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How Population Change Will Transform Our World
Predicting the shape of our future populations is vital for installing the infrastructure, welfare, and provisions necessary for society to survive. There are many opportunities and challenges that will come with the changes in our populations over the 21st century. In this new addition to the 21st Century Challenges series, Sarah Harper works to dispel myths such as the fear of unstoppable global growth resulting in a population explosion, or that climate change will lead to the mass movement of environmental refugees; and instead considers the future shape of our populations in light of demographic trends in fertility, mortality, and migration, and their national and global impact.
How Population Change Will Transform Our World looks at population trends by region to highlight the key issues facing us in the coming decades, including the demographic inertia in Europe, demographic dividend in Asia, high fertility and mortality in Africa, the youth bulge in the Middle East, and the balancing act of migration in the Americas. Harper concludes with an analysis of global challenges we must plan for such as the impact of climate change and urbanization, and the difficulty of feeding 10 billion people, and considers ways in which we can prepare for, and mitigate against, these challenges.
How Population Change Will Transform Our World looks at population trends by region to highlight the key issues facing us in the coming decades, including the demographic inertia in Europe, demographic dividend in Asia, high fertility and mortality in Africa, the youth bulge in the Middle East, and the balancing act of migration in the Americas. Harper concludes with an analysis of global challenges we must plan for such as the impact of climate change and urbanization, and the difficulty of feeding 10 billion people, and considers ways in which we can prepare for, and mitigate against, these challenges.
- GenresSociology
256 pages, Hardcover
Published October 1, 2016
15 people are currently reading
75 people want to read
About the author
Sarah Harper
9 books2 followersLibrarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
February 8, 2017
This is a book for people who like their numbers. Wow, there are a lot of numbers. And charts. Lots and lots of charts. I do like numbers myself, but by about 1/4 of the way through I had become totally chart blind - I couldn't take in any more data. And yet, strangely, despite its incredibly rich data content I'd also say that primarily this is a book that fails the 'is it really a book' test - there may be lots of data here, but not enough information. In terms of narrative, interpretation and answers to 'So what?' questions, it really is more of a magazine article.
We learn that there are three types of country - ones where we're over the hump and strongly headed for a shrinking, top-heavy, ageing population, ones that are in transition, and ones that at the moment are still in the 'natural' condition of 'have lots of children to survive' leading to population growth as health care gets better and very bottom heavy age distributions.
Throughout, I struggled to understand where Sarah Harper was going with this. When talking about the advanced economies there was clearly a problem of having enough young workers to support the ageing population. But equally, there seemed to be emphasis on moving away from the more traditional population distributions because these had lower average ages and less social benefits - there was no real feel for what the ideal is in population terms, or how to achieve it.
There were also some strange gaps. In talking about how a population got into its current state, there was very little mention of cultural/religious influence on, say, contraception or women's education. This was despite the impact of women's education on birth control getting a large mention - but we get little feel for what restricts this. And the reader is presented with a lot of correlation as if this were clearly causality, but with very little mention of how the causal links are being established.
The book gets most interesting, I think, towards the end, where the contributions of climate change and migration were discussed. But I still got the feel for having vast quantities of data thrown at me with very little attempt to answer the crucial 'And so?' questions. We got a good feel for how population age distributions are likely to change with time (although there is a big dose of uncertainty rather quietly thrown in part way through, without really dealing with it), but no real idea of what the implications are. I can see this book working for students to use as a source from which to write essays - but not as a vehicle for to inform the public on the implications for all of us of the way that the world population is changing.
We learn that there are three types of country - ones where we're over the hump and strongly headed for a shrinking, top-heavy, ageing population, ones that are in transition, and ones that at the moment are still in the 'natural' condition of 'have lots of children to survive' leading to population growth as health care gets better and very bottom heavy age distributions.
Throughout, I struggled to understand where Sarah Harper was going with this. When talking about the advanced economies there was clearly a problem of having enough young workers to support the ageing population. But equally, there seemed to be emphasis on moving away from the more traditional population distributions because these had lower average ages and less social benefits - there was no real feel for what the ideal is in population terms, or how to achieve it.
There were also some strange gaps. In talking about how a population got into its current state, there was very little mention of cultural/religious influence on, say, contraception or women's education. This was despite the impact of women's education on birth control getting a large mention - but we get little feel for what restricts this. And the reader is presented with a lot of correlation as if this were clearly causality, but with very little mention of how the causal links are being established.
