The Human Tide

by Paul Morland

  The decline in people of European origin can be seen on two levels: continental within a global context, and country by country. Starting with the first of these, in 1950, as the era of European imperialism was ending, the population of the European continent contained around 22% of humanity. Adding in overwhelmingly white Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA, the figure came to 29%. Sixty-five years later, Europe’s share was down to 10% and that of the ‘wider white world’ down to 15%. Taking UN median projections, these two figures will by the end of the current century fall to 6% and 11% respectively.42 Many countries in Europe are already experiencing population decline, or would be were it not for inward migration. If UN projections are correct, then Bulgaria and Moldova will have lost half their population by the end of the current century and Latvia will not be far behind. Germany will have lost 10% and Italy 20%.

  Moreover, those countries are themselves becoming less white. By the middle of this century people of ‘white British’ origin may be just 60% of the population of the UK, although admittedly many of the immigrants and people of immigrant origin will be of European extraction.43 The white population of the United States, 85% in 1965 and 67% in 2005, is projected to dip below 50% by mid-century.44 In both countries it is likely that a ‘mixed origin’ element will be significant and fast-growing.

  Just as the Anglo-Saxon and then the wider European world was the laboratory for rapid and sustained population expansion from the middle of the nineteenth century, so too perhaps these countries will be the test-beds of a much more fluid world in racial, ethnic and national identity terms. There is no absolute reason why someone of Italian descent in the USA should be described as ‘white’ while someone of Spanish descent should be described as ‘non-white–Latino’. It is true that many Hispanics in the US are a mixture of Spanish and indigenous origin, but then Sicilians are themselves likely to be of partly non-European origin. As ever, distinctions are never absolute.

  The flipside of white decline in relative numbers has been and will continue to be the rise of Africa. In the middle of the twentieth century, after centuries of being sidelined, colonised and subject to slavery, sub-Saharan Africans accounted for barely one person in ten on the planet; by the end of this century they are likely to account for one person in four. With Africa still poor and young, the pressure of migration to Europe will be strong. To date, most African population growth can be seen arising from people pouring into towns and cities. Once prosperity gets above a certain level, however, the prospect of looking further afield than the nearest mega-city for economic salvation becomes more realistic.

  Beyond Imagination

  The world has changed at a frantic pace in the last few centuries, and the trend only appears to be accelerating. Much of this has to do with technology but it also has to do with demography, for the two are interdependent. Just as a world of European domination was unimaginable without the expansion of populations of European origin, so their contraction will inevitably have a global impact. For now, much of that impact is felt within countries once ‘white’ but now increasingly multicoloured. At some point, it is bound to have an impact on the international environment, whether because of the sheer weight of numbers or because of related issues of economic power.

  Yet history defies prediction. A Londoner of a hundred years ago would be astonished at the global face of his once more or less exclusively British city and astonished that the British Empire was no more. A Parisian would be similarly surprised to know that the Algerian experiment is over, having left no demographic trace at all in North Africa, while his own city is heavily North African. The demographic trends of the future are to some extent already in process: short of global pandemic or mass movement, we know how many fifty-year-olds there will be in Nigeria or Norway in 2050. However, there may still be surprises in store, and these may be driven by science and technology. It was technology which doubly broke the old Malthusian equation: the earth, it turned out, could provide exponentially for human beings, with the opening up of vast new territories using new ways of moving people and things, and using new ways of growing food; population growth, by contrast, could be cheaply and easily tamed by people’s choices without their having to restrain their natural appetites.

  The science and technology of the future may also reshape population in ways currently hard to envisage. What would global demography look like if ageing were reversible and people were able to live for centuries? What impact would that have on fertility rates? What if birth and sex were entirely divorced and if clones or designer babies could be ordered ‘over the counter’? Beyond technology, there are some more purely demographic developments which, if they continue, could behave unpredictably. Southern Africa’s rapid progression to lower fertility has been charted, and this might spread to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa far more quickly than expected, bursting the African demographic bubble. In a number of European countries, there has been a modest rise in fertility rates that may well persist beyond the end of the ‘tempo’ effect, which had not been envisaged. If Israeli women have three children, there is no reason why British or American women should not. The impact on Britain and America would be profound. On the other hand, in the US and UK we have seen some early signs that life expectancy growth may be faltering, with dementia and the diseases of rich lifestyles such as diabetes seemingly to blame.45 Life expectancy for men in the UK has fallen by a year and for women by a year and a half since 2011.46 This could be a glitch or the start of a new trend in which, once again, the Anglo-Saxons are pioneers.

