The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World

by Paul Morland

'Superbly explained' Washington PostEvery phase since the advent of the industrial revolution - from the fate of the British Empire, to the global challenges from Germany, Japan and Russia, to America's emergence as a sole superpower, to the Arab Spring, to the long-term decline of economic growth that started with Japan and has now spread to Europe, to China's meteoric economy, to Brexit and the presidency of Donald Trump - can be explained better when we appreciate the meaning of demographic change across the world.The Human Tide is the first popular history book to redress the underestimated influence of population as a crucial factor in almost all of the major global shifts and events of the last two centuries - revealing how such events are connected by the invisible mutually catalysing forces of population.This highly original history offers a brilliant and simple unifying theory for our understanding the last two hundred the power of sheer numbers. An ambitious, original, magisterial history of modernity, it taps into prominent preoccupations of our day and will transform our perception of history for many years to come.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Science, Economics, Sociology, Politics, World History

377 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 10, 2019

About the author

Dr Paul Morland is associate research fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London and a renowned authority on demography. A French speaker with dual German and British citizenship, Paul was educated at Oxford University, and was awarded his PhD from the University of London.

Reviews

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hadn’t heard of this author until recently when I saw an article about a new book of his, Tomorrow’s People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers. It looked interesting but I thought I’d get some background by starting with this 2019 book.

The main theme is how the human tide can wane as well as wax. The book focuses on the “demographic transition”, a pattern which, with minor variations, has been observed worldwide. Broadly speaking there are three stages. In the pre-modern stage - the entire world up to about 1800 - there were very high fertility rates balanced by high infant mortality, which meant that the population grew only very slowly. There are now no countries in the world left in this situation. In the second phase, fertility rates remain high but infant mortality plummets, leading to a population explosion. This is the current situation in most of sub-Saharan Africa and a few other countries. In the last phase, fertility rates crash, often to levels below the replacement rate. This raises the prospect of a declining population, especially in countries that receive little inward migration. Most of the world is now in this third phase. The decline in fertility rates happens through individual choice.

The author notes that the demographic transformation began in the British Isles, something that was of course closely linked with the take-off of the British economy from the late eighteenth century onwards. The population explosion in Britain and Ireland fuelled an immense flow of outward migration, allowing the peoples of first Britain and then the rest of Europe to dominate the globe. The effects were of course most long-lasting in North America, Australia and New Zealand, where the native populations were reduced to tiny minorities. In more recent times these areas, and Europe itself, have become the locations for massive inward migrations from areas of the world that experienced more recent population increases.

Because sub-Saharan Africa is still in the second phase, its proportion of the world population will increase markedly over the rest of the century. In 1960 Nigeria had a population of 45 million, today it has 180 million and the UN’s medium projection suggests the staggering figure of 800 million by 2100.

Most other countries in the world will face challenges from an aging population combined with a declining workforce. It will become increasingly difficult for a shrinking workforce to support state pension allowances and social care for the elderly. Interestingly, the author feels that China’s economic boom may start to stutter as it will no longer be fuelled by a growing workforce and will have to rely instead on productivity improvements.

The book contained plenty that was worthwhile but I found it got a bit samey as it went on. It’s structured by looking at each part of the world in turn, but the story in each is essentially the same thing with different timing and some cultural variations.

The author doesn’t seek to overstate his case by claiming demographics as the sole explanation for the history of the last two centuries, noting instead that population growth is one part of a complex set of interactions. I did feel that sometimes he risked implying that correlation equalled causation.

I remain interested enough to read his more recent book.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans. Demography is what happens while your country is busy making other plans.

Here is a book that argues pretty convincingly that, while most of us are bickering about the menu in the dining car, the train of history is chugging along towards a fairly predictable demography-driven destination, at least for the (next 100 years or so) short term. Blessed with a remarkable ability to believe, in spite of all evidence and previous experience, that the future will continue on a straight line from the present, people – plus the countries and empires that they populate – continue to predict that the present number-one top-dog country (and its associated values and culture) will dominate the political landscape forever. It will not, nor will the next number-one top-dog country. Prosperity has repeatedly brought predictable social changes, such as women (outrageously unreasonable as they are) wanting control over their own minds and bodies. The social changes in turn yield predictable demographic changes – lower birth rate, higher median age. These changes can be understood and planned for – if we want to.

For tens of thousands of years, the demographic pattern was, well, no pattern: maybe it went up for a while, and then there was a particularly bad plague or period of violence, or maybe there wasn't. The demographic pattern of our age: decreased infant morality and increased life span leading to a population boom, then a leveling off of population as women gain education and the population internalizes the idea that most children will live to adulthood. This pattern first appeared, slowly, in Great Britain. The pattern occurred over a longer period because Britain and its offspring colonies had to invent for themselves the improvements in agriculture and medicine that lengthened lifespan and decreased infant mortality. When the pattern appears in more recent times, the population boom takes place more quickly, because, instead of waiting for advances in medicine and agriculture to take place one-by-one, developing nations can get them, off-the-shelf and road-tested, from already-developed countries.

China and Islam, the twin great scary monsters of today's Western imagination, seem both poised to enter the leveling-off phase of the demographic pattern, according to this book. The implication is that those who think one or both of these teeming foreign hordes will overrun the West by the dint of fevered reproduction should find some other ridiculous bogeyman to base their xenophobia on. However, subsaharan Africa (still stuck in pre-Industrial Revolution levels of infant mortality and life expectancy) is poised now to enter on the first phase, with the problems that it brings, especially a large cohort of potential boy soldiers in the future, disgruntled and willing to perform suicidal violence to satisfy their grievance against the more-prosperous, as well as another large cohort of emigrants willing to stop at nothing to reach lands of more opportunity. These latter we are regularly seeing already on leaky overcrowded boats in the Mediterranean.

To put it another way, demographic development is like a film playing at different times in different cinemas; although the screening has yet to finish at a number of venues, we know how it ends (Kindle location 4063).

The conclusion of this book is of course more detailed and nuanced than the blockquote directly above. I urge you to read this book and understand demography, and your world, more fully.

It is sad to see that this new book, in spite of advance copies being available free to cheapskates like me via Netgalley, lacks (at this writing) even a single review. Furthermore, I seem to be the only one who has marked it “currently reading”, and the number of people who have marked it as “to read” seems woefully small. What is wrong with the world today? This is a book that combines two of the most fascinating subjects in the world: statistics and geography. On the down side, there is a lot of talk about people as well, but at least individual instances of people are kept to a minimum in favor of large groups. I suppose it couldn't be helped.

This quote from Shakespeare does NOT appear anywhere in the book.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. – Shakespeare, “Julius Caesar”, Act 4, Scene 3

I received a free electronic advance review copy of this book via Netgalley and PublicAffairs.

[Dave Schoettinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Demography is widely regarded as something of a dry discipline; lots of numbers, lots of generalizations. Even if you look at it as based on lots of people having lots of sex, it still lacks the specificity of, say, Lady Chatterley.

