I hope I didn't elaborate too much why I think it is that population matters in the world,
these are the kind of topics which are normally cited when when thinking about population,
its challenges, its problems, its opportunities and all problems. After all, pressure on resources, very obvious point.
When world population has reached now seven billion and is increasing by 70 or 80 million people per year, a diminishing number, of course.
But nonetheless, it's still quite a challenge, particularly when global population is almost certain to add another three billion to
that six billion with all kinds of questions as to the adequacy of of resources water,
particularly in global climate change, but also food and other aspects of resources.
These are on problems of security because this growth will not be equally distributed between different parts of the world.
Some parts of the world will grow, other parts of the world will shrink.
The balance of power, therefore, will correspondingly change for demographic reasons.
As we will see, urban growth is remarkable. We already have megacities of 20 million people.
These are going to grow even further in due course.
And one wonders just how far they can grow before certain aspects of the infrastructure start breaking down or their governance starts breaking down.
Other security problems arise of the kind which we've already seen here on television screens from time to time.
There are also broader problems, as you will discover over the next two terms.
There are some fundamental aspects of demography about which we are still ignorant.
We don't really know why people in educated societies go on to have babies.
We don't know how long we can continue to live longer and longer and longer and longer,
which is what we are doing in the developed world at the moment.
Seems to be life without end in a way, or at least survival in old age without end anyway.
What we think we know is this, we know, of course, as you will know, that all population projections are always wrong.
This may, of course, be a statement which you may think requires me to leave the stage at once and even go on to something more amusing.
The problem is that they're always wrong in detail. I don't think that matters as long as the approximate picture is about right.
And there are various ways which is usually right, as I hope I can go on to explain.
And I put a lot of money on these propositions that follow on the three billion increase in world population.
Almost inevitable. Almost all that increase is going to be in the developing world, not the rich countries, almost all of it in cities,
not in the countryside, where many countries, even poor ones, population growth in the urban and rural areas have ceased.
All birthrates will either stay low ish, round about two or not more than two, or get lower and lower populations.
Almost all populations are getting older. Those, I think, are some certainties for the future.
And what this means is, of course, that we have two problems at once in demography.
Customs, I'm sure, to reading in the papers, first of all, about rapid increase in poor countries,
about how that problem has been replaced by the problem of population ageing in
richer ones as a consequence of low birthrates and media attention being what it is.
The first problem is that were displaced by the second problem.
What the media have got to realise is you can you can actually have two problems at once.
And we do have two problems at once. We have rapid growth in the poorest parts of the world, particularly in tropical Africa.
We have rapid ageing and decline in richer ones Japan, Russia, Ukraine, most of Eastern Europe, Germany and elsewhere.
What we know we don't know are these things,
we don't know what the effects of global warming or global climate change are actually calling on, population are going to be.
The general expectation is that these these these effects will be deleterious, possibly highly deleterious,
if they make already hot and arid countries even more hot and even more added,
it may make part of them incapable of sustaining any kind of human agricultural output and therefore
provoke either a higher death rates or mass migration or some combination of difficulties of that sort.
On the other hand, of course, other parts of global climate change make areas wetter, as we've seen probably this summer in England.
That may be the future for the climate in this country.
Miserable jetstream whose displacement by Arctic warming you'll have heard all about in the papers.
As I mentioned, we don't know why people in your kind of cities, highly educated, knowing about family planning, ever bother to have any children,
given the enormous expense, given the 20 years of partial house arrest,
which it involves, and all the rest of the inconvenience to one's career and fun?
And also, we don't know whether the increase in lifespan, which we're experiencing one year after the other,
is going to end every year you live, you get a bonus of two or three months extra life.
And this has been going on for the last 20 or 30 years in countries like ours.
One of the reasons why I've been so cocky about about being certain about the level or the
approximate level of future population growth is what you might call the demographers friend,
which is population momentum. That is the same. What happens in population is to a very considerable extent, determined by the existing age structure.
And that, of course, is relatively unchangeable in the short run.
Two examples here on the left. You have got to Toivo.
Yes, on the left, you've got the population pyramid in Uganda, that's in 1991,
it's more than 20 years ago, it's still very much the same as much wider at all points.
Now, about almost half of the population of Uganda is aged under 15, if the ladies of Uganda who present how about six children,
each on average decide tonight to have not more than two babies each.
