No One Left by Paul Morland — why demography is still destiny

The word “demography” triggers a glaze-over mechanism in the minds of all too many of us. Yes, populations are ageing, there are ever smaller cohorts of women of childbearing age and fewer children today mean fewer workers and taxpayers tomorrow. But surely the world is overpopulated, and the issue of world population decline is a problem for the future?

No, no, no says demographer Paul Morland. It was a problem for the future but now it has arrived, and we had better wake up and deal with it.

Hats off then to Morland. Firstly, he has written a highly readable book, No One Left, laying out everything we need to know on this subject including the consequences of ageing and shrinking populations. Then he argues for a solution, and it is one that many really don’t want to hear. His subtitle is “Why the World Needs More Children” but I bet that if his publishers had let him, he would gladly have had “Read This First and Then Be Fruitful and Multiply”, instead.

In 1950 in Italy there were “about 17 under-tens for every one person aged over 80,” he writes. Now it is more like one for one. In Thailand in 1950 there were “more than 70 under-tens for every one person over 80 . . . Within a generation the over-eighties will outnumber the under-tens.” At current rates Japan and China will have lost more than 40 per cent of their populations by the end of the century.

When the NHS was founded in 1948 there were 200-300,000 people in the UK aged 80 and over, a cohort that typically needs six to seven times more healthcare than people in their prime. Now there are more than 1.5m. “This is not just social change,” he argues, but a “complete social transformation.”

In richer countries the consequences of low birth rates have been obscured by immigration. In poorer ones they have been accentuated by emigration. Recently I was chatting to a politician in Romania, a country whose population has shrunk by 18 per cent since the collapse of communism. That, like elsewhere in the region, is thanks both to emigration and a birth rate that is well under the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. Now that Romania’s economy is growing it needs immigrants to do the jobs that otherwise would have been done by some three million Romanians who have gone to the UK, Italy, Germany and Spain. He is not happy about that.

This hard-right Romanian is partial to the “great replacement” theory which believes that sinister liberal elites are trying to replace native Europeans with Africans, Asians and others. When asked what his solution was to yawning labour shortages it was clear that, like many a populist, he was clueless. He did not know the difference between a country’s fertility rate and the number of babies being born. He claimed that Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán’s expensive pro-natality policies had raised its fertility rate but was dumbstruck when told that last year fewer babies were born there than at any time in its history.

The fact is that pronatalist policies have proved disappointing for their proponents because, while they may slow decline a bit, money is not the only reason that people no longer want two or more children. Lack of space, the cost of living, the lack of affordable childcare and cultures where men don’t share the work at home equally are all important factors too.

Demographic issues play out over generations and so many politicians see no electoral advantage to them in tackling what can be a hornet’s nest. Low birth rates lead to labour shortages and the immigration on the scale we have now in Europe leads to populist reactions. But suggest that one way to address the problem in the long term is to encourage women to have more children leads to angry charges that the burden of having and raising children falls unfairly on women.

In 2022 Morland wrote an article in which he suggested that the UK introduce a “negative child benefit” tax for the childless as part of a national demographic strategy. The resulting invective was incredible and often irrational. He is like a “stoned pothead of a professor” wrote one commenter. In No One Left he argues in favour of several other solutions which cumulatively could make a difference but more than this he says, we need to move to a culture that is more parent and child-friendly.

You can bury your head in the sand, but Morland is surely right when he argues that “only by having a high fertility rate can a country have both a dynamic economy and avoid dependence on immigration”. What works in one country won’t work in another and “bold experimentation will be required” to find solutions. From geopolitics to tech from woke wars to hot ones the world is changing with dizzying speed but one thing remains a constant. Demography is still destiny.

No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children by Paul Morland Forum £20, 272 pages

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Letters in response to this article:

Where neither men nor women do domestic chores / From Timothy Y Tsu, Kobe, Japan

By that count, Niger would be world’s richest country / From Charlie Robertson, London N4, UK