Spring 2009

The World's New Numbers

by Martin Walker

“Here lies Europe, overwhelmed by Muslim immigrants and emptied of native-born Europeans,” goes the standard pundit line, but neither the immigrants nor the Europeans are playing their assigned roles.

Listen as Martin Walker discusses demographic change on dialogue.

Something dramatic has happened to the world’s birthrates. Defying predictions of demographic decline, northern Europeans have started having more babies. Britain and France are now projecting steady population growth through the middle of the century. In North America, the trends are similar. In 2050, according to United Nations projections, it is possible that nearly as many babies will be born in the United States as in China. Indeed, the population of the world’s current demographic colossus will be shrinking. And China is but one particularly sharp example of a widespread fall in birthrates that is occurring across most of the developing world, including much of Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The one glaring exception to this trend is sub-Saharan Africa, which by the end of this century may be home to one-third of the human race.

The human habit is simply to project current trends into the future. Demographic realities are seldom kind to the predictions that result. The decision to have a child depends on innumerable personal considerations and larger, unaccountable societal factors that are in constant flux. Yet even knowing this, demographers themselves are often flummoxed. Projections of birthrates and population totals are often embarrassingly at odds with eventual reality.

In 1998, the UN’s “best guess” for 2050 was that there would be 8.9 billion humans on the planet. Two years later, the figure was revised to 9.3 billion—in effect, adding two Brazils to the world. The number subsequently fell and rose again. Modest changes in birthrates can have bigger consequences over a couple of generations: The recent rise in U.S. and European birthrates is among the developments factored into the UN’s latest “middle” projection that world population in 2050 will be just over 9.1 billion.

In a society in which an average woman bears 2.1 children in her lifetime—what’s called “replacement-level” fertility—the population remains stable. When demographers make tiny adjustments to estimates of future fertility rates, population projections can fluctuate wildly. Plausible scenarios for the next 40 years show world population shrinking to eight billion or growing to 10.5 billion. A recent UN projection rather daringly assumes a decline of the global fertility rate to 2.02 by 2050, and eventually to 1.85, with total world population starting to decrease by the end of this century.

Despite their many uncertainties, demographic projections have become an essential tool. Governments, international agencies, and private corporations depend on them in planning strategy and making long-term investments. They seek to estimate such things as the number of pensioners, the cost of health care, and the size of the labor force many years into the future. But the detailed statistical work of demographers tends to seep out to the general public in crude form, and sensationalist headlines soon become common wisdom.

Because of this bastardization of knowledge, three deeply misleading assumptions about demographic trends have become lodged in the public mind. The first is that mass migration into Europe, legal and illegal, combined with an eroding native population base, is transforming the ethnic, cultural, and religious identity of the continent. The second assumption, which is related to the first, is that Europe’s native population is in steady and serious decline from a falling birthrate, and that the aging population will place intolerable demands on governments to maintain public pension and health systems. The third is that population growth in the developing world will continue at a high rate. Allowing for the uncertainty of all population projections, the most recent data indicate that all of these assumptions are highly questionable and that they are not a reliable basis for serious policy decisions.

In 2007, The Times of London reported that in the previous year Muhammad had edged out Thomas as the second most popular name for newborn boys in Britain, trailing only Jack. This development had been masked in the official statistics because the name’s many variants—such as Mohammed, Mahmoud, and Muhamed—had all been counted separately. The Times compiled all the variants and established that 5,991 Muhammads of one spelling or another were born in 2006, trailing 6,928 Jacks, but ahead of 5,921 Thomases, 5,808 Joshuas, and 5,208 Olivers. The Times went on to predict that Muhammad would soon take the top spot.

On the face of it, this seemed to bear out the thesis—something of a rallying cry among anti-immigration activists—that high birthrates among immigrant Muslims presage a fundamental shift in British demography. Similar developments in other European countries, where birthrates among native-born women have long fallen below replacement level, have provoked considerable anxiety about the future of Europe’s traditionally Christian culture. Princeton professor emeritus Bernard Lewis, a leading authority on Islamic history, suggested in 2004 that the combination of low European birthrates and increasing Muslim immigration means that by this century’s end, Europe will be “part of the Arabic west, of the Maghreb.” If non-Muslims then flee Europe, as Middle East specialist Daniel Pipes predicted in The New York Sun, “grand cathedrals will appear as vestiges of a prior civilization—at least until a Saudi-style regime transforms them into mosques or a Taliban-like regime blows them up.”

The reality, however, looks rather different from such dire scenarios. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that while Muhammad topped Thomas in 2006, it was something of a Pyrrhic victory: Fewer than two percent of Britain’s male babies bore the prophet’s name. One fact that gets lost among distractions such as the Times story is that the birthrates of Muslim women in Europe—and around the world—have been falling significantly for some time. Data on birthrates among different religious groups in Europe are scarce, but they point in a clear direction. Between 1990 and 2005, for example, the fertility rate in the Netherlands for Moroccan-born women fell from 4.9 to 2.9, and for Turkish-born women from 3.2 to 1.9. In 1970, Turkish-born women in Germany had on average two children more than German-born women. By 1996, the difference had fallen to one child, and it has now dropped to half that number.

