The global population is aging. Is the world prepared?

Transcript

Listen: The world is on the brink of one of the most fundamental demographic shifts in modern human history: populations are getting older, and birth rates are plummeting. By 2050, one in six people on Earth will be over 65, which will have a huge impact on the future of work, healthcare, and social security. On the GZERO World Podcast, Ian Bremmer sits down with Jennifer Sciubba, President & CEO of the Population Reference Bureau, to discuss declining fertility, the aging crisis, and why government efforts all over the world to get people to have more babies don’t seem to be working. Is a slow-moving crisis inevitable? What does all this mean for the future of immigration, women's rights, and global power? Most importantly, is it even possible to turn back the demographic clock, or is it time to start adapting to support the populations we already have?

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Transcript: The global population is aging. Is the world prepared?

Ian Bremmer:

Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are diving into an issue we all have in common, like it or not: aging. Specifically, population aging. Across the world, populations are getting older, birth rates are plummeting. By 2050, one in six people on Earth will be over 65. While the global population is still increasing, driven by growth in developing countries like Nigeria and Pakistan, experts predict that the global population will peak in about 60 years.

Countries are facing tough questions, or at least those countries that care about their future. What happens to economies designed for a much younger world? Will pension systems go bankrupt? How do they adapt to the demographic shift before it's too late? Places like Japan and Italy are already grappling with shrinking workforces, skyrocketing retirement costs, and healthcare systems stretched to their limits. What should governments do? Can they get people to have more children? Can immigration solve the problem? Most importantly, can we restructure our societies to deal with the populations they actually have?

We're going to talk about all of that and more with my guest today, Dr. Jennifer Sciubba, President and CEO of the Population Reference Bureau. There's a lot to discuss. The future of humanity literally hangs in the balance. So let's get to it. Jennifer Sciubba, thanks so much for joining us today.

Jennifer Sciubba:

Thanks for having me, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

And we have not had a big conversation about demographics on the show. And it's about time, right?

Jennifer Sciubba:

It's certainly time.

Ian Bremmer:

It's something we can actually project.

Jennifer Sciubba:

We can, yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

We can talk about the future with a reasonable degree of certainty. What's the single thing that you are most confident of, that you suspect our audience doesn't know?

Jennifer Sciubba:

I don't think most people realize that we are not far away from global population peaking, and that most of the world is far down that path already. I think there's still this sense that we are at unending growth and the globe is just filling with people with no end in sight, and we're all going to perish from overpopulation. But that's really not the case.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, I've noticed that, I mean, there's this massive trend that women in 20s, 30s, 40s, the most sharp increase is zero children. And we're seeing that all over the world, really, right? What's driving it?

Jennifer Sciubba:

Well, we have to break it down into two different buckets here. So if we think about places in the world that go very high numbers of children per woman to lower, and we'll just throw out a number for us of replacement levels, about two, obviously replacing both parents. So that's a number to keep in mind. When we save from this high, high level to that replacement level or just under it, typically speaking, ending child marriages, so people get married later. Obviously that shrinks the number of years in which you might be having children, increasing education, including secondary level education, and having rights-based access to family planning and health services. That brings it down. Working there, how all these feed in together with opportunities for work outside the home. So there's a greater opportunity cost for having those extra numbers of children.

Ian Bremmer:

And that's now happening in India, happening in Africa. We see that-

Jennifer Sciubba:

And has been happening for a long time. And so, I think people have a general sense of that. The puzzle that we've been sitting with today though is, there's not a bottom. Where is the bottom for the average number of children per woman? And so, the question that I think most people are wanting to know is, why does it keep going lower? And for that, it's a much more complicated answer. Because you can't just say, "Well, we are continuing to educate women, so they're not having children."

In fact, we're starting to see data that the more educated women, so now when we say educated, we're not talking about women who get out of high school, we're talking about women with advanced graduate degrees. They're actually seeing rises in the number of births. So we can't just say, "Oh, the relationship between education and fertility rates is straightforward." It's better for us to break it down.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, we're at just over eight billion people on the planet right now. My understanding is we're likely to hit something like 10. And most of that's Africa, right?

