Today, Explained - 8 billion humans

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

The United Nations says humanity has reached 8 billion, but Western nations are worried about population decline. Africa isn’t, though. The continent is about to shape the rest of the century. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Efim Shapiro and Cristian Ayala, and edited by Sean Rameswaram who also hosted. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The human race just set a record. Eight billion people now inhabit our ball in space. But who was the eight billionth person? Hard to say. Perhaps they were born in India. India is home to 1.4 billion people. This population is projected to soon become the world's largest. Or maybe in Nigeria. Nigeria's population put at over 200 million people

and a high fertility rate. Wherever baby 8 billion was born, chances are it wasn't Europe or Japan or anywhere else the population is dropping. According to experts, Italy's decreasing population is the most pressing issue that needs to be addressed. Population is booming in poorer countries and dropping in richer ones. On Today Explained, we're going to ask what that means

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Today explained Sean Romsverm, one of 8 billion humans on planet Earth, an estimate the UN noted on November 15th because we've never been here before. No, this is the highest it's ever been. Of course, the next day will be even higher and so forth, this is the highest it's ever been. Of course, the next day will be even higher and so forth and so on. But it's a day that really marks just how big this human population has gotten. Brian Walsh is an editor for Vox's Future Perfect. We were only about 1 billion people 220 years ago or so, about 1800. So it's a really fast amount of growth in a fairly small period of time that wasn't really the case for most of human history. This is really just the last 200 years that we've just, boom, taken off the way we have. So unprecedented for the race, how should we feel about the number? That entirely depends on who you ask and I guess

what you really care about most of all. There are those who look at that 8 billion number and say, this is just too many. We've already passed more people than the Earth can really support. I know that for a fact because they email me every time we write about this. But that's a long-running fear as well. We now realize that the disasters that continue increasingly to afflict the natural world have one element that connects them all. The unprecedented increase in the number of human beings on the planet.

But increasingly, you're also seeing people who look at this number and look at the trends we're headed towards in the future, especially in places like Europe, parts of North America, East Asia, see really low levels of growth, even shrinking in some countries, and worry that we're headed towards a future where there will be too few people.

In an empty delivery room at the Villa Elena Clinic, the midwife, Julia Tessio, tells me the number of babies she's delivered annually has dropped by 70%. And both those views, they have some credence, I think, to both of them, but really it does depend on where you fall on those various questions. Well, let's talk about the first camp of people first. I mean, the people who think we've already hit the population that this Earth can sustain. Tell me about the origins of those concerns,

and what is the magical number of how much humanity this planet can sustain? Well, those concerns go back quite a while, actually. You can go all the way back to the 18th century in England. There have been prophets who've warned us of this impending disaster, of course. One of the first was Thomas Malthus. He was a cleric and an economist who kind of really looked at population and decided that as population grew, think about human beings here, didn't really feel that food supplies would keep up. So it would be inevitable that you'd end up having retraction. People would, frankly, starve to death. That was the Muthusian economics you still hear about occasionally where there are limits and as population exceeds them, they will pay the penalty over time.

Net world population is increasing by 23 people every 10 seconds. It's clear that world population growth remains completely out of control. It really kicks off, though, those feelings that overpopulation fear in the 1960s, early 70s, a time period when human population is growing really, really quickly. Because look at what the year 2000 will be. If the present trends continue. More than 2% a year during that rough time period on average. And our cities are going to be choked with people.

They're going to be choked with traffic. They're going to be choked with crime. They're going to be choked with pollution. And they will be impossible places in which to live. And the explosions will be even worse. And people are looking around that and saying like, wow, this can't continue. These trends keep going.

We're headed towards a world where there simply will be too many people, where there'll be mass starvation. And that was really crystallized in a book by a guy named Paul Ehrlich called The Population Bomb, which came out in 1968, which really prophesied that we were headed towards a future of mass death, mass famine.