Paul Morland has addressed this image of demography by viewing the ebb and flow of birth rates, death rates and migrations as a vast ocean of humanity, sometimes increasing, sometimes decreasing, usually moving. Although his metaphor does add a little poetry to demographic concepts, there is still a lot of math.

Professor Morland writes more than once that demography is not destiny, however he has a demographic hammer and world history looks like a bunch of nails. Some of his observations seem obvious in retrospect, however Napoleon may well have benefitted from having an expert in Russian population statistics on his staff. The book included explanations of birth rates, death rates and fertility rates that were understandable, and provides a viewpoint of historic trends that are often not included in standard histories.

[Alvaro de Menard · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Human Tide is about the importance of demographics in history, with a particular focus on the last couple of centuries.

First, a couple of notes on the presentation. A book about demographics was never going to be a page-turner, but even by that standard this is dull and repetitive. And while it's essentially a data-driven book, its presentation of that data is bizarre. Morland presents all the data textually, for example:

"According to the United Nations, Russia’s total fertility rate stood at a little over one and a half children per woman in the early 1990s and fell to one and a quarter in the latter part of that decade, since when it has recovered somewhat to around one and two-thirds of a child per woman."

Why is this not a graph?

On to the content. The basic building block of this book is the demographic transition. Societies start in a Malthusian state with 1) High birthrates, 2) high infant mortality, 3) low life expectancy. Then modernity kicks in, decreasing infant mortality and extending life. Population booms, resulting in disproportionately young societies. But as that happens, women start having fewer children. Eventually fertility drops below replacement levels and societies start to age.

There are variations in the timing and intensity of the transition, and various temporary deviations (such as the baby boom), but the general pattern repeats itself consistently. Morland's approach is to go through various regions of the world, show how the pattern manifested itself there, and then connect it to historical events. There's a chapter on European imperialism, one on the West after WWII, one on the Eastern Bloc after WWII, one on East Asia, one on the Middle East/North Africa, etc. He argues convincingly that demographics were a key factor in just about every major historical event of the last 200 years, including colonialism and the world wars.

One of my biggest gripes with the book is that Morland is not interested in building a causal model of what drives the demographic transition. There's some vague handwaving toward economic development, education, birth control, urbanization, etc. but it's completely lacking in rigour. Since he has no model, his predictions about the future are built on sand. And it's not like there isn't a literature on these things, for example Becker's work on the trade-off between quantity and quality of children would have fit in perfectly.

Another hole is the lack of engagement with the long-run growth literature from historical economics. One of the key findings is that one must track population flows in order to correctly model the determinants of long-run growth, because ancestry matters. If you want to understand "how population shaped the modern world", you can hardly ignore these results.

A third issue is the lack of attention given to shifting demographic patterns of fertility. Morland dismisses this question as a product of "snobbery" and never even looks into the data. But as W. D. Hamilton wrote, "almost all of the worries of the early eugenicists were well-founded in spite of the relative paucity of their evidence at the time." As has been shown by Gregory Clark, David de la Croix, Richard Lynn, and others, the demographic transition also included a reversal of fertility patterns, from eugenic to dysgenic. This has been corroborated by contemporary data on fertility across the developed world (eg Kong et al. (2017) in Iceland, Conley et al. (2016) in the US, Chen at al. (2017) in Taiwan, etc.) Morland just comes across as ignorant when he tries to cover this question.

Strangest of all, while Morland meticulously argues that demographics is, indeed, destiny, he thinks anyone who cares about demographics is some sort of evil far-right extremist who is "weaponizing" "racial anxiety". He drops redpills with one hand and clutches pearls with the other! At times he seems to be channeling LKY:

Demography also matters more now than in the past because politics has become increasingly ethnic in its nature in the modern era, particularly since the French Revolution.

He mentions the influence of immigration on culture (though he should've brought up institutions, too):

Although the new immigrants were largely expected to assimilate into the predominant culture, they changed America.

He sees demographics as a key factor behind dominance in geopolitics:

It was the weight of numbers – combined with new industrial technologies – that enabled the British and their off spring to make their language, culture and political institutions the global norm.

And forecasts a vast escalation of migration from Africa and the Middle East into Europe:

Migration, which has so far occurred over the Mediterranean, might eventually be seen as but a foretaste of what is to come. A hundred million hungry, desperate Egyptians poised on the Mediterranean shores would knock into the shade any migration crisis Europe has seen to date.

And writes about how current low fertility has terrible consequences:

Since the early 1990s Germany’s fertility rate has at least stopped falling, but it has knocked along at around one and one-third children per women, perhaps beginning to pick up to around one and a half. This will have potentially catastrophic implications for the long term.

Yet he is squarely against fixing any of the above issues. Part of his POV is that there's really nothing to be done about fertility, because as he has shown earlier, demographic trends are extremely difficult (if not impossible) to influence through policy. But I'm not convinced that passivity and fatalism are the correct response to these threats.

Received copy through NetGalley.

[Mircea Petcu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Factorul demografic este adesea ignorat de istorici.

Descrierea Razboaielor Napoleoniene nu incepe cu precizarea foarte importanta ca o cincime din populatia Europei de atunci era concentrata in Franta. Peste o suta de ani. in ajunul Primului Razboi Mondial, populatia Frantei nu reprezenta mai mult de o zecime. Pe la 1800 francezii isi puteau propune hegemonia continentala.

In 2008, daca populatia americana ar fi avut aceeasi structura etnica pe care o avea acum 50 de ani, Barack Obama n-ar mai fi ajuns presedinte. Obama a castigat doar 43% din voturile albilor, spre deosebire de cele 55% ale lui John McCain, in schimb a obtinut majoritatea absoluta a voturilor populatiei "neeuropene".

[Bryan Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Human Tide is a useful and accessible introduction to the demographics of the past two centuries.

One major theme is a persuasive argument that demographics play a key role in world events. For example, Morland explains the Soviet crisis of the 1980s driven in part by population trends (164ff), argues that Japan needed a population boom to power its imperial adventure (201), and that 20th century decolonialization was made possible in part by colonial population declines and a childbirth boom among the colonized. (228) The recent Syrian civil war was driven by a youth bulge. (243) Elsewhere, the book sees Islamic fundamentalism as having "direct demographic roots… There is evidence of a link between fertility and religious intensity found in Islam, just as there is in other religions…” (240)

Across those historical events, Morland establishes a population framework based on a tidal metaphor. Starting with Britain in the early 19th century, the world experienced a population flood followed by an ebb. He calls this, rather blandly, “the demographic transition”:

A population will stabilize at a higher level once it has experienced growth as it moves from high birth rates and high death rates, through high birth rates and falling death rates, to low birth rates and low death rates.” (111)

What caused these huge changes? The flood came about thanks to early modernity. Industrial growth, urbanization, and population expansions worked together. (50) An economic boom can drive a baby boom, as with the US in the 1950s. (136) In addition, political and religious tensions can drive higher birth rates, as with Muslims in the Soviet bloc (231) and post-WWII Israel and Palestine (which Morland dubs "competitive breeding”, 249).

