The Population of the Earth
Numbers, Pensions and Cultural War

1. The Population of the Earth

2. The Ageing West: The Pensions Crises and Immigration

3. Cultural War Between Post-Explosion and Exploding Countries

4. Conclusions

1. The Population of the Earth

Optimum Population Trust statistics on the UK population, and United Nations reports on the massive increase of world population, inform us that:

“By 2031 [...] our population will have risen by 10 per cent to almost 66 million - nearly six million more - while calculations by the Optimum Population Trust suggest that at current rates there will be 10 million more Britons, equivalent to nearly one and a half Londons, by 2050. The UN, meanwhile, says global population will increase from 6.5 billion to 9.1 billion by mid-century.”

The Independent (2005)₂

From 1960 the total population of the Earth more than doubled, from 3024 million in 1960 to 6465 million in 2005₉. Every decade, the rate of increase has increased. The growth of the Human population on the Earth is still accelerating. Faster and faster growth, a population explosion, continues. In Global Trends, Michael J. Mazarr writes that "only after 2020 might annual additions to world population begin to decline" [Mazaar, p30-31]. The population will continue to increase for hundreds of years, but, there are signs that in the future the rate of increase will start slowing down.

The population explosion across the Earth is not uniform. Some countries are in the process of exploding, others are merely expanding. The main differences are between the developed world such as the industrialized West, and the developing third-world, such as the countries of Africa. Some countries will suffer more extreme problems as a result of overpopulation, whilst others will actually suffer economically as a result of the decrease in population growth. Europe in general is the first continental area to experience a general decline in numbers. See the forecast until the year 2050₉:

One country that will continue to experience strong growth is the USA, due to high rates of immigration, especially from the Americas, such as Mexico₁₀.

“On or around October 17th [2006], according to the Census Bureau's population clock, the number of people in the country will hit 300m, up from 200m in 1967. By as early as 2043, the bureau says, there will be 400m Americans. Such robust growth is unique among rich countries. As America adds 100m people over the next four decades, Japan and the EU are expected to lose almost 15m. [...]

American women today can expect to have an average of 2.1 children. That is the number needed to keep a population stable [...]. The fertility rate in the EU is 1.47 - well below replacement. By 2010, deaths there are expected to start outnumbering births, so from that point immigration will account for more than all its growth. [...] The fertility rate in Italy and Spain is 1.28, which, without immigration, would cause the number of Spaniards and Italians to halve in 42 years.

Falling birth rates are linked to prosperity. [...] The fertility rate in Niger and Mali, for example, is over seven children per woman. As countries grow richer and women get educated, they have fewer children and invest more in each one. [...]”

The Economist (2006)₇

There are too many human beings; the problems of overpopulation cannot be rectified. The only solution is for us to make fewer humans, and to redistribute existing ones more evenly. It is not just an issue of available resources; but of side-effects such as increasing levels of pollution due to there being more people. The scientist Chris Rapley says that 'if we invest in ways to reduce the birthrate - by improving contraception, education and healthcare - we will stop the world's population reaching its current estimated limit of between eight and 10 billion. That in turn will mean less carbon dioxide is being pumped into the atmosphere because there will be fewer people to drive cars and use electricity. The crucial point is that to achieve this goal you would only have to spend a fraction of the money that will be needed to bring about technological fixes, new nuclear power plants or renewable energy plants'₁₂.

2. The Ageing West: The Pensions Crises and Immigration

In many Western countries and countries such as Japan, a post-industrial slow in the population growth has occurred. Populations are ageing₁. This means that over coming decades, the numbers of old people will continue to rise whilst the numbers of the young continue to decline. It is the first time in Human history that the age distribution of nations has threatened to become long-term top-heavy. What this means is a change in the entire way that society is structured. The young will have an excess of elders, rather than the old having an excess of youth. Our ideas of work, retirement, socialisation and education will have to change.

“The EU is facing unprecedented demographic changes that will have a major impact on many areas of society such as social systems, consumption patterns, education, and job markets in the coming decades. People are living much longer and [...] fertility rates have dropped. [...] This demographic ageing means that the proportion of older people is rising in contrast to the share of those of working age (15 to 64). These demographic trends have serious economic and social consequences in a number of areas, including healthcare and benefit systems.”

Eurostat (2007)₉

Economically, many companies and governments are feeling the increasing pressure of having larger numbers of pensioners. More and more people are drawing pensions, and fewer and fewer will be paying into pension schemes. Economists have long predicted that in modern countries, all pension schemes will collapse. It is not possible for one worker to pay for the pensions of three, or hardly even two, retired elders. Governments such as those in Britain₈ and Germany₁₁ have implemented a gradual increase of the age of retirement to try and curb the collapse of pension schemes and to try to dam the exodus of workers from employment to retirement.

