Panicology

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  The favourite quotation of the British media is the remark attributed (probably erroneously) to Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister: ‘There are lies, damned lies – and statistics.’5 Yet statistical data are better than nothing – they are evidence of something, the starting point for a discussion, a way of understanding society. The numbers are not everything but they can inform analysis and provide the creative impetus needed to solve problems. The only alternative is to retreat into anecdote and hopelessly selective assumptions.

  However, the cult of innumeracy remains strong among the public – and the media. One leading newspaper recently announced that there was ‘about’ a 50 per cent chance that Europe would have above-average temperatures in some coming period.6 Indeed. In one of his acts, George Carlin, the American stand-up comedian, invited his audience to consider how stupid the average American is. Then he paused before observing that exactly half of them are even more stupid than that!7

  Although statistics about the past can be dangerous, forecasts about the future are even more dodgy. Questionable data are put in a black box computer model, cranked and spewed out often, it seems, with the sole purpose of scaring us. The ‘results’ have authority because it is experts and academics who do the cranking. Yet history is littered with examples where economists, scientists and other specialists have got their projections fantastically wrong. Furthermore, the same raw data can be made to yield very different projections according to the prejudices of the person cranking the machine and small adjustments made to the model’s assumptions.

  The difficulty we have in dealing with the numbers that express risk may be a symptom of a wider inability to evaluate risk at a human level. In part, this reflects a deliberate avoidance of unpalatable truths – smokers still may not give up smoking even though they know it will be the principal cause of death for half of them. But mostly, it’s down to ignorance. Perhaps you are sitting at home reading this. If so, you probably have no idea of the hazards that confront you right now. Are you more at risk from an airborne infection, a rat chewing through the wiring and starting a fire, or an asteroid crashing through the roof? You have no idea.

  We have plenty of evolutionary equipment to help us evaluate immediate danger. Our senses tell us where to tread and what’s safe to eat. But even the simple act of crossing a road is not so black and white. How can we choose between driving, flying or taking the train if we want the safest journey? What about radiation, which we willingly accept in the guise of an X-ray but fear otherwise?

  Given this uncertainty, it is no surprise to find that people in different countries fear different things. The Swedes worry about dangerous chemicals, the Danes about nuclear power and the Italians about radiation from their beloved mobile phones, even though the risks from each are probably broadly equal in these countries.8 Worries also change over time. A disturbing recent survey of Australian children found their main fears were being hit by a car, being near a bomb and being unable to breathe.9 In the same survey twenty years ago a trip to the headmaster, catching germs and falling over came top of the list.

  That’s a huge shift. Of course, risks change over time. Worries about terrorism and, well, anything from the following pages have replaced the Cold War worries of our parents about nuclear annihilation and communism. But, it seems, our perceptions of risk are much more changeable.

  It is almost as if we have to be afraid of something, as if we carry about in our heads a bucket of worry that we are compelled to fill with whatever’s available. Clearly, different individuals have different-sized buckets. But the important questions are: is the size of your bucket fixed, or does it expand and contract according to external circumstances? Does it expand only when there genuinely is more to worry about, or is it swelled by the media, governments and other interests? Acting collectively or individually, can we shrink our buckets? If so, how? And should we do this?

  According to the anthropologist Mary Douglas, writing with the political scientist Aaron Wildavsky in Risk and Culture, ‘people select their awareness of certain dangers to conform with a specific way of life’.10 A society united in fear is more cohesive. One where people fear different things is liable to fragment. Our dinner-table gossip and actions based on fears such as the rise or fall of house prices and immigration serve to strengthen or weaken the social fabric. So shrinking our bucket of worry too much may have consequences for social organization.

  We live at a time of unprecedented prosperity, mobility and connectivity. Most of us live at peace in democracies. It is not merely coincidental that we are also witnessing a loss of respect for authority, a fragmentation of society and rising levels of worry about ever smaller risks. They are a logical consequence of these developments. What we are seeing is people’s first uncertain response to greater technological and political freedoms. We are free to choose what we eat from a bewildering range of foods, for example. Governments, NGOs and corporations pull us this way and that – cheap, organic, low-salt, high-fibre, local or exotic and so on. But the choice is ours. Sometimes, though, we wish somebody would make it for us.

  What can we do? For many panic topics, we can bend the odds in our favour by being aware of controllable threats. We can free our minds by deciding not to worry about others. We can begin to weigh risks and measures to deal with them. For example, some safety measures, such as making cigarette lighters childproof or putting reflectors on lorries, have proved very effective in terms of saving life, while others, such as restrictions on hazardous waste, have merely proved expensive.

  It is quite legitimate to ask whether more overseas aid money should be put into flood defences in poor countries. If we want to cut road accidents, perhaps we should ban pedestrians from crossing the road while using their mobiles just as we ban drivers. Perhaps we should have a war on obesity rather than a war on terror. If we as voters were a bit wiser, and were not so easily freaked by dreadful or unexpected deaths by means such as hijacking or BSE, we might get better government.