The book gets most interesting, I think, towards the end, where the contributions of climate change and migration were discussed. But I still got the feel for having vast quantities of data thrown at me with very little attempt to answer the crucial 'And so?' questions. We got a good feel for how population age distributions are likely to change with time (although there is a big dose of uncertainty rather quietly thrown in part way through, without really dealing with it), but no real idea of what the implications are. I can see this book working for students to use as a source from which to write essays - but not as a vehicle for to inform the public on the implications for all of us of the way that the world population is changing.
August 26, 2024
In the past sixty years, global population has increased from 3 billion to 7.8 billion people, and per United Nations projections will reach 11.2 billion by 2100. With this growth, changes in demographics will result in extensive challenges for societies. In her book How Population Change Will Transform Our World, Oxford professor Sarah Harper outlines some of these challenges, as well as offering some policy solutions.
Last century, the “Green Revolution”, which was effectively the discovery of how to turn oil into food, significantly reduced hunger and allowed continued exponential population growth. However, in the developing world, hundreds of millions of people remain hungry today. These least developed countries are still experiencing rapid population growth, and with this growth, high levels of disease and mortality, poor health and education, poor governance, as well as a quickly growing low-skilled, young and dependent population. Unemployment has become the most significant economic issue facing leaders in developing countries. There is an extreme mismatch between skills required in the modern economy and the skills possessed by this growing young labor force. Unemployment skyrockets amongst those without college educations. As recent times have shown, desperate young men make great recruits for terrorist operations.
The most effective policies towards stabilizing population center on supporting women, including enhancing women’s rights, providing women with access to education, and providing women with economic opportunities. Also important are lowering infant mortality, reducing poverty, protecting the environment, providing family healthcare, and providing comprehensive family planning services. Simply put, when empowered, most women choose to have a smaller family.
These policies been repeated throughout the developed world, with significant results. Today, roughly two-thirds of the world’s countries have fertility rates below replacement level, leading to a lower percentage of young people and a growing percentage of older people. At the same time, improvements in nutrition and living conditions, as well as advancements in health technologies, are extending life expectancies. Also, vaccines have greatly extended life. Thus, we are seeing a demographic shift in societies, away from mostly younger people, towards older societies. The fastest growing age group globally is those over 60.
Life expectancy has been increasing by two and a half years per decade for the past 150 years. Current life expectancy has risen to 104 years for babies born today in the US, and biological technologies may extend human life even longer. There are major implications from ever-increasing longevity. With an older population, chronic diseases have risen. We are seeing a meltdown of pension systems, as well as vast increases in healthcare costs. With advancing old age, we will see an increase in fragility and dependency. Harper asks if we will have longer, healthier lives, or just longer lives? Where will the advances take us? These are open questions.
Harper stresses the need for governments to acknowledge how these structural demographic transitions are impacting us, and for governments to promote policies that account for these changes as we transition from a predominantly younger to a predominantly older world. Older populations have a lower percent of workers. Historically, we have had a “population triangle”, with vast numbers of working younger people supporting a small number of older people on the top on the triangle. This population image has shifted from a triangle to a rectangle, reflecting more older people and fewer younger workers. Countries are scrambling to find policies that will resolve this dynamic. Some leaders express the need for more children, ignoring global limits to growth. Others support greater immigration to bring in more workers, but this often causes a backlash, even though immigrants typically provide great benefits to a society. Harper reports that immigrants significantly improve local economies, including encouraging new investment, improving efficiencies and increasing tax revenues.
The challenges across the world will be for governments to manage these demographic shifts, while sustaining and enhancing well-being across people’s lives. This must include reducing inequalities, and ensuring the equitable allocation of resources between generations. Harper stresses that these will be extensive challenges. She also stresses the need for developing countries, mainly in Africa, to develop structures that put their citizens to work. Given the extensive corruption in many if not most developing countries, this will be no small task.
At the end of her book, Harper very briefly discusses how population growth and demographic trends will be impacted by other dynamics, such as technological advances. Advances in robotics, cognitive computing and other digital technologies will significantly exacerbate our future unemployment problem. Automation is a direct threat to cheap labor. For humans to compete, workers will have to acquire skills that enable them to undertake the sophisticated tasks currently beyond computerization. In less-educated, developing world countries, providing these needed skills with be difficult.
