Jennifer Sciubba, demographer and author of 8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World speaks as a part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series Monday in the Amphitheater.
Understanding demography is the key to reading the world, Jennifer D. Sciubba said Monday morning in the Amphitheater.
One of the foremost experts on political demography, Sciubba opened the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Four: “Eight Billion and Counting: The Future of Humankind in a Crowded World.” Her most recent book, 8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World, addresses the changing structures of the global population and what can be done to adapt to it.
For the first time since the beginning of human history, the world was home to 1 billion people in 1804. That number increased to 2 billion in 1927, and in 2022, the world saw its largest population yet, with 8 billion people. While this number continues to increase now, it won’t always.
Sciubba’s aim for her presentation was to address three prevalent myths about the human population regarding fertility rates, death and immigration. The first myth was that the global population is booming.
“We are not in the same world that we were in the middle of the last century,” she said. “If you look at the rate of global population change, it has been falling since the 1960s.”
To illustrate her point, Sciubba showed the shape of the global population — a diagram of the number of people on Earth, corresponding to their age, divided into male and female. In the 1950s and earlier, this was pyramid shaped, with the largest population being younger and the smallest being older. However, projections for the future show a more dome-like shape, with the highest population being older to middle-aged and tapering downward. This could be attributed to falling fertility rates.
“In 1968, there were over 120 of 200 countries where women had five or more children on average,” Sciubba said. “ … Out of 200 countries today, there are only eight with fertility rates of five or more.”
While the global population is still growing, the rate of growth is decreasing. Two out of three people live in places with “below-replacement fertility rates,” meaning for every two parents, there are less than two children.
The older population outnumbering the younger could also be due to differences in mortality. According to Sciubba, in 1995 the proportion of deaths of people above 80 years was 17%, while in 2023, it was over 50%. This makes the older population larger than it has ever been before.
The second myth she addressed was that population trends look the same everywhere. She explained that the issues faced by countries with shrinking populations are in many ways the opposite of the ones faced by the eight countries that still have fertility rates of five or more.
“Think about needing to provide jobs for increasing numbers of young people every year, finding enough school desks, basic vaccinations; to instead thinking about long-term care and social security, healthcare, pensions and workforce shortages,” she said.
In South Korea, the country with the lowest fertility rates, 16% of the population was older than 65 in 2020. However, due to low fertility, the country could face large workforce shortages in the future, since there won’t be enough young people to replace the older ones.
India, the world’s most populous country, also has below-replacement fertility, despite its increasing population. Same is the case with Thailand and Mexico, owing to the institutional family planning programs in those countries, instituted to curtail a population growing faster than the countries’ resources.
“How does a country like Thailand or India or Mexico have a policy agenda that deals with the population issues they have today — health issues, education and jobs — knowing just around the corner they will be dealing with European-style issues in terms of caring for an older population?” Sciubba said.
Sometimes there are political reasons behind demographic shifts. In the mid-2000s, Russia had a rapidly decreasing population, which led U.S. defense officials to believe the nation wasn’t a threat. They believed Russia’s demography would be its downfall, and that soon the nation would not have a conventional military force.
As a political scientist, Sciubba disagreed. It is important to think about institutions within each country, rather than current demographics, she said, and anyone following the news knows that this hypothesis about Russia was not accurate.
The last myth Sciubba addressed was the notion that population losses can be compensated for by increasing births and immigration.
“If we look at common solutions to low fertility, they are often economic,” she said. The thinking is that “if it wasn’t so expensive, if people had more (family) leave, then they would be able to stay home with kids; they would have more children.”
Countries like Japan and South Korea have generous family leave policies enshrined in law; however, mothers take leave at higher rates than fathers. The increasing awareness of gender disparity — and frustrations toward what’s perceived as government interference in citizens’ lives — have pushed fertility rates even lower.
China’s one-child policy — and a cultural preference for sons, rather than daughters — meant the country saw a skewed sex ratio in children being born. South Korea faced a similar issue; in 1990, for every 100 girls born, there were 193 boys.
“Cultures do change, and part of the way they change can be through laws,” Sciubba said.
One of the ways South Korea helped shift its culture was to change or do away with discriminatory laws regarding property inheritance rights, or banning ultrasound technology that revealed the sex of the baby. In less than a generation, the skewed sex ratio was balanced.
Even with countries with more equitable laws, like Finland, fertility rates are lower. This indicates that laws don’t necessarily translate to growing population rates — especially since younger people are finding it increasingly harder to be financially stable enough to become parents.
In the United States, despite low fertility rates, there is a growth in population due to immigration. Sciubba said only 4% of people in the world live in a different country from the one they were born in, and most migrants come from only 20 countries.
“Migration is not a demographic issue, it is a political one,” she said.
With this data, even if migration increases the population of one place, it will decrease that of another. As such, the global population will continue to fall.
“The places that were senders for migration, like Mexico, are themselves rapidly aging,” she said. “It is truly a different world.”
As fertility rates decrease, Sciubba said, the global population will hit a peak in the next generation and then begin declining. Sciubba said it was in humanity’s best interest to accept this scenario and use it to build a stronger, more resilient community.
“If we start to shift our mindset away from these myths and towards accepting the demographic reality, then a whole new set of policy options opens up for us,” she said.