“Firms big and small are threatened by a fundamental demographic shift that most have yet to adjust to. Britain's pensioners are proving a hardier bunch than expected. On August 1st the actuaries' trade body adopted a new set of mortality tables drawing on data collected between 1999 and 2002. It forecasts yet another increase in life expectancy. In 1999 actuaries assumed that a British man retiring at 60 would on average live to the ripe old age of 84. They then raised their estimate in 2002 to 87. Now they figure he will live about six months longer. What is good news for ageing folk is bad news for those who support them. Each increase in life expectancy of one year adds about £12 billion to the aggregate pension liabilities of FTSE 100 companies, says Peter Thompkins of Pricewaterhouse-Coopers, an accounting firm. [...]

Firms as a group are underestimating life expectancy. [...] Updating that estimate could well add more than £25 billion to the FTSE 100 deficit [...]. So it is not surprising that many companies are trying to reduce the risks of providing pensions by closing their final-salary schemes to new members (which three-quarters of FTSE 100 firms have already done) and, increasingly, to existing members.”

The Economist (2006)₃

In response to this, the UK government in 2006 produced a pensions bill designed to put off the pensions collapse:

“The state pension age will be increased to 68 and the link between earnings and pensions restored under a bill unveiled today. The pensions bill sets out plans for the state pension age to increase gradually to reach 68 by 2046. Ministers said the move is necessary to stave off a pensions crisis and secure the long-term financial stability of the pensions system, while ensuring fairness between generations.”

The Guardian (2007)₈

Unfortunately measures such as increasing the age of pension are only temporary, because as the population continues to age, the changes will always be lagging behind what is required. The Economist newspaper in 2007 recommends that mandatory retirement ages need to be completely scrapped: "the best way to ease the transition towards a smaller population would be to encourage people to work for longer, and remove the barriers that prevent them from doing so. [...] Mandatory retirement ages need to go. They're bad not just for society, which has to pay the pensions of perfectly capable people who have been put out to grass, but also for companies, which would do better to use performance, rather than age, as a criterion for employing people"₁₃.

Increase immigration is another method to reduce the crises. Several industries rely on immigrant workers, who pay into pensions systems, and we will need increasingly more immigrants in order to fuel the economy, as our population ages. My page on UK Immigration concludes:

“The UK depends, now, on immigrants to supply a workforce in multiple industries. For example in the Health Industry, "over the past five years, nearly half the new doctors and nurses employed by Britain's National Health Service qualified abroad"₅. This trend will continue: without increasing amounts of immigrants, the UK's industry (and then economy) would collapse. For now, new entrants into the European Union such as Poland offer healthy workforces to 'old' Europe. Europe's open borders allow the post-explosion countries to easily import workers. But, as the whole of Europe gradually enters the post-population-explosion era, more and more workers will have to come from Asia, South America and Africa. As yet, the increases are quite small and most immigrants come from within Europe, but in the future, Europe as a whole will be a hungry gobbler of young adults seeking work, from all over the developing world.”

"UK Immigration: Economics and Bigotry" by Vexen Crabtree (2007)

Such population flows will not, however, do more than dent the overall population growth of such donor countries.

3. Cultural War Between Post-Explosion and Exploding Countries

As the developed world becomes post-explosion, the developing world is still experiencing the most violent and destabilizing forces of an explosive growth in population. "The fastest expansion in world population during the last 45 years was reported in the developing world, in particular, Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia"₉. Developing countries constituted about a third of the world's population in 1960, but will account for more than half of all people by 2050. The result is an increasing polarity between rich and poor: The rich get older, whilst the poor get much poorer, crowded into population centres that cannot cope. Poverty is a leading cause of civil unrest; as is inequality. We are already at the stage where we can see the ways the populations of post-explosion countries will diverge from the under-developed world:

“Ninety-five percent of population growth between 1990 and 1995 occurred in developing countries, and that percentage will inch higher in coming decades. [...] This disparity in population growth in the developing world along side minimal, or even negative, growth in the developed world will [cause] intense new pressures for immigration and migration.”

"Global Trends 2005" by Michael J Mazarr, p31-32

“In East Asia and the Pacific, the [fertility rate] was 5.4 in 1970. Now it is 2.1. In South Asia, the fertility rate halved (from 6.0 to 3.1). In the world as a whole, fertility has fallen from 4.8 to 2.6 in a generation (25 years). [...] The most important exception to the rule of declining fertility is sub-Saharan Africa. All the countries with fertility rates over 5.0 are in Africa (with the one exception of Yemen).”

