Category Archives: Population

In 1950, Japan was the fifth-most populous nation on earth, Germany was the seventh, and the United Kingdom the ninth. By 2050 these countries will rank twentieth, twenty-first, and twenty-second, respectively. Population is the wellspring of power, both economic and military, and the reordering of global power is, Yoshihara and Sylva argue, inherently destabilizing.

The world is heading for demographic catastrophe. Fertility rates have been falling across the globe for 40 years, to the point where, today, Israel is the only First World country where women have enough babies to sustain their population. The developing world is heading in the same direction, fast. Only 3 percent of the world’s population live in a country where the fertility rate is not dropping.

As fertility falls, populations shrink. As populations shrink, economies will sputter. Western countries will struggle to support too many retirees without enough workers, and the rest of the world (particularly places such as China and Russia) will be challenged just to maintain order as societies change in unprecedented ways: Most people will have neither brothers, sisters, aunts, nor uncles, and there will be no such thing as an extended family.

This forecast may sound apocalyptic, but it’s nearly conventional wisdom among the demographers and economists who study such things. However, the conventional wisdom also sees a silver lining to the world’s demographic decline: a “geriatric peace.” As fertility rates decline, and babies become relatively scarce, the average age of societies increases. In many countries the median age is already over 40, with geezers outnumbering children. And once the entire world looks like Florida, the thinking goes, we’ll all be more peaceable, because countries full of old men don’t go to war.

Unfortunately, Susan Yoshihara and Douglas A. Sylva suggest that geriatric peace may be elusive, and in Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics they have collected essays from an all-star squad of demographers, historians, and military strategists—Phillip Longman, Nicholas Eberstadt, Toshi Yoshihara, and Murray Feshbach are among their Murderers’ Row—who argue that a shrinking world may be more dangerous than we might expect.

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“Cities are where the pressures of migration, globalization, economic development, social inequality, environmental pollution and climate change are most directly felt,” the United Nations said in a statement.

United Nations: India, China, Nigeria, Indonesia and the United States are set to lead the world’s growth in urban populations during the next four decades, sparking challenges in providing jobs, housing, energy and infrastructure, the United Nations said on Thursday.

Ahead of a UN sustainability summit in Rio in June, the world body released new forecasts for urban populations in a bid to urge global leaders to come up with concrete plans at the conference in Brazil to produce sustainable cities.

Nigeria’s cities are expected to add 200 million people by 2050, more than doubling the country’s current population; India’s cities are to add 497 million, increasing the current total population by more than 40%; and Indonesia’s cities are set to add 92 million people, about a 38% increase in its total population, according to the UN’s 2011 Revision of the World Urbanization Prospects.

US cities are forecast to add 103 million people, raising the country’s total population by a third, while China is due to boost its total population by a quarter, with an increase of 341 million in its cities.

Currently half the world’s 7 billion people live in cities, the United Nations said.

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