What’s so amazing about this upcoming reality is how, for decades, all we’ve heard about from the experts is that overpopulation is the real threat, and how we’d all eventually be eating soylent green or at least some indigestible tofu. I don’t know how many frightening educational films I was forced to sit through in grade school, all of which suggested the world was simply going to suffocate under the crushing weight of all these people! Instead, I’ll probably live to witness this amazing turn of events, a culmination of tens of thousands of years of effort on the part of humanity to grow its numbers and—by doing so—come to dominate the planet Earth.
The experts who still want to scare you on a regular basis are absolutely right when they note that global population, which currently sits at over six billion people, will rise roughly 50 percent over the next half century. That part’s pretty much a given, absent some giant meteor striking the planet or the Klingons attacking. Right now, the best “medium” projections point to a planetary population of approximately nine billion by the year 2050.◈ At that point, our birth rates and death rates will equal out, and our population will cease growing—give or take a few hundred million. But here’s the amazing part: because people will keep living longer and fewer babies will be born on average, at the same time we top out as a global population, the old (sixty years and older) will begin outnumbering the young (under fifteen).
That is completely against nature as we have come to understand it across our short reign on this planet. Frankly, we shouldn’t be able to do this as a species—the predators out there should hunt us down in sufficient numbers to deny us this amazing achievement. Yet it will happen, thanks in large part to China’s and India’s efforts, but primarily because economic development in general leads to lower birth rates. Over the past half century, fertility rates (babies per female) in developed economies dropped from six to three. I can see this in my own family. My parents had nine kids, but those nine kids have only begotten eleven kids so far, and except for the international adoptions, my siblings and I are pretty much done. That reduction-by-generation effect is spreading across the Core right now, but the trend will not reach much of the Gap until late in the twenty-first century. At 2050, the UN predicts, the forty-nine least-developed economies will still feature fertility rates above the replacement value of 2.1, meaning much of the Gap will still be growing even as the global population peaks.
So it’s a fairly reasonable prediction to say that by 2050, there will be nine billion people on the planet, and that will pretty much be the high-water mark for our species. Of that nine billion, roughly two billion will be over age sixty (more than a tripling of our current global total of just over 600 million), and roughly two billion will be fourteen and under, leaving approximately five billion in between. The problem with this picture is how all these billions will end up being arranged around the planet. Too many of the two billion young will be in the Gap, while too many of the two billion old will be in the Core. Someone will have to turn us over in our beds when we’re old, and our population trends simply aren’t providing that someone. By 2050, the global PSR will drop to only four to one. That means we’ll have less than half as many workers for every person sixty-five and older as we have today.
Now what does that trend assume? Globalization will continue to expand around the planet, triggering increased rates of urbanization and industrialization, so there will be significant increases in productivity. That will help make that four-to-one PSR more bearable. People will live a lot longer too, as life expectancy for the planet moves from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies by 2050. So it’s reasonable to expect that people will work longer as well, which should help slow down our PSR slide a bit.
Even if we stipulate the rise in both productivity and retirement ages, there will be no escaping the reality that unless people get on the move in large numbers in coming decades, globalization’s workers and retirees will not be sufficiently co-located to prevent a devastating drop in the Core’s PSR.
By 2050, the Old Core will have a collective PSR in the range of just two to one, or half the global average. Meanwhile, the New Core contingent dominated by India and China will have a PSR of roughly five to one. The least-developed economies in the Gap will still have a PSR in the double digits, or roughly ten to one. So there’s no mystery about what will have to happen. Young people will need to move from the Gap to the Core—or more specifically, the Old Core. This is what the UN calls “replacement migration.” The Census Bureau predicts that almost two-thirds of America’s population growth by 2050 will be accounted for by Latinos immigrating here from Central and South America.◈ This Latinization of American culture is already showing itself in the youngest age ranges of zero to five, so if you want to see the future of America, keep an eye on Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network, because there you’ll see shows progressively geared toward a rising Latino viewing share. Another place to see that future is in Texas, Florida, and Southern California, where Latinos now are the dominant minority population. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are no accidents. Expect to see a lot of future presidents coming from southern states, armed with more than just a smattering of Spanish phrases in their stump speeches.