The population of Uganda would still more than double. That's because there are so many potential young mothers coming on stream for the next 20, 30,
40 years that they will generate more and more babies in proportion to the numbers of new mothers,
even though they're only having two each so slow that momentum is guaranteed underwriting very substantial population growth.
Unless the Ugandan government adopts the sort of Chinese one child or half child policy that would cut down the meant, nothing else is able to do it.
Initially, there is negative momentum here. We have Italy in 1998.
It's even worse now. As you can see, lower birth rates to produce smaller and smaller numbers of young people coming on stream.
That means with AIDS eventually decide to have two children each.
From now on, from tonight onwards, as opposed to their current output of roughly one point three, one point four,
then the population of Italians in Italy will still continue to decline for the next 20 or 30 years before stabilising at a lower level.
The Italian population itself may not do so because, of course, this large scale immigration into Italy, but of Italians,
the number has been shrinking for some time and will continue to shrink until such time as the ladies of Italy decided to have their two child quota,
which is the kind of replacement level in low mortality populations.
So there is there are some underpinning to my rather strong comments about what's likely to happen here, there and everywhere.
Nonetheless, uncertainty remains. These are the latest United Nations projections of world population.
Demographers always hedge their bets and produce a central projection,
which I think is the most likely outcome of future developments in population birthrates and population death rates and also say,
well, maybe it'll be higher, maybe a bit lower. And up here we have a medium variant so-called, which is this this blue line here.
That's what the United Nations thinks is going to happen. Here are the the ten billion people coming up from from about three billion back in 1950,
from today's seven billion in 2010 and twelve, and probably levelling out at about 10 billion.
But it might be higher or lower if birthrates decline more slowly than the UN supposes,
then this is their estimate for the likely upper level of population size.
If birth rates decline faster or if death rates go up unexpectedly, then this this one here is what they think may happen.
Note, incidentally, that this one includes population decline on a global level.
Most of my colleagues believe that global population will actually be declining because
of generally falling birth rates by about two thousand and sixty two thousand seventy,
hopefully, therefore, within your lifetimes. And that really is on the cards.
It's already happening in populations totalling 500 million people in in Russia, in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, in general, Japan, Germany and elsewhere.
So a population decline may be a very interesting global phenomenon. Not everywhere, of course, but overall on average.
And this is the average figure.
If things continue as they are, if there's no change, further change in birthrates or death rates.
This is what will happen, an exponentially increasing population.
Our analysis at constant rates going up to 25 billion by the end of the century and then in government as well.
In the longer term future, that is not going to happen for one reason or another.
Very briefly to note that while those are so-called deterministic projections, you have the structure, you choose a rate of change of the birth rate,
a rate of change of the death rate, and you make a projection in a way that we will do later on this term.
And you get a particular specific result if you introduce an element of uncertainty, a stochastic principle, into population projection.
So there's a chance element in the variation of birth and death rates.
Then you've got a so-called probabilistic projection becoming very fashionable in demographic circles and they give you an increasing,
widening range of possibilities as time goes on naturally.
The further you go into the future, the greater the level of uncertainty. And this fan shaped diagram illustrates this.
The the average median level of population here, according to my my colleague, Wolfgang Knutson's associates in Vienna, is here in the red line.
As you see, they think it will be declining from about two thousand and seventy onwards.
But these these coloured bands indicate increasing levels of uncertainty as to where the population will be.
And, of course, if you go into the future, this uncertainty gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
Not terribly useful for planners because it doesn't really tell you what the demographers think is going to happen.
But it does underline the uncertainty of population projection and the way in which
estimates expand in uncertainty as you look further and further into the future.
More interesting, perhaps, than looking at the global total look at the regions, the regions, of course,
have their own specific age structures and their own specific patterns of birth and death rates, as you might imagine,
low birth and death rates in the rich countries, high birth and death rates in the poorer ones, but always nowadays,
much higher birth rates and death rates or death rates have gone down everywhere, thanks to modern medicine and development.
And you see at the bottom here the lines of of Brazil, of the USA, of Japan, ingratiatingly decline.
India, the pale blue line.
Surpassing surpassing China in the not too distant future, but then projected probably to to start declining before the end of the century.
China itself in red, almost certain to start declining by about 2035, even if the one child family policy is reversed,
which is likely to be overtaken by India as the world's biggest population around this time.
But sub-Saharan Africa, which of course is not one country but many where birth rates remain very high, declining only slowly,
scheduled to become the world's biggest major region by far abided by by mid century with no clear pattern of destabilisation.
