The 8 Billion Person Paradox
National Geographic magazine continues to amaze me and feed me information that is relevant to the most important issues we face today. The April, 2023 issue just arrived on my doorstep with a cover graphic that looks like the earth transformed into some combination of a high-viz articulated world map and a funky coronavirus with spiky outcroppings. The large title emblazoned across the globe simply declared “8 BILLION” with a subtitle of The Population Paradox. In almost all my classes and all my political conversations, I almost always reference the fact that as of November, 2022 we live in an 8 billion person world and that the scale of the human species changes everything. I consider demographics to be one of the most compelling and impactful realities that we are faced with and that should drive our collective decision-making. The most frequent rejoinder I get from my conservative friends and counterparties is that the world would be better off with 4 billion people, the level that existed when I graduated from college. But wishful thinking doesn’t change reality and we are, as a world, where we are. I like to say that the historical mitigants, most notably war and pestilence, have, fortunately, subsided in their impact. Even a once in a century global pandemic has only claimed the lives of 6,887,000 people over its three year scourge and that represent 0.09% of the world population. War deaths per annum had been declining to about 50,000 per year in the world, but then the Ukraine War kicked that up. Nevertheless, the totals over the three years is still probably under 500,000 in total. All of that adds up to well below the 200,000,000 gain in world population over that timespan. In fact, war and pestilence barely scratched the surface of the natural population demographic growth, even though, as we will discuss, birth rates are dramatically falling.
I have argued repeatedly that ESG policy, and especially the social aspect thereof, should recognize that life as any of us know it is very much governed by these demographics and that we can no longer close our eyes or build our walls higher to keep the problem out. When describing the impending Global Pension Crisis in my 2013 book by that same name, I have stated quite clearly that you can’t build your walls high enough and that more enlightened solutions are needed than anything advocated by the conservative body politic. No one will own the notion of genocide or induced fertilization and euthanasia, but they also prefer not to even acknowledge that allowing people to starve or die on our metaphorical front lawns and steps is an acceptable outcome either.
This concern and view is not a fictional one. I have spent too many years living in and visiting emerging countries and countries in crises and in need of relief. There are few things as debilitating and dispiriting than being surrounded by poor people in desperate existential need. Whatever feeling of “better them than me” might exist in the most hardy of us is quickly overwhelmed by sadness and a feeling of helplessness that is depressing in the extreme. Very few things are worse for quality of life than being surrounded by such desperation. When I was responsible for our business in sub-Saharan Africa (1987-1990) I travelled to Lagos, Nigeria, a country discussed at length in the article I am about to review. Everywhere we went, from the airport to the roadsides of the infamous highway into the city, to the open-sewage streets of downtown and the suburban neighborhood of Victoria with its walled compounds surrounded by street people hoping for some cast-off food or item to give them another moment of hope, we were surrounded by the oppression of humanity at its most grave.
That is no way to live and I noted that I suddenly understood why whomever we assigned to Lagos was given, besides all the other attempted comforts of an expat lifestyle, no less than 8 R&R trips per year to any location they chose around the world. That translated into the sense that we did not expect anyone assigned there to be able to put up with more than about 6-7 weeks of this oppression without a return to “civilization”. Since that time, Nigeria has grown to surpass the U.S. in total population (it is now up to 375 million) despite having less than one tenth the land mass of the U.S. That density is most certainly evident in Lagos, which has quadrupled since I was there and is now 16 million. And the scary part of that is that Lagos is only the 14th largest city with Tokyo at the top of the list with a staggering 37 million. I note that the other dozen cities that exceed Lagos are all in Africa, Asia, the sub-continent or Latin America. In other words, those of us in the U.S. and Europe, where infrastructure is far better than in those places can not fully guess at those conditions with Paris at a mere 11 million and NYC at a scant 9 million. And here’s the thing, this is not really about a paucity of space on earth, but a paucity of economic opportunity and the resultant Maslowian needs for life. The urbanization of the world has highlighted this problem, and while it occurred during the Industrial Revolution to create opportunity, it is now creating a crowding-out problem that is epitomized by Tokyo subway workers pushing people into subway cars like pigs to the slaughter.
But now things are starting to change. The natural world must sense the stress we have inflicted upon it. Beyond the obvious climate change caused by man-prompted global warming, the species is also reflecting this situation with fertility rates declining and the actually innate primordial instinct to procreate being impacted both psychologically and physically. This is Orwellian and Huxleyesque all rolled into one story more than any one of these early twentieth Century writers could have completely foreseen. And all we can do is have faith that mankind will find a way out of the problem. And suddenly, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Trees do not grow to the sky for a reason. And population does not grow to the end of the earth. For the first time in recorded history, we are seeing a slowing in population growth. 8 billion may not be our limit, but it seems to be our warning track and the brakes seem to have gone on the juggernaut all by themselves. This is not uniform across the board, but the trends are evident in virtually all countries to some degree.
The demographic factors are numerous. In addition to fertility, there is longevity, working life, gender dispersion and how that relates to aging, and many other factors that weigh directly on economic prosperity. In terms of continents, both Americas, Europe and Australia are solidly in the zone of slowing population growth. Surprisingly, so is most of Asia though India has now eclipsed China as the most populous country. The parts of Asia that are still not there are Middle Asia and Indonesia. But the entirety of Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa is where the population growth problem has still not come under control. However, even those countries are trending that way and just behind the development curve by a few decades. They too will start seeing slowing population growth soon enough. And there is the rub that we must all contend with next. As population slows, so does economic growth, that drug that we have all come to rely upon for our prosperity. Sufficiency may be more achievable, but prosperity not so clearly so. That means that the moment of truth for humankind is upon us.
I used to say that the Global Pension Crisis is a species defining event, but I think I have to broaden that scope somewhat to acknowledge that pension dynamics are combining with fertility dynamics and social egalitarianism as the combined species defining event for human life on this planet. I grew up thinking population was the problem and I now see that population is simply the instrument of the problem. The real problem is the paradox of the human condition. We are bred to compete and excel individually and yet the only way we can prosper is collectively. Stay tuned. It’s gonna be a helluva a ride.