Demographics: the disease is severe, but the prognosis is favorable
"Getting demographic growth out of control is a disaster"
– Now there are more than seven billion people in the world – of course, a lot. But they claim that much more lived in the past. It is believed that more than a hundred billion people have lived on Earth throughout history.
Fairly reliable quantitative estimates have been available since about the middle of the first millennium BC. All this time, the population grew very slowly, or rather, almost did not grow.
By the beginning of the XIX century, only a billion people lived on Earth – and this is the result of slow development over many, many millennia. For example, during the entire first millennium of our era, the population of Europe did not grow at all.
Of course, there could have been some fluctuations, but for humanity in general, such extremely slow growth is characteristic. This growth is primarily associated with the ability to migrate: animals, as a rule, are tied to their habitats, while humans can develop new ones. Having appeared, apparently, in Africa, people have spread to all continents and all climatic zones.
– That is, the current situation, as it has been developing since the beginning of the XIX century, is abnormal?A natural balance has been maintained for many millennia.
It was provided by complex biological and social mechanisms, including limited resources, wars, resettlement, and epidemics. In contrast to them, other systems operated – for example, cultural, religious institutions that required to multiply and multiply...
The "abnormality" you are talking about is a consequence of the so–called demographic transition. It began at the end of the XVIII century and grew gradually, and gained strength on a global scale in the twentieth century. The transition was "launched" by an unprecedented achievement of mankind – the establishment of effective control over many factors of mortality.
Let's remember: before, all countries and peoples were perfectly familiar with periods of terrible famine. Agriculture was inefficient, and if there was a crop failure somewhere, it was not possible to deliver food to the region. After all, this requires roads, transport, and methods of preserving the harvested crop. People were powerless to resist the epidemics that covered vast territories. The development of the economy and culture has only recently made it possible to put many deadly factors under control.
Medical achievements have played a huge role in reducing mortality. The turning point can be considered the discovery of Jenner, made at the end of the XVIII century. It's not even that he found a way to fight smallpox – he discovered the idea, the very principle of vaccination. These hundred years against the background of the previous tens of millennia is a very short period, but soon Europe moved to the stage of unusual population growth.
In those years, emigration became the most important means of containing overpopulation. The European demographic explosion has led to the "dumping" of the excess population overseas. New centers of European culture have developed in North and South America and Australia. However, European demographic growth in those years was relatively slow, not the same as global growth a hundred years later. The global demographic explosion was discussed only after the Second World War.
By the beginning of the XIX century, at the time of Jenner, a billion people lived on Earth, by the beginning of the XX there were already 1.6 billion, well, now there are more than seven. That is, in a hundred years, the population has grown, in general, fourfold. If we go back to the beginning of our conversation, now 6-7% of the entire mass of people who have ever lived on our planet in the entire human history, tens of thousands of years, live on our planet.
The exit of demographic growth out of control is, in fact, a catastrophe, even if poorly realized by people. But it is also a historical challenge that requires an answer. The disturbed balance must be restored. And I must say that such an answer was found, and also first in Europe, and now it is spreading to the whole world.
– Is it about the policy of birth control?And about her, too.
But politics is usually understood as measures taken by the state. And the answer was not initially found by the state, the mechanisms of birth control developed spontaneously, one might say, "from below". The first link that the changed situation began to affect was the family, and she had to look for answers to the demands of the time, often even in the face of opposition from the state, the church, etc.
Over the millennia, the mechanisms of generational change have been worked out to the smallest detail, everything in them was interconnected. Let's take at least the land, the main wealth of the peasants. It cannot be divided, children could inherit only a limited amount of land, the number of heirs and the size of land plots had to be in balance. While mortality remained high, most children died, this balance was somehow maintained. There were additional mechanisms, already social, that helped him – say, religious norms. After all, despite the call to "be fruitful and multiply," religion imposes a lot of restrictions on sexual life, limiting the birth rate.
When mortality began to decline rapidly, families of all classes faced an excessive number of children. Fortunes were fragmented, there was not enough land, children began to leave for the cities and so on. All this happened very gradually, but over time it acquired a massive, systematic character, and people began to make their own adjustments, began to actively use various ways to limit offspring.
I must say that all these methods have been known for centuries – contraception, abortion, and infanticide, which, by the way, was quite widespread in Russia. But before, these were rather marginal methods that were used only in certain situations. Now they have acquired a new meaning, they have become massive.
They first acquired serious proportions in France, where the revolution destroyed the system of religious norms that prevented the frequent use of contraception and other methods. Therefore, the birth rate here began to decline earlier than in other European countries. At first, Europeans laughed at France, but by the end of the XIX – beginning of the XX century, almost all developed countries themselves switched to some form of birth control.
One can recall the Neo-Malthusian movement in England. His supporters promoted birth control in marriage. At first they were pursued, but in the end the resistance was broken. Birth control has become socially sanctioned, and more advanced means have appeared. So the Europeans, who first found ways to combat mortality, then approved the principle of birth control.
As a result, in the twentieth century, the mechanisms of managing the size of the human population have changed significantly. In ecology, there are two breeding strategies – the K-strategy and the r-strategy. What we are seeing today in developed countries can be called the final triumph of the K-strategy (the r-strategy is considered more profitable in unstable and unpredictable conditions. A key role in it is played by high fertility and low care for offspring – as, for example, in insects. K-strategy, on the contrary, is more common in a stable environment and with limited resources. It consists in high specialization, a small number of offspring and long–term care of it - PublicPost). However, the world as a whole remains in a transitional state from one strategy to another, so the broken control over population growth has not yet been restored, although the world is still moving in the right direction.
– Has China always remained the world leader in terms of population?Yes, at least in the foreseeable historical time.
But still, even in the middle of the twentieth century, there were about 500 million people even in China.
Then the ideas of family planning were already spreading everywhere. They were actively promoted, including by the UN, in densely populated developing countries such as India. Meanwhile, in China, they continued to talk about it in a Leninist way, quoting his classic article "The Working Class and Neo-Malthusianism."
Lenin did not approve of neo–Malthusianism ("These laws do not heal the sores of capitalism, but turn them into especially malignant, especially severe for the oppressed masses" - cit. PublicPost), and the USSR did not support it either, although the population of the USSR itself was already quite "neo-Malthusian" by this time. So to some extent, we, our politics and ideology, are responsible for the fact that China's population has grown so powerfully.
– But after all, as a result of this neo-Malthusianism, developed European countries depopulate?The word "depopulation" itself came, again, from France, where panic about it rose at the end of the XIX century.
In fact, it just started moving back to the equilibrium that has always existed. The fact that this process does not occur with apothecary precision is quite normal, because it proceeds in many ways spontaneously and will inevitably fluctuate around the equilibrium point. And it would be wrong to consider it within the framework of one country or Europe alone. Let the birth rate be low in Europe, the population of the Earth as a whole is growing and continues to grow, although not as fast as before.
The peak of the growth rate has already been passed, but the dangerous inertia persists: according to the UN forecast, only by about the middle of the century it will come to almost nothing. Nevertheless, by the end of the century, the world's population will reach about 10 billion.
– But what will happen next? Will the Earth's population stabilize or begin to decline?10 billion inhabitants is a lot.
Given the limited resources and other difficulties that we have already begun to face, the development of humanity may not go according to the most favorable scenario. Demographic growth is mainly in poor countries, where it is especially fraught with all kinds of social tension and even conflicts, which can spill out in the form of external aggression.
If we imagine a more or less controlled development of mankind, then the most reasonable way is through a reduction in the birth rate around the world, to a level approximately corresponding to the European one. And again, it may turn out that European culture is paving the way for the rest.
So the speeches about the depopulation of individual countries are more populist formulations. Of course, I do not deny the problems that arise in depopulating countries, including Russia. But problems are not solved by spells, we need to look for adequate answers to new challenges, and not pretend that we cancel the problems themselves.
And here it is impossible not to recall that throughout the history of mankind, migration has served as one of the most important mechanisms for regulating the number of populations. Some people think that all this is a distant past, but this may turn out to be a strong misconception.
Now there are more than 200 million migrants in the world – this is approximately equal to the entire population of the world in the middle of the first millennium AD, when the Great Migration of peoples took place. Neither European nor Russian society can come to terms with the fact that their future is very much connected with migration, but I think the sooner they realize this inevitability, the better it will be for them. The redistribution of the population between different parts of the world is already underway, and it will only intensify.
How practical politicians should act in these conditions is a completely separate issue. In particular, they cannot ignore the anti-migration sentiments that are growing as the influx of migrants increases. But it is impossible not to see and understand that modern migration processes have a powerful natural basis. Pretending that someone can manage them as he pleases, listening only to the opinion of the electorate, is like thinking that policy measures can fight the change of seasons or gravity.
Let's return, however, to Russia. Of course, our country does not benefit from the population decline, but Russia is only a part of the world, it cannot exist separately from it, from global processes. Globally, low birth rates are a natural, legitimate and even positive response of humanity to what is happening to it.
– If we talk about Russia, we must remember that our low birth rate is combined with high mortality. And over the years, one creeps down, and the second one creeps up, creating the "Russian cross" known in demography...Indeed, back in the 1990s, I published a series of articles with this title in the newspaper Novye Izvestia, and today this term, so to speak, has taken root.
But if in Russia it is a "Russian cross", then in Germany there is a "German cross" and so on. In many European countries, natural population decline is either already observed or predicted. If we expect that, having reached the 10 billion threshold, the world's population will begin to decline, then we must understand the inevitability that this "cross" will become global.
But the "cross", no matter how we treat it, is a consequence of low fertility, not high mortality. He also threatens Japan, the champion in life expectancy. The curves on the graph intersect because the overall mortality rate is growing (the number of deaths per thousand people – PublicPost), but this coefficient cannot serve as a correct measure of mortality, since it depends not only on the actual mortality rate, but also on the age composition of the population. For example, in India this coefficient is 8, and in England it is 10, but this does not mean that the mortality rate in England is higher than in India. The correct measure of the mortality rate is life expectancy: in India it is 64 years, and in England it is almost 80 years (these figures relate to 2005-2010).
It is no accident that our officials adore the overall coefficient, it allows us to present the situation with mortality in a better light than it actually is. This is a long-standing story. Even in the middle of the last century, high-ranking party figures, referring to this coefficient, argued that the mortality rate in the USSR is lower than in the USA, England and France. Such statements could only demobilize efforts to combat the very high, in fact, mortality. They laid down an ignorant tradition that is still alive today.
The increase in the mortality rate in developed countries reflects the aging of the population, but there it is combined with a decrease in mortality and an extension of active life. If we look at, say, Japan, we will see that formally the population is aging, but physical old age and infirmity come later. Due to better health care, due to other factors, the onset of old age is postponed. Today's seventy-year-old is "equal", for example, to yesterday's sixty-year-old. Unfortunately, this is not the case in Russia. Our life expectancy at all ages is much lower than in most developed countries, the effect of "rejuvenation" of the population in response to its demographic aging is not observed.
– Are there any studies explaining our mortality problems?A WHO report has just been published, according to which our life expectancy is the lowest in Europe.
In each individual case, you can look for specific explanations, but when the backlog reaches such proportions and has been growing for many decades, you have to talk about some systemic flaws.
Of course, there are studies, although they are not enough, they show that we have a different, archaic structure of causes of death from other developed countries. Mortality is very high in the middle, most viable ages, especially in men. They die from diseases of the circulatory system, from so–called external causes - murders, suicides, road accidents, alcohol poisoning. However, the influence of alcohol can be seen behind all these reasons. Separately, I must say about the very low costs of maintaining the health of the Russian population.
There are so many reasons for this that, we can say, it is not a separate part that "hurts", but the whole "organism", and, accordingly, if treated, then it is necessary to treat everything as a whole.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru04.04.2013