Even by the end of the century, he's assumed that population in tropical Africa will will eventually stabilise,
will have to for one reason or another. But it's not really in sight yet.
And as you can see, the demographic dynamics of the 21st century are going to be increasingly Africa going from quite small numbers back in 1950,
up to about three and a half billion.
But by the end of the century and the global total of about 10 billion, about a third of the world will be African by by the end of the century.
On these assumptions, they're not likely to be hugely wrong short of some cataclysmic.
These are just a list of some countries which are projected to grow fast and those operations decline substantially,
this PowerPoint, by the way, like all of them, will be available on weblog.
So there's no need for you to try and scramble desperately to write these numbers down.
If that's not not necessary.
Just just pick up the point that some countries are still growing very fast.
Most of the ones in the left hand block, as you see, are in tropical Africa, Mali, Niger,
especially projected to increase four times by the United Nations just by mid century,
despite the fact that, as you see in the papers quite often, Niger is in a terrible situation to the point of view of its sustainability.
And overall, those populations increasing about three times in their present size between now and the century,
on the other side, countries in population decline, mostly in Eastern Europe, also increasingly some in the Far East,
the the ultra developed countries of the far eastern industrial areas, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, either already in population decline as Japan is,
or about to tip into it, as Taiwan and South Korea are going to do with very severe levels of population ageing.
But these are very much more prosperous situation than some of the countries in Eastern Europe, like Romania and Bulgaria,
where the situation is very much worse and where death rates are considerably higher than the population.
Ageing in Korea and Japan is made even worse by the extraordinarily long life of people
in Japan arising out of their diet and social homogeneity and all the rest of it.
What's certain is the demographic future is not European in the past.
Europe, in the broad sense, Europe from Iceland to the Urals, has been about a fifth world population.
That was true until sometime towards the end of last century.
That's going to change. Europe's population is likely to end up as about seven percent, not 20 percent of world population.
It's difficult to see how this can come about without a very considerable alteration of global economic power,
military power, political influence and all the rest of it, some of which we are already beginning to see.
And what we what we got here in subsaharan Africa, again in blue China, again in red Europe, is is this Europe in the broad sense?
As is this great line here with the red squares on it, as you see more or less levelling out,
they're still growing somewhat, partly because of population momentum,
partly because of immigration from overseas and scheduled to decline slowly, by marked contrast to North America,
which continues to grow considerably, as we will see in due course, thanks to high birth and thanks immigration.
There's much talk, as those of you who read The Economist and other papers will have noticed,
about the way in which the vigorous populations of North America are overtaking in every sense demographic,
economic, political and everything else, the ageing populations of so-called old Europe.
And this is somewhat true. The USA medium variant projection here in green.
Shows the US already exceeding its first 300 million, which it did a few years ago,
heading for its first half billion by mid century and possibly going on to add another half billion by the end of the century,
part because its birth rate remains quite buoyant and about two children per woman.
And therefore, momentum keeps on driving the population up, partly because, of course,
it's tended to hoover up large parts of the population of Latin America and also Asia.
Immigration into the US is roughly about a million people per year,
although for Mexico that's curiously gone into reverse, it would appear very recently.
Europe, of course, is the European Union keeps on growing by adding more countries.
So while the United States has the same territory as more people, the European Union adds more territory and more people.
Unfortunately, the additional countries from a population point of view of the point, who of any kind of population?
The countries which the European Union adds to itself are a dead loss from the point of view of population growth.
They tend to be relatively poor countries in Eastern Europe, where death rates are relatively high, birth rates are very low.
Now one point two, one point three children per woman,
and therefore they merely add to as a future projected levels of population decline unless something interesting happens, which it may.
The Americans, not unreasonably, given the complexity of three dozen European countries rather prone to talk about Europe as a one place,
well, there's no such thing as Europe, demographically speaking.
It's highly varied in the northern part of Europe and Scandinavia here, Ireland, possibly France, if you call that a northern Europe.
Birth rates are quite robust, as close as is likely ever to be reached to replacement level.
That is to say, one point nine five two point one, something of that kind.
And consequently, northern Europe is projected to grow. That's the brown line at the bottom, partly because of its very buoyant birthrate,
partly because of the level of migration which which contributes very substantial to population growth in Britain and in Scandinavia,
less so in France, southern Europe projected to to to level out and decline Western Europe, which includes Germany and Austria.