That's the bomb in population. Basically, populations opened like the fuse headed towards a bomb of human catastrophe. That feeling was reinforced in a lot of different places, a sense that we had to put limits on growth. We had to manage those numbers. That included increasingly often coercive reproductive controls. Most famously, of course, the one-child policy in China. It's a story of pain and loss that could be told at hundreds of millions of dinner tables. I did fall pregnant for a second time,

Jiang Xinping tells me, but I had an abortion. But we also saw pretty strict population control for sterilization even in countries like India throughout a lot of the developing world. Surely, Mrs. Gandhi, that a combination of intimidation, coercion by officials throughout India

to force people, in effect, to have sterilization. Yes, they were. Now people realize that if our population goes up at the rate it is going, their children won't be alive. A lot of people thought that if we didn't take those pretty extreme measures, we were headed for catastrophe. And, of course, in the end, it didn't quite work out that way. If you ask me the question,

are there things that I have written in the past that I wouldn't write today? The answer is certainly yes. I think he's definitely been proven to be wrong. I mean, this was a book that really looked at growth in countries like India, growth in other parts of the developing world, and said this was going to lead to a human disaster like we'd never seen before. You know, just saying like basically there's a line in the book that says the battle to feed all of humanity in the future is already lost. And that is not at all what happened, actually. If you look over the last period of time since that book came out, global hunger has declined significantly. Famine is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Today, famine has been banished

to the most remote and war-ravaged regions. Global poverty has fallen as well. 200 years ago, 90% of the world's population subsisted in extreme poverty. Today, fewer than 10% of people do. It's hard to say I would like to go back to 1968. Like, it's a better world now, almost across the board. And now, in 2022, around the globe, there is hand-wringing over population decline. Chanhee is one of the last children on a remote island of South Korea.

According to the World Bank, South Korea became the world's fastest aging society. Why are we scared of population decline when we're hitting peak humanity, Brian? I think we're scared about it because this is something we've never really experienced before. When you look back over really all of human history, for the most part, it's generally been one of growth. Countries like the United States, most of Europe, elsewhere where you have well below what's known as replacement fertility, that's 2.1 children per woman, which means roughly two to replace the parents and an extra 10th to cover, you know, anything you're missing there. Which means that over time, you will see drinkage without some kind of influx from outside, whether it's immigration or anything else like that.

You know, so there's a fear that leads to aging populations. We're already seeing that happening again in the US and elsewhere. Come on. That means fewer workers of what we want to say, productive age to support those older people. That might mean a society that is less innovative, less creative. And you look far enough into the future, you have to wonder whether eventually the whole population of the globe will begin to shrink. And that, you know, no one knows what comes after that. This is uncharted territory in that way. And when we had you on the show the last time we spoke with you, Brian, to talk about this issue, you told us that one of the clearest solutions to all the problems you just listed was immigration policy. Because the situation we're facing in

terms of population decline is not being evenly faced across the planet, right? There are places where the population is still growing. Absolutely. I mean, this is a really important part of the story that I think tends to get overlooked, which is that when demographers look into the next several decades, look to the end of the 21st century or so, what you see is really robust growth still happening in India to a certain extent, other parts of South Asia, but really sub-Saharan Africa. I think the UN projects that the population of that region will about double from about 1.2 billion in 2022 to about 2.1 billion just by mid-century. That's because you still have fairly

high fertility rates, although those have come down a lot as well. The same kind of trends work there. It's just they're coming down from a much higher level, which means a lot of young people, a lot of potential economic energy, a lot of potential sort of creative energy, innovative energy. Then you have these countries, the US, the US, Europe, even more so East Asia as well, where you are losing people, or you will lose people over time, you have a lot more older people, you don't have enough workers, there is a sort of logic to what, well, what if the workers of the place that has lots of people could go to the places that have lots of jobs, that would seem to be a great trade off, almost like a sort of globalization of human beings. But of course,

there's huge political barriers to that actually happening. In a recent xenophobic speech, Orban likened migrants to a flood being forced upon Hungary and decried a mixed race society. A lot of countries are really saying no, even though in doing that, they may be dooming themselves to a future of decline, stasis, or worse. And without the migration question, how might Africa fare as the new global center of population growth? That's an enormous question. You know, how it will fare, I think,