Jennifer Sciubba:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

The eight to 10.

Jennifer Sciubba:

A lot of it, yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

And then, we basically fall off a cliff.

Jennifer Sciubba:

No, we don't. We just slide down a gentle sloping hill. So a lot of our future growth is already baked into our structures today. So the world has what we would call a youthful age structure. If you think about lining up all eight billion people from the youngest to the oldest, and ask that person in the middle to raise their hand, where are they age-wise? They're on the younger end. And so, that means that baked into the future are cohorts of reproductive age people who will, even if they don't have a lot of children on average each, right now they have just above replacement level on each, there's momentum for growth. So even a country like India that has below replacement fertility rate, will still grow in the future. So it's not all in Africa, it's in some of these larger places in the world like India. But then, we gently start to have declining numbers of people after that at the global level. The global level is one thing, but when we start zeroing in, that's when it gets really interesting.

Ian Bremmer:

And when you say interesting, you mean some of the countries where the contraction is severe? You're talking like Japan, South Korea, even China potentially, right?

Jennifer Sciubba:

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, China, and the writing is on the wall. You can read documents from the Chinese government 40 years ago, and they're well aware that, "We put these policies in place, we go after this path of slower growth, we know that we'll be an aging and shrinking country."

And so, this is the thing about demographics, is there's not a lot of surprises that are really built in. It's math, most of the time. It's predictable human behavior that follows these long-term patterns, where we have our research questions, is kind of at the margins like I said, where will we see the bottoming of fertility, or how slow will it come down in places where it's high? Those are questions that we don't necessarily know the answers to.

Ian Bremmer:

What is it that worries you the most? Because I hear when you're talking about population contraction, I hear a level of concern in your voice. And I'm wondering what drives it.

Jennifer Sciubba:

There are two things that concern me. One is when we paint population as the problem, we look for population-based solutions, and we see murmurings around the world, I would say particularly in the United States. If we want more babies, then we might have to make that happen. So when you see population as the problem and population as the solution, I really worry that women's rights, access to contraception for example, are on the chopping block. The second thing that worries me is that we've kept the focus just on the population numbers. How many babies will there be? Why are there so few babies? And we've taken no responsibility for adjusting to this. So I think we are decades behind in preparing for the world that is surely to come. And instead, we keep trying to think only in terms of this as a population issue.

Ian Bremmer:

But I wanted to get a little past that and say, let's imagine, I mean, we had this massive run-up from just a couple billion to what's going to be 10 over just a few generations. Why is it necessarily so horrible if we have a gradual slide from 10 to eight, to seven, to five, why is that necessarily a problem?

Jennifer Sciubba:

For me, it's not necessarily a problem. For governments, for families, it could be a problem. So the governments that do not adjust their systems, they will have a problem. And in fact, if we're thinking geopolitically, who's likely to come out on top, it'll be the ones who realize the fastest that they're not going to reverse these population trends and they instead build to deal with it. That means you're thinking about things like the workforce, your use of AI, for example, education, housing, social security systems.

And I think that it's also an issue at the family level though, because we have very poor care infrastructure around the world. And so, if the government is not the one who is taking the responsibility for caring for the people, and it's not that case, not the case everywhere in the world, we tend to think about European style social welfare systems and aging. But not every country in the world has that system. For example, look at Singapore. So who holds the bag then? It's the family. And when we say the family, that's really code for women. So failure to prepare and put in place systems that deal with what you actually have, which is an aging smaller population in the future. Well, that's really dangerous.

Ian Bremmer:

And if we look at the countries right now that are facing the biggest almost certain contraction, who's responding to it well, who's responding to it badly, and why?

Jennifer Sciubba:

Yeah. Well, I don't know that anyone is really responding to it well. Really, when I look all across the world, I just don't see that standout place that says, "We absolutely get it."

Singapore, perhaps. Of course Singapore is tiny, but I think they're a really interesting country and one I've thought about in the past in my research, because the aging countries 20 years ago, they were almost all democracies. So what we thought we knew about aging countries I think was based on those. Now a quarter of our aged countries are non-democracies. There's a very different relationship, of course, between the people and the government in a non-democracy.