These sharp reductions in fertility among Muslim immigrants reflect important cultural shifts, which include universal female education, rising living standards, the inculcation of local mores, and widespread availability of contraception. Broadly speaking, birthrates among immigrants tend to rise or fall to the local statistical norm within two generations.

The decline of Muslim birthrates is a global phenomenon. Most analysts have focused on the remarkably high proportion of people under age 25 in the Arab countries, which has inspired some crude forecasts about what this implies for the future. Yet recent UN data suggest that Arab birthrates are falling fast, and that the number of births among women under the age of 20 is dropping even more sharply. Only two Arab countries still have high fertility rates: Yemen and the Palestinian territories.

In some Muslim countries—Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Lebanon—fertility rates have already fallen to near-European levels. Algeria and Morocco, each with a fertility rate of 2.4, are both dropping fast toward such levels. Turkey is experiencing a similar trend.

Revisions made in the 2008 version of the UN’s World Population Prospects Report make it clear that this decline is not simply a Middle Eastern phenomenon. The report suggests that in Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim population, the fertility rate for the years 2010–15 will drop to 2.02, a shade below replacement level. The same UN assessment sees declines in Bangladesh (to 2.2) and Malaysia (2.35) in the same period. By 2050, even Pakistan is expected to reach a replacement-level fertility rate.

Iran is experiencing what may be one of the most dramatic demographic shifts in human history. Thirty years ago, after the shah had been driven into exile and the Islamic Republic was being established, the fertility rate was 6.5. By the turn of the century, it had dropped to 2.2. Today, at 1.7, it has collapsed to European levels. The implications are profound for the politics and power games of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, putting into doubt Iran’s dreams of being the regional superpower and altering the tense dynamics between the Sunni and Shiite wings of Islam. Equally important are the implications for the economic future of Iran, which by midcentury may have consumed all of its oil and will confront the challenge of organizing a society with few people of working age and many pensioners.

The falling fertility rates in large segments of the Islamic world have been matched by another significant shift: Across northern and western Europe, women have suddenly started having more babies. Germany’s minister for the family, Ursula von der Leyen, announced in February that the country had recorded its second straight year of increased births. Sweden’s fertility rate jumped eight percent in 2004 and stayed put. Both Britain and France now project that their populations will rise from the current 60 million each to more than 75 million by midcentury. Germany, despite its recent uptick in births, still seems likely to drop to 70 million or less by 2050 and lose its status as Europe’s most populous country.

In Britain, the number of births rose in 2007 for the sixth year in a row. Britain’s fertility rate has increased from 1.6 to 1.9 in just six years, with a striking contribution from women in their thirties and forties—just the kind of hard-to-predict behavioral change that drives demographers wild. The fertility rate is at its highest level since 1980. The National Health Service has started an emergency recruitment drive to hire more midwives, tempting early retirees from the profession back to work with a bonus of up to $6,000. In Scotland, where births have been increasing by five percent a year, Glasgow’s Herald has reported “a mini baby boom.”

Immigrant mothers account for part of the fertility increase throughout Europe, but only part. And, significantly, many of the immigrants are arrivals from elsewhere in Europe, especially the eastern European countries admitted to the European Union in recent years. Children born to eastern European immigrants accounted for a third of Scotland’s “mini baby boom,” for example.

In 2007, France’s national statistical authority announced that the country had overtaken Ireland to boast the highest birthrate in Europe. In France, the fertility rate has risen from 1.7 in 1993 to 2.1 in 2007, its highest level since before 1980, despite a steady fall in birthrates among women not born in France. France’s National Institute of Demographic Studies reports that the immigrant population is responsible for only five percent of the rise in the birthrate.

A similar upturn is under way in the United States, where the fertility rate has climbed to its highest level since 1971, reaching 2.1 in 2006, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. New projections by the Pew Research Center suggest that if current trends continue, the population of the United States will rise from today’s total of some 300 million to 438 million in 2050. Eighty-two percent of that increase will be produced by new immigrants and their U.S.-born descendants.

By contrast, the downward population trends for southern and eastern Europe show little sign of reversal. Ukraine, for example, now has a population of 46 million; if maintained, its low fertility rate will whittle its population down by nearly 50 percent by mid-century. The Czech Republic, Italy, and Poland face declines almost as drastic.

In Russia, the effects of declining fertility are amplified by a phenomenon so extreme that it has given rise to an ominous new term—hypermortality. As a result of the rampant spread of maladies such as HIV/AIDS and alcoholism and the deterioration of the Russian health care system, says a 2008 report by the UN Development Program, “mortality in Russia is 3–5 times higher for men and twice as high for women” than in other countries at a comparable stage of development. The report—which echoes earlier findings by demographers such as the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Murray Feshbach—predicts that within little more than a decade the working-age population will be shrinking by up to one million people annually. Russia is suffering a demographic decline on a scale that is normally associated with the effects of a major war.

It is important to consider what this means for the future of the Russian economy. Identified by Goldman Sachs as one of the BRIC quartet (along with Brazil, India, and China) of key emerging markets, Russia has been the object of great hopes and considerable investments. But a very large question mark must be placed on the economic prospects of a country whose young male work force looks set to decrease by half.