  ‘Men,’ wrote Charles Mackay, ‘go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.’11 After reading Panicology, you will, we hope, worry less about many of our subjects; in one or two cases, you might be prompted to worry a little more. But you will have begun at least to prioritize your worries. You are on the road to recovery.

  1. Sex, Marriage and Children

  Worrying about whether there too many people on our planet or too few, and how we should relate to them, is at the heart of many panic stories. Mrs Thatcher told us two decades ago that there is no such thing as society, but the families we make – and break – and the increasingly diverse relationships we form, and see others form, cause plenty of concern. And don’t forget how we all got here – sex – is it a problem or a pleasure?

  The Birth Dearth

  ‘A second baby? Russia’s mothers aren’t persuaded’

  New York Times

  Italian men not helping much around the house is apparently one of the principal reasons why Italian women are producing so few babies.1 Other reasons for the birth rate of Italian women falling to be among the lowest in the world include the lack of flexible work, a shortage of nurseries and the poor provision of children’s services, in a country where couples have traditionally relied on families for support. A low birth rate might seem an unlikely problem for a predominantly Catholic child-loving country, but a serious shortage of babies and the prospect of a shrinking population is affecting many developed countries, to such an extent that it could soon threaten their livelihood and viability. Mass immigration, not always seen as desirable in the West, might become a necessity.

  The prospect of too few people being a problem is a far cry from the impending ‘population crisis’ that most of today’s adults were brought up with. ‘Too many people in the world?’ was the provocative question on the cover of one American magazine in 1963 and typical of the genre. Declining death rates, in other words increasing life expectancy, around the
world contributed to the more than doubling of the world’s population since 1950 to its current 6½ billion. It is now increasing by a little over 6 million a month, roughly 200,000 every day. The consequences of this growth are enormous shortages of water and fuel, the depletion of natural resources, high unemployment rates, pressure on public services including education and healthcare, increased ill-health, damage to ecosystems and pollution.

  It seems, then, that there are too few people in some areas and too many in others.

  Population fluctuations and associated scare stories are nothing new. The highly influential Essay on the Principle of Population, written by Englishman Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798, predicted that population would outrun food supply before the end of the nineteenth century. His basic view was that population, if unchecked, increases exponentially, at a geometric rate, whereas the food supply grows in a linear fashion, at an arithmetic rate. Malthus saw the solution to rapid population growth as being ‘moral restraint’ – including late marriage, which paradoxically is one of the key features of the problem now facing many Western countries with low birth rates and declining population. If we failed to embrace such restraint, excessive population growth would be checked, he told us, by accidents, war, pestilence, famine, infanticide, murder and homosexuality. Well, it hasn’t turned out quite that bad – yet at least. Economic progress, notably developments in food production, has kept most people nourished even if the more intensive use of the world’s resources has given rise to scares discussed elsewhere in this book.

  Sensible debate around the topic of population growth has been hampered by several factors. One is the population projections, which have a reputation of being fantastically unreliable – they are heavily influenced by the prejudices of those conducting the forecast, and very small differences in assumptions can make large differences to the results, due to the power of compound growth rates. Another problem has been the inability to define overpopulation. Conceptually it can be thought to arise when there is a shortage of resources leading to an impaired quality of life, serious environmental degradation or long-term shortages of essential goods and services. But how serious is serious and how long-term is long-term? As there is never a eureka moment when we can suddenly say that there is overpopulation, the whole debate is conducted in shades of grey. Population generally changes only slowly and unevenly, and the concerns or pressure points vary according to the society’s location and its wealth.

  Nevertheless, there have been other recent well-known works along similar lines to Malthus. These include The Limits to Growth,2 the world’s best-selling environmental book, published in 1972, which modelled the consequences of rapidly growing world population given finite resource supplies, and The Population Bomb,3 which predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s. At the time there was no shortage of criticism of the books, and both appeared on lists of the century’s worst books made at the turn of the millennium.

  Whatever the predictions, it is not difficult to argue that, with around 1 billion people already malnourished and without access to safe drinking water and healthcare, the earth is supporting 6½ billion people only because many live in misery. Others, more optimistically, have suggested that the world has a ‘carrying capacity’ of nearer 10 billion, and that the falling rate of population growth in various parts of the world, coupled with progress in science and technology, means there will be no problem with overpopulation.

  Rapidly growing populations leading to overpopulation might appear to be a global issue, but it is limited to a minority of geographies. Indeed, the United Nations forecasts that nine countries will account for half of the world’s projected population increase in the period up to 2050. These are India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Uganda, the US, Ethiopia and China, listed in order of their contribution to the growth. The growth is associated with increased urbanization, bringing a range of problems, with cities growing particularly fast in China and India – India already has more than thirty cities with populations over 1 million. These changes will cause a shift in where the world’s power – in terms of population – is concentrated. All of the growth forecast for the next four decades – adding 2.6 billion to the world’s population – is expected to take place in less-developed regions, with the population of the developed world remaining unchanged at around 1.2 billion.