And that kind of projected to decline.
And some of them are already starting to decline in Eastern Europe, markedly declining, especially since the end of communism in nineteen eighty nine.
Nineteen ninety one has been downhill ever since.
In terms of population size, not much immigration. There is some to Russia birth rates well below the replacement level.
Death rates are relatively high for European centres, shockingly so for males in Russia.
And so partly because mostly because of this this major effect of decline in Eastern Europe,
if you put you add them all together and create something called Europe,
you tend to get a very stagnant looking looking population pattern,
which gives a rather misleading picture, I think, to some commentators, particularly across the Atlantic.
And if you look even closer, you increase the magnification even further.
And look at individual countries, you see some interesting things happening there for the greater part of the 20th century,
the population of Germany has been by far the biggest of any of the individual Western European countries.
And about 80 million people, as you can see from here, is Germany in red up to about two thousand.
This line here. Germany's population has now slipped into decline,
most particularly the U.K. in purple and France in this dark colour here appear to be engaged in the kind of population race,
almost neck and neck to see who could who could be next with the extraordinary U.K. population will actually exceed that of Germany by about 2040,
something which, of course, something of a sensation in the newspapers when that projection was released.
This is partly because the UK's birth rate is quite high and has actually been growing,
as has most of them in Western Europe over the last few years, but also because immigration,
especially since 1997, has been very,
very high to about one hundred and fifty two hundred fifty thousand extra people per year in net immigration terms.
So very major transitions happening in Europe.
If these things come to pass, then of course, it will have an effect upon economic power and political power on the balance of
voting in the European Union and all the rest of it on a sort of miniature scale,
rather like the balance of power changing in the whole of the world in the way that I pointed out earlier on,
will put Italy in green again, down Spain, incidentally, leaping up in this rather unrealistic and implausible fashion here.
That's mostly because of an enormous influx of migration into Spain,
which initially wasn't counted because most of it was illegal when it was counted.
Then, of course, it made a big jump, suddenly an artificial jump in the population, which is reported for Spain.
Most of the people were there already, but they hadn't been counted as people of hence the peculiar pattern of the Spanish population curve,
even though even there, though, the birth rates low and decline will be on the long term horizon.
This is just a projection of UK population to underline the importance of migration in
population growth in Britain and also in Norway and on to other northern countries.
The blue line is the Office of National Statistics Central Projections.
What they expect to happen going from sixty three million up to an astonishing eighty five million by 2070 or so.
Of course, two thousand seventy also is a very long time in the future.
All sorts of things can happen, particularly migration, because it is influenced, if only imperfectly, by national population policies.
And you know, the present coalition government has promised to reduce migration from, quote,
hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands unquit whether it can do so with the rise of some scepticism.
But certainly it has made some changes of a controversial nature, which you will have heard about,
no doubt in respect of overseas students, for example, to try and bring the rate of growth down.
However, this is what's implied by recent figures. This is what is implied.
If there are no migration at all, in or out, some increase,
even without migration arising out of our old friend population momentum and then the population going back to the present,
63 million in about in about 50 years time.
So no danger of population decline in the UK unless something really peculiar happens in the unforeseeable sort.
Very important to realise, particularly in respect of migration, that migration can go down as well as up, we tend to assume,
not unreasonably, that forces propelling migration from poorer countries to richer ones are powerful and difficult to reverse,
either by the natural economic development or by policies of the kind which the coalition, for example, is trying to impose at the present time.
Nonetheless, migration does go down for a whole variety of reasons political, economic and elsewhere.
This is Germany, which for most of the 20th century was Europe's major importer of population.
About a third of all international migrants to Europe went to Germany.
About a third of all asylum claimants went to Germany. But even even there, the pattern of migration was very much a roller coaster.
Net migration is the blue line, which is this one here.
As you can see, going up and down here is zero and here is minus.
Here is plus and minus 100000, peaking in the 1990s in a kind of crisis situation where about 800000 people moved into Germany.
But now, as you see, going down to very much low levels. And so therefore, of all the three components of population change versus migration,
migration is by far the most volatile and the most difficult to incorporate into population projections, as this graph I think illustrates.
Ignore this one. I think this is just a contrast between various pairs of countries in Europe and outside,
perhaps the most amusing one is this here this is a comparison of the United Nations projections for for Russia and for Uganda.
This is Russia here going down here is Uganda coming up from very low levels, allegedly overtaking Russia by about.
