When the Chinese Communist party announced earlier this week that it would allow families to have three children, it justified it in terms of the need to “maintain China’s natural advantage in human resources”. Such an economic focus on fertility is nothing new. At least since the Reverend Thomas Malthus at the end of the 18th century, practitioners of the dismal science have puzzled over the connection between population growth, natural resources and improvements in long-term living standards. The latest question is how welfare systems will cope with ageing populations and increasing numbers of dependants.
China is not alone in facing a demographic transition. The global population is likely to peak this century or early in the next — fertility rates have declined pretty much everywhere. The number of children born per woman has fallen from about five in the 1960s to about 2.4 in 2018, according to the World Bank, slightly above the all-important “replacement rate” that marks the difference between a population getting older or younger. In sub-Saharan Africa, likely to deliver much of the population growth over the next century, fertility rates have dropped from about 6.8 children per woman in the 1970s to about 4.6 in 2018.
Those high birth rates in the 1970s inspired a revival of Malthusian worries that growing populations would swiftly exhaust natural resources. That opinions have shifted so far — worrying about the pace of decline rather than expansion — shows that while our anxieties over fertility may change they will always be with us in one form or another. The 1970s worriers had a point too: predictions of food running out have come to naught but the damage to biodiversity and the environment is obvious.