Projections, projections
Niall Ferguson takes us on a tour of the world of 2050, with its 9 billion people. One of the very interesting aspects of the projections is the effect of the one child policy on the China of the future:
China’s 1.3 billion population may not be as big a source of power as many American and European commentators assume. According to the UN’s medium variant projection, the population of the world will increase from 6.5 billion to 9.2 billion between now and 2050. But China will account for just 4% of that increase.
The most rapid growth will be elsewhere: in sub-Saharan Africa, where the population will more than double, as well as in the Muslim world (Iran’s population will grow by 44%), India (up 46%), and the United States (up by more than 33%). India’s population will overtake that of China some time around 2025…
As well as ceasing to be the world’s most populous country, China will become almost as elderly a society as Europe. Today, fewer than 8% of China’s population are 65 or older. By 2050 that proportion could have risen as high as 24%. The equivalent figure for Europe is 28%; for the UK 24%; and for the US 21%. In sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, the proportion will rise from 3% to less than 6%. One way of understanding what this means for China’s economy is to calculate a dependency ratio, conventionally expressed as the total number of elderly as a percentage of the working-age population. Right now the figure for China is 11%, compared with 24% in the UK and 18% in the US. By 2050, however, the Chinese figure may be as high as 39%, only fractionally lower than the UK ratio and significantly higher than that for the US…
Certainly, Japan is not a great advertisement for the senescent society. With 20% of its population already aged 65 or over, it has become the sick man of the developed world, struggling to escape from a 15-year slough of low growth and deflation…
Perhaps the great global division of this century will not be between Muslims and “Judaeo-Christians” or between East and West, but simply between the Old World and the Young World.
These projections are fascinating, and it is certainly worth thinking about the implications of current trends. However, it is the predictable-in-nature but random-in-timing appearance of great discontinuities — World Wars, Inventions and technological innovations, Great Depressions or Inflations, Pandemics, etc. — that more captures our imagination. Several very great surprises lie in wait on the road to 2050, some of them positive, some of them devastating, some of them utterly beyond our capacity to predict as of this moment.