What brings about the successive ebb? A mix of factors, including better public health and improved medicine, which pushed infant mortality down. (73) Rising female literacy plays a huge part. (106) So do cultural factors: “later marriage to the very questioning by the LGBT movement of what it means to be a man or woman,” plus feminism and secularism, as well as more access to birth control. (142)

One cultural aspect caught my eye. Soviet gender politics depressed births:

The ideal Soviet woman was politically conscious (and therefore, almost by definition, literate), living in a town of city and probably employed in a factory; she was bound to have fewer children than her illiterate peasant mother. (106)

Governments can influence births a little bit, but not much, as the example of Soviet bloc Romania shows (188). In fact, that story reveals a libertarian theme in the book: “the human tide is best managed by ordinary human beings themselves and not by their self-appointees engineers” (218)

I read this with an eye on the future. What does Morland see, especially as he views "[m]uch about demographic as 'baked into the future' and is certain to happen" (274)? In a handy phrase, the human race will become more grey, more green, and less white. (274) We will become more peaceful and suffer less crime; on the flip side, we'll be less prone to risk taking. (275) Paying for pensions will be a planetary challenge. (276) Greener: fewer people, eventually, will give more space to nature, and more people living in cities means some greater efficiencies. (278) Less white: Anglo-Saxon and European population growth is stalling and falling back, along with much of east Asia; in contrast, we're experiencing a boom in Africa. (279-80) This could lead to more immigration, such as a possible flood of Egyptians into Europe, should that nation's fragile economy collapse.(235-6)

A useful book, but with one limitation. It is a deeply Anglocentric work, starting with Britain (which is understandable) and never really letting go of the UK. European nations generally receive more attention to closer they are to Britain, and that pattern continues in many ways for the rest of the world. Certain nations are treated far too lightly - namely India, likely the world's most populous in a few years!

Once you realize that gap, you can follow up with further reading elsewhere. Otherwise, I commend The Human Tide.

[Raghu Nathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I first saw the title of this book, I wondered whether it is one more book that looks at human population growth as a tsunami that will destroy all that is good on Earth. There is a lengthy history of such thinking. In the eighteenth century, the economist/philosopher Thomas Malthus saw disease, famine, war, and calamity in the wake of population growth. In the 1960s, we had Paul Ehrlich, William Paddock, and Paul Paddock, academics from Stanford and Princeton, getting alarmed by the ‘population bomb’. They saw massive famines and civil war in India by 1975 and the probable death of a hundred million people. Also, they advised the Johnson administration not to intervene when it happens but let it play out to the bitter end. Then, there was the “Limits to Growth” report from MIT in 1972 that asked us to choose between civilization and growth. By the early 1990s, events proved all these pundits woefully wrong. India, the problem child of the 1960s, has since reached a fertility rate that is just above the replacement level. We have research now that tells us that the global population will begin declining in the next three decades, and it will never end once it starts. Still, today’s environmentalists keep raising alarms on the menace of over-population. As I started reading this book, I was pleased that it did not beat up on the same old alarmist theme. Rather, it emphasizes the notion that the world has seen vast improvements in health, education, living standards, and opportunities alongside the surge of human population in the past two centuries.

The goal of the author in this book is modest. He talks about the role of demography as one more force that shapes history. It is not necessarily a primary determinant or first-mover. It is a factor which itself is driven by other factors, numerous and complex, some material, some ideological, and some accidental. These factors are causal ones such as technological innovation, economic progress, and changing beliefs and ideologies. Using such a flexible framework, the book details how population change has taken place across the world at different times. It covers predominantly the Anglo-Saxon world with chapters on Africa, the Middle-East, East Asia, and Latin America. I shall recap the author’s arguments summarily as follows: Human societies, irrespective of culture and geography, have been transitioning through history in familiar and predictable stages. The population growth was gradual for most of history. Major epidemics and pandemics like the Bubonic plague, low longevity, and high infant mortality affected this growth substantially. This stage is called high fertility - high mortality. Starting with the 1800s, especially in Britain, the industrial revolution was associated with rapid population growth. With improvements in medicines and sanitation, society transitioned to the stage of high fertility - low mortality. A century later, with increasing health, prosperity, and opportunities, much of the world now is at a stage of low fertility - low mortality. The book does not speculate about the future of mankind in this century. Author Morland says that the science and technology of the future would reshape the population in ways hard to envisage at present. He speculates that we may be in for a future where there may be less interest in sex and romance as part of a low fertility culture. He cites the LGBTQ culture, the emergence of the young Japanese and Western ‘herbivore’ (one who is disinterested in sex and relationships) as reasons to support his contention.

As one can see, the book does not set the Thames on fire. It does not give us any new insights into the population question. I felt it was much more of a historical recap of the human population over the past two centuries. Despite the author saying upfront that demography is only one factor in history, there are many occasions where he slips into an argument that it is the most critical constituent. There are other occasions where he makes claims of demography being a significant factor in current and past world events. I shall touch on a few of them.

On the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980s, Morland says that an important cause of Soviet defeat was demography. In the 1980s, the median age of Russia was thirty-three while it was below sixteen in Afghanistan. A young, growing Afghan population, even if smaller, was difficult to defeat on its home pitch. On the contrary, low fertility in the Slavic heartland of the USSR made it difficult to get more and more young men into the Afghan war. Morland makes the claim that even in the second world war, the USSR won against Germany because Russia had a younger, growing population compared to Germany. These arguments are unconvincing. The spirit of the Afghans to drive out foreign occupation, the massive military aid from Riyadh and Washington, the Soviet soldiers’ reluctance to fight in a war they didn’t want to, and the tough Afghan terrain of combat might account for 95% of the reasons the USSR suffered defeat. Demography did not seem to be a factor.

Regarding the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Morland says that demography played an important role. He says that the USSR economy, despite being inefficient, was growing in the 1930s because of a growing Slavic labor force. But low fertility and high male mortality in Russia started dogging the USSR by the 1970s. This resulted in the economy floundering. People from areas (non-Slavic Central Asia?) where productivity and education were poor, augmented the industrial labor force, leading to economic collapse. These arguments for the collapse of communism in the USSR fare weakly when compared to the many other reasons like a dictatorship, stagnation because of a command economy, high military expenditure induced by the Star-wars program of the Reagan administration, etc.

On the questions of Islamic extremism, violence in the war in Yemen, and the Syrian civil war, the author makes equally unconvincing arguments based on Arab demography. The ‘youth bulge’ in the Arab world results in high unemployment, which Morland says is a recipe for social disruption and violence. Then, he makes an unsupported claim that there is evidence of a link between fertility and religious fundamentalism in Islam and that demography will drive the continued growth of Islamic conservatism and Jihadism. He believes even the Syrian civil war has demographic roots. The population of major cities like Damascus used to be populated mostly by Alawites, Druze, and Christians, who supported the Baathist regime. Over the years, the rural, neglected population of the majority Sunnis gradually moved towards cities like Damascus in search of jobs and practically laid a siege to those cities. The author says this is one cause of the civil war. Similarly, he contends that the civil war in Yemen results from the young demography of Yemen. However, most experts think the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars are the echo of the larger Shia-Sunni conflict that is ripping the middle-east apart, where both these nations feel compelled to pick the Iranian side against Saudi Arabia.