It also might mean that you could pivot, you could put in place policies that could be unpopular without the same kind of penalty. So in Singapore, the family does hold a lot of the responsibility for caring for older people. And while they do still struggle with the care infrastructure to support women who have to take care of children, work and take care of parents, I think there's an interesting model there for what does that do to the government budget? They also, of course, supplement population growth through immigration. And so, that's something that countries have as an option to do. When you think about a shrinking workforce, well, you could bring in people from the outside.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. And Singapore is, I mean, right now I think there's six million people and that's like double what they were just a few decades ago. But I guess it's unfortunate that, I mean, there are much larger countries out there that are facing serious contractions and you are not putting any of them in the box of, "These guys are doing a good job." What happens to a Japan, a South Korea in a generation, if they don't actually pivot to a changing population?

Jennifer Sciubba:

Japan's probably adjusting better than many other countries. I think about France for example. Let's just contrast Japan and France. We can see that Japan, average age of exit from the workforce is at older ages. So people tend to work longer, the population is healthier. That right there gets you huge bonus points when it comes to adjusting to aging. In France, they've got a healthy population, but there's still all these pressures for early retirement.

Well, when you're living decades beyond retirement, you really constrain those social welfare systems. So that's what I look for. If you are a country that the government has made extreme promises to take care of you, and there are fewer people in the workforce, then there's not as much money flowing into that pie and those pies being divided in many other ways. So I think the strains in government budget is where we'll really see the biggest issue. So there are trade-offs. I mean, what will go while you pay for an older population? Will it be defense? Will it be something else? Will it be education?

Ian Bremmer:

Especially an older population that has a significant amount of power over political decision making.

Jennifer Sciubba:

That's where I think the democracy part is very interesting. Love democracy, fantastic. But I think it's very difficult to do long-term planning in a democracy. And demography is the ultimate long-term planning. It is looking out and saying, "In 30 years, we know what the strains will be. How do we put in place structures now that support that?" But instead, voters and politicians, they have such a shorter term view. So I really worry about the ability of democracies to kind of pivot and prepare for the future that's just 20 to 30 years ahead.

Ian Bremmer:

So let's come back here. In Washington, DC right now and in the United States, we know that Medicare is not funded for much longer. We know social security is not funded for much longer. There are lots of pressures to reduce illegal immigration in the United States or to fix the existing system, none of which is happening anytime soon. That feels like a significant fiscal pressure. Is something going to break soon?

Jennifer Sciubba:

It is a pressure, and I often wonder, does something need to break in order for us to come back stronger? And I think that's a great research question. Is it going to be the case that we just have to let some of these systems implode before we can build back something better? That's where looking at countries that are quickly having this demographic transition, Mexico, Iran, they actually may not... Some of these countries may not have in place the same kind of promises and the same kind of rigid structures that set them on a path for unsustainability in the next couple of decades. So could they now put in place something that is more sustainable, even India?

Ian Bremmer:

Now, the other side of the policy equation is if you don't like what's happening with your population, can you change it, right? I mean, China's gone from a one-child policy to a two-child policy, to a three-child policy. Isn't changing their demographics at all.

Jennifer Sciubba:

No.

Ian Bremmer:

What have we seen in place that has made a significant difference in changing population trends?

Jennifer Sciubba:

Well, if we think about population trends as three pieces, there's the births and there's the deaths, and there's the migration. The migration piece. Countries can do a pretty good job of changing. In fact, we talk about porous borders, but really at the end of the day, they're not that porous, especially if you define borders as your asylum systems, all the adjudication. States have pretty good control over their migration part of things.

Ian Bremmer:

So Canada, for example, they've decided that their demographic policy is, "We're just going to bring in. A lot of people."

Jennifer Sciubba:

"Come on in," they have said.

And so, we haven't seen that big of political penalties of that yet, but probably more to come in the future as that happens. The death part, countries also have some control over. A little asterisks here, we're going to talk about the United States, because there's a lot countries can do to invest in health and longevity. And so, our aging problem, so to speak, is partly because we're living longer, and that's a great thing. The United States compared to its peers, however, what we think of as our peers is not in the same boat. So the US peers in terms of healthy life expectancy or health span are Russia, China and Mexico. It's not Southern Europe. And so, we are at a significant disadvantage there.

