birthrates
is a global phenomenon. Most analysts have focused on the remarkably high
proportion of people under age 25 in the Arab countries, which has inspired
some crude forecasts about what this implies for the future. Yet recent UN data
suggest that Arab birthrates are falling fast, and that the number of births
among women under the age of 20 is dropping even more sharply. Only two Arab
countries still have high fertility rates: Yemen and the Palestinian
territories.
In some Muslim countries—Tunisia,
the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Lebanon—fertility rates have
already fallen to near-European levels. Algeria and Morocco, each with a
fertility rate of 2.4, are both dropping fast toward such levels. Turkey is
experiencing a similar trend.
Revisions made in the 2008 version
of the UN’s World Population
Prospects Report make it
clear that this decline is not simply a Middle Eastern phenomenon. The report
suggests that in Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim
population, the fertility rate for the years 2010–15 will drop to 2.02, a shade
below replacement level. The same UN assessment sees declines in Bangladesh (to
2.2) and Malaysia (2.35) in the same period. By 2050, even Pakistan is expected
to reach a replacement-level fertility rate.
Iran is experiencing what may be
one of the most dramatic demographic shifts in human history. Thirty years ago,
after the shah had been driven into exile and the Islamic Republic was being
established, the fertility rate was 6.5. By the turn of the century, it had
dropped to 2.2. Today, at 1.7, it has collapsed to European levels. The
implications are profound for the politics and power games of the Middle East
and the Persian Gulf, putting into doubt Iran’s dreams of being the regional
superpower and altering the tense dynamics between the Sunni and Shiite wings
of Islam. Equally important are the implications for the economic future of
Iran, which by midcentury may have consumed all of its oil and will confront
the challenge of organizing a society with few people of working age and many
pensioners.
The falling fertility rates in
large segments of the Islamic world have been matched by another significant
shift: Across northern and western Europe, women have suddenly started having
more babies. Germany’s minister for the family, Ursula von der Leyen, announced
in February that the country had recorded its second straight year of increased
births. Sweden’s fertility rate jumped eight percent in 2004 and stayed put.
Both Britain and France now project that their populations will rise from the
current 60 million each to more than 75 million by midcentury. Germany, despite
its recent uptick in births, still seems likely to drop to 70 million or less
by 2050 and lose its status as Europe’s most populous country.
In Britain, the number of births
rose in 2007 for the sixth year in a row. Britain’s fertility rate has
increased from 1.6 to 1.9 in just six years, with a striking contribution from
women in their thirties and forties—just the kind of hard-to-predict behavioral
change that drives demographers wild. The fertility rate is at its highest
level since 1980. The National Health Service has started an emergency
recruitment drive to hire more midwives, tempting early retirees from the
profession back to work with a bonus of up to $6,000. In Scotland, where births
have been increasing by five percent a year, Glasgow’s Herald has reported “a mini baby boom.”
Immigrant mothers account for part
of the fertility increase throughout Europe, but only part. And, significantly,
many of the immigrants are arrivals from elsewhere in Europe, especially the
eastern European countries admitted to the European Union in recent years.
Children born to eastern European immigrants accounted for a third of
Scotland’s “mini baby boom,” for example.
In 2007, France’s national
statistical authority announced that the country had overtaken Ireland to boast
the highest birthrate in Europe. In France, the fertility rate has risen from
1.7 in 1993 to 2.1 in 2007, its highest level since before 1980, despite a
steady fall in birthrates among women not born in France. France’s National
Institute of Demographic Studies reports that the immigrant population is
responsible for only five percent of the rise in the birthrate.
A similar upturn is under way in
the United States, where the fertility rate has climbed to its highest level
since 1971, reaching 2.1 in 2006, according to the National Center for Health
Statistics. New projections by the Pew Research Center suggest that if current
trends continue, the population of the United States will rise from today’s
total of some 300 million to 438 million in 2050. Eighty-two percent of that
increase will be produced by new immigrants and their U.S.-born descendants.
By contrast, the downward
population trends for southern and eastern Europe show little sign of reversal.
Ukraine, for example, now has a population of 46 million; if maintained, its
low fertility rate will whittle its population down by nearly 50 percent by
mid-century. The Czech Republic, Italy, and Poland face declines almost as
drastic.
In Russia, the effects of
declining fertility are amplified by a phenomenon so extreme that it has given
rise to an ominous new term—hypermortality. As a result of the rampant spread
of maladies such as HIV/AIDS and alcoholism and the deterioration of the
Russian health care system, says a 2008 report by the UN Development Program,
“mortality in Russia is 3–5 times higher for men and twice as high for women”
than in other countries at a comparable stage of development. The report—which
echoes earlier findings by demographers such as the Woodrow Wilson Center’s
Murray Feshbach—predicts that within little more than a decade the working-age
population will be shrinking by up to one million people annually. Russia is
suffering a demographic decline on a scale that is normally associated with the
effects of a major war.