  Demographers normally measure either the crude birth rate – the number of children born per thousand of population each year – or the total fertility rate – the average number of children born to each woman over the course of her life. On either measure a number of developed countries stand out as having a problem with declining population levels. Fertility in several dozen developed countries has reached levels unprecedented in recorded history – below 1.3 children per woman in several southern and eastern European countries. By contrast, fertility at the world level stands at 2.65 children per woman, a figure that rises to 5 children per woman in the least developed countries. The world average crude birth rate is around 20 children per thousand of population each year, yet a number of developed countries, including Germany, Japan and Italy, have rates of below 10.

  Countries have always feared a declining population. In the past, a large and growing population was required to develop land and generate wealth. Population increase was encouraged, often by means of conquest and enslavement. Larger armies, and increased security, required a healthy supply of youths. The pressures are different these days, but a declining population, often associated with an ageing population, is widely expected to damage economic growth and wealth generation, in turn increasing the difficulty of caring for the elderly.

  The reasons for the drop in fertility are not entirely clear. The theory of ‘demographic transition’ suggests that, as the standard of living and life expectancy increase, family sizes start to drop. At one level, factors such as the increased access to contraception give adults more choice over when and if to have children. The tendency to get married at later ages, reflecting in part the desire of many women to have careers, also reduces the scope to have children. And the sharp fall in infant death rates has reduced one pressure to have multiple births. The financial equation of having children has also altered: in rural areas in less-developed countries, children contribute to the economic well-being often from an early age, but in developed, urban settings bringing up children is increasingly expensive.

  Crude birth rate of selected countries

  * * *

  Rank by state∗ Country Births/000 population (crude birth rate) Total fertility rate

  * * *

  1 Niger 50.7 7.5

  20 Nigeria 40.4 5.5

  55 Pakistan 29.7 4.0

  89 India 22.0 2.7

  – World average 20.1 2.6

  112 Israel 18.0 2.4

  122 Brazil 16.6 1.9

  136 Ireland 14.4 1.9

  137 US 14.1 2.1

  142 China 13.3 1.7

  148 Australia 12.1 1.8

  151 France 12.0 1.8

  160 UK 10.8 1.7

  169 Spain 10.1 1.3

  173 Russia 10.0 1.3

  – European Union 10.0 1.5

  174 Poland 9.9 1.2

  178 Italy 9.6 1.3

  180 Japan 9.4 1.4

  181 Singapore 9.3 1.1

  184 Czech Republic 9.0 1.2

  189 Austria 8.7 1.4

  192 Germany 8.2 1.4

  * * *

  Source: The World Factbook, www.cia.gov. The total fertility rate is the expected number of children born per woman based on 2006 age-specific fertility rate date. ∗According to crude birth rate.

  The low fertility trends in some countries are such that demographers are now warning of ‘negative momentum’, occurring when a shrinking population goes into an ever-steeper spiral of decline – fewer babies now means fewer mothers in the future. When fertility rates fall below 2.1 (each woman needs to give birth on average to 2.1 babies to
maintain a developed nation’s population size) and death rates are broadly stable, a country’s population will decline unless it is offset by a favourable combination of immigration and emigration.

  This is a situation which is now facing much of Europe. The population of many of the former Soviet republics is falling due to emigration (notably since the fall of the Berlin Wall in the early 1990s), ill-health of those who remain and relative poverty. The population in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and the Slovak Republic was lower in 2005 than in 2000. The population of Germany declined in 2005 and 2006, a situation that would be reflected in several other western European countries were it not for net immigration. The future looks no more promising for most developed countries. Europe’s population was estimated at 731 million in 2005 – the base from which the United Nations conducts its projections. On the ‘low’ scenario, Europe’s population is expected to fall by over 20 per cent to 566 million, by 2050. The ‘high’ scenario sees a rise of 6 per cent, while the ‘medium’ scenario sees a fall of 10 per cent.4 All other continents, in contrast, see a significant increase in population in even the low scenario.

  A declining population will usually be accompanied by population ageing, one of the factors explaining the economic malaise of Japan and Germany in the last decade – and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. The median age of the world’s population is currently around 28 years, but that ranges from around 16 to 18 in many of the less-developed African countries to over 40 in a good number of European countries. Looking ahead, the problems could be severe for Europe’s pensioners. Currently there are around 35 pensioners for every hundred people of working age, but by 2050 there could be twice as many pensioners, around 75, for every hundred workers. Italy and Spain could see their ratios approach one for one. In most European countries, pensions are paid out of current tax revenues, which means that taxes will have to rise sharply, with the burden falling on an already proportionately shrinking number of workers, or pensions will have to fall.