Ian Bremmer:

Which is astonishing, right? Because I mean, the United States is a peer of Singapore and Western Europe at the 1% of the population wealth and education, but the average American not even close.

Jennifer Sciubba:

Not even close. And I think that really should be caused for alarm. I'm generally not an alarmist about population, but if you're going to be alarmed about anything in the US, it should be on the health and longevity piece here. One of these things is not like the other one when it comes to us and what we think of as our peers. And so, of course, it's not an easy fix. It's not just about the amount of money that we're spending on things. There's some larger cultural issues here behind why we have such poor health, and that affects our ability to adjust to population aging because we are going to have to have more and more people working longer.

Ian Bremmer:

So we've talked about death, we've talked about migration. We haven't talked about-

Jennifer Sciubba:

The big one.

Ian Bremmer:

The big one.

Jennifer Sciubba:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

Having kids.

Jennifer Sciubba:

Having kids.

Ian Bremmer:

And that's the one that I suspect you're going to tell me you can't move very much with policy.

Jennifer Sciubba:

You can't move very much, which of course China is finding out because they can say, "Please have babies, please get married."

There's so many countries out there that are actually in the business of trying to do matchmaking. Korea is also one of these countries, and it's very difficult to get people to get married and have children, because the government wants them to here in this modern world. The approach that most governments are taking, particularly in Asia to the low fertility issue, they are really focusing on gender, but in the wrong ways, because this actually is an issue about gender. It's an issue about women's opportunities, women's rights. We just don't tend to frame it that way when we're talking about it at this geopolitical level. But at the end of the day, reproductive decisions, they're made either between couples or perhaps even individually for women.

And so, when we have these national level policies, they really often do not resonate at the individual or household level. And so, most of these countries are trying to lean into, "How do we convince women to have more kids, or how do we create a system to get them to have more kids?"

And these opportunities look all over the place. So China's actually doubling down on traditional roles. They're calling for women to exit the workforce, and get back into the home and have babies. Women who've been exposed to the idea that there's a bigger world out there, they're educated, they've perhaps moved to the cities already, they have jobs. That does not resonate with them. They are really pushing back against that. In South Korea, they've had a lot of the same kind of rhetoric and policies over the years. So there's a huge feminist movement in South Korea that is actually having women opt out altogether of even dating.

Ian Bremmer:

So when we talk about what leads to a decision to have one child per family, 0.5 children, zero children per family, which again is an outcome we are increasingly seeing and it's socially acceptable in a lot of countries, what do we know? What have we learned about what's driving that?

Jennifer Sciubba:

We've learned that it's not just one thing, and that's really frustrating for policymakers. Same as being a researcher, you want to boil it down to one or two things, so that you can put in place policies to change that if that's something you want to change. In this case, it's a confluence of factors. But a really interesting one we are not talking as much about these days is technology. So when we look globally, we look at especially wealthier countries and watch these trends around births. We see it fall off during the financial crisis, and you might expect it to recover. Historically, that's what it's done. It's gone back up afterwards. But it hasn't, it's continued to go lower. And around that same time, we really see everybody carrying around something in their pockets, which is their smartphone.

And anyone who is the parent of or has a loved one who is around those teenage years and early 20s knows what a difference having those smartphones and the social media, and all of that that goes along with it has made in those children's and young adults' lives. In terms of even how they interact with one another, how they date. And so, I think let's put that on the menu of things. It's very interesting for us to trace. And the way we'll know how much that matters is there's a huge counter movement to that now of having people wait until later for smartphones and technology. And I wonder if that's actually going to end up changing in the opposite direction, how people form these relationships.

Ian Bremmer:

So you're suggesting that proliferation of smartphones among young people is plausibly leading to a reduction in birthrate?