Sometime towards the end of the century, not really likely to happen,
but it may do and it just shows the power of population growth and birth rates are six compared with one and a half.
The basic driver of population ageing,
which is one of the major sources of economic and social interest in in Britain and elsewhere in the developing world is,
of course, birth rates, low birth rates meet populations older.
It's very important to realise that the major cause of population ageing is low.
Fertility has been low fertility. It will become be replaced by higher, longer survival in due course once birth rates have been stable.
So low level for a long period of time. So the population age structure stabilises.
Then after that, the continued improvement in expectation of life, if it carries on, will be the major driver of population ageing.
But contrary to what you might expect at the moment,
it's still the effects of low birth rates that cause population ageing more than the effects of longer life.
Or this balance will change as time goes on. And you can see here that there's considerable divergence between the birth
rates of different major groups of countries in in Western Europe and the USA,
rather, in Europe as a whole. And USA at the top is the US with a birth rate round about the level of replacement.
Just over to here is northern Europe creeping up to about to northern Europe, including Britain and Scandinavia.
Western Europe bumbling along at about one point six or so down here in the doldrums.
And Southern Europe, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in Greece all down at one time to about one point three,
one point four, which which, if continue, would generate very severe levels of population ageing,
very substantial levels of population decline, which some of them are indeed already experiencing.
But it just emphasises if you ignore all the spaghetti around here, this is very confusing.
If you look at this, this relatively stable pattern over the last 20 or 30 years ago, A,
it points out the enormous variety of birth rates in apparently similar European countries with all
sorts of powerful implications for divergence in their population size and their population ageing.
It it underlines the fact that there's no such thing as Europe, demographically speaking.
It also points out that, generally speaking, what you read about in the media still to a large extent about Europe's falling birthrate is
idiotic because birth rates in most parts of Europe have not been falling since the 1980s,
for the most part, except for Eastern Europe, for all sorts of crisis reasons.
And in general, they've been increasing and this is creeping upward slowly. This has been creeping up as more substantially.
The US has been holding, holding constantly, even down here, as you see, they've been going up rather than down.
That's been brought to a temporary, probably temporary halt by the current economic crisis.
If this graph were totally up to date, it would show a bit of a movement down.
Not yet a substantial one. Have to wait and see what happens.
In theory, of course, economic crises do make people postpone births and postpone union formation.
Um, just to emphasise my point, these are a number of countries where the birth rate has been creeping up,
I chose and particularly to make my point, I make no pretence.
This is a random sample, is not this is to emphasise the point of birth rates do go up as well as down in Denmark,
France, New Zealand, US, Norway, UK and others I could have put in that would confuse the graph.
Some countries, therefore, are heading for what can generally be regarded as a manageable levels of ageing.
That is to say, ones where sensible changes in pension age, sensible changes in a pension structure,
sensible changes in workforce participation can stop population ageing being the
economic and demographic catastrophe which the press like to pretend it's going to be.
However, if the birthrates right down at one point to one point three or even lower as it is in Taiwan and Hong Kong and elsewhere,
then it's much more difficult to manage that demographic problem by economic and political management.
These are the the lowest low facilities of the industrial far east of Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Japan itself.
As you can see, hovering not much more over one, some signs of recovery in some of them, no signs of recovery.
In others, the Taiwanese total fertility rate is about one point one at the moment.
In Hong Kong, it's nought point nine.
That really is a major problem with even their very powerful economies may have some difficulty in insurmountable.
We will see. I mentioned the longer life was was was the was the norm, not everywhere.
Some parts of Africa, thanks to the impact of AIDS, have been have been very severely put into reverse, although AIDS is now diminishing.
Generally speaking, as Simon Gregson, my colleague, an expert on these matters,
will point out to you later on, generally speaking, things are getting better.
But again, it's highly, very. This is the distribution of exploitation of a life at birth.
Around 2000, these are quintiles, generally speaking, the darker the better.
So there's areas where it's, well, yellow or orange have the worst survival, the highest death rates.
Those were dark brown, the ones where survival is very interesting.
Gradients of survival going east and west.
There's also one going north and south of the rather erratic kind of is not so obvious in that particular map,
but lots of variation in expectation of life, even in the so-called developed world.
And here you can see the divergence. Of expectation of life at birth in different countries from 1945 up to almost the
present day at about 2009 with the blue countries at the top are Switzerland,
Greece, Japan and France, the countries of the bottom are going down.
