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BY 2020, FOR THE first time in history, there will be more people on the planet over 65 than under 5.¹ More grandparents than grandchildren.

Two trends are driving this ageing of the world. First, we are living longer. In the twentieth century, average life expectancy increased by 30 years in most developed countries, because of better nutrition and sanitation, and medical advances. Men currently live longest in Switzerland, with an average life expectancy at birth of 82; women live longest in Japan, to about 87. Australia, Israel, Canada, South Korea and most Western European countries are close behind. The gap between men and women is narrowing, because men who once led rackety lives (drinking and smoking) are cleaning up their act.

The second reason is that the world’s women are turning away from motherhood. In 1964 the average woman had just over 5 children; in 2015 she had only 2.5.²

There are now 83 countries, home to nearly half the world’s population, with fertility rates below the ‘replacement rate’ – roughly 2.1 births per woman – needed to maintain the population. Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Chile and almost every country in Europe now has fertility below that level. South Africa and India are moving rapidly towards replacement rate, with birth rates of 2.5 and 2.3 respectively.³

The changes will alter the shape of countries. Japan’s population is already shrinking. By the middle of this century Italy, Poland, South Korea and Russia will be dwindling too.⁴ And these shifts could redraw the geopolitical balance of power: between countries on an ageing, shrinking trajectory – notably China – and countries which are sustained by younger, immigrant populations – currently the US.

Africa will provide the young of the future. The populations of 26 African countries are expected to double between 2017 and 2050, adding another 1.3 billion people to that continent.⁵

Fewer humans should be good news for the environment, once global population peaks (some time after 2070, though estimates range from 9 to 11 billion).⁶ But the impact on humans can already be glimpsed. Visit Japan’s Akita Prefecture, where over a third of residents are over 65 and the main growth industry is funeral parlours.⁷ Or go to Rudong in eastern China, where half the schools have closed in the past 15 years as the younger generation moves away.

Demography is changing not only the landscape, but the very meaning of family. What networks will we rely on, as children become scarce?

The Chinese government has passed an ‘Elderly Rights Law’, threatening to fine children who don’t visit parents often enough.⁸ But the children are fighting back. ‘What is considered “often”?’ complained one poster on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter.⁹ ‘It’s fine that no one is paying for us to visit our parents, but is there someone who can give us time off to do it?’ asked another, refusing to buy into traditional notions of family.

The best way to visualise what is happening is through the population pyramids used by demographers. In 1950, if you laid out the population of any nation with each age group represented by a bar, the youngest at the bottom and the oldest at the top, it looked like a pyramid, with the young outnumbering the old. That has been the shape throughout recorded history, as this chart for Japan shows:

Since then, falling birth rates and longer lifespans have changed the picture dramatically. Japan, the world’s oldest society, has one of the lowest birth rates in the world: 1.4 births per woman. Fifty years ago, life expectancy in Japan was about 72 years. Now it is 84. In 2015, over a quarter of the population was over 65, turning the pyramid into a barrel:

Between now and 2050, longer lifespans will continue to alter the pyramids’ shape. The fastest growing group in the world population will be those aged over 80. In Japan, the pyramid will stretch up and outwards, to look more like a flowerpot:

One former health minister has predicted that ‘the Japanese race will become extinct’. The first question is why? Why have millions of individuals simultaneously changed their minds about having children?

Japan: ‘Herbivore Men’ and Career Women

‘Men here don’t want a woman who’s cleverer than them,’ says Keiko, a Japanese executive in her early forties, who is wearing a smart suit and demure heels when we meet in the lobby of the Tokyo Hilton. ‘They worry you might be demanding, that you might be demanding in bed too. And I just think, why bother? Why bother with a guy who’s more interested in his Xbox?’

Something strange is going on in Japan, which now has the world’s highest proportion of old people. In 2013, it was claimed, more nappies were sold for elderly, incontinent people than for babies.¹⁰ That ugly benchmark proclaims the raw truth: babies have gone out of fashion.

The roots of this shift, in a society which has traditionally prized family above everything, lie in a feminist revolution: women are shaking off the traditions of dutiful service to husband and household, and challenging men to adapt. ‘I wouldn’t mind a child, if I’m honest,’ said a Japanese student I met in London. ‘But I’m not sure I’d want to put up with a husband.’

‘It’s hard,’ says one Japanese woman in her late thirties, who speaks perfect English and has married a New Zealander. ‘Many of my friends are really serious about their careers. It’s their chance and they’re not going to bother with a man who can’t bring home the bacon.’

