No One Left (eBook)

2

Paths to Low Fertility

From pre-modern to modern: drivers of the demographic transition

The classic model of human demography, which fits some places more perfectly than others but almost all pretty well, suggests that in the beginning people were breeding like rabbits and dying like flies. And this was true for the vast bulk of human history. In most places, a quarter or a third of children died before their first birthday, and the majority of people died before completing their fertile years. When circumstances were favourable, with good weather, bumper crops, and no pandemics or wars, the population would surge upwards, as fewer people died. Then it would fall back as some calamity or other struck the community.

In Europe, the early and high Middle Ages saw major population growth before the numbers were knocked back by the cold weather and bad harvests of the 1310s and by the Black Death from the 1340s onwards. Another great setback occurred during the first half of the seventeenth century, particularly in Germany, when up to a third of the population died during the Thirty Years War. Similar forward and backward motions are recorded in China, with plagues and conflicts punctuating population growth. In some places it is reckoned that populations took centuries to return to their pre-catastrophe highs. Ireland’s potato blight of the 1840s not only caused about a million deaths but set off a pattern of emigration that was so intense and continued for so long that despite decades of high fertility in the intervening years, the population has still not returned to its former peak.1

Globally, population inched forward, taking from around the year ad 1 to around 1800 to grow from a quarter of a billion to a billion.2 This meant an average annual growth rate of less than one-twentieth of what the world managed in 1964, for example.

The appallingly high level of infant mortality in all pre-modern societies is brought home to us when we read the biographies of famous and often materially well-off people in earlier centuries. Queen Anne (r. 1702–14) had not a single surviving child from 17 pregnancies – and she herself died just short of age 50. Conditions were better in Victorian England, but this still did not prevent someone as distinguished and financially comfortable as Charles Darwin losing three of his ten offspring in childhood or infancy. Progress was made in the nineteenth century with falls in infant mortality gathering pace towards its end and particularly in the early years of the twentieth, but Britain was, in demography as in most things, ahead of the Continent at that stage.

The music of Gustav Mahler, who was born and brought up in Bohemia in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is haunted by a childhood scarred by being one of six surviving children out of a total of 12. One of his own two children died at the age of four, and that was in the early twentieth century when infant mortality was starting to fall strongly in the more advanced parts of Europe. The deaths of children, the losses of sons and daughters at a young age, and of siblings in one’s own childhood, was quite normal in a way we now find hard to comprehend.

This demographic regime, captured by English clergyman Thomas Malthus in his (1798 and subsequent revised editions), meant that for most of history, most of humanity was living at or close to the edge of existence, generally in a state of material misery. But the industrial revolution and the processes of what can be described as ‘modernity’ eventually changed all that. First in the UK, then across Europe, and finally across the world, mortality rates fell and populations grew as even rudimentary improvements in the quantity and purity of food, the cleanliness of water, and the provision of public health measures and medical knowledge pushed back death. With plenty of births but fewer deaths, populations surged. Eventually, richer, more educated and more urban populations became able to control their own fertility and chose to reduce it. This came to be known as the ‘demographic transition’: first falling mortality and a growing population, then falling fertility and a stabilising population.3

In more developed societies with healthcare systems and government programmes, people can more easily access contraceptives. Better educated, they are more able to use them effectively. But it is not just a question of the to reduce fertility; there is also the question of and . Classic demographic transition theory suggests that in a high infant-mortality scenario, people realise, consciously or not, that they need to have a large number of children just to ensure a couple of survivors. In a high-mortality society, a fertility rate of only two will mean rapid extinction. Six children at least are required for a steady-state population, because two will likely die in infancy and another two will die before they can complete their own fertility.

Once improved conditions mean that infant mortality falls, it takes a while before childbearing habits adapt. We can see this in Guinea, in West Africa, where the infant mortality rate has fallen steadily from more than one in five to fewer than one in 15 since the early 1960s. But it was only from the early 1990s that the fertility rate started to drop, from around 6.5 then to around 4.5 now. Over the same period infant mortality has fallen sharply in Denmark too, from about one in 50 to about one in 300 since the early 1960s, although throughout this period and long before, infant mortality in Denmark was too low and high infant mortality was too far back in the collective memory for people to have extra children to counteract the loss of children.4

There is a complementary economic explanation as to why people in poor agricultural societies have many children, while urban and industrial (and post-industrial) folk have fewer. In rural Guinea, an extra child, initially fed exclusively from his or her mother’s breast and not expected to be the recipient of lots of special baby equipment, imposes little cost on the family. At some point in early childhood, he or she can be put to some economically useful activity in the home or in the field. Education is hard to access and is of questionable economic value in any case, given the opportunities available. Perhaps the flow of economic value is still from the parent to the child: even in hunter-gatherer societies this probably remains the case.5 But overall, the flow is modest. Children are not a significant drain on short-term resources in poor rural societies, so incentives to reduce their number (as well as, often, the means to control fertility) are limited or do not exist at all. In modern urban living, by contrast, children are expensive to rear and to educate but, with the right investment and qualifications, can potentially earn a high salary decades after their birth.

This is why it might make sense for a couple in a remote Guinean village to have many children, while city dwellers in the capital Conakry want to have fewer. In Conakry, poor though it may be, wages are higher than in the countryside. Education levels are higher. People are more likely to watch television and have access to the internet. They are more likely to have access to birth control and are more likely to be within reach of medical care, albeit rudimentary, to help keep alive those children they do have. And they are more likely to be able to put their children through school and for that schooling in due course to pay off when it comes to entering the workforce. For similar reasons this is why, for example, people living in Kolkata in West Bengal in India have half the fertility rate of the state as a whole.6 Or why women in Addis Ababa have half the number of children compared to women in Ethiopia overall.7 In poor agricultural societies, wealth might at some point start to flow from children, who provide a useful pair of hands in the field from an early age, to parents. In developed urban societies, with expensive childcare and education, wealth flows the other way, in large quantities and for a long time, which incentivises parents to have fewer children in the town.8 In addition to the financial incentives, there is the compounding effect that urban women tend to be more educated and to have easier access to contraception. So as well as the will, there is also the ability to translate a desire for fewer children into reality as people become more urban, wealthy and educated.

Africa: demographic history in progress

Most of the world has now largely passed through its demographic transition with relatively long life expectancy and low fertility rates. This is true even of countries considered poor until quite recently: both Mexico and Bangladesh, for example, have life expectancy beyond 70 years and fertility rates below replacement.

The one part of the world still working its way through the transition is Africa, the continent that is least economically developed. Until not that long ago, much of Africa had not even started on the transition, but almost everywhere, life expectancy is now lengthening and in most places fertility is falling. It is worth spending some time examining this last place on the planet where the traditional processes of demography are still in progress. But as you would expect in an area of such size and variety, the different parts of the continent are at very different points on their demographic journeys.

If Africa is the global exception, the last redoubt of high fertility, then it contains exceptions within itself as the exception. The picture across the...