I was disappointed that Harper failed to connect population growth with other environmental issues, such as climate change. Given the extensive scientific research that exists on how climate change will dramatically impact the planet, and thus also human life, an assessment of how climate change and population growth will collide seems highly relevant, and worth more than a casual mention. Other critical environmental issues, such as habitat loss, loss of arable land and potable water, pollution of our oceans, and species extinction, are directly impacted by continued human population growth. Human impact on all life on Earth is quite apparent. Sadly, Harper fails to address this connection, and for that, her study seems woefully incomplete.
Last century, the “Green Revolution”, which was effectively the discovery of how to turn oil into food, significantly reduced hunger and allowed continued exponential population growth. However, in the developing world, hundreds of millions of people remain hungry today. These least developed countries are still experiencing rapid population growth, and with this growth, high levels of disease and mortality, poor health and education, poor governance, as well as a quickly growing low-skilled, young and dependent population. Unemployment has become the most significant economic issue facing leaders in developing countries. There is an extreme mismatch between skills required in the modern economy and the skills possessed by this growing young labor force. Unemployment skyrockets amongst those without college educations. As recent times have shown, desperate young men make great recruits for terrorist operations.
The most effective policies towards stabilizing population center on supporting women, including enhancing women’s rights, providing women with access to education, and providing women with economic opportunities. Also important are lowering infant mortality, reducing poverty, protecting the environment, providing family healthcare, and providing comprehensive family planning services. Simply put, when empowered, most women choose to have a smaller family.
These policies been repeated throughout the developed world, with significant results. Today, roughly two-thirds of the world’s countries have fertility rates below replacement level, leading to a lower percentage of young people and a growing percentage of older people. At the same time, improvements in nutrition and living conditions, as well as advancements in health technologies, are extending life expectancies. Also, vaccines have greatly extended life. Thus, we are seeing a demographic shift in societies, away from mostly younger people, towards older societies. The fastest growing age group globally is those over 60.
Life expectancy has been increasing by two and a half years per decade for the past 150 years. Current life expectancy has risen to 104 years for babies born today in the US, and biological technologies may extend human life even longer. There are major implications from ever-increasing longevity. With an older population, chronic diseases have risen. We are seeing a meltdown of pension systems, as well as vast increases in healthcare costs. With advancing old age, we will see an increase in fragility and dependency. Harper asks if we will have longer, healthier lives, or just longer lives? Where will the advances take us? These are open questions.
Harper stresses the need for governments to acknowledge how these structural demographic transitions are impacting us, and for governments to promote policies that account for these changes as we transition from a predominantly younger to a predominantly older world. Older populations have a lower percent of workers. Historically, we have had a “population triangle”, with vast numbers of working younger people supporting a small number of older people on the top on the triangle. This population image has shifted from a triangle to a rectangle, reflecting more older people and fewer younger workers. Countries are scrambling to find policies that will resolve this dynamic. Some leaders express the need for more children, ignoring global limits to growth. Others support greater immigration to bring in more workers, but this often causes a backlash, even though immigrants typically provide great benefits to a society. Harper reports that immigrants significantly improve local economies, including encouraging new investment, improving efficiencies and increasing tax revenues.
The challenges across the world will be for governments to manage these demographic shifts, while sustaining and enhancing well-being across people’s lives. This must include reducing inequalities, and ensuring the equitable allocation of resources between generations. Harper stresses that these will be extensive challenges. She also stresses the need for developing countries, mainly in Africa, to develop structures that put their citizens to work. Given the extensive corruption in many if not most developing countries, this will be no small task.
At the end of her book, Harper very briefly discusses how population growth and demographic trends will be impacted by other dynamics, such as technological advances. Advances in robotics, cognitive computing and other digital technologies will significantly exacerbate our future unemployment problem. Automation is a direct threat to cheap labor. For humans to compete, workers will have to acquire skills that enable them to undertake the sophisticated tasks currently beyond computerization. In less-educated, developing world countries, providing these needed skills with be difficult.
I was disappointed that Harper failed to connect population growth with other environmental issues, such as climate change. Given the extensive scientific research that exists on how climate change will dramatically impact the planet, and thus also human life, an assessment of how climate change and population growth will collide seems highly relevant, and worth more than a casual mention. Other critical environmental issues, such as habitat loss, loss of arable land and potable water, pollution of our oceans, and species extinction, are directly impacted by continued human population growth. Human impact on all life on Earth is quite apparent. Sadly, Harper fails to address this connection, and for that, her study seems woefully incomplete.
