Most countries – even in the developing world – are entering an era of ageing and population decline. With fewer and fewer babies and more and more elderly, what does the future look like?

According to Shamil Ismail, a South African investment analysist, it looks very grim. In his book The Age of Decay: How Aging and Shrinking Populations could Usher in the Decline of Civilization, he sketches scenarios from which our politicians are averting their eyes. We will look back nostalgically, he predicts, on the years from 1990 to 2020 as a “Golden Age of Prosperity”.

His calculations are straightforward. If global fertility rates continue to fall, there will be massive labour shortages everywhere – except in sub-Saharan Africa. But the infrastructure of modern economies relies upon armies of unseen workers; without them, it crumbles. Forget about robots and AI. They cannot fix leaks in water mains or maintain lifts in high-rise buildings. If you want to see the future of Japan, Korea, or Italy, look at depopulated and dilapidated Detroit.

The Covid pandemic was a dim preview of an ageing world. It was then that we realised how much our societies depend upon essential workers. The world can survive without lawyers and florists and professors of Mediaeval French, but not without nurses, lorry drivers, shelf stockers, nursing home cooks, plumbers and garbos. Jobs requiring high-level analytical skills are important, but Covid reminded us that society requires a minimum number of those essential workers simply to function.

Most predictions of a low-fertility future focus on the dependency ratio – the number of workers required to support children and the elderly. Ismail highlights the worker-to-aged ratio. In 1990, European countries and the US and Canada, the ratio stood at about 4 to 1. It has been falling ever since. When the ratio sinks below 2 to 1, the proportion of essential workers begins to rise. When the number of workers equals the number of aged, 45 percent of the workforce will be needed in essential services to keep society ticking over. “Infrastructure is difficult to scale back and entire networks must be maintained regardless of how many people they service,” he points out. We won’t be able to downsize many essential services. Innovation will slow dramatically as society struggles to keep the lights on.

As a result, the critical tipping point when we will really experience the effects of a too-low birth rate is not when the fertility rate drops below the replacement rate of 2.1—rather, we will start seeing the consequences when the ratio of worker-to-aged people drops below 2.0.

Where are we going to source those essential workers? Ismail points out that Gen Z is unlikely to take up the challenge with zest. They lack resilience and they are too highly educated to fix potholes or drive delivery vans.

This will happen all over the world. According to his analysis: “by 2040, seven countries—Japan, South Korea, Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Germany—could have a combined shortage of about 7 million workers. By 2050, 14 countries could have a labor shortfall totaling around 20 million workers.”

The standard response to this disquieting scenario is that countries like the US, Australia, or the UK will open their doors to more migrants.

Apart from the social and political disruption that this might provoke in the short term, in the long term this will simply not work. Skilled migrants won’t come. In a globalised world, “as more countries experience labor shortages, the bargaining power will shift from those countries to the immigrant workers themselves”. Whereas now rich countries are capping immigration levels, in the future they may have to give lavish benefits, like a quick path to citizenship and family reunion, to coax workers to migrate.

Perhaps the United States will still be able to afford expensive migrant labour, but how about a small and poor country like Albania? Its fertility rate is lower than the US. In 2100, the “foreign workers needed by Albania will amount to 16% of its total population, but a staggering 38% of its working-age cohort,” Ismail says. How will it cope?

Ismail paints a dismal picture of life after the year 2050. He imagines Eva, a widow with one unmarried son. Sho lives on the seventh floor of a leaky block of flats. The lift doesn’t work because there is no one to maintain it. With all those stairs, shopping has become an ordeal. In any case, the shelves are often empty because there’s a shortage of truck drivers. The streets are potholed because the city has run out of money. Small shops have closed for lack of custom. We are entering, he says, “the Age of Decay”.

There is a silver lining to this story. For Africa this represents a golden opportunity. “The 22nd century will be an exciting time for Africa and it may well become known as the ‘African Century’. This prestige will not be realized through the exploitation of the continent’s abundant mineral resources, but rather because of the latent potential that its vast reservoir of human resources will hold,” writes Ismail – who is South African.

In contrast to other regions, Africa’s consumer spending could skyrocket and increase almost fourfold by the end of the century. This is mainly because the African population will increase from 1.3 billion in 2020 to 3.9 billion by 2100, and a large part of that population would be of working age—the ‘sweet spot’ for consumer spending. This is yet another reason why the African continent is set to play such a pivotal role in the world economy over the next two centuries.

What can be done to stop this slide into the slough of despond?

The appalling truth is that no one knows. Ismail ticks off the pro-natalist incentives that governments have rolled out to boost birth rates – subsidised IVF, maternal leave, paternal leave, egg freezing, subsidized child care, working from home … None of them have worked.

Nicholas Eberstadt, one of America’s leading demographers, has just published his own survey of a depopulating world in Foreign Affairs. He reaches more or less the same conclusion: “Depopulation will transform humanity profoundly, likely in numerous ways societies have not begun to consider and may not yet be in a position to understand.”

Eberstadt’s explanation of the birth death is psychological, not economic or social — that for the first time in history, women can have as many children as they want – and it seems that they want only one or two:

People the world over are now aware of the possibility of very different ways of life from the ones that confined their parents. Certainly, religious belief—which generally encourages marriage and celebrates child rearing—seems to be on the wane in many regions where birthrates are crashing. Conversely, people increasingly prize autonomy, self-actualization, and convenience. And children, for their many joys, are quintessentially inconvenient.

Do these words contain the germ of a solution? If women around the world are drinking the Kool-Aid of autonomy or “expressive individualism”, as some call it, what if they drank something with more vitamins?

What if there were a religious revival which made childlessness and small families unappealing? Impossible?

Perhaps not. Ideas have consequences. Childlessness literally leads to nihilism, nothingness. As Ismail shows, the consequences of the idea of very low fertility have been and will be extremely destructive. If he is correct, as Millennials and Gen Z and their children age, they will have to accept much lower standards of living, poorer health care, dramatic social change, and unrewarding jobs.

But can anyone imagine that people will simply accept living alone on the seventh floor of a decaying block of flats? Human beings are resourceful and resilient. They will not go gentle into that good night. By the year 2050 the idea that people are the ultimate resource will be indisputable, part of the conventional wisdom.

My intuition is that coming generations will react by adopting a radically different idea – that marrying and having large families are the most rewarding of life trajectories. Couples will marry younger. There won’t be any need to ban abortion; it will simply fade away as an acceptable lifestyle choice. Every child, every single child, will be a wanted child. Contraception will be taboo.

Instead, they will search for a philosophy of life which supports families and children. For most people in the West, that will be Christianity.

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This article was originally published on Mercator under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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