The good news for America is that this influx of Latinos is business as usual for a nation built largely through immigrant flows over our blended history. Latinos are nothing more than the latest wave, along with, to a lesser extent, Asians. According to the UN’s calculations, America is letting in sufficient numbers of immigrants on an annual basis to shore up our PSR in a reasonable fashion. The UN predicts that we’ll need to let in just over half a million per year through 2050 to keep our fifteen-to-sixty-four cohort size at roughly its peak absolute value, or 200 million. Because we’re a relatively young nation, we won’t hit that peak value until around 2015, whereas aging Europe and Japan hit their peaks almost a decade ago.◈
Happily, the UN projects that we’ll hit that total easily, since we average somewhere between 750,000 to one million immigrants each year—and that doesn’t include those who enter the country illegally. Even with that influx, America’s PSR will decline from roughly five to one down to three to one by 2050 (beating far worse ratios in Europe and Japan), but a certain amount of decline is only natural as productivity grows. Anyway, we’d need to let in about ten million immigrants a year to keep our PSR fixed at five to one, and that is simply impossible, politically and otherwise. Instead, most Americans should expect to retire in their mid-seventies, not their mid-sixties or—God forbid—their mid-fifties.
The news, unfortunately, looks a lot worse for insular Japan and xenophobic Europe. If America has its problems with immigrants, what with bilingual education and all, our issues pale when compared with those of the rest of the Old Core. Europe already has its share of right-wing, anti-immigration politicians exploiting people’s worst impulses, and Japan has such a dismal record of accepting immigrants that the Land of the Rising Sun is heading toward its sunset at warp speed. According to the UN, Europe is likely to let in about 300,000 immigrants per year between now and 2050, when it really needs to let in something in the range of 1.5 million each year if there’s any hope its PSR won’t drop below two to one by mid-century. Japan’s situation is even worse. It is difficult to project any immigrant flows for the country between now and 2050 because there’s nothing in its history that would indicate any willingness to let immigrants in at all, but the UN estimates that Japan will need to average roughly 600,000 immigrants a year over the next half century.
How big of a change would these larger flow numbers be for Europe and Japan? If Europe were to let in 1.5 million immigrants each year, by 2050 a quarter of its population would be foreign-born. That I can imagine happening. As for Japan, as much as one-third of its 2050 population would be foreign-born if they pursued the immigration rate required to stabilize their absolute number of working-age citizens. Simply put, that wouldn’t be Japan anymore; that would be an entirely new country. I
personally believe that would be a better Japan, because I think that insular society has so much to offer the world that letting more of that world in will let the Japanese achieve the “normal” nationhood they have sought ever since their brush with the apocalypse in 1945—such are the tides of history.
Given that a lot of people will have to move from the Gap to the Core to keep globalization on track, the question becomes, How can this massive shift be achieved? Immigration is the obvious—and most socially challenging—route, but there are two promising trends that we’ll need to promote in addition to permanent immigration: the “virtual migration” of jobs from the Core to the Gap, exemplified by India becoming a “back office” for the U.S. economy; and a “global commute,” best displayed by the Philippines’ amazingly mobile workforce.
Virtual migration has been around for a while, we just hadn’t noticed it. When my wife, Vonne, was working as a unit secretary in a major Virginia hospital in the mid-1990s, she helped send the doctors’ audiotaped medical chart logs to India via the Internet for overnight transcription. Instead of paying more to have it done in the United States by non-medical experts, the hospital ended up paying half as much for Indian medical professionals to perform the service outside of their day jobs.◈ It’s not just the back office-type jobs that have migrated to India and elsewhere, but virtual face-to-face service jobs like customer call centers, where the “Susan” who ends up taking your complaint is really Nishara working in Bangalore.◈ Then there is the huge role Indian software companies have played in the rise of Silicon Valley over time. In effect, India has become the overnight software patch that keeps our information technology industry humming on a daily basis: tasks that would have sat overnight in America are now beamed to India for resolution by the next business day. It is often said that Indian information technology workers, the largest single pool on the planet, write half the world’s software.◈ Most will never see America, and yet they are an integral part of our nation’s computer-fueled productivity gains.
