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مدح الانخفاض الديموغرافي

Jul 2, 2019 Adair Turner

لندن- تصدر الأمم المتحدة كل عامين آخر تقديراتها بشأن الاتجاهات السكانية المستقبلية. وتكشف احتمالاتها لعام 2019 عن فجوة صارخة. إذ في جميع أنحاء آسيا وأوروبا والأميركيتين، تحقق بالفعل الاستقرار السكاني، أو سيتحقق قريبًا، حيث تشير التوقعات المتوسطة إلى زيادة من 6.4 مليار اليوم إلى 6.5 مليار في عام 2100، أي بزيادة قدرها 2٪ فقط. وفي مقابل ذلك، تتوقع الأمم المتحدة أن يرتفع عدد سكان إفريقيا من 1.34 مليار إلى 4.28 مليار.

ولِما يزيد عن عقود من الزمن، تعتمد الاتجاهات السكانية، كثيرا، على توقعات معدلات الخصوبة في المستقبل، والتي ليست ثابتة بطبيعتها. ولكن في جميع الاقتصادات المتقدمة في العالم، استمر نمط الخصوبة الحالي لفترة طويلة لدرجة أنه من المرجح أن يظل سمة مستقرة للمجتمع البشري.

وفي جميع البلدان المتقدمة اقتصاديًا، انخفضت معدلات الخصوبة بسرعة بين أواخر القرن التاسع عشر وعشرينيات القرن العشرين، حيث أصبحت وسائل منع الحمل متاحة بشكل متزايد، وتحررت النساء من المجال المنزلي عن طريق التعليم، وارتفاع نسبة مشاركتها في القوى العاملة النظامية. ولكن بعد انخفاض معدلات الخصوبة إلى أقل من اثنين في العديد من البلدان بين الحربين العالميتين، ارتفعت مرة أخرى في فترة ما بعد الحرب مباشرة، حيث وصلت إلى حوالي 2.4 في شمال وغرب أوروبا، وما يزيد عن ثلاثة فقط في أمريكا الشمالية.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 16 in all 16 Comments on this article

Eduardo Oribe Jul 29, 2019

Interesting article.
I think the main issue is the timing.
Will there be enough time for the adaptation process of societies, organizations and governments to the lesser jobs - more people (at least more people looking for a job) challenge?
Migrations will continue and the second generation with less kids among immigrants seems also to be part of this adaptation process.
On the long run, as History teacher I am optimistic. On the short run, I am a bit nervous.
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Jane O'Sullivan Jul 18, 2019

A very welcome article, thank you Adair Turner.
I still hear from Africans that their economists say the more babies the better. It gives me the shivers.
China/East Asia was a one-off: you can only displace Western manufacturing once. Africa would have to displace Asian manufacturing, against the tide of automation.
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Henk Crop Jul 3, 2019

The author couples high population growth and automation. Automation would then make it impossible to create jobs and prosperity in Africa.

I doubt that. I know they grow roses in Kenya, which are distributed all over the world through logistic networks in the Netherlands. Tourists create jobs in Africa. Automation cost jobs, but also creates new jobs.
The key remains the high birth rate. Especially when it exceeds the 2,1 child per woman. They raise more children than they are able to support. They are the individual families but also the sovereign countries. For thousands of years Egypt was an exporter of grain, now they are an importer.
Also I believe that China, Korea, etc. have increased their prosperity by exports but also by a lower, manageable, birthrate.
These high population growth, on which no one has much influence, is a major threat to the world.
Every year the world population grows by 83 million. Of this growth 96 % takes place in developing regions.
The most discomforting aspect is that it does not get adequate attention:
- The UN hardly pays attention to it in its aid programs
- The developing countries think immigration to the West is beneficial for both
- The developed world are still living in the year 1945 and feel they must welcome and pamper anyone who makes it to its shores.
The sad thing of this all is that it does lead to a waste of resources and solves little.
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Jonathan Engel Jul 3, 2019

It seems to me that the author of this article has a vision of humans as being pretty much undifferentiated, replaceable one by another, and carries also the view that needs, or demand in economic parlance, is unaffected by the disturbances to the "pyramid" of ages.