As women become more ambitious for themselves, they talk disparagingly about what they call ‘herbivore men’ (soˉshoku-kei danshi), a term coined in 2006 by the Nikkei columnist Maki Fukasawa. The herbivore man doesn’t know how to ask a woman out on a date. He’s intimidated by women. And, the implication is, he’s not even that interested. A survey in the Japan Times found 20 per cent of men in their late twenties reported having little or no interest in sex – some citing crippling long working hours.¹¹

It’s not clear to what extent the stereotype is true. There are still plenty of Love Hotels, the Japanese hotels which were created for salarymen to grab some respite. And the number of children produced by married couples is still hovering around replacement rate. But far more people are staying single. As arranged marriages disappear, hundreds of thousands of men whose mothers would once have found them a bride are struggling to adapt. One in four 50-year-old Japanese men has never been married.¹² Since this is a country which still feels uncomfortable having children out of wedlock, that’s bad for birth.

Having children is also a costly business. In surveys, 20- and thirty-something men and women¹³ say lack of money is a serious obstacle to getting married. Couples increasingly need two incomes. But it’s hard to combine a career with motherhood in a culture where people stay at their desks late.

Cost is not the whole story. Many women have been liberated from the need to find a husband to support them, as employers have become more open-minded about hiring. This partly stems, ironically, from the realisation that Japan must utilise all its talents if its economy is to prosper as the population shrinks. As all the curves on the graph turn downwards, experts are now looking desperately for solutions.

‘We must increase immigration, or we will see our nation vanish,’ says Dr Jun Saito, a leading economist at the UCLA Japan Center in Tokyo. Dr Saito believes that Japan must import more foreign workers even if it manages to increase the number of women and older people in the work force. ‘Even if we raised the fertility rate to 2.1 tomorrow,’ he tells me, ‘an option that is difficult to achieve, the population would not stabilize until 60 to 70 years later.’

Japanese reluctance to admit immigrants is legendary. Fewer than 2 per cent of the country’s workforce is foreign. Although the government recently created new visas for low-skilled foreign workers in industries like construction and care, and has broken a taboo by letting those workers bring their families immediately, rather than after five years, the numbers are a trickle. Only 18 foreign workers have qualified for the care-worker visa, partly because the exams are in Japanese.

‘The worst scenario in my mind,’ Dr Saito confides, ‘is that even if we open up the country, nobody comes.’

China: Growing Old Before It Gets Rich

They call it the grey wall of China. By 2100, China’s elderly population will dwarf that of any other country except India. It’ll be so large, wags joke, that you’ll be able to see it from outer space. At the park around Beijing’s Temple of Heaven, in the cool of early morning, hundreds of older people are playing cards, doing tai-chi or exercising. A group of about 50, mainly women, dance to lilting music. They move gracefully, quietly, in a choreographed routine, on the paths between the trees.

It’s an uplifting, harmonious scene. The women place their feet confidently, and with precision. But it’s hard to feel so confident of the future. Most of the people in this park are retired. China’s working-age population has been in decline since 2012¹⁴ and is set to fall by almost a quarter by 2050. The demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, of the American Enterprise Institute, has predicted that this will drag down China’s GDP growth rate. By mid-century, China’s population could look much more like Japan’s – but without Japan’s affluence.

The birth rate was falling even before the government introduced the One-Child Policy in 1978. Now, China is awash with only children. Many find themselves having to support two parents and four grandparents – known as ‘the 4–2–1’ problem. There is the added, disturbing glut of bachelors because so many families preferred sons to daughters. These ‘guang gun’ (bare branches) will struggle to find brides.

Sensing the danger, the Communist Party dropped the One-Child Policy in 2015. But it is probably too late. Few eligible families have applied to have a second child. Many don’t feel they can afford it, because so many have moved to cities where the cost of living is high. Seven in ten Chinese mothers work, with little time for an extra child.

Marriage is becoming less attractive. On TV dating shows like If You Are the One, successful Chinese women criticise potential suitors for being ugly or poor. More women than men now attend Chinese universities, and many are defying the jibes about unmarried women being ‘shengnu’, or ‘leftover’. A survey by the Chinese dating website Baihe.com has found 75 per cent of women saying that any husband should earn twice as much as them.

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicts that the Chinese population will peak at 1.44 billion in 2029 before entering ‘unstoppable’ decline.¹⁵ By 2065, it says, the population will have shrunk to the levels of the mid-1990s.

What could this mean for China as a military power? Mark L. Haas, a political scientist at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has suggested that China could be forced to make ‘geriatric peace’ with other nations, as it becomes too burdened by its elderly to maintain military spending. That is not certain: China may not feel beholden to spend as much as a democracy on older citizens, and it can use technology to raise productivity. But it is too big to be able to level the playing field by importing enough immigrants.