The Russian future highlights in exaggerated fashion another challenge facing the European countries. Even absent Russia’s dire conditions, the social and political implications of an aging population are plain and alarming. At a 2004 conference in Paris, Heikki Oksanen of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs noted that the European social model of generous welfare states is facing a crisis because the number of retirees is rising while the number of working-age people is declining. “People are aware that there is a problem, but they do not know how serious it is and [what] drastic reforms are necessary,” he said.

Oksanen went on to describe the dire implications for European tax systems. A pay-as-you-go pension scheme would take “only” 27 percent of wages if Europeans had replacement-level fertility, retired at age 60, and lived to 78. But if fertility decreased to 1.7 while longevity increased gradually to 83—close to where Europe is now—the tax would rise to 45 percent of the wage bill. Because of its low birthrate, Germany’s problem is particularly acute. It currently has about four people of working age for every three dependents. Under one scenario for 2050, those four working-age Germans would be required to support five dependents.

But these sorts of projections don’t capture the full picture. There are at least three mitigating factors to be considered, which suggest that the German welfare state and others in Europe might not have to be dismantled wholesale.

The first is that the traditional retirement age of 60 in Italy, France, and Germany is very early indeed, especially considering that life expectancy is approaching 80 and that modern diets and medicine allow many elderly people to continue working well into their seventies. An increase of the retirement age to 65, which is being slowly introduced in France and Germany, would sharply reduce the number of nonworkers who depend on the employed for support, as would more employment for people below the age of 20. A retirement age of 70 in Germany would virtually end the problem, at least until life expectancy rose as high as 90 years.

Second, the work force participation rate in Germany (and much of continental Europe) is relatively low. Not only do Germans retire on the early side, but the generous social welfare system allows others to withdraw from work earlier in life. An increase in employment would boost the revenues flowing into the social security system. For example, only 67 percent of women in Germany were in the work force in 2005, compared with 76 percent in Denmark and 78 percent in Switzerland. (The average rate for the 15 “core” EU states is 64 percent; for the United States, 70 percent.)

David Coleman, a demographer at Oxford University, has suggested that the EU’s work force could be increased by nearly a third if both sexes were to match Denmark’s participation rates. The EU itself has set a target participation rate of 70 percent for both sexes. Reaching this goal would significantly alleviate the fiscal challenge of maintaining Europe’s welfare system, which has been aptly described as “more of a labor-market challenge than a demographic crisis.”

The third mitigating factor is that the total dependency ratios of the 21st century are going to look remarkably similar to those of the 1960s. In the United States, the most onerous year for dependency was 1965, when there were 95 dependents for every 100 adults between the ages of 20 and 64. That occurred because “dependents” includes people both younger and older than working age. By 2002, there were only 49 dependents for every 100 working-age Americans. By 2025 there are projected to be 80, still well below the peak of 1965. The difference is that while most dependents in the 1960s were young, with their working and saving and contributing lives ahead of them, most of the dependents of 2009 are older, with more dependency still to come. But the point is clear: There is nothing outlandish about having almost as many dependents as working adults.

Population growth on a scale comparable to that which frightened pundits and demographers a generation ago still exists in 30 of the world’s least developed countries. Each has a fertility rate of more than five. With a few exceptions—notably, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories—those countries are located in sub-Saharan Africa. Depending on the future course of birthrates, sub-Saharan Africa’s current 800 million people are likely to become 1.7 billion by 2050 and three billion by the end of the century.

One striking implication of this growth is that there will be a great religious revolution, as Africa becomes the home of monotheism. By midcentury, sub-Saharan Africa is likely to be the demographic center of Islam, home to as many Muslims as Asia and to far more than inhabit the Middle East. The non-Arab Muslim countries of Africa—Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Senegal—constitute the one region of the Islamic world where birthrates remain high. In several of these countries, the average woman will have upward of five children in her lifetime.

Christianity will also feel the effects of Africa’s growth. By 2025, there will be as many Christians in sub-Saharan Africa—some 640 million—as in South America. By 2050, it is almost certain that most of the world’s Christians will live in Africa. As Kenyan scholar John Mbiti writes, “The centers of the church’s universality [are] no longer in Geneva, Rome, Athens, Paris, London, New York, but Kinshasa, Buenos Aires, Addis Ababa, and Manila.”

But awareness of Africa’s religious revolution is usually overshadowed by the fearful possibilities raised by the continent’s rapid population growth. By 2050, the national populations are expected to more than double in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, reaching 147 million and 91 million, respectively. Smaller countries—such as Liberia, Niger, Mali, Chad, and Burundi—are expected to experience growth of 100 to 200 percent. These are the countries with the weakest state institutions, the least infrastructure, the feeblest economies, and thus the poorest health and education systems. They also face daunting problems of environmental degradation—and the lesson from Darfur and the Rwanda genocide is that disaster can follow when population growth strains local environments so badly that people cannot feed themselves.

The various demographic changes I have described arrived with remarkable speed. At the turn of this century, the conventional wisdom among demographers was that the population of Europe was in precipitous decline, the Islamic world was in the grip of a population explosion, and Africa’s population faced devastation by HIV/AIDS. Only a handful of scholars questioned the idea that the Chinese would outnumber all other groupsfor decades or even centuries to come. In fact, however, the latest UN projections suggest that China’s population, now 1.3 billion, will increase slowly through 2030 but may then be reduced to half that number by the end of the century.

