Book Review: Tomorrow's People by Paul Morland
Is Demography Destiny?
I recently finished up Tomorrow’s People by British academic Paul Morland, a review of demographic mega-trends for the coming century. The compelling thing about demography is its rock-solid ability to predict the structure of populations well into the future. All of the people who will be adults in 10 years, for example, are already born, and trends in demography tend to move slowly enough to make useful but non-obvious predictions.
My takeaways and reflections from this book:
World population growth is slowing dramatically and total population will peak sometime this century or early in the next.
There is a fairly predictable progression as a society develops. As economic prosperity emerges, education increases, infant mortality drops, life expectancy rises, and the population begins to have fewer children. Morland shows how trends in literacy, health, and fertility are now moving faster than economic development. Many countries in Africa, for example, now have infant mortality rates below that of the UK in the 1960s, despite economic prosperity not improving as dramatically. It turns out that increasing literacy and improving health outcomes is fairly cheap and developing countries, since they do not have to invent the enabling technologies, can improve health and education more quickly than per capita income. Health and education improvements tend to drive down birth rates as effectively as economic prosperity and are easier to achieve.
On the entire Eurasian landmass, from northwest Europe to southeast Asia, birthrates are either below replacement or rapidly converging to below replacement. India will reach below-replacement birth rates sometime in the next 10 years.
The global exceptions to this trend are sub-Saharan Africa, rural religious whites in Western countries, both urban and rural Mormons, and predominantly urban ultra-Orthodox Jews. The latter has helped the nation of Israel achieve birth rates well above what would be predicted based on its economic and educational development. At over 3 children per woman, Israel is the only quasi-Western-type country that achieves above-replacement birth rates. Notably, its birthrate now significantly exceeds that of all of its Islamic neighbors, which are approaching European levels of fertility.
Africa continues to have large numbers of children, in some places as high as 5 children per woman, and while Africa’s birth rates have declined, they have not declined as quickly as its economic development would have predicted. Africa is much better off economically than most Westerners anchored to memories of the 1980s famines might think, as extreme poverty has almost been eliminated worldwide by the ongoing march of capitalism. Time will tell whether Africa will catch up with its economic development in terms of declining birth rates. It’s possible there’s something special about African culture that makes it more child-welcoming than other places. Deep religiosity across the continent might be the best explanation, as highly religious populations in the West are also the general exceptions to low birth rates.
Small differentials in birth rates can have a disproportionate impact on the future. Morland conducts a thought experiment starting with the world population at the time of Christ, approximately 250 million. Starting with such a population, if every woman had four children at an average age of 25, and all of those children had reached adulthood to become mothers and fathers themselves, then by 500 AD or so the total world population would be over 100 billion. Obviously, this did not happen and certainly could not happen given the famines, pestilence, and violence of the ancient world. But today, a small founder population could have a disproportionate impact on the future given low infant mortality. We are entering a demographic era of choice, where only those who actually want children are having them. Political scientist Eric Kaufmann, an associate of Morland’s, says the Amish could become a majority of Americans by the 2200s:
This is perhaps unlikely, though one estimate calculated that the Amish might already constitute something like 1% of white American births. Combine the Amish with other highly pro-natal groups and the future looks very different from the past. One way to think of the future, in a world of declining population, is as a reopening of the frontier. God has so arranged things that a fully developed economic cornucopia relative to ancient poverty is waiting to be claimed by those who will simply show up for the future by welcoming their own children into the world. The Culture of Death centered on hedonism, self-sterilization, and abortion is erasing secular populations. The Culture of Life will triumph of simple necessity. All of the above-replacement populations are highly religious; none are secular. It seems that only transcendent religious convictions enable mankind to fulfill our most basic duties and escape hedonism when given the choice.
One defining feature of the emerging Culture of Life will necessarily be a strong reality preference. Our animal instincts are increasingly hijacked by supernormal stimuli. Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller proposed (in 2006!) that pornography and video games are a sufficient explanation for the Fermi paradox:
I suggest a different, even darker solution to Fermi's Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today.
…
I suspect that a certain period of fitness-faking narcissism is inevitable after any intelligent life evolves. This is the Great Temptation for any technological species — to shape their subjective reality to provide the cues of survival and reproductive success without the substance. Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children.
…
Heritable variation in personality might allow some lineages to resist the Great Temptation and last longer. Those who persist will evolve more self-control, conscientiousness, and pragmatism. They will evolve a horror of virtual entertainment, psychoactive drugs, and contraception.
We are surrounded by fake food, fake sex, and fake accomplishment, all of which are easier to obtain and in certain hedonic respects, particularly instant gratification, better than the real thing. Only those with a hard-nosed religiously-enforced preference for reality, and who enjoy having children around, will survive.
