by Jasper Gilley
Note: this is effectively a sequel to the post We’re Still in the Industrial Revolution. You should read that post before reading this one.
We’re still in the Industrial Revolution, and we will be for the foreseeable future. In the first Industrial Revolution post, we looked at the industrial future through the lens of micro-industrializations, speculating as to which would come next. But one doesn’t have to look solely through the lens of micro-industrializations. This post will trace an aspect of the industrial future that will transcend any individual micro-industrialization: the Industrial demographic shift.
Industrial Demography
In the pre-Industrial world, there was a lot of death. Every year, for every 1,000 people alive, about 39 would die.¹ That means if you had 100 friends in January 1600, anywhere in the world, you could expect about 4 of them to die by December.
Fortunately, there was also a lot of procreation. Every year, for every 1,000 people alive, about 40 would be born. The end result was that populations remained roughly stable or grew slightly, except in times of war, disease, or famine, when populations shrank dramatically (30-60% of Europe’s population was wiped out by the Black Death.²)
Then the Industrial Revolution arrived in the West, and death rates began to fall as a result of dramatically increased food supply. Procreation, however, failed to adjust accordingly, and industrialized nations subsequently saw a massive population increase (Britain’s population doubled from 1700 to 1800, and again from 1800 to 1850.) Eventually, people caught on and stopped procreating so much, and population sizes began to level off again.
Many historians divide this demographic transition into phases:
In western Europe, where the Industrial Revolution originated, Phase 1 ended in the late 1700s, Phase 2 ended in the late 1800s, and Phase 3 ended around the 1970s. The United States is still arguably in Phase 3, China is in Phase 4, India is in Phase 2, and much of the developing world is in Phase 1.
Yet Phase 4 isn’t the end of the line. In some long-industrialized nations, such as Russia and Germany, the birth rate has fallen below the death rate, leading to declining population sizes if immigration is a negligible factor. Some define a fifth phase for this phenomenon.
The important thing, however, is that slowing population growth across the world is and will be the norm for the foreseeable future. All nations are moving inexorably towards Phases 4 or 5. So far, immigration to the developed world from the developing has largely prevented population shrinkage. The population of Canada, for instance, is growing at the same rate as that of India, despite the fact that women in India give birth to nearly one more child than women in Canada, on average (this doesn’t sound like a lot but it is.) As fertility in the developing world declines, however, immigration will eventually become significantly less significant, and European nations will see large-scale population shrinkage.
The New Automation
As outlined in the previous Industrial Revolution post, a constant of the Industrial era has been the automation of jobs performed by humans, leading to the creation of more jobs for humans than were originally lost. This automation has been driven largely by economic forces – why pay a human to do a task for $1 when you can pay a machine to do it for $0.10? Of course, as long as there are humans to innovate, this sort of automation will continue on.
But as humans become more scarce, at both a national and a global level, they’ll be decreasingly able to perform all the tasks required in the economy at large, especially if the economy keeps growing exponentially. A new bout of automation will be ushered in by demographic forces, with market forces as the vector: as people become a scarce commodity, they’ll need to be paid more, giving new teeth to the incentive to automation. Indeed, there may simply be no humans around to perform certain tasks that humans have always performed.
Make Birth Rates Great Again
As I see it, there are three possible outcomes to the industrial demographic transition. One is that across the world, birth rates stabilize in the general vicinity of death rates, the world population levels off at around 12 billion, and humans continue living on Earth as before. This outcome is really boring, but I had to mention it because it’s a distinct possibility.
The other two possibilities are much more interesting. To examine the more pleasant of the them, consider what causes population growth. Populations of any sort grow when they have a surplus of food and space, both things that were extremely abundant for the past 300 years. Perhaps it’s no coincidence, then, that the human population is leveling off now, when most of the world’s habitable areas have been habitated. For future humans, however, the Earth need not limit spatial expansion: it seems increasingly likely that humans will set foot on Mars and become a multi-planetary species before 2050. The forthcoming age of space exploration, therefore, may give rise to a second era of exponential population growth. Automation and procreation will coexist as they have for the past 300 years, and the driving force behind automation will once again be economics. In many ways, this would be most like the world as it is now.
Not With a Bang, But a Whimper
Yet if present trends continue into the future indefinitely, another outcome may occur. The population of a humanity confined forever to Earth, never to explore again, might stagnate permanently or even decline irreversibly. In the end, natural forces might prove superior to a humanity made weak by demographics, leading to what would be the end of sentient life in the universe, as far as we know.
Yet, of course, Industrial Revolution-era machines need not be subject to biological demographic forces. As machines become more intelligent, they may become capable of operating without human guidance of any sort. Thus, a sort of biological twilight would occur: humans, having lost Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht, or will to power, would become obsolete, replaced by their synthetic successors. Personally, I find this possibility infinitely more compelling than Asimov-esque arguments that machines will out-compete humans directly.
There is also an interesting comparison to be made between the notion of biological twilight and the ideas of Thomas Malthus, who showed that, in a stagnant economy, occasional Malthusian catastrophes would put a limit on population growth. Biological twilight would be the ultimate Malthusian catastrophe insofar as it would put a final limit on population growth, except that it would be a total reversal of Malthusian concepts (in which populations always tend towards positive growth until they are decimated.) As T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men concludes, “this is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but a whimper.”
Demography and Geography
Which of the three outcomes (stagnation, continued acceleration, implosion) will occur? Looking at nations in advanced stages of the demographic transition would seem to suggest that implosion is the most likely. Most long-industrialized nations have birth rates well below the replacement rate of just over two births per woman, which means that without the effects of immigration, their populations would be shrinking (once again, immigration will become much less of a globally significant factor in coming decades.)
Yet predicting the future by this method assumes that the limits of human territory will be the same indefinitely. This is, of course, an assumption that will only be true for a limited time. Thus, humans’ demographic future and humans’ geographic future are intricately intertwined. Given some of the more recent developments in humans’ geographic future, however, I wouldn’t be quick to discount continued acceleration as the likely course of the future.
¹ – The Economist
² – New World Epidemics in Global Perspective by Suzanne Austin Alchon, pp. 21