From below:
Anna Parolini tells a common story. She left her small hometown in
northern Italy to find better job opportunities. Now 37, she lives with
her boyfriend in Milan and has put her desire to have children on hold.
She is afraid her salary of less than 2,000 euros a month would not be
enough for a family, and her parents still live where she grew up.
“I don’t have anyone here who could help me,” she said. “Thinking of
having a child now would make me gasp.”
NB: From above, note that she left "to find better job opportunities".
The fundamental reason for the changes below are not a drop in
heterosexual copulation, but rather the strong socio-economic inequality
that drives those economies that do not depend upon family enterprises
(e.g., agriculture) in which large (extended) families perform the
manual work to maintain the enterprise, often at a near subsistence
levels. A religion and/or government imposed end to contraception would
result in a higher birth rate, but without an equitable socio-economic
redistribution from the ultra-wealthy to the rest of the population, the
fundamental issues will not be addressed. At the same time, the
neo-liberal profiteer economy based upon constant growth (whether a
government calls itself capitalist, Marxist-Leninist, or whatever), not
steady-state stability, likewise requires growth markets. Growth on a
finite resource planet is not sustainable -- the planet already has more
human population than the carrying capacity assuming a median EU
standard of living (not a subsistence standard with traditional
population growth rates controlled by famine/starvation,
disease/epidemic/lack-of-sanitation, and violence/war/conquest).
https://www.yahoo.com/news/long-slide-looms-world-population-114958574.html
The New York Times
Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications
Damien Cave, Emma Bubola and Choe Sang-Hun
Mon, May 24, 2021, 4:49 AM
Diners at a Haidilao, China's most popular hot pot chain, in
Beijing, June 30, 2018. (Gilles Sabrie/The New York Times)
Diners at a Haidilao, China's most popular hot pot chain, in Beijing,
June 30, 2018. (Gilles Sabrie/The New York Times)
All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and
a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history that
will make first-birthday parties a rarer sight than funerals, and empty
homes a common eyesore.
Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are
appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea cannot find
enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties
have been razed, with the land turned into parks.
Like an avalanche, the demographic forces — pushing toward more deaths
than births — seem to be expanding and accelerating. Although some
countries continue to see their populations grow, especially in Africa,
fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else. Demographers now
predict that by the latter half of the century or possibly earlier, the
global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time.
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A planet with fewer people could ease pressure on resources, slow the
destructive impact of climate change and reduce household burdens for
women. But the census announcements this month from China and the United
States, which showed the slowest rates of population growth in decades
for both countries, also point to hard-to-fathom adjustments.
The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers
and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized —
around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies
and help pay for the old. It may also require a reconceptualization of
family and nation. Imagine entire regions where everyone is 70 or older.
Imagine governments laying out huge bonuses for immigrants and mothers
with lots of children. Imagine a gig economy filled with grandparents
and Super Bowl ads promoting procreation.
“A paradigm shift is necessary,” said Frank Swiaczny, a German
demographer who was the chief of population trends and analysis for the
United Nations until last year. “Countries need to learn to live with
and adapt to decline.”
The ramifications and responses have already begun to appear, especially
in East Asia and Europe. From Hungary to China, from Sweden to Japan,
governments are struggling to balance the demands of a swelling older
cohort with the needs of young people whose most intimate decisions
about childbearing are being shaped by factors both positive (more work
opportunities for women) and negative (gender inequality and high living
costs).
The 20th century presented a very different challenge. The global
population saw its greatest increase in known history, from 1.6 billion
in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000, as life spans lengthened and infant
mortality declined. In some countries — representing about one-third of
the world’s people — those growth dynamics are still in play. By the end
of the century, Nigeria could surpass China in population; across
sub-Saharan Africa, families are still having four or five children.
But nearly everywhere else, the era of high fertility is ending. As
women have gained more access to education and contraception and as the
anxieties associated with having children intensify, more parents are
delaying pregnancy, and fewer babies are being born. Even in countries
long associated with rapid growth, such as India and Mexico, birthrates
are falling toward or are already below the replacement rate of 2.1
children per family.
The change may take decades, but once it starts, decline (just like
growth) spirals exponentially. With fewer births, fewer girls grow up to
have children, and if they have smaller families than their parents did
— which is happening in dozens of countries — the drop starts to look
like a rock thrown off a cliff.
“It becomes a cyclical mechanism,” said Stuart Gietel Basten, an expert
on Asian demographics and a professor of social science and public
policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “It’s
demographic momentum.”
Some countries, like the United States, Australia and Canada, where
birthrates hover between 1.5 and 2, have blunted the impact with
immigrants. But in Eastern Europe, migration from the region has
compounded depopulation, and in parts of Asia, the “demographic time
bomb” that first became a subject of debate a few decades ago has
finally gone off.
South Korea’s fertility rate dropped to a record low of 0.92 in 2019 —
less than one child per woman, the lowest rate in the developed world.
Every month for the past 59 months, the total number of babies born in
the country has dropped to a record depth.
That declining birthrate, coupled with a rapid industrialization that
has pushed people from rural towns to big cities, has created what can
feel like a two-tiered society. While major metropolises like Seoul
continue to grow, putting intense pressure on infrastructure and
housing, in regional towns it is easy to find schools shut and
abandoned, their playgrounds overgrown with weeds, because there are not
enough children.
