The Future (31 page)

These new higher projections for peak global population in the latter part of the twenty-first century reflect a slower than expected decline in the average
fertility rate in scores of less developed countries—the majority of them in Africa. The biggest single reason for the increased population estimates for Africa and the world is the failure of the world community to make fertility
management knowledge and technology available to women who wish to use it.

Population and development specialists have learned a great deal over the last few decades about the many factors that actually drive changes in the dynamics of population growth. Voluminous research has shown conclusively that four elements of the population puzzle all fit together and act in combination to shift the pattern of population growth in any country from one equilibrium—characterized by high death rates, high birth rates, and large families—to a second equilibrium—characterized by low death rates, low birth rates, and small families.

The good news is that the global effort to slow population growth is actually a success story, albeit one that is unfolding in slow motion. Even though very large increases in our absolute numbers will continue for many decades to come, almost every nation in the world has been moving from the high equilibrium state toward the low equilibrium state. Some have changed quickly but others are lagging behind. In the U.S., the rate of growth in population has slowed to the
lowest level since the Great Depression.

For several decades in the twentieth century, the prevailing view was that increases in GDP—particularly those factors associated with industrial development—were the key to falling population growth rates. This was another early illustration of the seductive convenience and illusory simplicity of GDP as a proxy measurement of generalized progress and how it can capture the attention of policymakers, even when it is only loosely connected to the real goals they are trying to reach.

Although GDP is
not
one of the four factors, economic growth is loosely correlated in many countries with the
creation of social conditions that can and do have an impact on population. And conversely, in most instances, extreme poverty is certainly correlated with higher population growth rates—especially in countries with failing institutions and shortages of clean water and topsoil. All fourteen nations with those three characteristics have extremely high population growth rates;
thirteen of the fourteen are in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The four relevant factors, all of which are necessary but none of which, by itself, is sufficient, are:

The struggle to provide access to contraception and the knowledge of how to manage fertility has not gone as well as social scientists and population experts had hoped. The commitments by wealthy countries to finance wider access in poor countries to fertility management have not been fully met. In some developed countries where democracy is being weakened, like the United States, attacks on programs beneficial to women have been more successful in recent years. Political opposition to contraception, for example, has surprisingly reemerged in the United States in the last two years, even though the overwhelming majority of American women (
including 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women) support it and even though it seemed to be a question that had been settled in the 1960s.

The religion-based opposition to contraception by a tiny minority in the U.S. has also had a harsh impact on U.S. contributions to the global effort to make fertility management available in fast growing developing countries—in part because of the disingenuous conflation of contraception and abortion. Since foreign aid is always vulnerable to budget cuts in the United States, the amount of help actually provided has fallen far short of the amount pledged. And once again, the imbalance of power
and political paralysis in the U.S. has deprived the world of desperately needed leadership, which, in turn, has seriously damaged the world’s ability to take action.

Partially as a result, anticipated declines in fertility rates have not been achieved—especially in Africa,
where thirty-nine out of the fifty-five African countries have high levels of fertility. (There are nine high-fertility countries in Asia, six in Pacific Island nations, and four in the low-income countries of Latin America.) In thirty-four of the fifty-eight high-fertility countries in the world,
population will triple in the balance of this century.

On a global basis, women now have an average of
2.5 children during their childbearing years. In Africa, however, the
average is almost 4.5 children per woman. Moreover, in four African countries, the average woman is still expected to have more than six children,
leading to disruptive and unsustainable population growth. Malawi, for example, which has 15 million people today, is projected to have a nearly tenfold increase in population
by the end of the century to an estimated 129 million. The African nation with the largest population, Nigeria, is projected to increase from slightly more than 160 million people today
to more than 730 million by 2100. That
would put Nigeria’s population at the level of China in the mid-1960s.

Before the improved understanding of population dynamics, many people assumed that higher death rates reduce overall population. But the impact of high death rates on high birth rates gives the lie to this former belief. The Black Death of the fourteenth century did reduce population—indeed, that is believed to be the last time population has declined. But in today’s world, even the most feared diseases have not had an impact on population. The HIV/AIDS epidemic has had an impact on the overall numbers of people in a few African countries, but on a worldwide basis population grew by more in the first five months of 2011 than all of the deaths from HIV/AIDS since the disease first began rapidly spreading three decades ago.

In countries with high rates of infant mortality, the natural tendency of parents is to have more children in order to ensure that at least some of them will survive to take care of their parents in old age and to carry on the family name and tradition. In practice, when child death rates fall dramatically, birth rates generally decline a half generation later—provided the other three factors are also present. Following World
War II, revolutionary advances in health care—higher levels of sanitation, better nutrition, antibiotics, vaccines, and other achievements of modern medicine—led to
significant declines in child and infant mortality in many countries around the world. This same combination of improvements in health care and nutrition has doubled life expectancy in industrial countries from the
beginning of the nineteenth century—from thirty-five to seventy-seven years.

