Gwynne Dyer, ContributorAT THE end of a discouraging year, here is an encouraging thought: the world IS growing up. The average age in the world today is 28. (In Shakespeare's time, it was around 15) By 2050, it will be 40. At the age of 40, calculations of long-term self-interest have largely prevailed over hormones. It doesn't necessarily make people nicer, but it certainly makes them more careful.
In 1950 there was not a single country on the planet where the population was not growing rapidly, the average woman had over five children in her lifetime, and the birth-rate was not dropping significantly anywhere. Then came the new birth-control technologies and the rise of women's liberation ideologies, and in many Western countries the birth-rate halved in ten years. As recently as 1974, however, the median birth-rate worldwide was still 5.4 children per woman, so the pessimists were still winning the arguments.
They believed that only literacy could spread the ideas and techniques that made the birth-rates fall, and that literacy would not grow fast enough. Well, literacy has grown a lot faster than they expected between 1980 and 2000, literacy rose from 18 per cent to 47 per cent in Afghanistan, from 33 per cent to 64 per cent in Nigeria, from 66 per cent to 85 per cent in China, and from 69 per cent to 87 per cent in Indonesia. But birth-rates have dropped even more steeply than literacy has risen: the global average is now 2.7 children per woman.
STARTLING RECENT DROPS
Some of the most startling recent drops have been in places where women's illiteracy is still quite high Bangladesh and parts of India, for example so we clearly need a broader criterion than mere literacy. In fact, ANY form of mass media, including broadcast media that do not require literacy, seem to produce the same effect in many places. (Though purely local cultural factors also play a role: Pakistan and Bangladesh both had a birth-rate of 6.3 in 1981; now Bangladesh's is 3.3, while Pakistan's is still 5.6).
The global birth-rate may be no more than a decade away from dropping to replacement level, only 2.2 children per woman. Most developed countries have already dropped well below that rate. This does not immediately stop population growth, since all the children who have already been born will have a child or two themselves, and then live for another 50 years afterwards. It does not solve the environmental crisis either, since all of these seven or eight billion human beings will aspire to the kind of lifestyle now enjoyed only by the privileged billion or so.
But it does mean that populations almost everywhere will start greying within the next decade, and in due course the old will come to outnumber the young. (The exceptions are practically all African and Arab countries, amounting altogether to only a tenth of the world's population.) Countries where the average age is rising are unlikely, on all historical precedent, to become aggressor nations. Peace through exhaustion, perhaps?
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