  Social trends might also surprise us. Given reasonably good luck and good timing, little sex is required to have a large family, so a general loss of interest in sex need not as such reduce fertility rates. But the recent emergence of the ‘herbivore’ in Japan–a young person who seems to have no interest in romantic or sexual relations with another person–could be part of a general culture of low fertility. There is some evidence that a trend towards less interest in sex and relationships is becoming common among the young in the West.47 Data still reports on ‘men’ and ‘women’, but the rise of LGBTQ could have a significant impact on demography and certainly on how it is measured.

  Whatever the future holds, of one thing we can be sure: that just as in the past, demography and destiny will continue to be entwined. Demography will shape the course of history as long as birth and death, marriage and migration remain the most fundamental events in our lives.

  Appendix I

  How Life Expectancy is Calculated

  Life expectancy is the best measure of how long-lived people are in a society, since it accounts for the fact that some societies are older than others and, all things being equal, would have a higher death rate (deaths over total population). To calculate life expectancy at birth in any given year–a calculation that was first used by the life insurance industry in seventeenth-century England–take the number of those aged 0–1 who died during the year as a share of all those aged 0–1. Add to that the share of those aged 1–2 who died during the year as a share of all of those aged 1–2. Continue this procedure until the cumulative share reaches 50%, at which point life expectancy at birth for that year is reached. In a country with a high infant mortality and child mortality rate, the percentages will rack up quickly and soon reach 50%, which is why high infant mortality means low life expectancy and falling infant mortality significantly extends life expectancy. Where deaths of young or even middle-aged people are uncommon, the 50% mark will not be reached until much later.

  This means that life expectancy at birth is not really about what someone expects but rather what he or she would expect knowing the incidence of death and therefore the likelihood of dying in a particular age cohort in a particular year.

  Normally the data is presented separately for men and women, although it is often aggregated for the whole population too. A gendered approach allows demographers to highlight differences between the sexes. For example, in Russia the differentia
l is particularly wide: normally the life expectancy for men is shorter than it is for women, but in Russia the difference has been and continues to be particularly marked. By looking separately at male and female life expectancy we learn something useful about a society. In the case of Russia, knowing that men are dying much earlier than women leads to examinations of lifestyle, alcohol consumption and the suicide rate between the sexes so that a deeper understanding of the social causes of low life expectancy can be gained.

  The table that follows is an example of a life table. It is for Singapore in 2015, and column A shows the age at the start of the year while column B shows the percentage of those at the given age who died during the year. Less than a quarter of 1% of Singaporeans aged 0–1 (actually 0.214%) on 1 January 2015 died by 31 December 2015, while slightly more than 12% of those aged 90 at the start of the year had died by the end of it. Column C adds up each of these probabilities: if the probability of dying aged 0–1 is 0.214% and the probability of dying aged 1–2 is 0.012% then the probability of dying aged 0–2 is 0.226%. This probability, column C, gets higher and higher as we add in the share of deaths in each age cohort. Adding in all the cohorts to age eighty-one gets us just less than 50%. By adding in another cohort, we get to just over 50%. Therefore, at birth, we can say that a Singaporean could ‘expect’ to live to eighty-one. In fact a new-born in Singapore is likely to witness an extension in life expectancy during his or her life and so live longer than this; to reiterate, by ‘life expectancy’ we only mean what could be expected if the experience in future years is the same as the one at which we are looking.

  We can also consider life expectancy at later ages. A seventy-year-old in Singapore in 2015 had no chance of dying aged one or two or any other age below seventy, so for him or her the calculation can start again. We can add the column B probabilities but not starting until age seventy. This is shown in column D. For a seventy-year-old in Singapore in 2016, as we can see, life expectancy is eighty-three, or another thirteen years beyond his or her current age.

  Table 2: Singapore Life Expectancy: Both Sexes 20151

  Appendix II

  How the Total Fertility Rate is Calculated

  The birth rate shows the number of births as a share of the population but does not account for the fact that some populations have more fertile women than others and so would be expected to have more children relative to population size. Completed fertility for a cohort–how many children the average woman born in a particular year or decade bore–is historically very revealing, but the data will always tell us what was happening some time ago and not give us a contemporary picture of what is going on now. The best measure to compare contemporary societies to others or to their own immediate past is the total fertility rate (sometimes known as TFR).

  The total fertility rate is calculated by looking at the number of births by women in a particular year or period and then calculating how many children a woman would have if her childbearing experience were typical of women in that year or period. Usually, fertile years are considered to be ages fifteen to forty-five or fifty (while there are births outside this range, in most societies they are statistically insignificant). In only the least developed countries do many girls below fifteen years of age have many children. As for older women, fertility technology is changing but to date birthing after this age has been sufficiently rare for demographers to be able to ignore it.