For a book on population and its role in shaping history, there is only a sparse discussion on the role it played in India and China. India is discussed only since its independence from Britain in 1947. Particularly, the author has not discussed his theory of “demography will drive the continued growth of Islamic conservatism and Jihadism” against India’s large Muslim population. Indian Muslims have not shown any tendency towards Jihadism. China is also given short shrift. There is some discussion on the effects of China’s one-child policy. While the author credits a large population as contributing to the USA’s dominant position in the world, he does not say why India and China have missed the bus while having four times the population of the US.

I find it hard to recommend the book.

[Boudewijn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Volgens Paul Morland, demograaf verbonden aan de universiteit van Londen, ligt aan elke ontwikkeling een demografische factor ter grondslag. In Het menselijke getij laat hij zien hoe elke natie, beginnend met het Engeland uit de 18e eeuw, een demografische transitie heeft doorgemaakt.

Malthus had het fout: vanaf de Industriële Revolutie bleek de aarde wel degelijk een exponentieel groeiende menselijke bevolking te kunnen voeden doordat er met behulp van nieuwe (technologische) mogelijkheden meer voedsel gekweekt kon worden en door verbeterde transportmogelijkheden nieuwe landbouwgronden opengelegd konden worden.

Wat volgde was een demografische transitie: als eerste een daling van de kindersterfte gevolgd door een daling van de vruchtbaarheidscijfers. Met andere woorden: een explosieve stijging van de bevolking, gevolgd door een afvlakking van de groei op langere termijn. De explosieve stijging van de bevolking stelde het Engeland van de 18e eeuw tot het in stand houden van de Industriële Revolutie (meer mensen betekent meer werknemers, meer mensen betekent ook meer afzet) en door de massale emigratie vanuit de UK naar landen als de VS, Canada en Oceanië een groot wereldrijk. Later kwamen daar landen als Duitsland en Rusland bij.

Vervolgens behandelt Paul Morland de verschillende geografische lokaties in de wereld: te beginnen met Europa en Rusland (vergrijzing, dalende bevolkingscijfers afgezwakt door immigratie), Azië en met name China, waarbij de eenkindpolitiek achteraf helemaal niet nodig bleek, het Midden-Oosten met zijn hoge percentage jonge bevolking en ten slotte Afrika, waar de demografische transitie pas net is begonnen.

Paul Morland laat ons ook zien wat de toekomst ons kan brengen: mondiaal stijgende bevolkingscijfers met een piek rond 2100. In Europa betekent dat meer 'grijs', een oude bevolking. Meer 'groen' omdat de afnemende wereldbevolking ons is staat stelt de wereld weer te vergroenen. En als laatste: 'minder wit' omdat het aandeel van de Kaukasische (blanke) bevolking als percentage zal afnemen, alhoewel sommigen alt-righters het liever 'meer zwart' zullen noemen.

[Amanda (Books, Life and Everything Nice) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley, Public Affairs and Paul Morland for an ARC ebook copy to review. As always, an honest review from me.

Like:
- a wonderful mix of sociological, economic, political, cultural and science’s effects on population changes throughout history - Fascinating!
- Can tell the author is knowledgable and passionate about the topics
- Has me looking at history in a new way
- Views the population changes in a new and completely interesting way

Love:
- Readers can learn a lot from the book.

Dislike:
-Some sections didn’t interest me or were repetitive (This could definitely be a personal preference, and may not be the case for you.)

Wish that:
- There was more science based information. Based on the book description, I expected a better balance of science and history.

Overall, an interesting and educational book that’s filled with so much information. The author makes the topics accessible.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a recent article for Vox, David Roberts argued that greens should mostly not understand environmental questions as overpopulation questions because the people who enjoy the highest standard of living have the largest impact on the environment. This is a good point: people in poverty rarely fly private jets, even if their energy use is sometimes "inefficient." Further, even a glancing consideration of population trends seems to raise thoughts that veer alarmingly close to either racism, eugenics, or draconian policies. A love of the earth has not inoculated greens against these disturbing areas of thought. Still, if the goal is to maximize quality of life for as many people as possible while minimizing harm to the planet, it seems to me that greens should pay at least some attention to population dynamics. In The Human Tide, Paul Morland provides a demographics 101 overview for casual readers.

The first half of The Human Tide introduces demographic transition, which occurred first in England. They saw their infant mortality and death rates drop and combined it with industry. What might follow such a mix? An empire. Colonialism. The "white man's burden" narrative. Perhaps also modernity. Morland warns that demographics are not destiny and that demographic trends are not directly causal of social outcomes. Nevertheless, to the extent that economists can look at markets and say "aha, an invisible hand is at work here," demographers can point to population trends and say "aha, we've found an invisible hand motivating human behavior." With that in mind, it is not surprising that a population with many young men is more likely to be violent than an older population; it is not surprising that cultures that educate women often see declining birth rates; it is not surprising that snobbish comments about the "masses" are often delivered from privileged people in the face of a population boom.

The second half of The Human Tide provides an overview of current trends. Infant mortality is mostly low or falling around the world. People are mostly living longer. Cultures that educate women will not fully replace their young, so their population will age. This means countries like Japan and America are greying, and I mention Japan and the USA because they show that demographics alone are not destiny. Japan has mostly resisted the urge to supplement their working population with immigrants and is instead investing in robots and other businesses (apparently it's a job in Japan to remove the bodies of elders who died without anyone noticing, perhaps for days or weeks) to care for their elderly. The USA has a long history of immigration (though it also has a long and, sadly, very contemporary history of xenophobic isolationism) that it might rely on to maintain its work force. If so, they can tax those workers to care for their elderly. If they don't, some stress will push another option forward, perhaps higher taxes or a reduced standard of living for the elderly or more families choosing to live in multi-generational homes so they care for their ailing parents and grandparents.

The most interesting thing about The Human Tide is that it presented me a different way of thinking about countries. Within this framework, individuals are a causal agent of the population, but governments are also agents in the population. I didn't always love these thoughts, especially because from a certain "altitude," people become assets rather than agents. Still, here are thoughts I had while reading The Human Tide.

-I'm a Canadian and we face the ageing population issue now and in the coming decades. Consequently, the Trump administration's xenophobia to all forms of immigration to the USA (excepting, perhaps Norwegians?) is an advantage to Canada insofar as we are in the market for skilled migrants. The USA is wealthier, larger, and warmer than us—significant competitive advantages—but we can present ourselves as stable, relatively well governed, and more welcoming to newcomers. (For the record, I don't view us as, here in reality, acing these criteria.) Further, I couldn't help but think of America's "dreamer" children as potential assets: these are children who likely speak English perfectly, they are likely bilingual, their values are likely similar to Canada's, and they are already educated in a developed economy's education system.

-I struggle to fully accept this thought, but Morland suggests China will have an older population by 2030 than the USA does.