Because there are so many assumptions embedded in it, this forecast of the Chinese future could well be wrong. There is one area, however, in which demography relies on hard census data rather than assumptions about the future, and that is in mapping the youth cohort. All of the teenagers who will be alive in 2020 have already been born. So a strong indication of the eventual end of China’s dominance of world population statistics is apparent in the fact that there are now 372 million Indians under the age of 15, but only 270 million Chinese. This gap will grow. India seems very likely to become the world’s most populous country by 2030 or thereabouts, but only if nothing changes—China maintains its one-child policy and India does not launch the kind of crash program of birth control that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi so controversially attempted in the 1970s.

There is another development that could affect future Indian and Chinese birthrates: the use of sonograms to ascertain the sex of a fetus. Wider availability of this technology has permitted an increase in gender-specific abortions. The official Chinese figures suggest that 118 boys are now being born in China for every 100 girls. As a result, millions of Chinese males may never find a mate with whom to raise a conventional family. The Chinese call such lonely males “bare branches.” The social and political implications of having such a large population of unattached men are unclear, but they are not likely to be happy.

Gender imbalances are not limited to China. They are apparent in South Korea, Taiwan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and increasingly in India, particularly among the Sikhs. Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University and Andrea den Boer of Britain’s University of Kent at Canterbury calculate that there 90 million “missing” women in Asia, 40 million each in China and India, six million in Pakistan, and three million in Bangladesh.

In a recent paper Hudson and den Boer asked, “Will it matter to India and China that by the year 2020, 12 to 15 percent of their young adult males will not be able to ‘settle down’ because the girls that would have grown up to be their wives were disposed of by their societies instead?” They answered, “The rate of criminal behavior of unmarried men is many times higher than that of married men; marriage is a reliable predictor of a downturn in reckless, antisocial, illegal, and violent behavior by young adult males.” Resulting cross-border “bridal raids,” rising crime rates, and widespread prostitution may come to define what could be called the geopolitics of sexual frustration.

The state’s response to crime and social unrest could prove to be a defining factor for China’s political future. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency asked Hudson to discuss her dramatic suggestion that “in 2020 it may seem to China that it would be worth it to have a very bloody battle in which a lot of their young men could die in some glorious cause.” Other specialists are not as alarmed. Military observers point out that China is moving from a conscript army to a leaner, more professional force. And other scholars contend that China’s population is now aging so fast that the growing numbers of elderly people may well balance the surge of frustrated young males to produce a calmer and more peaceful nation.

China is also a key site of another striking demographic change: the rapid growth
of the global middle class, perhaps the fastest-growing discrete segment of the world’s population. While the planet’s population is expected to grow by about one billion people by 2020, the global middle class will swell by as many as 1.8 billion, with a third of this number residing in China. The global economic recession will retard but not halt the expansion of the middle class—nobody expected growth without interruption.

The lower the birthrate, the greater the likelihood that a given society is developing—investing in education, accumulating disposable income and savings, and starting to consume at levels comparable to those of the middle classes in developed societies. Absent a shock factor such as war or famine, a society with a falling birthrate tends to be aspirational: Its members seek decent housing, education for their children, provision for health care and retirement and vacations, running water and flush toilets, electricity and appliances such as refrigerators and televisions and computers. As societies clamber up the prosperity chain, they also climb the mobility ladder, seeking bicycles, motor scooters, and eventually cars; they also climb the protein ladder, seeking better, more varied foods and more meat.

This pattern is apparent in China, India, and the Middle East. China’s new middle class, defined as those in households with incomes above about $10,000 a year, is now estimated to number between 100 million and 150 million people. Some put the figure in India as high as 200 million. But it is apparent from the urban landscape across the developing world—whether in Mumbai or Shanghai, São Paulo or Moscow, Dubai or Istanbul—that a growing proportion of consumers seek to emulate a Western-international lifestyle, which includes an air-conditioned house with a car in the garage, a private garden, satellite TV, and Internet access, along with the chance to raise a limited number of children, all of whom will have the opportunity to go to college. Whether the biosphere can adapt to such increases in consumption remains a critical question.

Perhaps the most striking fact about the demographic transformation now unfolding is that it is going to make the world look a lot more like Europe. The world is aging in an unprecedented way. A milepost in this process came in 1998, when for the first time the number of people in the developed world over the age of 60 outnumbered those below the age of 15. By 2047, the world as a whole will reach the same point.

The world’s median age is 28 today, and it is expected to reach 38 by the middle of the century. In the United States, the median age at that point will be a youngish 41, while it will be over 50 in Japan and 47 in Europe. The United States will be the only Western country to have been in the top 10 largest countries in terms of population size in both 1950 and 2050. Russia, Japan, Germany, Britain, and Italy were all demographic titans in the middle of the 20th century. Today, only Russia and Japan still (barely) make the top 10. They will not stay there long. The world has changed. There is more and faster change to come.

Full text PDF available here.

Martin Walker, a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, is senior director of A. T. Kearney’s Global Business Policy Council.
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COMMENTS (45)

The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and in no way represent the views or opinions of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. This section is moderated by Wilson Quarterly staff.

wow

Thanks for a fascinating article.