This is, um, this one is, uh, it must be Russia, I would guess this is Russia.
This, I think will be Ukraine and this one probably Belarus.
And here interestingly, we have we have Hungary, um, after this is a long standing problem.
This is not just to do with the end of communism, as you can see from the nineteen sixties,
that the trend of survival in all of these Eastern European countries diverge from that of the West and Germans.
We can got worse. This is males, whether the position is much worse than females.
Um. Once countries change their social and political and economic structure like Hungary,
left the communist system abandoned state control joined the European Union.
You will see a marked change in trend of survival.
This is Hungary's and also that of the Czech Republic that Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe,
which is no longer part of the communist bloc of exploration.
Life is improving at the same sort of rate as you would have expected it to improve over the last 50 years or so.
But but 50 years too late? Well, 50 years later,
that is the same trajectory that just a lot of the time to pick up those which are unreformed for the most part in terms of politics and economics.
Russia, Ukraine and Belarus are still stuck in this terrible,
really very deplorable level of high male mortality, which which is a kind of mediocre third world level.
Sixty two. Sixty three, sixty four. It's about 10 years, 10 years lower than the current world average,
which is really quite extraordinary exponential growth going up in most other countries.
This is repeating what I've done before. Um, let's turn back to population ageing.
These problematic aspects of population ageing, the effects, I think are pretty well known.
I've listed them here that there's that there's an imbalance,
a growing imbalance between that part of the population, which is productive, which is active in the workforce,
which is earning money, paying taxes, supporting therefore a state pension systems,
a growth in those who are less economically active, consuming money, consuming tax tax, tax revenues and so on.
On top of that, there's a problem of possible labour shortages, possible inflation and wages.
As a consequence,
problems of finding the provision for care for the elderly in terms of getting people to do it and or and some claim a less creative older workforce.
Of course, I'm deeply opposed to this notion of decline, creativity with old age.
It applies much more, it seems, to manual work, I'm glad to say, than than to know manual work.
The the balance between different countries between now and the future is likely to change a lot,
as you'd expect, from a very different pattern of birth rates, which we have now and expect in the future.
This is the potential support ratio of what is a very simple calculation.
It's simply the number of people of normally working age for every individual of nominally pension age, says certain number of people,
roughly speaking, between 20 and 65 for every one person who's 65 and over, making a big assumption about workforce participation.
But it's a demographic measure. The the current level is the pale blue.
The dark colour is is the projected level in 2060.
And you can see that there's a there's bound to be a halving of support ratio even in countries or a reduction by a third,
even in countries with the birth rates quite favourable, like in France and the UK halving in Japan, a major reduction in China and South Korea.
Over here on this side of the graph showing that the severity of the population ageing problem, which those countries,
particularly China, is likely to experience the problems of China, as it's often said, it risks becoming old before it's rich.
At least these countries over here have got high GDP per head and can sustain pension systems are quite expensive,
much more difficult in China, despite the fact they're making some progress there.
This is the pattern of population ageing, which we've experienced,
this is for a for Austria is typical of what goes on in the more extreme cases in Europe
and what will happen also in the developing world as refugees go down on the left,
it's nineteen sixty nine.
This population pyramid, by the way, in case you aren't familiar with it, is a very basic diagram in demography that the vertical axis is age.
The horizontal axis is the number of peoples in each age group on the left, males on the right and females nineteen sixty eight.
Sixty nine have here Austria before the demographic transition. Likewise in 1910 not change.
Big difference by nineteen thirty four huge chunks beaten out by the low birth rates of the First
World War and a big chunk out of the male population here by the casualties of the First World War.
And then after the First World War, a reduction in birthrates generating the start of population ageing.
Nineteen fifty one. And we have this, this.
All these things have moved up. The birth death of the First World War is now considerably older.
We have another birth death from the Second World War and continued population ageing from from smaller birth rates.
And then we have the baby boom. Amazingly, what no one forecast the baby boom.
All those things that takes demographers by surprise makes us feel very embarrassed because we didn't forecast it.
This revival of birth rates, revival of marriage in the 1960s and 1970s,
generating all these babies and generating a bulge and the subsequent pattern of population
structure in many European countries has been slightly like a python that swallowed a goat.
His just having been swallowed. Here is the goat.
He moved up the gut, as it were, as time goes on, being replaced by the other cohorts from lower birth rate years.
And here it is just about into retirement and of course, much worse.