-Many north African and the Arab countries have young and growing populations. They, however, have largely built their economies around oil production, an industry that concentrates wealth in the hands of a few ruling families and which is further forecast to decline in value in the coming decades. These countries have often resisted educating and empowering women, too. This means that they will continue to grow their population but they are unlikely to have a strong industry to feed it. They have not invested enough in education to innovate very much. It is a worrying mix because it seems likely to lead to civil unrest, and not only for them but also for their neighbors. Europeans who loathed the migrant crisis should realize they have a stake in promoting feminism abroad.

-To what extent are overlapping political preferences a conscious or unconscious response to demographics? In recent years, I've been struck by the tendency for xenophobes to express skepticism of feminism. Why? If you're coming out of demographic transition and want to stabilize your population without immigration, you'll want women to have more children. Because educated career focused women are likely to have fewer children, it might seem like the easiest way to maintain your "preferred population group" is misogynist policy. Conversely... I've noticed in recent years that progressives are increasingly likely to call for better structures for working women. Here, we can maybe look at democratic socialist countries in Europe that provide baby boxes, public supports such as France's creche system, and/ or generous maternity and paternity leaves for families. These countries seem to understand that children, at some margin, are important for a country's future interests. They therefore want to decrease the extent to which a career and a family seem like a trade-off.

-The best time to invest in the market or in mitigating climate change is yesterday. The second best time is today. That suggests the same is true for many other mandates, especially the education of women and innovation in green tech. I note that women's education is one of the top climate initiatives in Paul Hawken's Drawdown. (There is a very handy website adaptation of the book.)

-Income inequality threatens longterm demographic stability.

-I note without further comment that abortion is never treated as a moral quandary by Morland. It's just something Morland expects to see in certain population scenarios.

There is something about birth rate overviews that is... not thrilling. I suppose this is one reason why "great man of history" narratives are so popular. But it does seem like political leaders operate within demographic contexts, reacting as much as they're creating. So while I didn't enjoy The Human Tide, I did find it fascinating. And I suspect we'd get more out of many discourses by considering demographic trends.

Notes...

The growth of the country's population was not greeted by all as a national boon. Among intellectuals – and not only those who could be dismissed as conservatives or reactionaries – there was an upsurge of horror as the population spread and a mass civilization and landscape came into view. In 1904 The Times lamented that the suburbs of south London were producing a "district of appalling monotony, ugliness and dullness." H.G. Wells despaired that "England now for half of its area is no better than a scattered suburb" and spoke of the "tumorous growth" of endless streets and indistinguishable houses. D.H. Lawrence was positively genocidal in his response to the masses: "If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as Crystal Palace… then I go out in the back streets in Main Street‘s and bring them in, all the sick, the halt in the maimed." Pg 45.

Snobbish contempt for the lower orders was at least as old as ancient Greece, but the peculiarly nauseous (and nauseating) sentiments expressed here can be seen specifically as a response to population growth on a scale never seen before. No one expressed it more bluntly or alarmingly than the German philosopher Nietzsche: “the great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men." This is a sentiment less likely to have been heard when the population was small and growing slowly at best, and when most of the poor were not far from the edge of starvation. Page 45

The hard-hearted attitude of British officialdom in the face of the Irish famine was informed by a Malthusian mindset undoubtedly supplemented by a degree of racism quite unfathomable from today’s perspective: a belief that, if the starving masses were fed, they would only breed in greater number and exhaust the land. It was the anti-philanthropy (or misanthropy) of the bottomless pit. Any attempt to alleviate the misery, to feed and tend to the poor and their sickly offspring, we just lead to more of them surviving and eating up the limited resources, pushing them again into misery. (This is the same approach that the Victorians took to the poor in general and is familiar to us through the writings of Charles Dickens, parodying and condemning this outlook in, for example, Oliver Twist and Bleak House.) So as commercial exports of wheat and barley continue, the population remained unfed. 53

The Soviet Union was not a land in which matters were supposed to take their own course – it was a planned society. For Soviet ideologues, society and the economy were to be run to meet specific goals. With effectively no free-market or private property, the state was supposed to provide everything for its citizens from education and a home to a job and a holiday—not to mention a maternity ward and a funeral, the archetypal 'cradle to grave.' It should come as no surprise, therefore, that demography was not going to be left to chance. But while it turned out that the state could not arbitrarily determine how many children would be born or how many people in any year would die, and therefore it could not entirely control the population size and make up, it could and did react to population trends in the country. Page 173-4.

There is a good deal of evidence to suggest the link between instability and conflict on the one hand and demographic trends on the other, the general consensus being that "youth bulges" are associated with increased risk of political violence. Where there is a large share of men in the population aged in their teens and early to mid 20s, the chances of civil strife are higher, and it is no coincidence that some of the oldest societies in the world, such as Japan and Germany, are among the most orderly, while some of the youngest, such as a Yemen and the Democratic Republic of Congo, are among the most strife-riven. Pg. 242

The immediate cause of the fall infertility in Brazil appears to be the usual mix of increased use of contraceptives and abortion (and perhaps increasingly disrupted marital patterns), although one much discussed social factor has been increased access to mass media and in particular to the soap opera, presenting and popularizing a vision of modernity which features smaller families. Television lowers fertility rates not because "people have something else to do in the evenings" — a decline in sexual activity, even if it is occurring, need not meaningfully reduce the fertility rate; very little sex, if well-timed, is required for a woman to fall pregnant six or seven times in her life — but because television in the right circumstances can offer a vision of a different sort of life, and this plays a role in shaping aspirations as effectively as does education. The impact of television on fertility has less to do with sex than with aspiration, and the link is not just a result of anecdote; research in Brazil has shown that, particularly among lower socioeconomic groups, access to TV soap operas has a. significant impact on fertility rates. Page 258.

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

The information in this book is great, and it is unquestionably well-researched. However, editing was needed because it is repetitive to the point of being difficult to read. There are paragraphs with three sentences saying essentially the same thing with slightly different words. The theme is also repetitive, but that is largely the point, since the central thesis is that patterns repeat. Additionally, the presentation could've been better. There were so many places where a graph or chart could have simplified the text and driven points home more effectively. Overall I felt this book was a slog when it didn't need to be - this is a fascinating topic that should have been more compelling to read.

[Laurent Franckx · Rating 3 out of 5]