Posted by: Park Slope Pubby | 5/3/09

German demographics

Early statistics indicated that Germany’s birth rate was rising because of new, generous government polices. But the statistics were misleading. Despite lavish benefits, the German birth rate continues to drop. Der Spiegel reports On Tuesday, though, the German Federal Statistical Office released preliminary figures for all of 2008, and the news is not pretty. Rather than the heralded rise in births, 2008 saw a 1.1 percent drop in the birthrate — or 8,000 fewer children for a country already worried about its growing demographic crisis.

Posted by: Lee Podles | 5/3/09

Don't completely buy his thesis

"Fewer than two percent of Britain’s male babies bore the prophet’s name.". How does this little factoid tell us how many children were born to Muslim immigrants in England? They could be naming their kids Jack as well? The key fact that the author acknowledges is that with the little data that is known, immigrant women in Europe have more children than native born Europeans. The difference may have narrowed, but it is still there. Another piece of info that he implies is that the number of dependents in the future will be no problem as we have had the same number (children then, seniors now and in the future) (per working age population) in the 1960's. I'm no expert, but my initial bet would be that the per capita cost of seniors is greater than kids.

Posted by: WJ | 5/4/09

In the words of the late, great Douglas Adams - Don't Panic!

Thanks for a fascinating article to show my right-wing co-workers who point an accusing finger at me, a newly-wed 29 year old, for not wanting to be a breeding machine - "be ready to wear a burkha in twenty years!" We're hoping for two kids, like most other educated, middle-class couples, whether in Germany (where we are), the US (where I'm from), Turkey or India. Five, as the loudest of my colleagues was clamoring for, would be insanity.

Posted by: Amanda | 5/4/09

Jobs and Life expectancy

Jobs don't apear out of thin air. It is needed that jobs fullfill some market(people) necessity. With increased efficiencies it is to be expected that there will be much less work available and we will have the benefit (others will say the risk) of getting technological satiated with increasingly better products that will surpass our senses. Our inflexible societies are not prepared to that. Just to note that several countries are already over 80 years in Life expectancy like France, Canada, Sweden.

Posted by: lucklucky | 5/4/09

Russian Birthrate

From the article: "In Russia, the effects of declining fertility..." Russian fertility is no longer declining. While the Russian birth rate is still below replacement level, it has been rising for several years now, and consequently the pace of Russian population decline has slowed dramatically. This should have been mentioned in the article.

Posted by: Jon0815 | 5/4/09

Don't Panic! ... So long as you like Euro-collapse.

Amanda, Make sure you also show your right-wing co-workers this: http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjhkOTVlZTBhNzQxMWE4MGYxODI4NGQ0NDE4M2U5NjA=

Posted by: Ted S. | 5/5/09

Dependents' Costs

Children's education can certainly be just as expensive as seniors. For example, the average expense for elementary school education in DC is about $12,000/year.

Posted by: Robert Hume | 5/5/09

Cost per child

That $12K figure is cherry picked. It represents the high end. Homeschooled children have a per capita cost in the low hundreds of dollars. In between are many other figures closer to $6K. Meanwhile nursing home costs are now over $70K/yr. on average.

Posted by: ubercheesehead | 5/5/09

Freedom of research?

When I read about fertility rates in Western Europe I wonder how it is distributed among different groups of women depending on their nationality, skin colour and religion. The article gives only few hints on very existence of such data. Is it allowed to collect it in the lands of political correctness? What are e.g. fertility rates of white French women born in France and black or Muslim women living in France and born anywhere? Are researchers allowed to collect information like that or do they need to play games like collecting data on fertility of women born in Morocco?

Posted by: PM | 5/5/09

Steyn is the statiscal fearmongerer

OMG, if Mark Steyn is being quoted it's really bad. He says: "Walker doesn't provide any serious evidence that ethnic European birthrates are increasing." Well, according to the Danish statiscal institute, they are: http://www.dr.dk/Nyheder/Indland/2009/05/06/083729.htm in english http://islamineurope.blogspot.com/2009/05/denmark-immigrantsdanes-have-same.html This report points to a basic fact which makes logical sense: Immigrants don't just adopt the birthing statistics of the host nation, they do it when they start to resemble the host nations socio economic status. In other words, if they are well integrated, this will be reflected in birthing numbers. The fact that they're Islamic i n background has little or no influence. Unless ... of course you WANT TO believe that all muslim immigrant come to Europe with a sinister TAKE over plan ... !!! Wait, didn't I see that movie? Invasion of the body snatchers? Yep. The "Islamization of Europe" narrative, has all the hallmarks of a bad scifi movie. Luckily, we have a scifi answer: infect them with the equality socioeconomic status virus, and?? They will magically, sorry, LOGICALLY disappear! The "immigrants breed like rabbits and they will outnumber us soon" is very, very old. It was said about Italian and Irish in NYC, and about French Canadian Catholics in Canada. Both have proven to be wrong. But if muslims continue to be marginalized, they WILL seek security in larger families. Of course, we could beat our chest and demand that we don't succumb to this threat of "Equalize us or you'll be run over", but throwing tantrums is not helpful. And we don't do Endlosung in Europe anymore. And whats more, the birthrate among Euro-muslims KEEPS falling. And in the richer muslim states. Only the extremely poor African countries have birthrates of 5 to 6. Lots deaths through war as well. Finally: When Italy and Spain were extremely poor, they had high birth rates as well. Look at them now!! With 1.3 they are among the lowest. And if you're so worried???? Make more kids!!!

