Seite 174 [174]
172 GÁBOR PIRISI
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— Population increase —— Fertility rate
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Figure 3. The annual pace of growth of the global population and changes
in the fertility rate (1951-2021) Source of data: Our World in Data
The question is what comes next. The theory of demographic transition, present
in the social sciences since the 1940s or 1950s (Coale 1989; Kirk 1996; Lee 2003),
has stood the test of time. The theory links the four stages of demographic
development to the modernization of society. In the first, the high fertility rate of
the pre-modern era goes together with high mortality, producing a low population
growth rate. In the industrializing phase, the death rate begins to decline but a
continuously high birth rate causes a population explosion, which becomes
mitigated in the third phase by a decrease in the fertility rate. In the fourth phase,
a new, lower level of equilibrium has evolved (or will evolve), with low fertility
and mortality rates. Apparently, every society on Earth progresses or has progressed
along this course of development, although the differences are not negligible (in
terms of the length of the phases and the intensity of the changes). The fourth
phase, presuming a state of equilibrium, rather appears to be the product of wishful
thinking or an aspiration for elegance; it is practical experience that there is no
lengthy stability in the fourth phase, but the model needs to be completed with
a fifth phase, in which a further decline of fertility will cause a massive drop in
the population. This particularly applies to closed migration-free countries such
as Japan which clearly illustrate that it is illusory to wait for the demographic
processes to settle in a new equilibrium along some socially, politically and
economically comfortable stability. In other words, we must prepare for a steady
decline of the global population, as the demographic reserves are gradually depleted.
In countries already past this major turn, there is a highly pressing and urgent
social-political dilemma in need of an answer: are they willing to use in their own
national economies the demographic resources still being produced in less developed
regions by proclaiming an open, pro-immigration policy together with all its real
or alleged conflicts, or will they accept the problems entailed by the inevitability
of their shrinking and aging populations? So it seems that there is no third option,
however strongly many people want to believe it.
It is, however, still an open question whether all this is to be seen as a problem.
We rush to qualify certain demographic processes as “good” or “bad”, whereas it
is not sure that this approach is the right one to take. Actually, in a society, both