Demography is not an obvious topic for a book that is targeting a general public, but Paul Morland shows with "The human tide" that he is not afraid of taking on a challenge.
His book discusses the evolution of the world's population from Malthus to the present day.
Morland's main objective is to show how demography has affected politics and economic development over the last 200 years.
Some of the facts discussed by Morland are not really new: how technological progress in agriculture has proven Malthus spectacularly wrong, how a combination of decreasing mortality without immediate
decrease in fertility led to a population explosion over the 20th century... It is less generally known yet (unfortunately, I would say) that, in most countries, the great demographic transition has already come
to a halt, and that, where it has not, it can be almost always be attributed to a lack of opportunities for women (and not to religious factors).
It's also interesting (and worrisome) to read how fears of being overtaken demographically have played a crucial role in the tensions that have built up in Europe in the years preceding the first World War - people may
be surprised to hear that, a century ago, it was Germans and Russians who had the reputation of "breeding like rabbits".
Morland also makes a convincing case that demography played a key role in both colonization and decolonization: Europe could colonize the world when it was booming demographically while the rest of the world stagnated,
but was quick to abandon its empires once it was clear that it would be overtaken soon by its own colonial subjects.
This being said, the book is not without its flaws, the most important being that, in its enthusiasm to provide a demographic lens to word history, it falls in the trap of trying to explain everything from this perspective,
which is not very convincing. Sometimes the enumeration of numbers is also more detailed than what is really needed to make the point.
But that shouldn't refrain you from reading the book. There's a lot to learn from it.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that everybody should read. I'd say it's as important, if not more so, than "Guns, Germs and Steel". It contains another take on why the Europeans (briefly) conquered the world, and why it got unconquered. I wouldn't say demographics explains everything (and neither would Morland), but it's deeply intertwined in ways I never suspected. There are a lot of good insights into Trumpism as well (for example, it's not new or rare). If your book club reads it, I'd love to hear why they think this subject is not discussed more. We talk about war, technology, global warming, religion, etc. all the time, but nobody seems to want to recognize the effect that babies, longer lives and mass migrations have on human history. A lot of the statistics in this book are just startling, like the percent of babies in various parts of the world in 1950 that did not reach their first birthday.

I do have a quibble with this book. While it's not a difficult read, the presentation makes it more difficult than it had to be. It's essentially a data-driven book without a single graph or table, or even numerals. Here's a snippet of what I mean (and this is one of the easier ones):

"In 1870 the US population had been almost one-third as large again as that of the UK and its economy about the same size. By 1950, with a population three times larger than that of the UK, the economy of the United States was four and half times larger than the UK's."

There's an important point in there, but, for me, it's hard to tease it out of the verbage. I can understand Morland's reluctance to include graphs for historical periods where records were not very well kept, but since 1950 it sounds like there are good numbers for charts and graphs.

[Cj Dufficy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very disappointed. How he fails to recognize (even to discount) that climate change may in fact be a Malthusian constraint writ large especially as it’s generally seen as a product of the Anthropocene era and therefore man made.

[Stephen Selbst · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read The Human Tide after reading Empty Planet earlier this year. Empty Planet is a long opinionated essay which argues that fertility rates are falling fast across the planet, and that the 21st century will see global population peak and then begin to decline. The Human Tide is more analytic, less opinionated and more cautious. It also spends more time on historical analysis. But what's striking is the degree to which the authors agree. Both write that as populations urbanize, and as women face better economic choices and get more education, fertility rates fall. The difference is timing: Empty Planet asserts that the changes will come more rapidly, The Human Tide suggests the changes will be slower. But both books predict that China's population will peak mid-century and begin to decline rapidly after that. Both argue that the world overall will be older, less violent, but also less dynamic, and that all governments will spend increasing amounts on old-age care. Both books are well worth reading.

[Indranil Banerjie · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The Human Tide” by, Penguin. Pages 227. Price: Rs 599.

Once in a while there comes along a book that is revelatory, one that suddenly brings to perspective some aspect of the world so critical that one is left awestruck. The Human Tide by Paul Morland, a research fellow at the University of London, is one such book. The book is a major work that must rank with non-fiction classics such as The Rise and Fall of Civilisations, A Brief History of Time and so on. Anyone even slightly interested in the story of humankind’s continuing evolution must read it.
The author best explains what his book is all about: “The Human Tide is about the role of population in history. It does not argue that the great trends in population - the rise and fall of birth and death rates, the swelling and shrinking of population size, the surges of migration - determine all of history. Demography, it argues, is part but not all of destiny.”
“To leave demography out, however, is to miss what may be the most explanatory factor in world history of the last two hundred years. For millennia, the same bleak story could be told of steady population progress reversed by plague, famine and war. Since, 18000, however, humankind has increasingly managed to take control of its own numbers, and to stunning effect.”
The book explains the demographic revolution that occurred since 1800; a change that suggests a turning point in the history of mankind. The author explains the spurt in world population with a telling analogy: “Imagine a car trundling slowly forward at more or less the same speed for mile after mile after mile. Imagine it then increasing its speed, gradually for the first few miles, then rapidly, until it achieves tremendous, even frightening, velocity. Then, after a relatively short distance hurtling along, the brakes are suddenly applied, resulting in rapid deceleration. This is what the world’s population growth pattern has been like since 1800.”
To appreciate the extent of the spurt in world population one only has to remember that it “took hundreds of thousands of years for the world’s population to reach a billion but only a couple of hundred years more for it to reach today’s 7 billion.”
“Rapid population acceleration and deceleration send shockwaves around the world wherever they occur and have shaped history in ways that are rarely appreciated”, the author argues. “Once this immense speeding up and then quite sudden slowing down are apprehended, it is possible to get a sense of the great fairground ride of world population change and our own position, today, of living at a turning point.”
The story of populations turning point starts with the Anglo-Saxon population explosion in the British Isles. In the chapter titled “The Triumph of the Anglo-Saxon”, the author points out that average population growth in England was a mere third to a half of one per cent during the 18th century. Things changed dramatically in the 19th century when population growth in England soared to 1.7 per cent during the period 1811-25.
At an average England’s population despite significant emigration, grew at an average of over 1.33 per cent annually, which meant a doubling of population every 50 years. Nothing similar had occurred at any time in history anywhere in the world.
As Britain’s population exploded so did its economy, turning it from a traditional to an industrialised one. “Without its great nineteenth-century population growth, Britain could not have developed either into the workshop of the world early in the century or into the world’s greatest financier in the second half”, the author contends. “Even ignoring the impact of the growing population on increasing the market and enriching the population and simply looking at how sheer growth increased the economy, about half of the economic growth was the result of population increases alone.” This population growth also fuelled the growth and spread of British colonies to the Americas, Australia and New Zealand.
“What started in Britain went on to storm the entire world and shake it to its foundations in country after country, on continent after continent”, the author writes. “The population explosion first allowed the peoples of Britain and then more widely the people of Europe to dominate the globe, then played a major role in forcing their retreat.” Today, it is the developing world in Asia and Africa that is leading the demographic race.
The book takes us through the demographic journeys of various parts of the world including Europe, Russia, China, Africa and South Asia. It tells us of the marvellous workings of nature that have and continue to give rise to often unexpected changes in humankind’s development. The book suggests that demographics has profoundly influenced the military and economic clout of nations as it does equations between and within them.
“Whatever the future holds”, the author concludes, “of one thing we can be sure: that just as in the past, demography and destiny will continue to be entwined.” While there is no telling where it will take us tomorrow, The Human Tide reminds us whether we like it or not we will all be swept along with it.
Indranil Banerjie
March 2019

[Geoff Walling · Rating 4 out of 5]

You think you know starting out that of course population shaped the world. The book does a great job of explaining how much more there is to the subject. A really interesting read.

[Liviu · Rating 3 out of 5]

It started very strong with a discussion of how demography dictated or at least was very influential in a lot of historical events, but when moving towards the present it became a cliche spouting book and almost unreadable

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very unique topic — human migration since the Industrial Revolution. Fascinating and thorough. I can see a Bill Gates or Barack Obama wanting to read this book.