Posted by: TheSteelGeneral | 5/6/09

Stats

Demographics like Climate Science is driven by statistical analysis. In other words, the data and algorithims can be manipulated. Data manipulation, however, eventually comes up hard against reality. In Frankfurt Germany, the OB ward of thier local hospital would have closed many years ago if it wasn't for the Islamic minorities. Ditto for Amsterdam, Berlin, and Brussells. In Italy, the average age of a farmer is 65, and in Sweden and Norway homeschooling has become the norm in many towns simply because there are not enough children to justify the cost of even a 1 room school house. Yes, this is all anecdotal. But eventually the evidence piles up. Yes, the trends could drastically change if European women under 35 began to have 2 and 3 children. But, I don't remember seeing too many Mormans over there. Besides having children entails sacrifice, a drain on income, and lots of stress. Who needs that, right?

Posted by: JP | 5/7/09

Analysis seems thin

Unfortunately, not only do you fail to actually prove the white European fertility rates are increasing (it just looks like you wrote that the gap between Muslims and Christians was shrinking), you also fail to address which white Europeans are having children. I read a study that said that the right half of the bell curve in Britain (IQ), was down by more than half a standard deviation in children. I would guess that this is indicative of all developed countries; within a few generations there will be few smart people, unless there are smart drugs.

Posted by: Greyswan | 5/9/09

Cost of Seniors

Of Course those who live at the Nursing Facilities, last an average of 3 to 6 years. I beliveve Education of children with college & prolonged childhoods much exceeds that of dependent seniors.

Posted by: Katie | 5/15/09

Russia fertility

With an average female age over forty it is going to take a large fertility increase to prevent a long phase of population decline.

Posted by: Snake Oil Baron | 5/17/09

Amanda, please think again

Amanda, really, five children would be riches and despite the trouble and hard work, would bring more joy than all the things and other satisfactions you could have instead. Brothers and sisters are the best gifts you can give your children. And there is enough love to go around; it isn't something which gets split up like a pie. -From a mother of nine.

Posted by: eulogos | 5/27/09

Lacking

That's an odd coincidence because I'm from a family of 9 kids! This whole argument reminds me of that bit in Monty Python's 'Meaning of Life' where the Catholics are sprouting up everywhere. You know the funny this is, they were right! Now we're seeing the Muslims copy the same techniques. What I didn't like about this article is the following: 1-The statistics are about everything but what they need to be. All I've seen are the same ones I've read in articles expressing opposite views. He denounces projections of the future but many of his counterpoints are based on them. It is true that '... sensationalist headlines soon become common wisdom', the most prominent being 'The World's New Numbers'. What it needs is this: -total current birthrate of Native Europeans vs. total of Immigrants for the past 10 years. -total population of Western World vs. Rest of the World 2-He doesn't explain the reasoning behind this whole 'question'. Why are people afraid of rising Muslim immigration ? Why was the Western birthrate declining and the rest growing?(which even he admits in the line '... northern Europeans have started having more babies.' ) Most importantly, regardless of natives and immigrants,should the World on a whole be declining or rising in population? I was referred to this article because the other fellow claimed it had these answers. What I found was an attempt but it doesn't conclude the 'Question'. (P.S.-Amanda, why would 5 kids be insanity? And where's your sense of adventure?)

Posted by: Philip Hunt | 6/5/09

factoid

"Fewer than two percent of Britain’s male babies bore the prophet’s name.". How does this little factoid tell us how many children were born to Muslim immigrants in England? They could be naming their kids Jack as well?" The factoid is a refutation of The Times' factoid about the name Mohammad that has been repeated incessantly as part of the debate on this issue. And there are probably a lot more apostates and secularists of Muslim background named Mohammad than there are orthodox Muslims named Jack.

Posted by: Snake Oil Baron | 6/10/09

This is misleading...

I find much of this article misleading, for example, the Islamic countries cited as having near European fertility levels were Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Lebanon. First, ALL these nations are small for Muslim countries, secondly, of these only Lebanon and Tunisia are actually at sub-replacement fertility, and over time, this makes an enormous difference. I can't see how we can be complacent about this, and I am horrified at the indifference of European and Western nations at their incoming demographic fate...

Posted by: emblazoned | 6/18/09

The Prophet’s Name

Also note that the pool of usual 1st names may be smaller for other cultures than it is in England, making the 'leading' "John" a relativly tiny % of the total.