will depend on a few things. One will be, how much can they take advantage of this huge bump of young people? You know, if you look to countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, others in the second half of the 20th century, they had what's called a demographic dividend. Basically, they had fertility rates drop a lot. They had all these young people, fewer kids, relatively fewer retired people. And they were able to grow like crazy because they could really take advantage of those young workers. They got them educated,

they prepared, they got hooked into the global economy, and suddenly you have manufacturing giants in countries like South Korea or Japan, for instance. The question is, will Sub-Saharan Africa, will they be able to take advantage of those young people? You know, will they be able to get them educated? Will they be able to hook up into the global economy? That's an open question. It's not easy. The downside of having all those young people is that if you can't get them jobs, you can't sort of fulfill the expectations they're led to have, they can get pretty upset. You know, you can have social problems, you can have the growth of terrorism, you can have these things if you have a lot of young people and you're not able to really get them the lives that they deserve. How to make sure we grow in a way that's not upsetting.

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today explained is back we heard from brian earlier that much of the Western world and some of the Eastern world is experiencing declining population rates, despite humanity just hitting 8 billion. Africa is where a lot of the growth will be centered this century. We know the West isn't wild about African migration. So the question is, what will this growth look like in Africa? And what will it mean for the world? To find out, we turn to Alden Young, who's an African historian at UCLA. Alden, which countries are driving the population growth right now in Africa? I mean, in Africa, so much of the population growth is actually driven in West Africa,

particularly in Nigeria. This is Lagos, the most populated city in Africa. It's the financial capital of Nigeria, the continent's largest economy. And sometime this century, we'll have more people than the United States. But other huge population centers are, for instance, in countries like Ethiopia, which eventually this century will have more people than Japan. And you see huge countries like Egypt, also in North Africa. And the fastest growth is occurring in places in the Sahel. So countries like Niger and Mali. So I think one of the biggest things will be that often when we think of what the world's great cities are, our mega cities, you know, we might think of like

London, New York, and Tokyo. You know, we call those the global cities. But increasingly, the world's megacities will be in Africa. Egypt's capital is bursting at the seams. Cairo is equipped to handle around 3 million. Some of the old megacities are places like Cairo, where you have something like 20 million people versus the 8 million people in New York City. In a landmass that's much smaller than the landmass of New York City, trapped, you know, between the desert and the Nile. Or you'll see these huge cities in places like Addis Ababa or Lagos. And we see the growth of huge tech industries in places like Nairobi. The government hopes that this $14

billion undertaking will attract 250,000 residents. They say the city will be described as Africa's own Silicon Valley. For many of us sitting in, you know, the United States or Western Europe, I think it's a big shift to think about where the world's population actually will be located. In many ways, there's been a decline in things like infant mortality. There's been rapid urbanization, but there's also been economic growth across the continent. And one of the things that has been really interesting from a historical standpoint is that in the beginning of the 20th century, it was widely thought that Africa was underpopulated. And so one of the things that's very interesting is that in many ways, Africa might be returning to its pre-colonial, pre-Atlantic slave trade percentage of world population.

Is the growth right now at a clip that feels sustainable? Africa is the second most unequal continent in the world in terms of income inequality, rivaled only by Latin America. And so one of the challenges for African economies is that as the population gets much bigger, can they distribute resources in ways that feel more equal, particularly for larger numbers of people? But classically, one of the arguments has been that a larger population would actually make African economies perform better. For instance, African economies are often compared with economies in East Asia. For instance, people say, you know,

why haven't African economies been able to develop in the way that economies like South Korea or Vietnam or Taiwan have been able to develop. And one answer might be that the population has been too low. There haven't been enough people to work in manufacturing and sustain agriculture at the same time. And so larger African populations might actually make that type of economic development more possible. We've established on this show plenty of times that the West isn't wild about migration from Africa, but how is the West and even the East trying to get in on this growth in Africa? Because growth is good for economies, right? You're completely right. I mean, what we