Instead, the government has started offering five-year multiple-entry visas to tempt its diaspora back home – something South Africa and India are also doing.¹⁶ It is also contemplating raising the retirement age, which is 60 for men and 55 for women.¹⁷

Will they be fit enough? China faces an increasing burden of chronic disease approaching Western levels. Junk food and stress have accompanied rapid urbanisation and the country has not yet broken the smoking habit. Under Mao, China’s population was surprisingly healthy: it saw the world’s most sustained increase in life expectancy, from 35 in 1949 to 65 in 1980.¹⁸ That healthy, working-age population helped to drive its unprecedented economic growth.¹⁹ But now, China is growing old with neither Japan’s wealth nor its health, at a time when many of its jobs still require physical, manual labour. And its rival, America, is on a different path.

China v America

America has long been a demographic exception, with a higher birth rate than most other rich countries. China’s population is currently around four times the size of America’s. But that gap will have halved²⁰ by the end of this century, unless America slams the door shut on immigrants.

The chart below gives a glimpse into the geopolitics of the next few decades. It shows China’s working-age population dropping, along with Europe’s, while America’s remains stable:

Before the financial crisis, the American population was sustaining itself, with a birth rate of 2.12.²¹ This is partly because it has higher levels of immigration, and because immigrants tend to have larger families. In the US, 23 per cent of births are to foreign-born women,²² while only 13 per cent of the population is comprised of immigrants.²³

American women also become mothers earlier than in any other OECD country: at an average age of 26, compared with 28 in the UK, and 31 in Italy. Only 14 per cent of US women remain childless, compared to 18 per cent in the UK and 23 per cent in Germany.²⁴

There is a dark side. America has been lagging behind other rich countries in life expectancy, partly because its high rates of obesity mean it has failed to combat deaths from stroke. But now, US life expectancy at birth has dropped for three years in a row, the first drop since the AIDS/HIV epidemic, partly because of what the Princeton professors Case and Deaton have dubbed ‘deaths of despair’²⁵ – from suicide, alcohol and opioids.²⁶ Poverty and inequality pose real challenges.

In 2017, America also hit a 40-year low in its fertility rate, of 1.76.²⁷ What is not clear is whether this is a post-crisis blip or a new direction. The fertility rate of Mexicans in America dropped by a third between 2006 and 2013, partly because of the financial squeeze – and it hasn’t yet recovered. If migrants are to keep working their magic on fertility, they need to keep coming, because second- and third-generation immigrants tend to adopt the cultures of the host country and have fewer babies. Any president who builds a wall could therefore get more than he bargained for: because population is shaping up to be a powerful geopolitical weapon.

India: Educating Rhia

Today’s Indian couples say their ideal family size is two children, according to a poll by The Economist.²⁸ That’s smaller than the ideal family cited by Brits and Americans. Fifty years since the biologist Paul Erhlich predicted mass famine in his book The Population Bomb, India’s youthful population is growing slowly. The average woman now has just 2.3 children – fewer if she is Sikh, Jain or Christian, slightly more if she is Hindu and a bit more again if she is Muslim.

India did not need a One-Child Policy to reach this point. Although government has nudged people to have smaller families in various ways, India is a good advert for the principle that educating girls reduces the number of children they have. Especially if you accept that education comes in many forms. Birth rates have fallen where cable TV has arrived in rural areas, bringing Bollywood soap operas featuring independent childless women and chic urban mothers with small families.²⁹ Audiences name their babies after the characters, become less tolerant of domestic violence and use contraception. India is not alone: telenovelas have had a similar effect in Brazil.³⁰

While India still wrestles with poverty and illiteracy, it seems that urbanisation, growing prosperity, public health and most of all education are powerful contraceptives.

Singapore: City Living

‘Having kids was important to our parents,’ one thirty-something civil servant in Singapore explained to researcher Joel Kotkin, who conducted extensive interviews with young professionals. ‘But now we tend to have a cost and benefit analysis about family. The cost is tangible, but the benefits are not.’³¹

Such chilling pragmatism resonates in many parts of Asia, especially those where property prices are high. It is no accident that Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing, some of the world’s most expensive cities, have some of the lowest birth rates. The Singapore government’s ‘Marriage and Parenthood Package’ offers substantial bonuses to couples who have children. But it’s not working too well. Many ambitious youngsters seem more focused on their careers: a third of graduates aged 30 to 34 years old are single in Singapore, and the birth rate is 1.2.³²

These modern workers don’t seem to worry that no one will look after them in old age. Across Asia, the traditional model of close-knit families is breaking down. Social networks are increasingly made up of friends, not relatives: reinforcing the notion that childlessness is normal.