Jennifer Sciubba:

Yeah, I am. I think it's part of that because it also affects the images that we see. The pandemic is a time for us to think about with this. So everybody had to Zoom with people during the pandemic, and I was in a household with a kindergartener and a first-grader. I am sure that I did not make motherhood look like a very attractive thing when I'm attempting to work and be very serious, and behind me are running around a couple of screaming children. That same kind of imagery really proliferates around the internet, all social media as well. So there's not a sense when you talk to young people today that having kids looks like very much fun. I think this is part of it. Of course, that's not all of it, but I absolutely think that that matters.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, my stereotype here, you tell me if this is right or not, is that despite the fact that more women are coming into the workplace and getting better educated, that men are still doing almost none of the child-rearing house care in a two-income relationship. Is that true? And is that also a significant component of why women don't want to have kids?

Jennifer Sciubba:

Yeah, it depends on where you are as to how bad the disparity is. In East Asia, it is a tremendous disparity. I mean, the average number of minutes that men spend on household labor a day is much, much smaller in Japan and South Korea, for example, compared to women than it would be in Scandinavia, as you might expect. But there's still an imbalance in both places. And yes, that also plays a part in this as well. So in many countries, marriage is a precursor to having children. Very few births happen out of wedlock. And so, when marriage itself looks like something that is not going to make your life necessarily better, if you're a woman, then that becomes less attractive. And then, a byproduct of that, of course, would be smaller families, fewer or no children.

Ian Bremmer:

What do you think, what are the governments right now that are doing the most to try, however ineffectually, to change their birth rates?

Jennifer Sciubba:

Korea is one of the countries that is doing the most. They have spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to raise fertility, and they're doubling down. I was there not that long ago, and they have set up a new population ministry to really lean into this more. And there's a sense I get that some of these messages around gender are resonating. For example, it's not just putting in place a paternity policy, saying, "Okay, we want there to be paternity leave, and that'll solve everything." They have that in South Korea, but fewer than 10% of dads take it. So then that points to another question. Well, it's not just the government policy, it's-

Ian Bremmer:

So, you're telling me they're giving you money. They're saying, "No problem. Have a month, have two months." How much time are they giving?

Jennifer Sciubba:

It doesn't fully replace the income. I know that.

Ian Bremmer:

I see. Okay.

Jennifer Sciubba:

Yes. Yeah. And well, there's one piece of it. So it doesn't fully replace the income, but the researchers have pointed out that it's less about that income replacement part and more about the workplace culture. So now then, is this really a population issue or is an issue with workplace culture generally? So the same kind of thing in Korea in terms of education. Researchers have pointed out over the years that Korean education system is so expensive and it's so onerous, particularly on mothers. They know that that's a problem for everyone, not just around the fertility rate.

So then this new population policy set, they're working to try to adjust that as best they can, these famous cram schools and such. So what we learned here is when we're talking about fertility rates or births and who's having children, it's a whole suite of policies that say, "What's your life like? Is your life a rich life, where you're optimistic about the future and you're forming relationships, and you have strong communities?" If the answer is yes, you're more likely to have higher fertility rates. If the answer is no, it's more likely to be lower.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, one of the things that interests me a lot about demographics is we have such a wide variety of countries out there on the basis of what their populations look like. I mean, you have African countries out there where the average age is 18, and on the other hand, in Japan and South Korea, it's like over 50 now, I think?

Jennifer Sciubba:

Japan is getting closer to that. Yes, Japan is getting close.

Ian Bremmer:

So, I mean, these are populations that just look radically different when you travel to those places. Like I've spent time in Nigeria, I spent a lot of time in Japan. You just see, I'm younger than a lot of people, or I'm the oldest person on the street. What have we learned? What do we know about how countries are different on the basis of their demographic profiles?

Jennifer Sciubba:

When we think about the base population that determines, of course what the priorities are at the country level. So when your base is so radically different, it gives you completely different priorities at the country level. So if you are in a very young country, you are extremely worried about how you're going to educate your population. Maybe 40% of your population is younger than age 15. That's your set of issues. You're worried about creating jobs for people, so that they will have opportunities as they get into those working ages. If you are on the other end of the spectrum, you're thinking more about do you have enough workers to especially support those entitlement systems that you very likely have put into place? So really different sets. We're worried about empty cities in Japan, and you're worried about building enough housing in Lagos. So it's wildly different, and it makes me worry about what we do at the global level when we have all these transnational issues we need to come together on. And we've got over 30 shrinking countries, and we've got a set of countries whose populations will double over the next 30 years.