Both propositions seem to me to be untrue, and the future Europe, where Germans (for example) will have been "aged out" of the labour force, leaving (on present performance) a hardly literate, and essentially unqualified mass of potential employees from Africa or the Middle East to fill their jobs bodes ill for high tech export performance. It would seem likely that German investors will also be "cashing out" of the industrial sectors as demographics start to bite, seeking more stable long term returns... Exacerbating difficulties in the absorption of the huge numbers of migrants which western developments of health care have made inevitable.
- Jane O'Sullivan Jul 18, 2019
  
  Jonathan, you seem to assume that the process of ageing continues inexorably until there are no working-age people left. This is untrue. The age structure settles out after the high-fertility cohorts who had families before the fertility transition die out. Europe can expect to still have a majority of people of "working age", in addition to older people choosing to work longer. There is no issue of labour shortage, and no need for immigrants (setting aside any moral obligation to accept them). Of course the specific mix of needs and "demands" will change with the age profile, but not as dramatically as it has changed with technology, so no reason to think we can't adapt.
  - Jonathan Engel Jul 18, 2019
    
    Jane, you affirm that the pyramid will work itself out after a while… and you may be right, except that I have read that no society in history has recovered from a sustained 1.3 fertility rate, which seems to be where some countries in Europe are now, and have been for a decade. Inter alia it seems that the Mayan civilisation died out from the same population collapse paradigm. Europeans seem to have lost their pride in their societies, and the millennial cultist vision of today's ecologists could become reality.
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Emanuel Müller Jul 3, 2019

During the roughly 300 thousand years of its existence, the homo sapiens was more than eighty percent of the time only or nearly only present on the African continent.
In other words the vast majority of homo sapiens usually lives in Africa.
If the off-shots of Africa that are the non-african homo sapiens are replacing themselves with consumer products producing artificial automata, the picture will be simply more of the same, allowing a new out of Africa, were the african scouts will not only find natural automata e.g. apple trees as in the past but also artificial automata.
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chappielovedaddy1 Jul 3, 2019

Whilst this article is interesting, I believe it needs to be linked as a future pressure on migration, which is already being exacerbated by rapid climate change caused severe weather patterns, such as drought and flooding which can lead to mass migration on a biblical scale.
- Henk Crop Jul 11, 2019
  
  There seems to be no significant difference in drought and flooding patterns. However the increasing population cause more casualties than in the past.
  - Jane O'Sullivan Jul 18, 2019
    
    Well said, Henk.
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Prashant Kotak Jul 3, 2019

Great article.
The standard line of most economists on PS on automation tends to be "ra-ra-tremendous-economic-gains-but-we-must-ensure-benefits-go-to-all-blah-blah", but in the words spat out by Luke Skywalker, 'this is not going to go the way you think!'. It seems om PS, Lords Turner and Skidelsky are amongst a very small number of economists who are willing to analyze the negative impacts of automation/ai arriving in developed nations and the consequences of that on poorer nations.
I cannot agree enough that the poor of Africa are likely facing catastrophe as automation arrives there, and things aren't going to be too comfortable in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Philippines etc, either. Where I disagree with this article is the (soft) implication that advanced economies including China will cope and manage the impact on employment of tech driven change just fine. The other thing I disagree on is the (unsaid) implication of the speed with which the take-up of automation will happen. Most economists think this is a slow burn that will span several decades. I think that timeline is completely delusional. My perspective is of a long term worker in tech and from what I can see, we have *literally under a decade* before we start to see the large scale truncation of human work, across dozens of industries, hundreds of professions, affecting hundreds of millions of people. Circa 2025 as the tipping point is my guess. And in the developed economies first, because that is where the fastest take-up of automation will be, because that is where you get the biggest bang for buck by removing human employees. And when the switch over to automation starts to happen, it will be breathtakingly rapid. The reason is brutally simple - any businesses that sees it's competitors automate are forced to do the same or face going bust. And the effect of large numbers of smart people forced to move out of white collar work like accountancy and law, and move into information technologies will be to simply super-accelerate further the drive to automate.