Posted by: j3f3r | 6/20/09

Why the new U.N. projections may turn out to be serious underestimates

Thank you to the Wilson Quarterly and Dr. Martin for this excellent article. This is offer to two additional observations concerning the latest U.N. population projecions: (1) The most recent U.N. population projections could, like so many demographic projections in the past, again turn out to be dramatic underestimates of the numbers that actually emerge. Why? Because in the past, decades of falling birth rates were expected to slow rates of population growth. The factor that has repeatedly confounded such projections, however, is that medical advances end up lowering death rates more dramatically than expected so that dramatic reductions in mortality end up canceling-out tendencies otherwise suggested by falling birth rates. Result? In the past, real-world populations with decades of falling birth rates (e.g., Sri Lanka 1938-1984) routinely ended up not just growing larger, but growing faster-than-ever. This last fact is the lesson that Sri Lanka holds for the world today: Even if we succeed in lowering birth rates around the world, progress in medical research, life-extension, and biotechnologies may well end up lowering death rates even more. Thus, while both trends each constitute one sort of good news, at the end of the day, when taken together, our populations could end up growing faster instead of more slowly. If a similar set of events takes place worldwide and affects generations now living, world population by 2100 could end up closer to 13 billion than to the 9 or 10 billion imagined by current U.N. projections. And, if we are already close to or beyond earth's long-term limits, each of these extra and unexpected billions increases the possibility and seriousness of overshoot. Recent research studies, for example, have succeeded in multiplying lifespan in laboratory organisms six-fold. In a recent review article, for instance, Cynthia Kenyon (2005) reports on six-fold extensions of lifespans that have already occurred in laboratory organisms, noting that in human terms, an equivalent extension would result in healthy, active 500-year-olds. (If what has already been accomplished, then, in actual laboratory organisms can ever be widely-achieved in human populations, some replacement-level fertility rates may, perhaps, have to fall to just 4/10ths of a child per woman - per century?) The suppostions above may actually be surprisingly more realistic than they at first seem. For example, over the past one hundred years, our species has followed a repeated pattern following new discoveries and technical advances: First there is an initial achievement or discovery that is quickly followed by rapid advances, proliferation, and wide and novel applications. A good example of this is illustrated by the development of aeronautics. At Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright flew a heavier-than-air vehicle for twelve seconds and a distance of 120 feet. Less than seven decades later, U.S. astronauts traveled to the moon, landed on its surface, and returned safely to earth again in just over one week. Similar patterns have also characterized the development of computers, DNA technologies, communications, and molecular biology – each beginning with technical advances, followed by quick proliferation and progression to today's capabilities with breathtaking speed. All of the above examples thus suggest that today's advances in medicine, molecular genetics, and life-extension may have far-reaching impacts on death rates and demographics in the half-century just ahead. (2) Problematic failures of Demographic Transition Theory Suppose that science and medical research bring about advances that result in relatively sudden and unexpected reductions in mortality. In this circumstance, current demographic theory envisions a period of “demographic transition” during which there is a time-delay before reductions in fertility occur to reflect the reduced mortality (and during this lag-time, populations skyrocket as births greatly exceed the lowered death rates). Finally, however, after one or more generations, current theory postulates a gradual decline in fertility rates that slowly reduces them to levels commensurate with mortality rates, and a population stabilizes. Thus, demographers commonly envision our time of soaring populations as a transition period during which fertility rates have not yet caught up to our falling mortality rates. And they hope, imagine, and suppose that the transition will complete itself any decade now. One problem is, however, that such anticipations may well be subverted by a problematic aspect of transition theory. How? Why? Because science, medicine, and technology lower mortality rates not just once, but repeatedly - over and over and over again – so that we live in a perpetual state of transition. In other words, we repeatedly extend and perpetuate the period of demographic transition (with its skyrocketing populations) so that its completion never occurs or is repeatedly postponed. (In effect, each of our breakthroughs in medicine and life-extension re-initiate the transition period, delaying its completion and extending its duration more and more - so that our falling fertility rates are never allowed to catch up.) As fertility rates slowly and gradually adjust to an initial mortality reduction, today’s genetics, technologies, and medical advances institute a second, third, fourth, and fifth mortality reduction in increasingly quick succession. As a result, falling fertility never catches up to the multiple new reductions in mortality and the interim stage of the transition (with its period of soaring population) is never completed. (It will be completed eventually, of course, but with each delay in the transition, the completion is increasingly likely to occur as a collapse.) What current theory does not fully articulate, therefore, is the role of science, technology, and medicine that are currently making reductions in death rates so quickly and repeatedly that offsetting fertility reductions do not (or cannot) occur in the short times available. And finally, the coup de grace of all this is that the emerging advances in longevity seen in laboratory organisms (and compounds, perhaps, like resveratrol) seem set to perhaps amplify and worsen our current overshoot and carry us calamitously past natural thresholds and tipping points that should not be transgressed, so that our degree of overshoot becomes so great that complete collapse can no longer be avoided. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the earth's carrying capacity for an industrialized humanity is almost certainly somewhat less than two billion, and, considering the fact that we are on-track to add our seventh, eighth, and ninth billions between now and mid-century, a continuation of today's demographic tidal wave may constitute the greatest single risk that our species has ever undertaken. As a member of the natural science community, I concur entirely with one of the "asides" in Martin Walker's article: "Whether the biosphere can adapt to such increases in consumption remains a critical question."

Posted by: rocky xviii | 9/1/09

Very incisive analysis

Sir, your article is a real eye-opener. I am an engineer from India and population & demographic issues have been of particular interest to me, especially as it pertains to my beloved, overpopulated India, as well as the rest of the world. It think that most of the so-called fifty- or hundred-year demographic predictions are basically bunkum. In the coming decades, the demographic scene will alter very non-linearly and to some extent unpredictably. Moreover, I have an ever-strengthening hunch that we will see some kind of a "momentous population reset" in this century. Like one of the commenters, I sincerely believe that this planet can only sustain around 1-1.5 billion people having living standards approaching those of the west, at most. The coming decades will definitely throw up many huge surprises, rather upheavals. The current demographics are just not sustainable. Either Man, or Nature, will intervene. I am not a flag-bearing pessimist, but I fear that this century will be calamitous. I worry about my posterity.