Europe: Waiting for Mr Right?

‘Capitalism + atheism + feminism = sterility = migration,’ tweeted Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks and fugitive from justice, in 2017. ‘EU birthrate = 1.6,’ he went on. ‘Replacement = 2.1. Merkel, May, Macron, Gentiloni [the leaders of Germany, Britain, France and Italy at the time] all childless.’

This was a neat summary of Europe’s plight. And nowhere does it apply more strongly than in Italy, which most of us still associate with large Catholic families. The country of ‘amore’ now has the lowest birth rate in Europe. This is partly a consequence of youth unemployment. The long, grim recession since the financial crash of 2008 has seen many Italians travel abroad to find jobs, and others fearing they can’t afford children.

The average Italian woman would still like two or more children.³³ But she doesn’t have her first child until 31 – older than anywhere else in the EU.³⁴ One reason may be that two-thirds of Italian men under 35 are still living with their parents, in contrast to most young women.³⁵ Politicians have dubbed these Mama’s boys ‘bamboccioni’ (‘big babies’) who won’t grow up. Political commentator Antonio Politi has claimed that women are being deterred from raising families by men who are neither fulfilling their roles as breadwinners, nor stepping up to fatherhood.

Attempts to warn women not to leave it too late have backfired spectacularly. When Italy’s health minister Beatrice Lorenzin organised a national Fertility Day, with talks up and down the country, she was met with outraged counter-demonstrations. Women marched through the streets carrying placards reading ‘siamo in attesa’:³⁶ a play on the Italian for ‘we’re expecting’, which also translates as ‘we’re waiting’. Waiting for jobs, waiting for affordable childcare, and waiting for equality. Many Italian women still lose their jobs when they get pregnant; one in four is sacked within a year of having her first child.³⁷ Romance is not entirely dead, but the birth rate is in trouble when women need to work but don’t have equality.

Germany has similarly high rates of childlessness to Italy. But in Europe’s prosperous heart, this has less to do with money worries. ‘In the days of “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” [“Children, Kitchen, Church”] it was natural to have children,’ I’m told by Dr Jan Kessler, a paediatrician in Munich. ‘But that’s old-fashioned to a generation which wants to keep its options open. They want to study; they want a good career; it’s never really a good time to have a child.’

Women are enjoying success, and don’t always want to deal with old-fashioned views of motherhood. ‘No one minds me having a career,’ one married academic told me. ‘But I would get a lot of flak if I left a child in a crèche.’ Some German women fear being labelled as Rabenmütter, ‘raven mothers’, if they dare to combine work and motherhood. This appalling image, of ravens as carrion-eaters who neglect their young, seems to weigh heavily on some women, who are in any case not certain whether they want children.

The German government gives generous parental leave and has massively expanded day care. It now spends almost three times as much on benefits to families as it spends on defence.³⁸ (The UK spends about 1.3 times more.³⁹) The reforms were led by Ursula von der Leyen, a government minister and mother of seven, who subsidised paternity leave and declared that men should be responsible for half of the childcare. And the birth rate has nudged up a little, with the help of immigrants. To keep pace, the Federal Statistical Office has estimated that the country would need half a million immigrants every year until 2040. That seems unlikely, given the backlash which followed Angela Merkel’s opening the borders to around a million refugees in 2015.

The birth rate is higher in Britain, where part-time working and maternity benefits are routine. That’s partly because of high levels of immigration: 28 per cent of live births in the UK are to foreign-born women,⁴⁰ though foreign-born people make up about 14 per cent of the population.

We are also breeding a nation of only children. Almost half of British families now contain only one child. It’s not clear how much of that is deliberate. In polls, Brits say their ideal family is just over two children, but the birth rate is 1.76.

Sarah Davies, a teacher, was in her mid-thirties when she plucked up the courage to ask her long-term boyfriend to settle down. He dumped her. Now, she wonders if she’s left it too late. ‘No one will fancy me if I look desperate,’ she says gloomily, staring at a dating site. Ms Davies is not one of those mythical creatures regularly accused by the UK press of ignorantly frittering away their fertility. She’s been muffling the ticking of her biological clock for years, fearing men are on a different timetable. ‘They’ve got no incentive,’ she reflects. ‘If I was a man, I’d probably focus on my career too, and not want to be hamstrung by a baby till I’d made it.’ A lack of suitable partners may explain recent increases in the numbers of single women seeking IVF, and why birth rates for women over 40 are at their highest level since 1949.⁴¹ That seems more likely than the idea that highly capable career women, who stick to every other timetable, somehow ‘forgot’ to have kids.