The other positive trend is the emergence of the global commute, and no country exemplifies this development better than the Philippines. The government there has systematically facilitated two-year deployments around the world by a major portion of its labor force (roughly 10 percent of its total population of 76 million). These global commuters are specifically recruited by the government for this program, which mobilizes the OFWs, or Overseas Filipino Workers, in significant numbers for temporary labor duty all over the planet. In 2001, these workers sent back in remittances $6.2 billion, constituting almost a tenth of the national GDP. Factor in the multiplier effect on the national economy (every dollar sent home generates three to four dollars of growth), and you’re looking at a flow that shapes a significant portion of their domestic market demand.◈
Not surprisingly, of the top twenty nations frequented by Filipinos in their global commute, fifteen are Core states (U.S., Japan, Hong Kong-China, U.K., Taiwan, Italy, Canada, Germany, South Korea, Greece, Guam, Switzerland, Netherlands, Austria, and Australia). The rest are rich Gulf states plus Malaysia and Singapore— two of the most Core-like states in the Gap.◈ The difference in wage-earning potential is huge: nurses in the Philippines average $15,000 a year, but close to $50,000 in the United States, which has accepted so many of these global commuters as to trigger a nursing shortage in the Philippines.◈
Making this global commute possible are low airfares and new telecommunications advances, like inexpensive text-messaging, which acts as a cheap but essential lifeline between parents working overseas (two-thirds of OFWs are women) and their families back home, where the government goes out of its way to support OFWs with special events promoting free medical care and celebrating their role as bagong bayani, or “new heroes,” of the Filipino economy. Filipinos were prominently represented among the first foreign workers rushed into Iraq as part of the postwar rebuilding process. Why? Ninety percent of Filipinos can read, compared with just two-thirds of Iraqis, and most Filipinos learn English in school as a legacy of a long American occupation in the first half of the twentieth century. As the Philippines’ secretary of labor and employment declared in the weeks leading up to the war, “If they’re looking for skilled workers, they’ll come to us.”◈ Wired magazine has described the program as “an example of socioeconomic engineering on an unprecedented scale,” arguing that the Philippines is doing nothing less than “creating the world’s most distributed economy, where the sources of production are so far-flung it boggles the mind.”◈
The aging Core will need to accept the Gap’s desperate ambition for a better life, because in doing so, we shrink the Gap one motivated worker at a time. The importance of this flow of remittances to the Gap is hard to overstate. Latin American workers toiling overseas send home roughly $15 billion a year, or more than five times what the region receives in foreign aid from the Core.◈ Any connectivity that facilitates this flow, whether on a permanent or temporary basis, expands globalization’s reach. Conversely, any restrictions placed on such movement in the name of a global war on terrorism will end up doing more damage to America’s long-term interest in seeing globalization succeed than any number of suicide bombers can ever hope to achieve.◈
In effect, this flow of labor from the Gap to the Core is globalization’s release valve. With it, the prosperity of the Core can be maintained and more of the world’s people can participate. Without it, overpopulation and underperforming economies in the Gap will lead to explosive situations that spill over to the Core. Either way, they are coming. Our only choice is how we welcome them.
The Flow Of Energy, Or Whose Blood For Whose Oil?