[Anuraag Sharma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Demographics are funny.

Want to increase population growth rate?
Let infants die.

Want to decrease the population growth rate?
Don't let infants die.

[Jim Gise · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fresh perspective on modern history. Math doesn’t lie but more explanation of the drivers would have made a good book great.

[Daniel Nguyen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kinda just standard book on demography, not too exciting, didnt really learn anything new.
If people have never thought about it they should maybe read it though

[Shhhh... Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never really paid attention to demographics before, and this was surprisingly interesting. I was always happy to listen to this audiobook, even as so much in this was kind of text-booky. That being said, the outlook this book paints for the future of the world is hopeful, and certainly debunked certain biases that I didn't even know I had. Anyway, fascinating things that I learned from this book....

- an understanding of global phenomenon of the "Demographic Shift," being the tendency as a society modernizes and escapes the Malthusian trap for infant mortality to fall, life expectancy to increase, and then in the next generation with access to education for fertility to fall, in some cases very sharply. And that since Industrial England, this trend is repeating itself all over the world, in some cases in EXTREME and unexpected ways...
- In Brazil, even without female education, the prevalence of telenovelas has been studied and shown to have an aspirational effect of women and how they'd like their families to look
- Muslim countries have higher birth rates globally (interestingly, despite a religious tolerance for birth control and abortion) but that due to a lack of female education there's been a lag - which has resulted in a Youth bulge that resembles Europe during it's great Democratic Shift... that lead to the tumultuous decades of the first two world wars
- In societies with less youth and more elderly... the militarism is pretty much non-existent. Yay pacifism. But also, problematic in other ways. Like the number of Japanese elderly who are dying alone in their homes... and no one notices for days. :-(
- How the One Child Policy in China was unnecessary... and falling birth rates were already happening.
- I had no idea how bad the forced sterilizations in India were... also, again, perfectly unnecessary. Population was already falling.
- how Israel is the only developed country with a high birth rate - and how it's almost a demographics race with Palestine. Ah.... although, this too is slowing on both sides - hope for the future?
- how Africa is due to emerge as an economic power house. I really love how he approached this, accounting for the gravity of AIDs, authoritarian governments, and ethnic woes, while also showing how, for the first time, Africa is no longer depleted population-wise by the Middle Eastern or European slave trades and is finally growing into itself. I'd just read My Sister, the Serial Killer which depicted modern Lagos, Nigeria, and was so intrigued by the mix of modernity and non-Western culture described.

This is a giant ramble, but this is all to say, this book has mostly quelled some of my environmental fears of total apocalypse and given me hope we're moving toward a more pacifistic world.

[Wendy (bardsblond) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been reading a lot of books about geopolitics for the past few years and have come to conclude that most academics, historians, politicians, and media personalities vastly overestimate the significance of things like which bill is passed in Congress (as an example of something that could impact a country's prosperity and future), and vastly underestimate the importance of things like demography and geography, which truly do overwhelm most other variables. No matter how rich a country is, without a younger generation to replace those retiring, it will collapse. A country's future can be radically altered by, for example, a substantial cohort of young men being decimated in a war.

In The Human Tide, Paul Morland discusses the role that fertility, mortality and mobility, have on a country's destiny. Here are a few examples of issues discussed:

(1) A settlor country (e.g., U.S., Canada, or Australia) can pull in migrants to fill in its workforce and ensure the country has enough young people. But not all countries can handle migration so swimmingly due to certain countries having a very specific national identity that is central to societal coherence.
(2) When any country industrializes, childbirth rates plummet, because children go from being a family's labor force on a farm (which means the children make money) to unnecessary expenses that require college tuition. Further, the later industrialization happens, the quicker this process takes place. In the UK, it took a couple hundred years. In China, it took forty years.
(3) Graying society's act in very different ways than young societies and you can predict a country's likelihood of going to war by looking at how many men it has between the ages of 16 and 30 relative to the rest of the population. Europe had two very bloody world wars in the 20th century and, in the 20th century, it was a very young continent bursting with nationalistic young men bristling against their neighbors. Now it is mostly a graying society looking at retirement.

Morland persuasively argues that things like childbirth rates, death rates, refugee movements, emigration and immigration all play crucial roles in the fate of a country. The reason why I've been reading a lot of books that discuss demographics recently is because the planet is almost certainly going to go through an era of depopulation in the next fifty years or so, with the populations of countries like China, Russia, Japan, Germany (and most of Eastern Europe), set to halve in the next few decades. We have no idea what that looks like or what kind of social collapse these countries are in for because we really don't have models for countries imploding demographically so quickly. However, I do think deindustrialization will be a component of it. I highly recommend this book.

[Petch Manopawitr · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice book tackling human population and demography. It's interesting to see how human population growth pattern keeps repeating itself with economic growth and education. Stating with high birth rate (>5-6) to counter high infant mortality. When infant mortality drops because of improved health service and medication, population grows into Malthusianism - exponential growth. However when female population received education and have a choice through contraceptive pill and other birth control option, history shows that people will have fewer child. This has occurred repeatedly throughout. A number of countries now even have population that is shrinking.

The book explain the pattern and implication through history, England, Europe, US, East Asia and so on. Younger population tends to be more violent. Older population tends to come with higher income. However, some countries like Thailand, birth rate drops faster than economic improvement thus we are likely to be aging society before rich or a middle income country.

Around the world, only Sub Sahara Africa now that demographic is still in the first phase i.e. high birth rate and lower infant mortality. This should soon be changed just like the rest of the world when economic development, public health availability and education become a norm.

Author predicts that the human race will become more grey, more green, and less white as one of the reviewer put in. "We will become more peaceful and suffer less crime; on the flip side, we'll be less prone to risk taking. (275) Paying for pensions will be a planetary challenge. (276) Greener: fewer people, eventually, will give more space to nature, and more people living in cities means some greater efficiencies. (278) Less white: Anglo-Saxon and European population growth is stalling and falling back, along with much of east Asia; in contrast, we're experiencing a boom in Africa. (279-80) This could lead to more immigration, such as a possible flood of Egyptians into Europe, should that nation's fragile economy collapse.(235-6)"

The book is information-dense and can be dull at times because of its repetition and redundancy. I think to emphasize some key points, it is fine to repeat but one need to elaborate it more interestingly. This is similar problem with "Uninhabitable Earth" too. Lots of stat but it could lost the meaning quickly if author fail to tell the story with different angles or science-based evidence.

I think that separate a fantastic book like 'Never home alone' and 'good - fair' like this book or 'Uninhabitable Earth'.

You can keep the theme consistent but must not dull and repeat yourself too often throughout.

Nice book could have been better still.

[Paleoanthro · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting thesis in which the author looks at the world and how it has been shaped, through the lens of demography. It is through birth and death, marriage and migration, that the course of history, and the world itself, has been shaped. The author takes an in-depth look at the how the modern world has become what is it is today through demography and its concern by governments and regions alike.

[Hans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book! The most underrated engine behind geopolitics is the ebb and growth of human populations and the effects that has on a nation. I’ve always long held the belief that no resource is more important than the human demographic. Only scary part is the logical extreme would then be that babies are your most valuable form of “production” for a Capitalist system to survive and grow. Which reduces humans to becoming units of energy to be mined for wealth.