Expectant mothers in many areas can no longer find obstetricians or
postnatal care centers. Universities below the elite level, especially
outside Seoul, find it increasingly hard to fill their ranks; the number
of 18-year-olds in South Korea has fallen from about 900,000 in 1992 to
500,000 today. To attract students, some schools have even offered iPhones.
To goose the birthrate, the government has handed out baby bonuses. It
increased child allowances and medical subsidies for fertility
treatments and pregnancy. Health officials have showered newborns with
gifts of beef, baby clothes and toys. The government is also building
kindergartens and day care centers by the hundreds. In Seoul, every bus
and subway car has pink seats reserved for pregnant women.
But this month, Deputy Prime Minister Hong Nam-ki acknowledged that the
government — which has spent more than $178 billion over the past 15
years encouraging women to have more babies — was not making enough
progress. In many families, the shift feels cultural and permanent.
“My grandparents had six children, and my parents five, because their
generations believed in having multiple children,” said Kim Mi-kyung,
38, a stay-at-home parent. “I have only one child. To my and younger
generations, all things considered, it just doesn’t pay to have many
children.”
Thousands of miles away, in Italy, the sentiment is similar, with a
different backdrop.
In Capracotta, a small town in southern Italy, a sign in red letters on
an 18th-century stone building looking onto the Apennine Mountains reads
“Home of School Kindergarten” — but today, the building is a nursing home.
Residents eat their evening broth on waxed tablecloths in the old
theater room.
“There were so many families, so many children,” said Concetta D’Andrea,
93, who was a student and a teacher at the school and is now a resident
of the nursing home. “Now there is no one.”
The population in Capracotta has dramatically aged and contracted — from
about 5,000 people to 800. The town’s carpentry shops have shut down.
The organizers of a soccer tournament struggled to form even one team.
About a half-hour away, in the town of Agnone, the maternity ward closed
a decade ago because it had fewer than 500 births a year, the national
minimum to stay open. This year, six babies were born in Agnone.
“Once, you could hear the babies in the nursery cry, and it was like
music,” said Enrica Sciullo, a nurse who used to help with births there
and now mostly takes care of older patients. “Now there is silence and a
feeling of emptiness.”
In a speech this month during a conference on Italy’s birthrate crisis,
Pope Francis said the “demographic winter” was still “cold and dark.”
More people in more countries may soon be searching for their own
metaphors. Birth projections often shift based on how governments and
families respond, but according to projections by an international team
of scientists published last year in The Lancet, 183 countries and
territories — out of 195 — will have fertility rates below replacement
level by 2100.
Their model shows an especially sharp decline for China, with its
population expected to fall from 1.41 billion now to about 730 million
in 2100. If that happens, the population pyramid would essentially flip.
Instead of a base of young workers supporting a narrower band of
retirees, China would have as many 85-year-olds as 18-year-olds.
China’s rust belt, in the northeast, saw its population drop by 1.2% in
the past decade, according to census figures released Tuesday. In 2016,
Heilongjiang province became the first in the country to have its
pension system run out of money. In Hegang, a “ghost city” in the
province that has lost almost 10% of its population since 2010, homes
cost so little that people compare them to cabbage.
Many countries are beginning to accept the need to adapt, not just
resist. South Korea is pushing for universities to merge. In Japan,
where adult diapers now outsell ones for babies, municipalities have
been consolidated as towns age and shrink. In Sweden, some cities have
shifted resources from schools to elder care. And almost everywhere,
older people are being asked to keep working. Germany, which previously
raised its retirement age to 67, is now considering a bump to 69.
Going further than many other nations, Germany has also worked through a
program of urban contraction: Demolitions have removed around 330,000
units from the housing stock since 2002.
And if the goal is revival, a few green shoots can be found. After
expanding access to affordable child care and paid parental leave,
Germany’s fertility rate recently increased to 1.54, up from 1.3 in
2006. Leipzig, which once was shrinking, is now growing again after
reducing its housing stock and making itself more attractive with its
smaller scale.
“Growth is a challenge, as is decline,” said Swiaczny, who is now a
senior research fellow at the Federal Institute for Population Research
in Germany.
Demographers warn against seeing population decline as simply a cause
for alarm. Many women are having fewer children because that is what
they want. Smaller populations could lead to higher wages, more equal
societies, lower carbon emissions and a higher quality of life for the
smaller numbers of children who are born.
But, said Gietel Basten, quoting Casanova, “There is no such thing as
destiny. We ourselves shape our lives.”
The challenges ahead are still a cul-de-sac; no country with a serious
slowdown in population growth has managed to increase its fertility rate
much beyond the minor uptick that Germany accomplished. There is little
sign of wage growth in shrinking countries, and there is no guarantee
that a smaller population means less stress on the environment.
Many demographers argue that the current moment may look to future
historians like a period of transition or gestation, when humans either
did or did not figure out how to make the world more hospitable — enough
for people to build the families that they want.
Surveys in many countries show that young people would like to be having
more children but face too many obstacles.
Anna Parolini tells a common story. She left her small hometown in
northern Italy to find better job opportunities. Now 37, she lives with
her boyfriend in Milan and has put her desire to have children on hold.
She is afraid her salary of less than 2,000 euros a month would not be
enough for a family, and her parents still live where she grew up.
“I don’t have anyone here who could help me,” she said. “Thinking of
having a child now would make me gasp.”