How Population Change Will Transform Our World, by Sarah Harper
Review by Dave Gamrath
One-liner: In her book How Population Change Will Transform Our World, Oxford professor Sarah Harper assesses the complexities and challenges facing our planet throughout the 21st century as global population increases to more than 11 billion people.
Book Review:
In the past sixty years, global population has increased from 3 billion to 7.8 billion people, and per United Nations projections will reach 11.2 billion by 2100. With this growth, changes in demographics will result in extensive challenges for societies. In her book How Population Change Will Transform Our World, Oxford professor Sarah Harper outlines some of these challenges, as well as offering some policy solutions.
Last century, the “Green Revolution”, which was effectively the discovery of how to turn oil into food, significantly reduced hunger and allowed continued exponential population growth. However, in the developing world, hundreds of millions of people remain hungry today. These least developed countries are still experiencing rapid population growth, and with this growth, high levels of disease and mortality, poor health and education, poor governance, as well as a quickly growing low-skilled, young and dependent population. Unemployment has become the most significant economic issue facing leaders in developing countries. There is an extreme mismatch between skills required in the modern economy and the skills possessed by this growing young labor force. Unemployment skyrockets amongst those without college educations. As recent times have shown, desperate young men make great recruits for terrorist operations.
The most effective policies towards stabilizing population center on supporting women, including enhancing women’s rights, providing women with access to education, and providing women with economic opportunities. Also important are lowering infant mortality, reducing poverty, protecting the environment, providing family healthcare, and providing comprehensive family planning services. Simply put, when empowered, most women choose to have a smaller family.
These policies have been repeated throughout the developed world, with significant results. Today, roughly two-thirds of the world’s countries have fertility rates below replacement level, leading to a lower percentage of young people and a growing percentage of older people. At the same time, improvements in nutrition and living conditions, as well as advancements in health technologies, are extending life expectancies. Also, vaccines have greatly extended life. Thus, we are seeing a demographic shift in societies, away from mostly younger people, towards older societies. The fastest growing age group globally is those over 60.
Life expectancy has been increasing by two and a half years per decade for the past 150 years. Current life expectancy has risen to 104 years for babies born today in the US, and biological technologies may extend human life even longer. There are major implications from ever-increasing longevity. With an older population, chronic diseases have risen. We are seeing a meltdown of pension systems, as well as vast increases in healthcare costs. With advancing old age, we will see an increase in fragility and dependency. Harper asks if we will have longer, healthier lives, or just longer lives? Where will the advances take us? These are open questions.
Harper stresses the need for governments to acknowledge how these structural demographic transitions are impacting us, and for governments to promote policies that account for these changes as we transition from a predominantly younger to a predominantly older world. Older populations have a lower percent of workers. Historically, we have had a “population triangle”, with vast numbers of working younger people supporting a small number of older people on the top on the triangle. This population image has shifted from a triangle to a rectangle, reflecting more older people and fewer younger workers. Countries are scrambling to find policies that will resolve this dynamic. Some leaders express the need for more children, ignoring global limits to growth. Others support greater immigration to bring in more workers, but this often causes a backlash, even though immigrants typically provide great benefits to a society. Harper reports that immigrants significantly improve local economies, including encouraging new investment, improving efficiencies and increasing tax revenues.
The challenges across the world will be for governments to manage these demographic shifts, while sustaining and enhancing well-being across people’s lives. This must include reducing inequalities, and ensuring the equitable allocation of resources between generations. Harper stresses that these will be extensive challenges. She also stresses the need for developing countries, mainly in Africa, to develop structures that put their citizens to work. Given the extensive corruption in many if not most developing countries, this will be no small task.
At the end of her book, Harper very briefly discusses how population growth and demographic trends will be impacted by other dynamics, such as technological advances. Advances in robotics, cognitive computing and other digital technologies will significantly exacerbate our future unemployment problem. Automation is a direct threat to cheap labor. For humans to compete, workers will have to acquire skills that enable them to undertake the sophisticated tasks currently beyond computerization. In less-educated, developing world countries, providing these needed skills will be difficult.
I was disappointed that Harper failed to connect population growth with other environmental issues, such as climate change. Given the extensive scientific research that exists on how climate change will dramatically impact the planet, and thus also human life, an assessment of how climate change and population growth will collide seems highly relevant, and worth more than a casual mention. Other critical environmental issues, such as habitat loss, loss of arable land and potable water, pollution of our oceans, and species extinction, are directly impacted by continued human population growth. Human impact on all life on Earth is quite apparent. Sadly, Harper fails to address this connection, and for that, her study seems woefully incomplete.
Reviewer Opinion:
A slow, academic read. Although the book addresses the key issue of population growth, its omission of other key issues is frustrating.
Reviewer Rating of Book:
Thumb mostly down.