China is poised to pass one of the great demographic inflection points” – that’s according to the Financial Times. The inflection point the FT is referring to is that of diapers for the elderly growing into a larger market than diapers for infants. China won’t be the first. As far back as a decade ago in Japan, adult diapers started outselling infant diapers.
What does that tell us about demographics, not just in China, but about the developing world as a whole?
We are in the midst of a larger global trend that has not received enough attention: crashing fertility rates and shrinking populations.
According to forecasts by an international team of scientists published last year in The Lancet, the world population will peak at 9.2 billion around 2065, and then drop to 8.8 billion by the end of the century. That’s a stunning difference -- if you take into account that in the 20th century world population grew 600%, from one billion to six billion.
The Lancet study also found what the lead scientist for the project called a “jaw dropping” result: the population of twenty-three countries -- including Japan, Italy, Spain, and Thailand -- would drop by at least half by the end of the century. The U.S. and the rest of Europe are also headed for a worrisome situation.
This is a trend that will have far-reaching implications for the 2020s. It will impact economics, geopolitics, culture…it could radically change the very nature of how our societies are organized.
To get a crash course on the issue, we invited someone who has been screaming from the hilltops about this trend for a long time. Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he researches and writes extensively on demographics and economic development generally. His many books and monographs include “Poverty in China”, “The Tyranny of Numbers”, “The End of North Korea”, “The Poverty of the Poverty Rate” and “Russia’s Peacetime Demographic Crisis”. His latest book is “Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis”. Nick earned his PhD and masters degree in political economy from Harvard, and a Master of Science from the London School of Economics.
