Traveling from the future (Kenya) to the past (Japan)
Countries that grow, countries that shrink
Dear Friends,
I’ll say it again: What a wild time to be alive. Putting aside the UFOs and manipulative AI chatbots for a moment, we’re in the midst of an unprecedented demographic transition as some countries begin to shrink while others rapidly expand. Over the past 70 years, the number of people on this planet more than tripled from 2.5 billion in 1950 to more than eight billion today. By 2080, and perhaps sooner, the planet’s population will begin to contract, and many countries have already started.
Last week, I was in East Africa for work, one of the youngest and fastest-growing regions of the world. (Over 55% of Ugandans are under 18.) Over the next 30 years, Africa’s population will double. And then between 2050 and 2100, it will double again.
In a radical juxtaposition, next week my sister and I will embark on a two-week sibling adventure to Japan, the world's oldest country, with the fewest children.
While I was in Kenya, Iris and I would speak on the phone at 7pm in Nairobi and 8am in California, and she would joke that I was living in the future. I could tell her all about my day, but she had just started hers. Next week, our roles will be reversed as she’ll be the one living seven hours in the future. Even beyond time zones, it truly feels that Africa is the future and East Asia is the past.
Headlines have hammered into our heads that the 21st will be the Chinese Century, but China’s population and economy are already shrinking, while East Africa has the fastest-growing economy in the world.
What if Ross Douthat is right? What if we look back in 75 years and realize that the most important issue of the 21st Century was not climate change so much as an aging world? What if the sea levels don’t rise as much as predicted, but we end up with billions of lonely old people and not enough young people to take care of them?
Once you take Douthat’s provocation seriously, the signs are everywhere. His first “rule” for an aging world is that “the rich world will need redistribution back from old to young” and we see it play out in the debate over the U.S. debt ceiling as Social Security and Medicare expenses by retirees outpace the tax revenue generated by younger workers. This hasn’t yet turned into a generational conflict between young people who want to work less and older people who want to enjoy retirement, but I expect that it will.
And anyway, the U.S. is in relatively good shape. Our population will continue to grow slightly, assuming we continue to welcome immigrants. There are dozens of countries, on the other hand, whose populations are declining already, including China. Last September, I wrote about the gradual disappearance of Latvia, a small nation of 1.8 million people that is projected to lose over 20% of its population by 2050 (putting it in third place behind Bulgaria and Lithuania).
The IMF calls Japan “the world's policy laboratory for dealing with an aging, shrinking population,” and predicts intergenerational conflict between young workers and older retirees over how tax revenue is spent. Productive young Japanese workers will be tempted to emigrate if 50% of their salary is funding the retirement of their centenarian grandparents. Much like Sweden, Australia, and Hungary, Japan has tried various incentives to boost its fertility rate, including baby bonuses and more support for working women. But according to an analysis from the New York Times of the impact of fertility-boosting policies, “once a country crosses the threshold of negative population growth, there is little that its government can do to reverse it.” In fact, demographers regularly underestimate depopulation; China’s population decline came several years earlier than expected and South Korea’s population continues to decline faster than expected despite the country spending more than $200 billion over the past 16 years in incentives to boost fertility.
There is only one proven way to stave off population decline despite decreasing fertility rates, as the US, UK, and Germany have all demonstrated: immigration. Italy’s anti-immigration prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, wants to pass a new welfare program to take care of the country’s aging population. Sounds nice. “But without more young people” — or more immigrants — “to join the workforce and pay into pension and welfare systems, the whole system is imperiled.”
Shortly after Bill and Flora Hewlett created the Hewlett Foundation in 1966, they were influenced by Stanford professor Paul R. Ehrlich, who argued that the world would face famine if it didn’t rapidly bring down its fertility rate. Prompted by his dire prediction, over the past 55 years the foundation has spent billions of dollars to reduce fertility rates. The “population program” has since been renamed “reproductive equity,” and is now more focused on increasing women’s agency than reducing fertility rates.