Posted by: PURU RAJ | 9/21/09

UK Fertility by Ethnic Group

Richard Berthoud made some estimates for UK fertility by ethnic group in the UK 2001 ONS Population Trends 104, page 14. You can find it on the UK National statistics website. white 1.8 Afro-Caribbean 1.8 Indian 2.3 Pakistani 4.0 Bangladeshi 4.7 As Berthoud says "If the overall trend in Britain is from ‘old fashioned family values’ towards ‘modern individualism’, it can be argued that of the principal minority groups, South Asians, and especially Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, are behind the trend, with very high rates of marriage and of fertility, while Caribbeans are ahead of the trend, with high and rising rates of single parenthood." There are also figures available for total fertility by country of birth of mother (more than 20% of UK births are to mothers themselves born overseas) in the "Series FM1 no. 35 Birth statistics Review of the Registrar General on births and patterns of family building in England and Wales, 2006" Table 9.5 United Kingdom 1.6 India 2.3 Pakistan 4.7 Bangladesh 3.9 East Africa 1.6 Rest of Africa 2.0 Other New Commonwealth 2.2 Rest of World 1.8 If these two sets of data are correct, it implies that UK-born women of Bangladeshi origin have higher fertility than Bangladeshi-born women in the UK, while the revese is true for Pakistanis. Seems an unlikely hypothesis - but the key data is the much higher birthrate for both Pakistani and Bangladeshi women, whether UK-born or not.

Posted by: Laban Tall | 10/3/09

Something Evil Tampering With The Human Gene Pool

Isnt it interesting that the first people to use birth control&limit family size were white Europeans, now Asians&other yellow, red&brown peoples are catching up. However many black people are still resistant to birth control or limiting their family sizes. Still thinking "that this is an evil plot of the white man to exterminate the black man". In sub-saharian black Africa children are like "ants" everywhere. Just like it has been a failure to encourage white Europeans to have more children, it has been&will continue to be a dismal failure to see the worlds black population to slow down-it is never going to happen. The devil only wants the black genetics to be the whole human race in the future&he is doing a fine job of bringing this to pass.

Posted by: Ronnie Safreed | 12/28/09

To Ronnie Safreed

Without exception, the other postings include factual information from which a conclusion has been drawn and presented - some of which are just as racially charged as yours, but based in statistical information nonetheless. However, you have neglected to do so and have only revealed that you live under the cloud of a deep, irrational fear of Black people; you are silly.

Posted by: RefutetheFoolishness | 12/30/09

wow

wow, that was really longg (:

Posted by: anoymous | 4/28/10

Interesting discussion of population

I think the bottom line is that all people everywhere should only have as many children as they can care for emotionally and physically. I cringe when I think of people having more children than they can feed. Why? Children are a wonderful priceless gift, but the only loving choice is to have the number of children you can give a good life. I'll be one of those seniors in 10 years, but I've provided for my own future and won't become a dependent of my children or society. Our planet has a finite amount of resources and at some point the question should be, is the world population sustainable on this planet? I enjoyed all of this discussion until ignorance reared it's stupid head with the comment "The devil only wants the black genetics to be the whole human race in the future..." Really. The devil you say. Education and kindness of spirit is the way to live on this planet with a whole lot of other people. I hope we don't have a whole lot of future children who grow up without food, shelter, education and love. There isn't a magic number of children anyone should have as long and they can provide a good life for them. That's just common sense, isn't it?

Posted by: Peggy Saint-Michel | 6/19/10

German data wrong

German retirement age is not 60 but 65, recently upped to 67 for people born after 1968 (I think, from memory). The welfare system is not generous, or my brother in Berlin could have afforded to move after about 7 years of unemployment. I did check for a pension at 60, wondering why he had not applied for an early pension, but that only exists for disabled people. He perished at the age of 60 in a de-tenanting campaign when the building was to be redeveloped to luxury apartments, The German welfare system is only generous for foreigners, but not for their own people.

Posted by: former Berliner | 6/29/10

very interesting combination of facts. I think the Muslim immigration to western countries could be a very good thing, in speeding up the modernization of the middle east. I think, in these "teens" years, we are going to see some big changes in the Arab world. (Starting with the 2011 shifts of power in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen)

Posted by: macaw | 2/2/11

Wage disparity

One more time... I learned two things working at a bank: 1. The increases in wages in 1974 was 20% across the board, but the lowest clerk got a .5% increase and the highest in the administration got a 18%. There are lots of ways to compute percentage. 2. Compound interest. Put these two ideas together, as the policy makers of the corporations have and you have part of the recipe for todays problems. They gave themselves a lot of rope and just ended up hanging themselves with it, along with a lot of innocent people who used to trust them.

Posted by: Susan Lorraine Knox | 3/6/11

Words Shmerds

No ones gonna do squat about anything Noone is soo many people Thats your names

Posted by: Someone | 3/25/11

The World's New Numbers

John Stuart Mill's "Very Simple Principle"

They Call It Home

The Pessimist Persuasion