[Paul Whitla · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book that deserves a very wide readership. Exploring the link between demography and historical patterns of growth, development and conflict, the author presents a very readable and convincing set of arguments that surprisingly has received relatively little attention. Reading this, a lot comes across as common sense but just something that most people haven't thought about or realised before. In this way, it has much in common with Jared Diamond's classic 'guns, germs and steel', a high compliment indeed, although this work is somewhat more constrained in scope.

The author presents the concept of 'the human tide' a demographic phenomenon that has been repeated in country after country, although staggered by time. This tide was first observed in the UK and it consists of a period of increasing life expectancies, decreased infant mortality with continued high levels of fertility (these terms are all explained in the appendices of the book - I highly recommend reading these before reading the book itself); this combination of factors leads to significant increases in population which due to the high number of young people, all of whom are having large families, is self-sustaining for a period of time. The tide aspect kicks in at later stage where fertility rates go down significantly, life expectancies continue to lengthen which in turn leads to an aging society, where over time (without immigration) population size starts to decrease. As stated, this was first observed in the UK where the tide was prompted in part by the industrial revolution which improved infant mortality rates and life expectancies; together with the open trade policies of the country and in hand with imperial expansion and gaining of access to imports of abundant food supplies allowed Britain to gain its leading position in the world. The turning of the tide however, the aging of British society, combined with the taking off of the tide in other places (particularly the U.S.) inevitably led to Britian's diminished global role.

Several other locations and countries, are tracked and their demographic patterns and the linkages to their development are examined in a high degree of detail. Much of the book is focused on Europe and a convincing argument is made that demography (and in particular population size) proved a deciding factor in the going to war in Europe and the outcomes of the great wars; the patterns of demographic growth and development in the 'west' since the war (from the baby boom to the current aging nature of many societies) is also examined in detail.

For myself the most interesting part of the book was the consideration of these trends in Asia, where the author looks at the cases of Japan and China. The point is made that both of these societies have similarly experienced the pattern of the human tide, but at much faster pace than the countries that had experienced it previously. There are many interesting insights into the challenges facing Japan which has an infamously aging society and the implications for China as it tries to avoid the middle income trap. The book finishes with a briefer consideration of Latin America and South Asia.

Throughout, the author is at pains to emphasise that demography is not destiny, and demographic factors are only one element in explaining country development, often demographic conditions are a necessary condition for development, but not a sufficient condition. There is no intention in this regard to mislead the reader or to overstate the case which is being made; it does however raise many other questions which to be fair are beyond the scope of this book. Why for example has China developed so much faster than India, despite apparently similar demographic conditions?

A highly recommended read, of interest to a wide range of disciplines, thought-provoking, well-written and concisely presented.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a really interesting read...

Demography, despite its obvious importance, is still neglected as a serious or salient explanatory variable in many policy debates and academic circles. For example, when one asks the question of why the Arab word lags behind comparatively in democratization, you’ll hear all sorts of answers citing Islam, oil, foreign intervention, etc. as detriments to political development. Morland, more or less, shrugs off these traditional explanations and argues that most of the big events of modern human history have their roots in demography and population size.

World War I, World War II, industrialization, the success of the British Empire and her colonies, violence in the Middle East, etc. Morland makes pretty convincing arguments that each of these things are inherently tied to characteristics of the population. Britain was successful with many of its colonies because it had a massive population that allowed it to export English natives that would alter the demographic make up of the colonies as seen in the success to turn Canada, the US and Australia into majority white colonies. Instability is accompanied by a large youth bulge in the population. World War I and the Arab Spring are similar in that each time period was accompanied by a large proportion of the population being represented by young males.

While Morland discusses more than this, he makes 3 predictions for the future, using demography as a guide.
1) The world will become grayer. People are aging, just about everywhere. Outside of Sub-Saharan Africa, just about every country on the earth is aging. This will undoubtedly have a great pacifying effect on the world but will certainly strain smaller, younger generations who will be expected to fund the services of the state and retirement benefits of a retired population much larger than their own
2) The world will become greener. Morland argues that population is already decreasing with many countries, or at least, is not growing as quickly. As the population shrinks, it is assumed that pollution will as well. Less humans=less humans to pollute the earth and smaller markets for fossil fuel industries to provide for
3) The world will become less white. Europe had the privilege of being the first area to experience the Industrial Revolution. And, as a consequence of early modernization, held some of the highest populations in the world which allowed them to colonize the globe. Just as Europe was the first to climb, they are also the first to descend. Developing typically takes a toll on demography as populations get smaller and older. Already, there are many European countries whose dominant ethnic group is projected to non-breed itself out of existence within 1-2 centuries from now. No doubt, we already see the consequences of this with the rise of the far right and white nationalist movements in the West

These are important things to discuss, not only in the West, but throughout the world as well. The effects of a graying, dying country are often associated with Europe. But the consequences and transitions are limited to that continent alone. Every other country is following this same demographic transition formula. The concerns that plague European discourse now will be felt globally within the next few centuries. Books like these are important so we can brace for the future and figure out what to do next as the human tide ebbs and flows

[David Neto · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book that puts demography in its highly important place. Who knew that it was people living and dying and migrating that shaped the planet?

Very interesting read, I'll place it in the shelf alongside with Sapiens, Prisoners of Geography and Guns, Germs and Steel, albeit it lags a bit behind these three in interest, possibly because if focuses only on the topic of demography (as does Prisoners of Geography focus mainly on geography, but its geopolitical implications and conclusions spawn across more, or at least more interesting, subjects - and yes, Paul, demography isn't everything but it explains a lot also).

The author does a great job of turning around what would seem to be an extremely boring job of statistical and data analysis, trying to explain the outcomes of the most meaningful conflicts of our recent history, and even forecasting how the human tide and its demographic occurrences will shape our planet and our lives until the end of the century. It feels thorough because it contemplates the numbers of people in all regions of the world, even though it comes from a eurocentric starting point (according to the authors thesis, rightly so).

It sheds light into the more talked about recent elections (USA, UK), whose winner campaigns were focused on stirring ethnic concerns among older voters, even though the numbers contradict slogans about building walls to hold back rapists (there are currently more latin emigrants leaving the US than trying to enter the country). One of the most interesting chapters talks about the arab-israeli conflict, and the disproportionate media coverage it gets, if one compares the number of casualties since the formation of the Israeli state with other conflicts in the middle east and northern Africa.

Written from a sensible, impartial and scientific standpoint, the book every once in a while reminds us that every single life is precious and should be protected. It reflects on how even the most disastrous attempts of governments trying to control and manipulate the numbers of people in its states (Stalin, Mao, Indira Gandhi) were tragic and unsuccessful. Given the freedom, opportunity and education, humankind will chose wisely on how and when to create life. We will face several challenges posed by demography (aging population and its consequences here in jolly old Europe), but hopefully we will continue to make the right choices and prevail as a species. Yes Paul, demography isn't everything, but it's everyone - and everyone counts.