The pattern of population is you have this huge influx of people born in the 50s and 60s who
contributed very favourably to the workforce when they were more youthful and improved support ratios,
improved productivity and output. Then moving into the the older age group here is twenty and thirty,
making an existing pattern of population ageing and much worse so that the voters were moved right up to the top of the of the gut eventually,
like goats and pythons, that is removed in this case by by, uh, by death,
so that the baby boomers will be cluttering up the pearly gates instead of retirement homes and hospital wards to be replaced by more,
even if birth rates remain constantly low to replace an even population ageing,
we move as well from Christmas tree shape that we had in 1891 to a kind of coffin shaped which is
more appropriate for the population pyramids of of countries with low birthrates in Eastern Europe.
This this is like like Austria. Like Germany is worse in Eastern Europe, better.
Much better in northern and Western Europe. And of course, this is these are drawn to a size because I'm using percentages.
The actual size is getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
And eventually this narrow coffin shape will get thinner and thinner and thinner and then disappear like the Cheshire cat.
Unless the Austrians pull their socks off and increase their birth rate they don't know how to do.
Um, here is here is UK population projection, a slightly different pattern of but as you can see, not the same proportion.
So it is difficult to compare it. But you can see it looks slightly more healthy, obese in the middle.
That's because of the projection level of migration. Other countries much worse, here's Japan in Taiwan and Japan in 2050, by the way,
this, which you often see in population permits is what some peculiarity of a female.
So there are lots and lots more females aged 100, aged Asia.
Ninety nine is because that's the top age group. So everyone age 100 and above is piled into this top level.
And so really it ought to be shaped like that. So that's that's Japan.
Unless things change in the Japanese projections are terribly pessimistic, amazingly pessimistic.
Population projections published on official Japanese government websites showing the actual disappearance of the Japanese population by about 20 30.
They got the last Japanese on their graph. This is this is gloom, which cannot be justified.
Things that won't happen. What will happen, I can't tell. I'm quite sure that won't happen even worse in Taiwan.
And see this, it doesn't come up very well. This is the so-called transition from the bonus to the onus in demography.
The bulge in the Taiwanese population, which they still got in 2010 here, you see is highly beneficial for the workforce.
As long as the infrastructure is there and the investment is there,
a very high proportion of the population is in the working age groups and therefore highly
productive with a small burden of dependency from the young and still a small dependency,
a burden for the old. By the time we get to 2060, which is, I see it, this pale shape here, of course,
this this current bonus has turned into a into a penalty because all these people once productive and now
in the retired age groups being replaced by much smaller cohorts of people who have to support them.
Hence this problem of population ageing.
The doctor was drinking and holding steady, however, questions, can we solve this in the developed world by immigration?
It sounds tempting because most immigrants are in the middle part of life.
There is about 10 years younger than the average of the population into which they're moving.
The trouble is that it's a once you start that it never ends.
This is the red line here shows the population size,
which you would have to have in the UK from immigration if immigration were devised so as to keep
the potential support ratio constant at the present level of four point what as you can see,
it would take the population from about 63 million now to about 110 million by the
end of the century to three hundred and six million by two thousand one hundred,
then right up into the stratosphere and to become infinitely large and in fact, exactly the same thing for the Republic of Korea.
If if you try to contrive to stabilise the potential support ratio for the Republic of Korea by international migration,
then we'll all have to pack our bags and go there because it would take a cumulative total
of six point five billion people to to preserve the support ratio in Korea by mid century.
That happens to be world population size. So that's a fantasy calculation is correct.
But obviously it's a fantasy. It just underlines the impossibility of solving population ageing by migration.
You have moderated. The council population ageing by migration, they can solve it by any other demographic means,
either you can't solve it by higher birth rates, it makes it better, but it doesn't solve it.
Population ageing is a fundamental fact of population security, and we've got to cope with it.
You can't make it go away. And all I hate to say this demography is not everything in this context.
What also matters is the policies you've got for retirement age.
The later the better for workforce participation rates, the higher the better for rational systems of pension.
We don't give to high pension replacement rates to people when they retire and so on.
Put all those things together as Jackson and how in Washington have done.
And we've got an ageing vulnerability index which shows Australia coming out top, which still is.
The UK since then has had a really severe problem with its pension system and will not deserve that second rank.
Nonetheless, the US is not doing too badly of not doing too badly.
Curious enough, Japan, which you have thought would be rock bottom,
is doing quite well because its retirement age is so is so late and its workforce participation is so high.