October 19, 2016
Rather arid for the general reader but nonetheless a concise and objective analysis of the historic and future trends in population and the implications for economics and political policy. It really emphasises the global rather than national, regional or local imperatives that should always be kept in mind (not least the compelling, if unpopular, case for open borders).
March 1, 2023
An interesting book. Does more or less what the title suggests ...that population change will transform the world. What I found especially interesting was the way that Sarah Harper focuses on the differences in a population composition that will drive both economic growth and population growth. She talks about the demographic dividend that some countries (like China) have benefited from: It's the combination of falling birth rates (or fertility), declining mortality rates ...which increases life expectancy and if the combination can be combined with improved education (and often/usually is) the you get an increase proportion in the productive (working stage of their lives. To benefit from the demographic dividend, countries also need to have other elements in place like good governance and appropriate infrastructure....and many countries (especially in Latin America) have missed out on these. I remember reading Malthus and thinking that he actually got his numbers fairly right. (It seems to me that most economists who decry Malthus's observations have just not read his stuff......he basically said unless there was killer diseases or widespread emigration then the UK was going to be overpopulated). And Paul and Anne Ehrlich were saying something similar in their book "the Population Explosion". As I recall they were suggesting that the world's population would reach saturation point in about 1986. (Maybe they were right and ever since we've been over-extracting and increasing our outputs of CO2 because of increasing population).
Anyway, Harper doesn't get into any debate about what sort of population the world can support. She merely makes a series of observations about declining fertility rates in nearly all countries except in Africa ...and even there the record is patchy. High birth rates tend to go hand in glove with: poverty, rural living rather than city living, low levels of education ....especially of women and poorer health outcomes ...meaning shorter life expectancy.
A couple of things had impact for me. First, Australian men at age 60 have the highest life expectancy in the world (24.08 years more...taking us to 84.08 years). Second, kids born this century have life expectancies of over 100 years (like 104 years or 107 years in the case of Japan). Third, the evidence is not especially strong but it looks like if you push out the life expectancy you still can expect around 3 years of disability at the end of your life...which is about the same years of disability as places with poor health systems. Fourth, education of women has a massive impact on birth rates ....by delaying marriage age, giving women more options and understanding about birth control etc.
There are some real basket cases in the world, and Niger is one of them with really low levels of education for women and high levels of poverty. Same with a number of the sub-Saharan African countries. I guess it's no surprise that armed gangs are kidnapping girls from schools in order to prevent them from getting an education.
There is also an interesting case study where Bangladesh introduced an educational program for birth control and it was taken up with enthusiasm ....but its counterpart country.....Pakistan did nothing about limiting population. In 1970 Bangladesh had 66 million people and Pakistan had 59 Million but by 2050 Bangladesh will have 202 million whilst Pakistan will have 309 million.
Harper is not really painting a doomsday scenario .....and she makes the point that even with a declining proportion of the population working it doesn't mean that the elderly face penury....they may be able to invest their savings etc .....or import workers as both the UK and Australia do.
Right near the end she touches on some of the other issues that will impact on demography, including, climate change, shortages of water, rising sea levels (flooding deltas and arable land) inequality .......technology (and discusses a rejuvenated US textiles industry which has largely been run by robots ...thus making the US able to compete with low wage cost countries). And artificial intelligence replacing a lot of the middle level skilled people. (The book was published in 2016.....before "ChatGPT"........so it will be interesting to see the impact that AI has on work and jobs).
I quite enjoyed the book ...though in places the editing left something to be desired (Same paragraph repeated twice on p138).......and the perennial problem of trying to show multiple lines on graphs in just black and white and shades of gray......frequently impossible to distinguish.
She concludes by saying that "while economic and political structures are important, economic growth has only occurred without the pre-requisite demographic change (the economic dividend) in exceptional circumstances". I give it four stars.
Anyway, Harper doesn't get into any debate about what sort of population the world can support. She merely makes a series of observations about declining fertility rates in nearly all countries except in Africa ...and even there the record is patchy. High birth rates tend to go hand in glove with: poverty, rural living rather than city living, low levels of education ....especially of women and poorer health outcomes ...meaning shorter life expectancy.
A couple of things had impact for me. First, Australian men at age 60 have the highest life expectancy in the world (24.08 years more...taking us to 84.08 years). Second, kids born this century have life expectancies of over 100 years (like 104 years or 107 years in the case of Japan). Third, the evidence is not especially strong but it looks like if you push out the life expectancy you still can expect around 3 years of disability at the end of your life...which is about the same years of disability as places with poor health systems. Fourth, education of women has a massive impact on birth rates ....by delaying marriage age, giving women more options and understanding about birth control etc.