The Economist (2008)₁₄

"Planet of Slums"
by Mike Davis

“In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population of more than one million... by 2015 there will be at least 550. [...] Residents of slums, while only 6% of the city population of the developed countries, constitute a staggering 78.2% of urbanites in the least-developed countries.”

Mike Davis quoted in The Guardian₄

In terms of Human history we are entering uncharted territory. Never before have Human demographics looked like this. Simplistically, it could be said that the interaction of developed countries versus developing ones is falling in to one of three possible states:

• War: The developed world has to remain on a constant war footing in order to defend itself (unfortunately) against it's suffering, but violent, neighbours.

• Globalisation: Optimistic globalists like to think that technological development and free markets will facilitate the development of the entire world into a post-population-explosion era of peace and progress.

• Conflicts: Increasing civil uprising, mass instability and frequent economic collapses serve to control the populations of under-developed countries, but over time, occasional strokes of fortune will allow individual countries to emerge into the post-explosion world.

In present decades, the highly developed West have waged multiple wars against much more densely-populated countries across the world. These crushing wars show no sign of ending: Afghanistan and Iraq are merely the biggest examples so far, and countries such as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and North Korea, all hint that war will define the way in which the post-explosion countries deal with the rest of the world. But others think that merely these are conflicts that will sometimes lead to a genuine and long-term development and improvement. For these people, the rebellions and mini-wars of Africa are also signs that multiple small-scale conflicts will continue, but not be as severe as a permanent war between developed countries and overpopulated continents.

Some see that the wars between nominally-Christian countries and explicitly Muslim ones are principally wars of population-attrition. As their populations continue to increase at great rates, they will continue to threaten to rise in power. This threat (and actuality) results in the tensions that sometimes become wars. Perhaps though, once Islamic nations experience their overdue enlightenment eras, this will cease and the West and the Middle-East will begin to converge.

4. Conclusions

The fantastic population explosion that the Earth is experiencing is uneven. The developed world is gradually experiencing a reduction in growth, leading to an actual decline in population. The result is that even as the West grows old, much of the world becomes more and more overpopulated. As a result the increase in the amount of retired people, and the decrease in workers paying into pensions schemes, all pensions schemes are already starting to collapse. Also, most industries rely on young adult immigrants as the local workforces are becoming increasingly scarce. Our economy and future depends on pulling increasingly greater numbers of workers from countries that are not yet entering the post-explosion era.

Developed countries must maintain strong armies to protect themselves from the rumblings of unrest in the overpopulated countries, and to protect such unstable countries from each other, and we must also keep a continual watch over the developing nations in order to aid them past the population-explosion stages in their history. To think that there is no problem or to ignore it is to invite the demise of civilised Western society under a tide of economic collapses brought on by overpopulation and civil chaos. At the end of the day, if there is no solution to wars and overpopulation, may the most advanced countries survive!

Thankfully, there are signs that things can be encouraged to turn out ok. Although poorer countries are rising in populations at an increasing rate whilst developed ones are beginning to verge on shrinking, people are escaping from poverty at a hopeful rate.

“In the world as a whole, a stunning 135m people escaped dire poverty between 1999 and 2004. This is more than the population of Japan or Russia - and more people, more quickly than at any other time in history. [...] In 2007 UNICEF, the United Nations child-welfare body, said that for the first time in modern history fewer than 10m children were dying each year before the age of five [-] a fall of a quarter since 1990. [...] Perhaps the biggest change affecting people's lives has little to do, at least directly, with development policy or public spending. People in poor countries are now able to exert more control over their own fertility, and hence over the size of their families.”

The Economist (2008)₁₄

Contraceptives and sex education are two key tools in the eradication of grassroots poverty. Another is the way in which developing countries sometimes leapfrog decades of technological development. For example in Africa, the adoption of mobile phones means that Africa has not needed to build a telecoms infrastructure, and wireless technologies may mean it doesn't have to build one in the future, either. But gadgets derived from science will not result in an easy cure for massive overpopulation; it must always go hand in hand with sex education and contraceptives to control fertility rates. Unfortunately for Africa, growing Christian fundamentalism and Islamisation of the continent has meant that religious forces are now threatening the basics of sex education₁₅; both competing groups argue against many of the findings of modern science. It seems that the developing world is plagued by two of Humanities worst enemies: ignorance of sex education, and superstition. If these forces overwhelm the educators, then the cultural war I warned about above between the haves and have-nots of the world, is again on the agenda despite the fact that at the moment fertility controls are reducing poverty.