The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [22]
At the national geopolitical level, however, new superpowers mean complicated, shifting alliances. Having more superpowers portends intense strategic rivalries for trade, foreign investment, and natural resources. It means having more powerful political leaders in the world, and history tells us that their ideas matter. The choices made by Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and George W. Bush will reverberate for years. Running through everything are the fault zones of historical, cultural, and religious divisions. “Bad outcomes are not inevitable,” the National Intelligence Council assessment concludes, but “today’s trends appear to be heading toward a potentially more fragmented and conflicted world.”74
The choices of future political leaders cannot possibly be divined here. But what we can foresee is an assortment of growing demographic, economic, and resource pressures that will shape the context and options available to them. We are barreling toward a world with nearly 40% more people and a doubled food requirement by 2050. We are transforming from a poor rural to wealthier urban species. We are in the midst of a historic transfer of money and power from West to East. The bad news, as we saw in Lagos, is that some parts of our world are poorly equipped to deal with these changes. The good news is that in our rush to urbanize, we may have found the golden pliers for defusing Ehrlich’s population bomb.
I See Old People
These megatrends have personal consequences. Honestly, for the long haul, I’ve begun socking away shares of pharmaceutical company stock. Because beginning right about now, the world is starting to fill up with old people.
Demography just might be the most fascinating academic subject you’ve never studied. Underneath its dull name and dry statistics lie gripping stories of sex and death, of the rise and fall of communities, of why migrants choose to pick up and move, of the futures for our retirements and for our children. It uncovers big surprises like the myth of the American melting pot.75 Although combing through census and national registry databanks on numbers of births, deaths, and marriages may not sound very fun, a new world is revealed. These data comprise a road map of our future still wired into today.
Consider the “baby boomer” phenomenon—that is, the post-World War II baby boom. Like a snake swallowing a big meal, this age bulge has worked its way through the decades, triggering all manner of economic and cultural transformations along the way. Many of them—like demand for doctors, vacation getaways, and Viagra as the boomers now enter their sixties—have been anticipated for years. Like all baby booms, it had a softer “baby echo” that cropped up a generation later—again, predictable.
“Population momentum” is another example of how demographic futures can be foreseen. Even if a society’s average fertility rate76 suddenly falls, its population will continue to grow twenty years later owing to the abundance of new parents carried forward from when fertility rates were high.77 This works in the other direction, too, meaning that elderly countries will keep shrinking even if fertility rises, owing to a small cohort of parents born when fertility rates were still low.
The unprecedented explosion of people on Earth happened because births began outnumbering deaths, but there’s more to it than that. The “Demographic Transition” concept described in Chapter 1 emerged from what transpired in Europe and the United States. And it appears to now be unfolding in the rest of the world as well. Recall that the Demographic Transition has four stages:
1. High and similar rates of birth and death (e.g., the preindustrial era, with a small and relatively stable total human population); followed by
2. Falling deaths but not births (initiating a population explosion); followed by
3. Falling births (still exploding, but decelerating); and finally
4. Low and similar rates of birth and death (population