Old Guys Walking
It’s 7:30 AM on a Tuesday morning in late September and Kim and I are heading north along the California coastline to visit with our friends from Sonoma with whom we are going up even further north to Mendocino for a couple of days. I woke up about an hour ago, which is my habit, and decided that based on the amount of travel we have today to get to Sonoma from here in Cambria that we don’t really need to leave until about 9 AM or else we will arrive inconveniently early. It’s also important when you’re on a trip like this to take some kind of advantage of the beautiful landscape of the mid-coastal California seashore, so I decided very uncharacteristically, to take a morning walk along the shore. It’s a beautiful morning here with the surf crashing in front of me, and the sea birds chattering as they sit on the rocks looking for bits and pieces of seafood or kelp to feed themselves. For the last week, our hilltop has been shrouded in a mist every morning and it’s nice to wake up to a clear morning, where the only mist is coming from the breaking waves. We’re staying at the Fireside Inn, which is our venue of choice when we come up this way because it’s the site that we chose five years ago to stage our celebration of Kim’s 60th birthday at Hearst Castle. It’s a pleasant enough inn, but it’s strongest suit is that it sits directly across from a long stretch of Moonstone Beach shoreline that has a very nice boardwalk. It all lets me spend the morning walking along the sage and brush covered hills along the beach.
I came out here this morning to get some fresh air and to give my stiff right leg and hip some exercise before I jam myself into the car for four hours of driving and to both make a work-related phone call in the calm of the morning as well as to dictate a story about what’s on my mind this morning. An opinion piece in the New York Times has yet again spurred my thought process and turned it to the issue of demographics in our changing world. If it’s not the ongoing fight for democracy that haunts me, it’s the changing demographics of the world and it’s impact on humanity, and what it all portends for the future of the species. The article was specifically about the acknowledgment that we are within several decades of seeing the population of mankind peak at approximately 10 billion souls. That will end the trend of the last two millennia that we’ve seen of human population trending ever higher at an accelerating pace. Demographers note that the average number of children per couple has recently reversed that trend and been dropping below 2.0. But they can also see an almost universally accepted trend that has the childbearing ratio falling to below 2.0 and causing human population to decline almost as rapidly as it rose over the last several centuries.
The chart that begins the article is actually quite eye-opening in the way it shows human population spiking dramatically upward to this point in time and then spiking downward again over the next 250 years. This is not the mad ravings of one demographer, but rather the consensus view of most professionals in the field. The basis for the prediction is the falling fertility rate across an array of nations, first the developed countries of the world, and now, even the emerging countries of the world. The few remaining places with birth rates exceeding 2.0 are in sub-Saharan Africa and even those are falling rather dramatically year-by-year. The particularly pernicious aspect of this is that demographers rarely if ever see falling fertility rates that go below 2.0 ever reversing, and rising above that level, thereby hardening the predictions of the population decline that they forecast.
Until COVID hit us four years ago, we were all used to seeing longevity rates around the world increasing due to improved healthcare and improved food security and nutrition. It will be interesting to see if that trend continues now that Cove it has abated. I suspect it will at least for a while since scientific discovery in medicine continues apace. One of the interesting thoughts from this article that jumped out at me was the idea that human innovation and advancement has accelerated so much in the last several hundred years because of the increase in population. What that means is simply that there have been no minds working on more problems and solving more problems than we are likely to see in a declining population scenario. As an economist, I have always recognized that the decreasing population growth would impact economic growth, but it never occurred to me that there would be a compounding effect on economic growth and prosperity for humankind of declining population due to declining innovation if that assumption is correct Thst really raises the stakes of what these demographics are telling us. I’ve come to think that with all of the political and societal turbulence in the world today, that my generation has been very fortunate, and perhaps more fortunate than the subsequent generations, because we may be enjoying peak prosperity for humankind on many levels. This new concept of curtailed innovation reinforces that notion, and as I sit here, looking at the pounding surf, I think that I best enjoy nature and its scenery as much as I can…while I can.
This morning, I was here on this lovely, mid-California-coastal walk. I’ve seen many other men my age out walking getting their morning exercise and enjoying the sea air. With all of these demographics in my head, and all of these questions about how we as a species are going to embrace this new reality in the coming decades and centuries, I am watching the seagulls fighting over a piece of kelp for their breakfast, and wonder why they fight when within inches of that tasty piece of kelp, there are thousands of other pieces of kelp, which lay waiting for these combating seagulls to snatch and enjoy and yet they choose to fight over one particular piece. I sit here on this beautiful morning, hoping that my grandchildren and their descendants will find a path that puts them in a better place than these silly seagulls which squabble over resources that really are in abundance if they would merely operate cooperatively rather than choose to follow their natural instinct of aggression towards each other.
Meanwhile, us old guys will keep on walking along the seashore wondering what will become of our world.