In poorer countries, many women don’t have access to contraception or safe abortion, and so don’t get to choose when they have children. In richer countries, where women have more choices, isolated families don’t have access to affordable childcare or flexible working hours to make parenthood appealing.
Time and again, it is greater access to education that slows fertility rates. The number of South Korean women who went on to postsecondary education rose from 6 percent in 1980 to more than 90 percent by 2020. But the more educated we become, the less likely we are to have children.
This isn’t all bad news. In fact, I think it’s mostly good news. We ought to embrace a declining global population, writes Wang. We’ll be less crowded, emit fewer greenhouse gases, and be forced to welcome immigrants, which will revive our otherwise stagnating cultures. Multigenerational housing is making a comeback as young parents face the impossible costs of housing and childcare. Even moderate conservatives like David Brooks are questioning the isolating nature of the nuclear family, and younger writers like Anne Helen Petersen are exploring how friends with kids and without kids can show each other more support and solidarity while bringing up the next generation together.
China will lose nearly half of its population by 2100, whereas Africa’s will quadruple. Admittedly, I was disappointed in my own reaction that I was so shocked to see Kenyan-Chinese couples in Nairobi looking lovingly at each other over Valentine’s Day dinner. Thirty years from now, it will be the most normal thing in the world.
(And now here’s a chance for me to share some a 90-second clip of early 2000s standup comedy I found recently on an old laptop hard drive.)
These thoughts swirl in my head as I prepare for next week’s trip to Japan, the world’s oldest country. It will be my first time there since September 2001, and I’m excited to travel with my sister. We’re both big fans of the Netflix series Midnight Diner. I can’t get enough Murakami (finally reading Norwegian Wood!) or long, slow Japanese movies like Drive My Car and Love Exposure. I feel like I’ve already walked around the entire country with Craig Mod’s newsletters. And I’m curious if Japan feels as old as it is portrayed in viral articles about childless villages and 70-year-old fruit pickers.
🧰 A useful tool? Create your AI synthetic voice
Luis and I are putting the finishing touches on our latest podcast episode for The Twelve Inquiries. We use Descript to collaboratively edit each episode. It is wildly powerful podcast editing software, and it has other uses. For instance, I have hours of recordings of my grandmother narrating stories from her life. Using Descript, I can automatically transcribe each recording to make them searchable, and filter out silent gaps or filler words.
But here’s where it gets futuristic. With just one minute of audio recording, Descript can create a text-to-speech model of my voice. And once it has that model, all I need to do is type a paragraph and, in theory, it will sound like me speaking. I haven’t done this yet, but in the name of science, I probably will for next week’s newsletter. Several American and European banks, including Chase, use voice ID to grant access to account information. Vice journalist Joseph Cox described how he managed to gain access to his account using a synthetic version of his voice that he created with a competitor tool, ElevenLabs. In other words, your unique voice is no longer uniquely yours. If you have ever left a minute-long voicemail or audio message, someone can upload that clip to create a text-to-voice model and then use it to impersonate your voice however they would like. Just imagine how junior high bullies will use this technology!
I mentioned this to Luis yesterday, and he pointed me to the memes proliferating on TikTok of Trump, Biden, Obama, and Joe Rogan playing Minecraft together.
👏 Kudos
A couple of weeks ago my neighbor and friend Hackim and I went for a fun bike ride with Kenyan cyclist Bobby Joseph. Bobby was intentionally taking it easy with us while he tapered for the 10to4 Mountain Bike Challenge. I asked Bobby if he thought he had a shot at winning and he said no way, that he’d be happy with a podium finish. Turns out that he underestimated himself: He won the second stage by a solid 40 seconds and came in second for the first stage. Here’s a quick reel Bobby made of our ride together:
🎵 A Song
I’m a fan of Fulani-Senegalese musician Baaba Maal. And while I never got into his tracks for the Wakanda Forever soundtrack, his latest single is 🔥! As he writes on his website: “Agreement is about the relationships you make in your life, whether they are with friends, musicians, neighbors, people you love. When you say to people, we are going on this journey through life together, through good times and bad, you should be very sure that you mean it.”
Have a most lovely week,
David