Morland proposes a policy model where nations can only choose two of three tradeoffs: economics, egotism, and ethnicity. He gives examples of the three possible combinations in the countries of Japan, the United Kingdom, and Israel. Japan has chosen to retain egotism, which Morland describes as a society where young people are encouraged to pursue individual goals and put off having families, many permanently. It has also chosen to preserve its ethnicity by refusing to allow immigration, so as a result of population decline, it must sacrifice its economic growth. The UK, by contrast, while also retaining a culture of egotism, has chosen to give up its ethnicity to preserve its economy through mass immigration. Morland points out that this is at best a temporary solution requiring continuing inflows to maintain, as fertility rates of immigrants quickly assimilate to local norms. I might question Morland’s comparison here. Japan’s policies don’t seem to make it materially different for the average family than the UK economically.
Among all developed countries, only Israel has chosen ethnicity and economic growth (through population growth) by rejecting egotism. According to Morland, in Israel, there is subtle social pressure for young people to have children given its unique history and vulnerable strategic position. I’m not quite sure this is the whole story with Israel, however, as I suspect a large part of their demographic strength comes from the growing minority ultra-Orthodox Hasidic population. According to my basic research and calculation, if ultra-Orthodox are 13% of the Israeli population but have 7.1 children per woman, and the overall fertility is 3.1 then the remaining 87% are having 2.5 children per woman, still impressive by Western standards, but it’s clear the Hasedi provide much of the demographic margin. The government makes extensive welfare payments to these families, exempting them from military service, and paying many men to study Torah instead of conventional employment. This may be a fair trade for the Israelis, for this population does the job their secular counterparts more commonly refuse: they give life to the next generation. Many of the children of the Hasedi will leave those communities and merge with secular Israeli society, while those who remain provide the demographic engine for the future.
It may be impossible to incentivize secular, hedonistic populations to have children. In parts of the West, below-replacement birthrates (along with secularizing social trends) were already firmly in place by the early 1900s. Mussolini, for example, in power from 1925 to 1943, was unable to significantly raise birth rates despite it being a major objective of his totalitarian fascist state, making it doubtful any modern democracy could hope to succeed in a similar endeavor. Hungary seems to be trying the hardest, offering $36,000 grants for those who have three children, subsidizing the purchase of minivans, and exempting women who have four or more children from income taxes for life. I suspect that incentives such as these need to be much richer to be effective (possibly exceeding the ~$250k estimated cost of raising a child) and will only increase birth rates among religious populations already inclined to have large families.
Governments may not be able to do much to increase birth rates, but they can certainly do much to harm them. The United States is particularly retrograde in this regard. Even something as mundane as our overzealous car seat laws have been calculated to suppress births by 8,000 children annually. The Biden administration recently mandated a 2019 Trump administration proposal that PrEP medication, a $2000-per-month prophylactic that prevents HIV infection from unprotected sex, must be covered by insurance plans at zero cost as “preventative care.” Meanwhile, childbirth is subject to the gigantic deductibles associated with post-Obamacare health plans, and fertility treatments aren’t covered by standard policies at all.
One consequence of declining birth rates is an increase in the average age of the population. Morland cites research showing this makes major wars much less likely. This is good news for those hoping to make a play for the future and makes me much more comfortable buying sector-rotating value stocks instead of gold, ammunition, and freeze-dried food. A managed decline like Japan or at worst a relatively non-violent unmanaged decline like Argentina is what investors ought to expect. A total collapse and civil war are unlikely when a population is aging - older men have too little testosterone and too much to lose to engage in one. While the political rhetoric will likely polarize further, our mental model for this ought to be two old geezers yelling at each other at the nursing home because they sit and watch Fox News and MSNBC all day. They might say horrible things, but serious violence is outside their capabilities. When the demographic chickens finally hatch, say in 100 years, the younger, stronger religious populations will likely be able to occupy the centers of power without much of a fight, not unlike tired Rome surrendering with a whimper to the energetic German barbarians.
The conflict in Ukraine might seem to buck this trend, but the scale of the war is very small compared to historical norms. Both sides have below-replacement birth rates and aging populations, and neither is willing to commit to the conflict fully. Both sides are likewise betting that the other gets tired of it first, and given how old their populations are, both have reasons to think this is a good bet. Putin probably overestimated Ukrainian nationalist sentiment in hopes of a quick, decisive war, but Ukraine will probably settle eventually for the status quo ante as they too run out of soldiers. Life continues much as it always has outside of the war zones. Both countries have seen young men evading conscription to avoid wasting their lives in a dumb Boomer war.
Overall, I rate Morland’s book a 4/5. His insight that the aging of the population reduces war-related tail risks for investors is worth the time spent reading. Buy-and-hold investing is unlikely to work in a declining demographic environment, but neither is prepping for an apocalypse of the geriatrics. Unlike many conservatives who bemoan these trends but exempt themselves personally from the implications of their research, Morland himself has three children and describes parenting as the most meaningful experience of his life.
I give, as a first order approximation, the chances of Ukraine being offered the status quo ante as being indistinguishable from zero. Who would be able to force Russia into that concession?