Ian Bremmer:

You have people starving all over the world, and then you have massive amounts of waste of food, and you have ghost cities in Japan and in China too. And yet you've got huge housing crises in other places. So much of this feels like a distribution challenge.

Jennifer Sciubba:

Yeah, it's a distribution challenge. A lot of people will just say, "Well, why don't we send those people from those young countries who need jobs to the places that are old countries where they need workers?"

But that's where I always say immigration is much more of a political issue than a demographic issue. So we want to talk about it within demography. We tend to talk about it like an economist would, like they're not real people. No offense to my economist friends, but they just think about, "Oh, we could just, let's send people where it looks like they should go."

But politically, of course, that's not how it works. And we also know that immigration brings with it its own host of challenges and changes, and not all countries we should expect will go down that path.

Ian Bremmer:

So when we see populations that are much younger, populations much older, are there any connections with type of governance? I mean, we know what the priorities have to be and they're very different. What about democracies and authoritarian regimes?

Jennifer Sciubba:

Well, at the very young level, yes, we know a lot. I mean, young countries, meaning countries that the average person is very young and they tend to have higher fertility rates, they are much more likely to be incredibly unstable, experience coups and not to be democratic. And so, where we're trying to figure out from a research perspective is if there's any causality there, meaning we used to think, I would say Arab Spring time, around the Arab Spring time we had a lot of questions about whether or not an older age structure would lead a country to become more democratic. I don't really think there's a lot of support for that now. I think instead we understand what we've known to be true for a long time, which is a demographically youthful country. It's not transitioning to democracy. If it does transition, it's not going to stay that way. And so, of course, when we're thinking about the world of the future, the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years, there's a set of countries, including Nigeria, that is not likely to see movements in that regard.

Ian Bremmer:

And these are going to be, Nigeria one, Indonesia another, Pakistan, these are some countries that are going to be some of the world's largest that we don't spend a lot of time thinking about right now.

Jennifer Sciubba:

Yeah, we don't. And the question I guess would be to what degree do our global power structures, the global influence, does that line up with population size? We were doing this conversation 100, 150 years ago. We would be so certain that those two things would align. Now, of course, that's not the case. And so, how fragile are our global systems that they could break down those structures of post-World War II? I tend to think they're pretty well entrenched. And so, we'll actually see power being concentrated in the hands of smaller and smaller countries, even as the rest of the world grows.

Ian Bremmer:

That implies a lot more instability, right? Because you're going to have more and more people that don't have access to power.

Jennifer Sciubba:

I think that's the case.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, of course, we do have a lot of immigration that is becoming a top political issue, migration in Europe, migration in the United States, and it's becoming fashionable to talk about this great replacement theory. Even members of the House and Senate in the United States, that it's not just that you have people coming in, but they're different kinds of people. How's this affecting your work?

Jennifer Sciubba:

Well, when I'm doing trendspotting and I'm thinking about the next several decades, I feel like it's a certainty that we will continue to see more and more political tussles over immigration, because we see that in fact, there is a difference between the populations that have shaped the countries, say France or the UK in the past, and the way that those populations are changing in the future. But the funny thing is, it's not about the numbers, it's about the perception. So this is where there's both a power and a limit to a demographic lens. It's the perception of change that makes people fearful. And this is the case when you look all over the world. So this is not just limited to Europe, and it's not limited to this point in time. We know this historically. There's always this fear of the other. And I guess what we're learning these days is that fear is alive and well, don't expect it to go anywhere and do expect it to show up in politics.

Ian Bremmer:

Jennifer Sciubba, thanks so much for joining.

Jennifer Sciubba:

Thanks so much, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you do. Why not make it official? Why don't you rate and review GZERO World? Five stars, only five stars. Otherwise, don't do it. On Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Tell your friends.