In France, where the long is good, that stands worse because its retirement ages is so early.
As you know, Mr Hollande has reversed Mr Sarkozy's policy to increase it by miserable two years to a sixty two and put it back to 60 for some workers,
which is a very retrograde step. It should be getting for 65, 67, 68.
So for that and other reasons, France doesn't do as well as its demography would lead one to expect.
But I must press on. Let's get to that.
And yes, this ageing thing will happen, of course, in the developing world as well.
It will hit China particularly badly. And this shows the population by age group in China and India by 2050.
You can see the large number of people in China moving into retirement ages and making the dependency ratio quite bad in India,
where birth rates are declining or the BOJ will still be in the middle of productive years.
If the Indian economy and an infrastructure can cope with this bulge of potential workers, it will do very well indeed,
although of course it will eventually age, same as China has done, although more or less severely, but much later in time.
And we can forget the Russian Federation.
One final point, which is worth pointing out is not only of the demographic transitions in birth and death rates.
So a very intriguing kind, but all these consequences for decline, growth, ageing and so forth, but also of ethnic change.
The populations of the world are changing because of the large scale of migration, which some of them have received, notably the US.
The United States is the first country in the Western world, the first country that I know of where what you might call the historically majority
population of white Americans is going to become a minority by about 2040.
This appears to be more or less graven in stone.
And this is the official U.S. Census Bureau projection over two thousand and forty, only about 30 years time or so.
All the minorities in America, the Hispanic minority, the Asian minority, the black minority, the Native American minority,
will together become more numerous that than that of white Americans, white, non Hispanic Americans, I should say.
And it is already the case that the number of births to those populations last
year exceeded the number of births to the white non Hispanic population,
as the American terminology classifies it, something similar happening in the Netherlands,
actually about 30 percent of first and second generation population of foreign origin in the Netherlands by by mid century.
Similarly, in many other countries of Western Europe, as a consequence of migration, this is Germany, USA, Netherlands, Denmark,
Sweden and Austria, similar sort of rate of change, different sorts of levels, depending on migration and when it started.
Um, and. One of the complicating factors is, of course, that these categories of people, white, non, Hispanic, white, British,
black, Caribbean and all the rest that are used in censuses and surveys and and enquiries of various kinds are not fixed.
Not only can people change that identity if they are asked what they think they are and people do change their identity in response to questions.
But also people of mixed origin become more and more common as a sex and love start to triumph, as it were, over bureaucratic categorisations.
Large, larger and larger numbers of people are happy to say they are of mixed origin.
In the 2001 census in this country,
about six hundred and sixty thousand people who said that they were a mixed origin is much larger in the 2011 census.
We haven't got the final figures yet. Here are three famous ones.
The chap on the left you would probably recognise this is a prise racing driver, Mr. Hamilton from Britain.
The lady up there was was, um, a contender for Miss France, and she is also a mixed race.
She was actually dismissed from her competition for some picadillo and I
imagine she'd seek asylum in Britain from the cruelties of French bureaucracy.
The populations of that kind of became more and more numerous. They will eventually, if that continues, fudges the edges of all these categorisations,
different sorts of people, and and make ethnic classifications possibly meaningless and maybe redundant.
So a few concluding points. Population ageing is inevitable.
We can moderate it. We can't we can't stop it or solve it in the strict sense of the word solve in the.
Different phases of demographic transition are going to generate a very considerable shift in population representation from Europe,
from Asia, from Africa, with major demographic losers and and with us in the very long run,
this is going to make a big difference in the power structures of the world, because in due course,
as poorer countries become rich, economic military rank will become equivalent to population size, as it was in the past.
The version of the Rancourt of the past will re-establish itself as wealth and power
become more evenly distributed across the different populations of the world.
There are still serious problems of fast growth in poor countries, as well as problems of ageing and decline in some rich ones.
One of the major uncertainties, which I think is is a really big question mark over some of these graphs I will
show you is the possible effects of climate change on some of these populations,
which appears to be likely to make things worse for much worse.
But for some of those in tropical areas, and even without the incorporation of climate change,
the projections world population is expected to be in decline of twenty seventeen.
It may be that climate change will make it decline even faster than we expect on that point.
I will stop. What I propose we do is have a few minutes break and then I will resume the second half
of this rather punishing schedule at about five past 11 or so and then about five,
five to 12. Thank you very much.