The real population timebomb - and why we need a more family-friendly society

Depopulating trends are global, across the developed world. After decades of worrying when Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” would go off, we are seeing a rapid decline in child-rearing, so much so that, for the first time, there are more grandparents than grandchildren on the planet. The lower birthrates are leading some demographers to suggest that global populations, instead of growing into the next century, will start to decline as early as 2070.

There is a profound and growing population crisis in the developed, urban world and it isn't what most of you think it is - we are no longer, indeed haven't been for a long while, replacing ourselves. It's not just headlines like the one about there being more grandparents than grandchildren but an accelerating decline in communities outside big cities and, without immigration, the growing inability to provide the care and support those grandparents will require.

Here's what it means:

According to a 2016 Italian environmental association report, there are nearly 2,500 rural Italian villages that are perilously depopulated, some semi-abandoned and others virtual ghost towns.

From the 1850s through to 2004 the population of the village always hovered around the 80 to 100 mark, but since 2004 the population has dropped to 50 and only 20 of those are under the age of 60.

Those living in the village are losing hope that the village – and indeed all of rural Ireland – can be saved.

In Hara-izumi, there's no worry about an influx of foreigners. There are no immigrants here, nor the prospect of any. A bigger issue now is wildlife: The village's population has become so sparse that wild bears, boars and deer are roaming the streets with increasing frequency.

The Alpine hamlet of Albinen is so desperate for new residents that it has voted to offer $70,000 for a family of four to settle in the southern Swiss community.

In the first referendum of its kind, 100 of Albinen's 248 residents showed up to vote Thursday, and 71 approved a proposal to pay $25,000 to each adult and $10,000 per child to live in their picturesque village.

"Only the elderly stayed behind, the parents of those who left, and over time they grew older and died," he said as he stumbled across rubble to reach his dilapidated former office. He said Kalna's population had shrunk from 4,000 to 1,000.

Just take the figures: 85 out of the town's 820 houses are empty. The town had 3,000 inhabitants not too long ago, but now there are only 1,900. When elderly citizens have passed away, there has been no one there to replace them.

"Nobody lives there anymore either," Daum says, pointing to a mint-green single-family house. The industrial bakery moved to the east, he explains, and the area in front of the former garden furniture factory is full of dandelions. The Edeka grocery store closed its doors for good last year, and no trains have passed through the town since 1994.

I could continue - these examples from Italy, Ireland, Japan, Switzerland, Serbia and Germany could be joined by others from Poland, from Canada and from the USA. Our cities are, where they've sustained their economies, thriving but the people making that thriving possible are the ones who've left these small towns and rural villages. All this sits against a background of concern about immigration and integration for the people who - because there's far fewer young people in these rich nations - are filling the gaps left by those empty villages.

Eighty percent of US counties, notes a study by Economic Innovation Group, with roughly 150 million people, have seen their labor force decline in the past decade. The demography of the United States will become more difficult in the next quarter century, with an increase in the working population (15-64) of 18 million projected to be swamped by 28 million new senior citizens, according to the United Nations.

For Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, whose article the quote above comes from, the problem isn't how you square the need for labour with local resentment of immigration but rather how we create a society and economy that allows population replacement. Not the explosive population growth of the past 200 years but a recognition that, if we're to continue the betterment of humanity, we need to achieve a steady state. Kotkin & Cox point to housing policies as a key component but we should also ask questions about policy and attitudes towards families, to childcare and to a more dynamic work environment allowing people to move in and out of paid employment. Above all we need to recognise the value of family and that it cannot really be measured in purely economic terms.

We need to place community and family policy right there alongside climate change, the impact of technology and long term healthcare as one of the 21st century's biggest challenges. If we don't we will see more and more of these shattered, even abandoned, communities, places filled with old people trying their best to look after very old people.

.....

The electoral register is the most accurate source for adult population data

Right now the electoral registers are probably the most accurate estimate of the UK's adult population. There are two reasons for this - one a credit to the Coalition government and the other to the insistence on data sharing by local authority chief executives. What disappoints me is that opposition parties at Westminster continue to present the idea that there is somehow a better estimation of adult population available for the drawing of constituency boundaries.

Let's look firstly at the the new electoral registers based on a process of individual registration.This new system was introduced for various reasons including the persistence of register stuffing (that is registering people to an address who aren't living there or in some cases don't even exist), inaccuracies such as dead and gone way folk (nixies as we call then in direct marketing) staying on the register, and a whole load of people who for various reasons weren't registered at all.

Had we just stuck with introducing a system of individual registration then it is beyond doubt that the numbers registered would have fallen and that fall would have disproportionately been among the young and the poor. But the new system didn't take that approach but instead allowed existing verified name and address data within government systems to be shared for the purpose of registration. As a result somewhere between 65% and 80% of registrations were concluded using existing information and this information, given much of it was for benefits recipients, disproportionately focused on the poor. Anyone receiving a benefit is automatically registered - that's every mum, all the registered unemployed, those receiving in-work benefits, retired people and those receiving sickness or ill health support.

We can add to this the use of council tax records, the DVLA database, MoD staff records and some higher education records. All-in-all a pretty comprehensive effort to ensure that most of the registration process didn't require expensive and time-consuming paperwork. To fill the gap, local authorities undertook a variety of different approaches including traditional mailshots, door drops, advertising campaigns and canvassing. The result is a system of registration that is over 90% accurate even before the addition of a further 2 million electors - an extra 4% on the total - during the first half of 2016 (controversially excluded from the drawing of new boundaries).

On the basis of this successful (but still not perfect) system it seems sensible to use the electoral registers as the basis for drawing up boundaries for parliamentary constituencies. Some seem to differ, arguing that we should use the "whole adult population" as the measure. The basis for drawing boundaries using a 'whole population' measure has to be the 2011 census and this is already five years out-of-date. We should also note that the census is not itself a precise identification of every person (although it strives to do this) and the data is adjusted to account for under-reporting in some areas and this data was challenged by some local authorities. Again, the census is better than 95% accurate which is good enough for most purposes but in this it isn't much better - at the point of collection - than electoral registration. Its advantage isn't a better identification of individuals at addresses but rather the richer data associated with the individuals actually identified.

And this is all out-of-date so we would need to make some adjustments to the numbers so as to be accurate. At the national level this is pretty straightforward - add and subtract births and deaths then adjust for net migration to get a pretty accurate estimate. For local authorities the first part (births and deaths) is easy but migration isn't as we've no requirement - such as is the case in Spain - for registering residency. We'd have to use proxy measures such as the council tax base, the Post Office change of address file and (irony) the electoral register. And this would still only get us a measure at the local authority level rather than the ward level data needed to draw up boundaries. None of this makes for a more accurate estimation of ward-level population than the electoral register.

There's a valid criticism arguing that those 2 million 2016 registrations should be included in the review but the effect of this would be pretty marginal unless the distribution of that 2 million is very skewed in terms of geography. It's effect would be to shift the quota range from 71-78,500 to 73.6-81,300 a result likely to further disadvantage smaller inner city seats - there's no evidence that excluding these voters would have anything other than a very marginal impact on the new seat distribution.

As a last thought, we can note that the last full review of English local council ward boundaries (2003) was on the basis of a future population projection rather than the census or electoral register. It is clear that, for many places, this was a pretty unsatisfactory measure - you only need to look at the population change in Leeds Council's Headingley ward to recognise that current population is a better basis for boundaries. And right now the most accurate source of current adult population numbers at ward level is the electoral register.

...

The case for immigration...

****

Here's a projection on Japan's population:

Japan's agency responsible for projecting population, the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research forecasts a stunning reduction of population to only 42.9 million residents in 2110. For every three Japanese residents today, there will be one in 2110 according to the National Institute of Population. If this projection is realized, Japan's population would drop to a level not seen since the middle 1890s.

The National Institute of Population projects a population loss to 97.0 million residents by 2050, for an annual population loss rate of 0.7 percent from 2015. By 2100, the population would fall to 49.6 million, for an annual loss rate of 1.3 percent. Over the 95 years from 2015, the annual population loss rate would accelerate from 0.4 percent annually to nearly 1.5 percent.

Now I know there's some folk who rather want humanity to die out (Jeremy Corbyn, for example) but Japan really does face a crisis because for much of the time between now and 2110 that country will be sustaining an ever bigger population of very old people with a smaller and smaller population of active working age people. This is essentially unsustainable. Unless, of course, you're like the UK and the USA and think immigration is rather a good idea.

....

A question...

****

What if the projections are wrong? What if, rather than the city growing younger and larger it grows older and smaller? What if the economy becomes dominated by the business of looking after that older population? And what if the older people who remain are the poorest and least healthy?

Residents of seaside towns, large and small, will be familiar with this picture. From being wealthy places of leisure and pleasure they have - from Blackpool to Bridlington, from Southend to Littlehampton - become just these kind of places.

The question for people in marginal northern towns - whether in East Lancashire or Yorkshire of the North East - is whether this picture is a real possibility for our future?

I ask because the happy thriving future we're being sold be politicians and planners might not be real.

....

Urbanisation, families and population decline

****

Here's a quote taken from a report written by geographer Joel Kotkin ("What is a City for?"):

In developing countries, where the megacities of the future are being formed, as the price of space rises, the quality of life declines, and city services become less accessible and efficient. Average household size and fertility rates in cities have begun to decline. For example, while The World Bank data puts fertility for China and Japan at 1.6 and 1.4 respectively, Beijing and Shanghai are experiencing much lower rates than the national average. In Tokyo, fertility rate is about 1.2. In Shanghai, according to National University of Singapore demographer, Gavin Jones (2009), it has dropped to a remarkably low 0.7.

These phenomena can be seen in virtually every part of the world, from developing countries such as Iran, China, Mexico and across Northern Africa, birth rates have plunged towards those of higher income countries as they have urbanised. Birth rates among Muslims in Europe, as well, have dropped (Pearce, 2010, pp.114–116). Divorce over the past decade has grown by 135% in Iran, where women now constitute 60% of college graduates. Meanwhile, household size has declined to less than 3.5, according to the most recent national census. In Tehran, another city of largely apartment dwellers with forbidding cost of living, especially for housing, the latest average household size in 2011 was reported to be 3.1 (Erdbrink, 2012).

Not only is this not the picture we expect of developing countries (we are told repeatedly by those with a vested interest in telling us that fertility rates are high and population growth is rapid - this appears only to be true in rural societies) but is raises an interesting question about cities and the process of urbanisation.

On the one hand urban growth drives economic growth, innovation and development but at the same time the reality for individuals and families is that costs rise to the point where raising children is forfeited because the couple simply can't afford to have a family. And because there are no families, no children in our cities the development of the urban environment does not provide for children. Our economic development strategies focus on attracting the young, single and highly educated to creating what Terry Clark from the University of Chicago called the

"...new city, built around the needs of what he calls “the slimmer family” of childless couples and often single professionals, focuses primarily on recreation, arts, culture and restaurants; a system built around the newly liberated individual."

 In a world where few people have families and, where they do those families are small, we build up problems for our future. So far the gap left by the absence of children is made up by migration mostly from rural areas. The question we need to ask is what happens when the migrants run out?

....

More from David Attenborough, eugenicist

****

Today, David Attenborough has returned to his neo-malthusian, crypto-fascism. Essentially he's saying we should let those dark folk in Africa (or wherever) starve to death:

Raising the example of Ethiopia, Sir David said that the famine there was down to there being “too many people for too little piece of land”.

Speaking ahead of his new series David Attenborough's Rise of Animals, he suggested that humans are “blinding ourselves” to the problem, claiming, “We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That's barmy”.

Yes folks, this is our sainted bunnyhugger-in-chief speaking here. You lap up his gorgeous programmes about animals and give him the air to say it's OK simply to let poor people starve to death.

Leave aside Attenborough's ignorance of what caused the Ethiopian famine, this attitude - wrapped up in pseudo-science as it is - needs to be challenged. And perhaps Attenborough should be called out for the unpleasant human being that he has become?

....

Tell me Sir David who are you going to kill first?

****

It seems that (at least according to George Monbiot*) the sainted David Attenborough has been peddling his eugenicist message again:

On the Today programme on Wednesday, Sir David Attenborough named the rising human population as the first of the factors causing the loss of the UK's wildlife. 

We know that Sir David believes in a mythical thing called 'optimum population':

On joining the Optimum Population Trust, Sir David said growth in human numbers was "frightening".

Sir David has been increasingly vocal about the need to reduce the number of people on Earth to protect wildlife. 

What interests me (leaving aside that the current population projections for the world suggest stabilisation by the middle of this century and decline thereafter) is who Sir David wants to kill off.

Is he proposing to sterilise less productive members of society - cripples, people without university degrees, members of parliament? Or are we to expect a sort of Logan's Run:

"The seeds of the Little War were planted in a restless summer during the mid-1960s, with sit-ins and student demonstrations as youth tested its strength. By the early 1970s over 75 percent of the people living on Earth were under 21 years of age. The population continued to climb—and with it the youth percentage..."

Perhaps 21 is too young to pop us off, maybe thirty as in the film or perhaps a more modest 45!  Or will we have be some dystopic variant on the National Lottery - with the prize being sterilisation or even death.

The truth is that Attenborough is perhaps the last of a dinosaur generation - the inheritor of the authoritarian state direction (I hesitate to give it its real name) that so appealed to Keynes, to Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and to that self-indulgent English elite: Shaw, Wells, Tawney, Foot. These people, for all their supposed socialism, saw a load of little peons to be herded about, organised, hectored, lectured and patronised. And if needs be, neutered.

So given it isn't gorillas Sir David plans on killing, who is it?

....

*Can I point out that Monbiot's article is (as usual) a pile of factually incorrect dribble

....

Why the nannying fussbuckets are wrong...

****

I wonder why those public health folk don't ever mention this?

The life expectancy of the UK population is increasing by five hours a day,

This is despite:

The obesity epidemic
Smoking
Binge drinking
Salt
Fat
Sugar

Not going to the gym
Processed food
Fizzy drinks

Or for that matter the best efforts of the NHS to kill us with incompetence and neglect.

So shut up will you and let us live our lives. We're doing OK!

....

David Attenborough - eugenicist

****

I was very tempted to title this comment "David Attenborough - fascist" but people might misunderstand my point. Others - via the fine medium of Twitter suggested: "David Attenborough - fabian" in recognition of all those social democrats and pseudo-liberals (and apologists for mass murderers) like Sidney & Beatrice Webb, G B Shaw, H G Wells and J M Keynes who were in favour of government intervention to stop the masses from breeding.

However, I thing that "David Attenborough - eugenicist" will suffice for that is what he is:

"We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so,” warns David Attenborough in an interview in the new issue of Radio Times magazine. “It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde,” says the natural history broadcaster.

And it's not us Western white folk - we're fine (or more pertinently failing to meet replacement levels meaning, but for immigration, negative population growth). It the huddled masses in Africa:

“We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves – and it’s not an inhuman thing to say. It’s the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a co-ordinated view about the planet it’s going to get worse and worse.”

 A less kind blogger might sniff a little racism there!

Now David Attenborough - along with the other posh eugenicists in organisations like Friends of the Earth and the Green Party - has a pretty loose association with actual facts about population and indeed about famine in Ethiopia - true there are food shortages most years in this country but no objective observer - or even the development industry - identifies population pressures as the cause.

The real problem for nasty eugenicists like Attenborough is that economic growth, trade and open markets - by making us richer - are the means to 'control' population. Coupled with sending women to school rather than to arranged marriages. Here are the facts that the eugenicists ignore:

...in the next few years (if it hasn't happened already) the world will reach a milestone: half of humanity will be having only enough children to replace itself. That is, the fertility rate of half the world will be 2.1 or below. This is the “replacement level of fertility”, the magic number that causes a country's population to slow down and eventually to stabilise. According to the United Nations population division, 2.9 billion people out of a total of 6.5 billion were living in countries at or below this point in 2000-05. The number will rise to 3.4 billion out of 7 billion in the early 2010s and to over 50% in the middle of the next decade. The countries include not only Russia and Japan but Brazil, Indonesia, China and even south India.

Attenborough and his posh eugenicist mates can sod off. Humankind doesn't need him to sort its population growth - getting richer and better educated is doing the job just fine.

....

Caroline Lucas - eugenicist?

***

Or something pretty close:

David and Victoria Beckham may have been overjoyed to welcome their new daughter, Harper Seven, last week but, according to a growing group of campaigners, the birth of their fourth child make the couple bad role models and environmentally irresponsible.

As the world's population is due to hit seven billion at some point in the next few days, there is an increasing call for the UK to open a public debate about how many children people have.

Now the Green MP, Caroline Lucas, has joined other leading environmentalists in calling for the smashing of what TV zoologist Sir David Attenborough has called the "absurd taboo" in discussing family size in the UK.

 I was aware of the unpleasant agenda that Sir David and his friends at the "Optimum Population Trust" were pursuing but it does seem that the Green Party are dangerously close to aopting this unpleasant view.

....

Doesn't look full too me!

The Greens, their fellow travellers and the proto-fascists at the Daily Mail have returned to the subject of population and how the human species, like some spawny bacterium, is devouring the planet with its excessive breeding.  And coming up on the rails is the BBC celebrity – in the form of “wildlife expert” Chris Packham. Demonstrating an almost complete ignorance of population geography or demographics, Mr Packham launches an appeal for us to have fewer sprogs:

The Springwatch presenter suggested offering Britons tax breaks to encourage them to have smaller families. He effectively endorsed China’s controversial one-child policy, which sees couples who adhere to the rule given a lump sum on retirement. But he stopped short of suggesting people should be penalised for having too many children.

This charming childless chap thinks that the pandas will die out if we don’t stop breeding:

‘I question the way, for example, people have two children with one partner, then split up and have two with their next partner, just to even up the score.

'Fact is, we all eat food, breathe air and require space, and the more of us there are, the less of those commodities there are for other people and, of course, for the animals.’

I hate to be a controversialist on this matter but it really is about time we started thinking about this issue on the basis of fact rather than prejudice (indeed the Daily Mail’s problem with population growth appears to be the lack of blonde, blue-eyed Anglo-Saxon Christians).

The Journal of Comparative Family Studies celebrated its 40^th anniversary with this observation:

A global fertility decline has left only a small set of countries and a few percent of the global population with very high fertility. The dominant pattern is fertility decline to low levels-with over half of the global population now living in countries with below replacement level fertility. Concerns of a population explosion are now geographically concentrated and are being supplanted by concerns of a population implosion (i.e., declining population size and rapidly aging populations).

Britain’s problem is going to be an ageing population, declining fertility rates and the crisis of too few workers (something that contributed to our recent immigration episode). Yet there remain useful idiots like Mr Packham to indulge the nastier elements of the Green movement such as the Optimum Population Trust – the ones who think the UK population should be cut to just 29 million and who promote draconian disincentives to larger families.

It is organisations such as this – and the equally unpleasant uber-greens at Forum for the Future – who are wrong, both in their science and in the proposals they put forward to control fertility. Just because a few celebrities can be rolled out to tell us not to have babies doesn’t mean for one second we have a population problem.

As the picture at the top makes pretty clear – whatever is said about England’s population density (and it does suit the green fascists to select England rather than the UK for their figures) – the country is a long way from full and very unlikely to be concreted over anytime soon!

....