Is Life Expectancy Stalling?

Galloping increases in life expectancy have recently slowed dramatically in the UK, and to a lesser extent in Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands. This has surprised actuaries. Some blame it on government cuts to public services, although those were not uniform in those countries.⁴² Others believe it has more to do with a slowdown in the incredible progress we have made against heart attacks and stroke.

Life expectancy at birth grew substantially during the twentieth century, because we were reducing deaths among infants and children: but life expectancy from the age of 65 barely budged. Between 1970 and 2011, however, older people saw a dramatic change: life expectancy at 65 increased 20 times as fast as in the previous century. The main reason? A massive drop in deaths from heart attack and stroke, driven by people giving up cigarettes.

Since 2011, progress has slowed. ‘It’s possible we have gone back to the time before 2000, when life expectancy improvement was more gradual,’ says Gordon Aitken, insurance analyst at RBC Capital Markets. ‘From 2000 to 2010, we saw the wealthier getting healthier. But it’s hard to keep reducing deaths from cardiovascular diseases at the same rate. And obesity and diabetes are on the rise.’

There is no consensus on how the change affects different socio-economic groups. One data set suggests that the ‘Comfortable’ are unaffected, and that the losses are among the ‘Hard-Pressed’. Another suggests that all groups are seeing a slowdown in improvement.⁴³

While these differences are of enormous importance to insurers, because they affect annuity payouts, they are less crucial for the rest of us. Mr Aitken explains that the chance of dying in 2018, for example, didn’t increase from the previous year. What has happened is that the forecasts for growth were too optimistic. A 65-year-old man in the UK is now expected to live to 86.5, while a 65-year-old woman is expected to reach 88.4.

Sub-Saharan Africa: The Young of the Future

Sub-Saharan Africa finds itself in a demographic bind of a different sort. Its population is expected to quadruple to 4 billion people by 2100,⁴⁴ with Nigeria overtaking America as the world’s third most populous country. There is much excitement at the prospect of youth burgeoning as the old world shrinks. Tanzanian President John Magufuli has claimed he sees no need for birth control, insisting a high fertility rate will boost his country’s economy.⁴⁵

Sadly, he may be mistaken. The great leaps forward made by the Asian Tiger economies came from the so-called ‘demographic dividend’: of rapid growth in working-age populations, enabling those countries to grow fast and invest, followed by sharp subsequent falls in the birth rate which boosted the skills base, because parents with fewer children could invest more in educating each one.

Sub-Saharan Africa is on a different path, of continuing population growth with no demographic dividend in sight. Its per capita income is growing slowly, and its many willing hands may not be able to find work, if they remain at low skill levels. Add to that the likely strains on the environment and infrastructure, and Mr Magufuli may come to change his mind.

The Paradox of Living Longer, But Not Being Fertile for Longer

Falling birth rates must be good news for a planet whose natural resources have been stretched to the limit by humans. And they reflect a welcome next step in the liberation of women. Almost everywhere outside sub-Saharan Africa, women are throwing off the shackles of their traditional roles. Lower infant mortality has made it safer to have smaller families. The hold of religion is waning. More women are pursuing careers. At the same time, job insecurity and the high cost of living, especially in cities where the jobs are, has left many couples fearing they can’t afford children.

Some worried governments have resorted to bribery. The Polish Ministry of Health put out a terrible video, encouraging the population to ‘multiply like rabbits’.⁴⁶ Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany and Russia pay ‘baby bonuses’. Some of these schemes have had limited success: France and Sweden have the highest birth rates in Europe. But not all women want to be treated like prize cows. A Danish government video, urging women to ‘Do It for Denmark’, missed the point: that many women don’t want children, and others can’t find a good father.

It may be that the post-war baby boom was unusual. Today’s combination of greater career opportunities for women, and increased financial pressures, may be returning us to an era when people did not get married, or have children, until they felt they could afford it. Some may leave it too late as a result. Others will feel liberated from the tyrannical view that there is something wrong with you if you’re childless.

In Extra Time people study longer, leave home later and may not be settled or solvent until their mid-thirties: when they may hit the hard deadline of the biological clock. That mismatch will leave some couples very disappointed.

For the foreseeable future, it looks as though we will be stuck with male fertility declining from about 45, and female fertility from around 30. In most other respects, though, we remain younger for longer.