When I’m giving a brief or speech to nonmilitary audiences, I often encounter a lot of cynicism regarding America’s security interests in the Middle East. In short, it’s moral outrage over all that violence in the name of cheap gas. Whenever I’m confronted by this anger, I don’t try to deny the essential truth of the matter, I just argue the larger context. Americans tend to forget that cheap gas doesn’t work just for us but for people all over the planet—people who can’t just “kick the habit” as easily as many might assume a rich country like ours could. So when we’re talking about a crisis in the Middle East possibly sending oil prices skyrocketing, it won’t be Americans who suffer most in that scenario, it will be the truly poor, located overwhelmingly in the Gap. I don’t pretend that our “good life” isn’t protected each and every time we use military force to stabilize things in the Persian Gulf; I just think it’s important to realize that countless others around the planet benefit far more whenever America performs those military deeds that only it can possibly manage.
Occasionally, when you encounter that harsh, blood-for-oil rhetoric, what you really find hiding behind the words are anti-Semites whose arguments that America should “get off oil” are really just another way of saying we should abandon Israel to its just deserts— you know, a “live by the sword, die by the sword” sort of realism. But mostly when people play this card, it’s about the immorality of spilling American blood to protect unworthy people. When “those people” are identified as “greedy” oil companies, my gut reaction is to advise people to get off their high horse (whatever model they drive) and take an economics class, because the notion that only a few executives at big oil companies reap the lion’s share of the value flowing out of those wells is simply preposterous. Simply put, everyone in this country benefits from cheap petroleum because it flows throughout our economy and not just into our gas-guzzling cars.
But when that righteous anger is directed at the House of Saud or the Emir of Kuwait, I don’t disagree with that innate sense of distaste or injustice, I just believe it’s misdirected in terms of goals. America shouldn’t be about protecting royal mafias who have largely kept themselves rich and their people disconnected. We need to be about the revolutionary goal of liberating these societies from repressive leaderships and letting individuals pick and choose on their own how the
y wish to be connected with the larger world.
Does that mean regime change in most instances? Hardly. That option only makes sense when the leadership on top not only treats its own people badly but also seeks to export danger or violence elsewhere, either by seeking weapons inappropriate to its defense needs or supporting terrorism and other criminal activities abroad. No, connecting the Middle East to the outside world is not about replacing leadership, by and large, but about expanding connectivity—in any form possible. We will need to accept that many Muslims will, for a variety of cultural and religious reasons, continue to prefer disconnectedness even when connectivity is offered. America just needs to establish an image as the provider of connectivity, not the protector of those elites who prefer to keep their societies largely cut off from the outside world. We need to stand for the ability to choose.
I sincerely believe that the real reason that plenty of Arabs hate America is not the oil trade, but because our political and military relationships with the region seem to focus on nothing but the oil trade. America needs to represent so much more, and perhaps we can demonstrate that capacity in postwar Iraq. The realist in me says oil is what brought us to the Middle East, but the optimist in me says “that’s fine” as long as we leverage that slim connectivity into a larger effort to integrate the region into the global economy in such a way that the masses find real opportunity in the economic interactions that ensue.
But the oil is also the region’s salvation on one crucial level: at least the Middle East has our attention. Whenever I field that “blood-for-oil” question from audiences, I typically respond, “Hell, yes, it’s all about oil. Thank God it’s all about the oil. Because I can show you parts of the world where there isn’t any oil, and there’s plenty of people dying, and no one seems to care whatsoever.” There’s no denying that oil has been the curse of Arab economic development, as it has been for numerous other countries around the world, but without it, the Middle East’s pain would be as distant to most Americans as that half-a-holocaust that’s already unfolded in Central Africa over the last decade. As Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times warns, we all had better be prepared to explain to our kids and grandchildren when they inevitably ask, “What did you do during the African Holocaust?”◈ You want to know why you haven’t attended any peace rallies or war protest marches on that one? Because there’s no oil there, so American troops aren’t sent, so millions die with no one paying any serious attention. That’s what “no oil” plus “no American blood” equals. Doesn’t exactly feel like the moral high ground, does it?
The Pentagon's New Map Page 24
