Raphael ThysPOPULATION, DEMOGRAPHY, AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
Adjusting to the Great Transition (Part 1)
(World population, 1700 to 2100, Creative Commons, 2023)
Annual global population growth has slowed and begun to decline. Given the best current projections, the “exponential growth” feared forty years ago has crossed the kink, making it an “S-curve” stabilizing in the middle of this century and beginning a slow decline. On the global level, the overall trend is for the human population to peak in 2086 at 10.4 billion, and then begin to drop.
We are well into a “great transition” that mirrors, on a much greater scale and in a much shorter time, the transition from pre-agricultural to agricultural societies around the world.
The Great Transition
The population of the world grew less in the twelve thousand years prior to 1950 than it has in the past fifty years. The human population only reached its first 100 million somewhere in the second millennium BCE, and then half a billion in 1600. The first billion arrived in the early nineteenth century. In my lifetime, the population has grown by roughly one billion people every twelve years: 2.5 billion in 1950, four billion in 1975, five billion in 1987, six billion in 1999, and eight billion in 2023.
(World population, 10,000 BCE to 2086 AD, Creative Commons 4.0, 2023)
The speed and distribution of the population change are reshaping the world in our lifetimes.
The Demographic Transition
This demographic transition is a result of economic development. As a rule, wealthy families have fewer children. With advancements in medical care and public health the knowledge that a child will survive to adulthood, helping to replace and support her parents, means there is no reason for the “insurance policy” of larger families.
(The demographic transition, Max Roser, Creative Commons, 2019)
The rise of welfare states, where the wealth produced by the children of the whole nation is taxed, assembled, and distributed by the state to the…