discovered by focusing on the consumer sector, particularly telecoms and consumer staples, is that many African countries, particularly in West Africa, are actually middle-income countries. And so their domestic markets are much bigger than we've thought before. And there's been a scramble of Western companies, particularly companies coming from places

like China and India, to sell products to the African middle class. Hashim is a Chinese mobile phone dealer in the market. The Chinese brand is taking almost more than half, actually 75 percent of it, because they're doing well. People like the product. And the United States and Western European countries have also tried to do this, but their products have often been too expensive. They haven't been targeted at the right price point, you know, in terms of things like cell phones, consumer staples, even increasingly

food, which we discovered many African countries, their biggest sources of imports of food, particularly grain, are coming from Russia and Ukraine. And so I think it's been a real scramble for particularly Western European and American companies to try to figure out and crack the African market. So you see China as the largest trading partner now for the first time with the vast majority of African countries. Whereas in the 1990s, for instance, the United States was by and far the largest trading partner. Tell me how African nations can make the transition from supplying natural resources to some of the most powerful nations and corporations in the world and not being as much on the resource exploitation end of the bargain where they might be sitting now. This has always been a challenge, right? I mean, for instance, diamonds aren't refined on the African continent, even though the vast majority of them come from Africa. I do my research. These guys live near the whalemines, which primarily is red oak. Nigeria is still a huge exporter of crude oil, but traditionally it's had to buy refined

petroleum products back from Europe or from the Middle East, from other nations. I drink your milkshake. We see Dangote, one of the richest men in Africa from Nigeria. What he's been struggling to do is to build a huge refinery for petroleum products to supply his own domestic market and hopefully to supply other West African markets. This refinery that we built is very, very important. It's going to help to transform not only the oil sector in Nigeria,

no, it will transform the entire economy of Nigeria. But Dangote's fortune was greatly enhanced that he has done part of this, right? I mean, when he started in the 1980s and 90s, Nigeria was importing concrete. Concrete is something that's incredibly awkward to import. It's very heavy. It doesn't have a really high value per pound of shipping and dangoti uh you know built some of the first concrete manufacturing plants in the continent so i think there's a lot of that that still has to occur and so you know it's about building some basic things in import substitution that are still there um and then going beyond import substitution to create companies that can export not just raw

materials, but software products, clothing, and fashion. Those kind of things, I think, are at the next stage where African economies are able to own more of their intellectual property and able to sell that intellectual property on a global scale. Which I guess could lead to African nations having a more prominent role internationally. We've been talking a lot about powerful nations' relationships with African nations here, but the most powerful nations in the world right now, a lot of them have shrinking or declining populations. Could the power balance shift with African nations' population growth and wealth and natural resources? have more people by the end of this century than Asia, clearly the international system needs to find ways to represent African interests in ways that they're not currently. So for instance, something like the UN Security Council. In many ways, I think these institutions need to

change their representation, especially if they see themselves as legitimated in some kind of democratic legitimacy of the global order. They have to change their representation or face irrelevance. And we see an attempt, you know, we see the creation of new organizations like the G20, or we see things like the BRICS, but these are still like international institutions kind of in their infancy. And they don't really have the authority to address major global challenges. But we know that as we move into the COPs or we move into problems like climate change, there's no way that we're going to be able to provide electricity. There's no way that we're going to industrialize or be able to provide the consumer needs for a huge African middle class without taking into consideration their points of view, without thinking about, you know, how can we provide for the needs of millions of more people? And there's an idea, I think, sometimes in the West that we're providing charity. But

actually, these are thriving economies that have to be, you know, taken into consideration on a world stage. Alden Young, UCLA professor. Halima Shah, Today Explained reporter and producer. Laura Bullard, fact checker. Afim Shapiro, director of sound, Krishna Ayala, helping out today. Thanks for listening. Tell your friends about Today Explained. We're trying to get all 8 billion of you to listen, eventually. Meow.