Automation is like pulling on a large heavy brick with a rubber-band. For a long time nothing seems to be happening, but the tension is ratcheting up. And just when all those economists expect the brick to start creeping towards you, it will instead zing through the air - and smash you in the face.
- Jane O'Sullivan Jul 18, 2019
  
  I love your metaphor! But we have always reinvented work as tasks were automated. The big sleeper to me is, where do the profits (returns on investment in automation) end up, compared with where the jobs are shed? We embraced globalisation of investment (to a foolish extent, in my view), thinking that it was the jobs that mattered. Without cycling most of the turnover back in local wages, foreign-owned companies become blood-sucking parasites.
  - Prashant Kotak Jul 23, 2019
    
    There are two points you make, which are linked. Let me debate them in turn:
    
    "...But we have always reinvented work as tasks were automated..."
    
    This might sound uber pessimistic, but I am no longer convinced this will happen this time. To support your stance, you should be able to point to employments that will accommodate hundreds of millions. And not with hypothetical types of work that will emerge in the future, but what we see right now. Because automation is not three decades away, or even three years away. It is here *now*. And it looks set to decimate in short order not just repetitive manufacturing work (sweatshops in the east etc), but most highly educated office work - accountants, actuaries etc. Such people can adapt and reinvent themselves, but what will the less skilled bulk of humanity do? In a decade of debating this question with all types of people including some high-end academics, I have found no one who can point to what work they will do. If you have ideas, I'm all ears.
    
    "...where do the profits ... end up, compared with where the jobs are shed?..."
    
    This is indeed the question that will determine how automation plays out. In the first instance, it is those who have developed/copied technologies, but then also have the 'Tech Heft' to sustain the advantage thereby gained - tech ecosystems with attendant concentrations of STEM expertise, stable legal frameworks to protect IP and regulate/police developments, tech infrastructure, the levels of tech startup investments that can be attracted, and so on. Currently, this is established hotspots in the free world, US (Silicon Valley, Seattle etc), Japan and S.Korea, though in Europe, all sorts of ominous signs of begining to lose out in this Darwinian battle, a symptom of which is: *no European tech giants*, despite tech concentration in the UK (London, Cambridge, etc) and elsewhere, and top-end intellectual firepower available across the continent. The other model is that of the (covertly) state-backed tech leviathans of the new kids on the block, too big to bully, in China in Beijing, Shenzhen, Changdu etc.
    
    In all cases, I see no reason/evidence whatsoever that these centers of tech expertise will share/give away their technologies for free to the rest of the world - they will instead exchange for assets or influence. Which means, from what I can see, the 2 to 4 billion dirt poor people across Asia and Africa will form a huge underclass who can do nothing that machines can't do better, and at the moment I don't see who will support their survival, unless the governments that emerge in those places on the back of chaos cut themselves off from the developed world to protect their populations from tech driven wipeout.
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Avraam Dectis Jul 2, 2019

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When fertility rates decline below about 2.1, the population is declining.

To declare that a population that is dying off is stable, is a remarkably odd proposition.

To be an eminent economist and yet have no idea how surplus population could be employed suggests an unworthy unexpectedly excessively constrained by past data world view.
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- P. Kamath Jul 2, 2019
  
  It is utter stupidity of anyone to talk how to handle the problem related to rise of population. Already the runaway population is a d****d curse . It would be better if fertility rate fell far below 1.9.
  Every body writes about the buzz word ‘Robotics’ . Robotics is beautiful but even if it were to replace some jobs, it will create new employment for “human robots’ which are us.
  
  Most economists however smart, write nonsensical articles exaggerating what robots will do but not what can NOT do. Example: say, two shingles in my friend’s roof is lifted. What would you do ? call a roofer to fix or a robot? Who will fix a cable chewed by a raccoon in the winter time?
  - Barry Rosenfeld Jul 7, 2019
    
    More people, especially if combined with higher incomes and purchasing power, will mean more GhG emissions and more air and water pollution. Nature will have its revenge.
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