There are some real basket cases in the world, and Niger is one of them with really low levels of education for women and high levels of poverty. Same with a number of the sub-Saharan African countries. I guess it's no surprise that armed gangs are kidnapping girls from schools in order to prevent them from getting an education.
There is also an interesting case study where Bangladesh introduced an educational program for birth control and it was taken up with enthusiasm ....but its counterpart country.....Pakistan did nothing about limiting population. In 1970 Bangladesh had 66 million people and Pakistan had 59 Million but by 2050 Bangladesh will have 202 million whilst Pakistan will have 309 million.
Harper is not really painting a doomsday scenario .....and she makes the point that even with a declining proportion of the population working it doesn't mean that the elderly face penury....they may be able to invest their savings etc .....or import workers as both the UK and Australia do.
Right near the end she touches on some of the other issues that will impact on demography, including, climate change, shortages of water, rising sea levels (flooding deltas and arable land) inequality .......technology (and discusses a rejuvenated US textiles industry which has largely been run by robots ...thus making the US able to compete with low wage cost countries). And artificial intelligence replacing a lot of the middle level skilled people. (The book was published in 2016.....before "ChatGPT"........so it will be interesting to see the impact that AI has on work and jobs).
I quite enjoyed the book ...though in places the editing left something to be desired (Same paragraph repeated twice on p138).......and the perennial problem of trying to show multiple lines on graphs in just black and white and shades of gray......frequently impossible to distinguish.
She concludes by saying that "while economic and political structures are important, economic growth has only occurred without the pre-requisite demographic change (the economic dividend) in exceptional circumstances". I give it four stars.
September 9, 2020
In this book, Sarah Harper discusses various aspects like change in total fertility rates in different parts of the world and ponders on the implications of it, like its correlation with the female labour force participation. She keeps stressing on the importance of education for women, and notes that as being a key driver of positive demographic changes.
She also talks about fall in mortality rates and questions whether the burgeoning aging population will genuinely lead longer, healthy lives, or would it just be longer lives but with chronic non-communicable diseases/disability?
I found the last chapter of the book the most interesting. She highlights two major challenges for the 21st century- environmental change and technological advances, and how these may interact with demographic change. She also presents immigration policies across the world and discusses their effects on population structures and sizes. Harper concludes the book by stating that there would be significant challenges in the 21st century due to rapidly changing and unbalanced age structures in the population. In that context, she questions whether 20th century institutions (like the health systems or the education systems) would be adequate to handle these novel problems of the 21st century.
She also talks about fall in mortality rates and questions whether the burgeoning aging population will genuinely lead longer, healthy lives, or would it just be longer lives but with chronic non-communicable diseases/disability?
I found the last chapter of the book the most interesting. She highlights two major challenges for the 21st century- environmental change and technological advances, and how these may interact with demographic change. She also presents immigration policies across the world and discusses their effects on population structures and sizes. Harper concludes the book by stating that there would be significant challenges in the 21st century due to rapidly changing and unbalanced age structures in the population. In that context, she questions whether 20th century institutions (like the health systems or the education systems) would be adequate to handle these novel problems of the 21st century.
May 7, 2022
3.5 ⭐ There is some bad editing with the exact same facts being worded somewhat differently within the same page. How come no one noticed. Interesting enough, but the attention is very much shifted towards the economics of demographic changes. I think this is a pity. Also rather than summing up statistical facts, which makes for boring and sometimes somewhat complicated reading I would rather have seen more clear tables and graphs. The gist is interesting enough though. Wonder how much the book would need revising "after" or since covid....
May 14, 2017
Concise overview, but limited to an age-based analysis. This is not surprising given the author's expertise in gerontology. Some interesting side notes to consider (e.g., role of technology). Supporter with many examples from a wide range of countries.
June 28, 2018
This book should be mandatory, especially if you work on the government. Policy making should take into consideration age and shifts on population (and even lead them).
Thorough and concise. Highly recommended
Thorough and concise. Highly recommended
March 28, 2019
This book gives you a clear image of how the world works and what role the population plays. The population age structure should be the starting point of public policies in every country, only then the countries can progress and grow economically.
February 2, 2019
eurocentric ideas
March 17, 2025
read this for my demographics class. super cool!
August 26, 2023
First few chapters more impactful
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews