The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [97]
In technical jargon, the entire world is experiencing the second half of a ‘demographic transition’ from high mortality and high fertility to low mortality and low fertility. It is a process that has occurred in many countries, starting with France at the end of the eighteenth century then spreading to Scandinavia and Britain in the nineteenth century and to the rest of Europe in the early twentieth century. Asia began to follow the same path in the 1960s, Latin America in the 1970s and most of Africa in the 1980s. It is now a worldwide phenomenon: with the exception of Kazakhstan, there is no country where birth rate is high and rising. The pattern is always the same: mortality falls first, causing a population boom, then a few decades later, fecundity falls quite suddenly and quite rapidly. It usually takes about fifteen years for birth rate to fall by 40 per cent. Even Yemen, the country with the highest birth rate in the world for most of the 1970s with an average of nearly nine babies per woman, has halved the number. Once the demographic transition starts happening in a country it happens at all levels of society pretty well at the same time.
Not everybody saw the demographic transition coming, but some did. When the journalist John Maddox wrote a book in 1973 arguing that the demographic transition was already slowing Asian birth rates, he was treated to a condescending blast by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren:
The most serious of Maddox’s many demographic errors is his invocation of a ‘demographic transition’ as the cure for population growth in Asia, Africa and Latin America. He expects that birth rates there will drop as they did in developed countries following the industrial revolution. Since most underdeveloped countries are unlikely to have an industrial revolution, this seems somewhat optimistic at best. But even if those nations should follow that course, starting immediately, their population growth would continue for well over a century – perhaps producing by the year 2100 a world population of twenty thousand million.
Rarely has a paragraph proved so wrong so soon.
An unexplained phenomenon
Deliciously, nobody really knows how to explain this mysteriously predictable phenomenon. Demographic transition theory is a splendidly confused field. The birth-rate collapse seems to be largely a bottom-up thing that emerges by cultural evolution, spreads by word of mouth, and is not commanded by fiat from above. Neither governments nor churches can take much credit. After all, the European demographic transition happened in the nineteenth century without any official encouragement or even knowledge. In the case of France, it happened in the teeth of official encouragement to breed. Likewise, the modern transition began without any government family-planning policies in many countries, especially Latin America. China’s highly coerced (‘one child’) birth-rate decline since 1955 (from 5.59 to 1.73 children, or 69 per cent) is almost exactly mirrored by Sri Lanka’s largely voluntary one over the same time period (5.70 to 1.88, or 67 per cent). As for religion, Italy’s plunging birth rate (now 1.3 children per woman) in the pope’s backyard has always seemed moderately amusing to non-Catholics. Of course, the provision of family planning advice surely helps, and in parts of Asia may have accelerated the transition, but on the whole it seems to help women cheaply and easily achieve what they wish to achieve anyway. The onset of Britain’s demographic transition in the 1870s coincided with the publication of bestsellers on contraception by Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh – but which caused which?
So what might be the cause of these episodes of quite extraordinary downward shift in human fecundity? Top of the list of explanations, paradoxically, comes falling child mortality. The more babies are likely to die, the more their parents