The education of girls has become commonplace around the world, including in most countries that used to focus only on the education of boys. Although there is still opposition to the education of girls among groups such as Afghanistan’s Taliban, most nations have long since become aware of the competitive advantages, especially in the information age, of educating all their children. Saudi Arabia used to focus on boys alone in their school systems, but according to the most recent statistics available, almost 60 percent—
compared to 8 percent in 1970—of college students in Saudi Arabia were women.

The comparable figure in Qatar is 64 percent, in Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates, 60 percent; the average in
Arab states is now 48 percent; in Iran 51 percent. Indeed, more women than men received college degrees in
67 of the 120 nations for which statistics are available.
The world average is 51 percent. In the United States, women now receive 62 percent of associate’s degrees, 58 percent of bachelor’s degrees,
61 percent of master’s degrees, and 51 percent of doctoral degrees.

The
empowerment
of women, on the other hand, remains a challenging goal in many traditionalist societies. None of those women college graduates in Saudi Arabia, for example, is allowed to drive a car—or vote—although their relatively progressive king
has announced plans to allow women to vote beginning in 2015. Even though 93 percent of the gender gap in education of women has been closed on a global basis, less than 60 percent of the gap in economic participation and
only 18 percent of the gap in political participation have been closed.

The Global Mind has accelerated demands for the empowerment of women throughout the world; women make up more than half of all social network users globally, and almost half of all Internet users. When
they are exposed to the more favorable norms of gender equity in advanced countries, they naturally become impatient for change.

Women have been coming into the workplace in almost all countries in higher numbers than men, reflecting a historic change in global attitudes about women working outside the home. In fact, for the last forty years,
two women have entered the workplace for every man. Women have made a particular difference in the competitiveness of rapidly growing East Asian nations,
with 83 women in the workforce for every 100 men. They have had the biggest impact in several export-oriented businesses, including clothing and textiles—
filling between 60 to 80 percent of the jobs.

The Economist
has calculated that on a global basis, “the increased employment of women in developed economies
has contributed much more to global growth than China has.” In developed countries as a group, women are
responsible for producing slightly less than 40 percent of GDP. However, another flaw in the way GDP is measured—one noted by Kuznets when he first introduced it in 1937—is that it does not assign any economic value to the work women (and some men) do in the home: raising children, cooking meals, keeping the household, and all the rest. If this housework in developed countries were valued at the amount that would be paid for nannies, cooks, and housekeepers, the total
contribution of women to GDP would be well over 50 percent.

The movement of women into jobs outside the home has had startling social impacts. In the United States, during the three decades between the 1960s and 1990s, the percentage of married women with children younger than six years old
who work outside the home skyrocketed from 12 percent to 55 percent. The percentage of all mothers with young children who chose to work outside the home
rose during the same three decades from 20 to 60 percent.

These sociological changes are also among the many factors contributing to the obesity epidemic. Because many more mothers are now working outside the home, and a much higher percentage of children live in families where both parents work, more people eat fast food, other restaurant food, and manufactured meals and food products designed for minimal preparation, such as microwaving. Portion sizes have also increased along with the body mass index. It
all adds up to what Kessler calls “conditioned hyper-eating.”

Studies also show that children in low-income neighborhoods are often permitted and even encouraged by their parents and caregivers to watch more television than average because of greater concerns about their safety
playing outside in neighborhoods that, relatively speaking, are prone to more violence. This mirrors a global trend for people of all ages, who are spending more time on electronic screens connecting to the Global Mind and are, on average, more likely to work in jobs that do not require as much physical activity as in the past. The trend toward more driving and less walking is also a factor.

The increased participation of women in the workforce, the dramatic changes in the education of women, and changes in social values have also led to significant structural changes in the institution of the family. Divorces have increased dramatically in almost every part of the world, partly due to new legislation making them easier to obtain, and, according to experts,
partly because of the increased participation of women in the workforce. Some experts also note the role of online relationships; according to several analyses,
between 20 and 30 percent of all divorces in the U.S. now involve Facebook.

The age at which the average woman gets married has also increased significantly, and a larger percentage of men and women choose never to marry at all. Fifty years ago, two thirds of all Americans in their twenties were married.
Now, only one quarter are. Many more couples are living together—
and having children—without getting married. Forty-one percent of children in the U.S.
are now born to unmarried women. Fifty years ago, only 5 percent of U.S. children
were born to unmarried mothers. Today, the comparable figure
among mothers under thirty is 50 percent.
Among African American mothers of all ages,
the percentage is now 73 percent.

In the overall rankings of countries on the basis of gender equity, the four highest are
Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden; the lowest rank goes to Yemen. However, the political participation of women has lagged far behind most other indicators of gender equity. On a global basis, women make up less than 20 percent of elected parliaments, with the highest percentage (42 percent) in the Nordic countries and
the lowest percentage (11.4 percent) in the Arab states. The United States is barely
above the global average. Only two countries in the world have a female majority in their parliaments—one of the tiniest countries, Andorra, and one of the poorest, Rwanda, which in the wake of its 1994 tragedy enacted
a constitutional requirement that a minimum of 30 percent of its parliament be women. The empowerment of women in corporate governance is lower still—with
only 7 percent of corporate boards in the world made up of women.