  Normally we look at the experience of women in particular age groups as this provides useful data. The table below shows the picture for Egypt in an average year from 1997 to 2000. In such a year there was an incidence of 0.051 in 1, or 5.1%, of a woman aged 15–19 having a child. A hundred such women would collectively have had just over five children on average in a year. Therefore, for any woman going through the ages of fifteen to nineteen with the typical experience of the period, there was a slightly more than one in four chance of her having a child in those years as a whole (i.e. 0.51 x 5, which is 0.255 in 1 or 25.5%). The right-hand column is simply the middle column multiplied by five, since we are looking at an annual incidence over five years.

  There was an incidence in an average year of 0.196 in 1 for a woman in her early twenties having a child. This means that, in an average year, there were nearly twenty children born (19.6 to be precise) for every hundred women in their early twenties. With that incidence, a woman going through that annual experience every year for the five years of her early twenties is likely to have had one child in those years, i.e. 0.196 x 5, or 0.98. In the late twenties the incidence was slightly higher at 0.208 in 1 or 20.8%, which means that the average woman going through those years would have another child in her late twenties.

  Adding the total incidences in the right-hand column we get to 3.505 or (to simplify and round slightly down) three and a half children. This means that a woman who shares the average experiences for women of different ages in a given period will have three and a half children. Ten such women will have thirty-five children.

  Table 3: Egyptian Fertility for an Average Year 1997-20001

  Acknowledgements

  Nick Lowcock has provided encouragement and thoughtful insight throughout my writing of The Human Tide. Professor Eric Kaufmann has been an invaluable source of wisdom and support. I am extremely grateful to Toby Mundy, whose inquisitiveness has driven the writing forward and whose professionalism has helped bring it to its conclusion. I cannot thank David Goodhart enough for all his help. Joe Zigmond and the team at John Murray and Clive Priddle at Public Affairs have been a pleasure to work with. Sir Brian Harrison, an outstanding tutor when I was at Corpus Christi College Oxford over thirty years ago, took on the process of review and comment with extraordinary but characteristic thoroughness and timeliness. A number of people have kindly looked at drafts of chapters or ideas, and I would like to thank them for the time they have taken and for their input. These include Daniel Benedyk, Michael Lind, Claire Morland, Sonia Morland, Ian Price, Jonathan Rynhold and Michael Wegier. I had the privilege of discussing this book in its early stages with my late and lamented friend Professor Anthony D. Smith, who as ever provided inspiration. Mike Callan was kind enough to pass an actuarial eye over the life-expectancy appendix. It goes without saying that any errors are entirely mine.

  Finally I must thank my mother, Ingrid Morland, my wife Claire Morland and our own small human tide, Sonia, Juliet and Adam Morland, to whom this book is dedicated.

  DR. PAUL MORLAND is an associate research fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a renowned authority on demography. He lives in London with his wife and has three children. A French speaker with dual German and British citizenship, Paul Morland also spends much time at his home in the French Pyrenees.

  He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first class B. (Hons) in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He graduated with distinction in his Masters in International Relations, also from Oxford University, and was awarded his PhD from the University of London. This is his first trade book, but in addition to an academic work on demography, he has contributed a number of comment pieces on demography to newspapers in the UK and Israel.

  Praise for The Human Tide

  “Demography here is made flesh. In a gripping narrative, Morland shows how history has been driven not only by science and economics, but by birth, sex, life and death. An essential read for anyone seeking to understand not only the human tide, but the tide of history. Gripping, authoritative and compelling.”

  —RICHARD V. REEVES, author of Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It

  “Demographic change underlies most of the trends of our time, from controversies over immigration to the challenge of funding welfare states. In The Human Tide, Paul Morland provides an eru dite and entertaining overview of the influence of population trends on history.”

  —MICHAEL LIND, author of Land of Promise: An Economic
History of the United States

  “Paul Morland has rudely awakened us to the hidden hand of demography in shaping history and politics in the modern world. It is not world population, but rather unevenness in its distribution over time, that is revolutionary. At a time when currents of global politics are confounding the conventional wisdom, the politics of population change offers many of the answers. Morland’s superb political-demographic history of the world alerts us not only to how manpower matters, but why the perception of population shifts may be even more consequential than the shifts themselves. By the time the demographic transition runs its course, nations’ ethnic and religious politics, the balance of global power, and the world economy will have been radically upended. If you want to understand our times, you must read this book.”

  —ERIC KAUFMANN, author of Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities

  “A fascinating account of how much sheer population numbers have mattered in human history—and why major demographic upheavals, happening now and over the next few decades, are going to affect us all.”

  —ALISON WOLF, Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management at King’s College London and author of The XX Factor: How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World

  “Population has been historically one of the key factors that has defined the relations between states. As Paul Morland shows in this nuanced, highly informative and rigorously argued book, it has now become the defining factor for the political dynamics within states. The Human Tide shows that we live in an age of hard and soft demographic engineering.”

  —IVAN KRASTEV, Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia