No one succeeds in solving the greatest mystery of our time

The mystery that no one has managed to solve
Has major consequences

Lena Mellin

This is a commentary text. Analysis and positions are the writer's.

Updated 13.07 | Published 06.16

 

Photo: Alamy Stock Photo

The mystery is not about space. We have no idea what it will lead to. But global power shifts, new lifestyles and extensive economic changes are not bad guesses.

What it is about is the greatly reduced desire to have children. It has already led to populations decreasing in 60 of just over 200 countries. One of them is China, which is no longer the world's most populous country. It is India, which is also well on its way to taking its place as the world's third largest economy.

If a nation's population level is to be maintained, each woman should give birth to an average of 2.1 children. In Sweden, the figure last year was 1.45, the lowest level since measurements began in the 18th century.

But we are not the worst. In South Korea, 0.7 children are currently being born per woman and the number of dogs sold is more than strollers. There, more diapers are also sold for the elderly than for children.

This is also the case in China, where fewer children are now being born than during the long era of the one-child policy. Few listen to the Communist Party's calls to have three children.

The global differences are extensive. Painted with broad brushstrokes, the birth rate is lowest in Europe and Southeast Asia. While population growth in Africa is still stable. Children are being born there.

There are no really sustainableh theories about what the change, which began around 2010, is due to. Previously, low population growth has been explained by, among other things, a weak economy and difficulties for women to enter the labor market, for example, inadequate childcare and elderly care.

But that is no longer enough as an explanation. There seem to be other structural factors behind it. Some that are mentioned are the internet (smart phones), the traces of the deep international financial crisis that froze the global economy in 2008, the pandemic and a generally unpredictable and threatening future with war and historically large refugee flows. Economic stimuli, "child money", which US President Donald Trump, among others, has ventilated, have not been effective elsewhere.

But just as elusive as the causes of the sharply falling birth rates in most parts of the world are their effects. How is the world affected?

 

In 2009, around 17 children were born a day at Danderyd Hospital. Photo: Gustav Mårtensson

Two population groups are decreasing and one is increasing. Those who are being thinned out are the young, those who have not yet turned 20. And the group that is usually called “of working age”, that is, those between 20 and 65. The only group that is growing is those who are older than that. Today, one in five people in Sweden is 65 years of age or older. By the end of this century, this will have grown to more than a third of everyone living in Sweden.

This alone is putting society under very great strain. Today, the so-called dependency ratio is 77 in Sweden, meaning that there are so many people out of 100 of working age. By the end of the century, the figure will be 97. In other words, just as many people will be outside the labor market because they are too old or too young as those who are working. With the same organization of society as today, those who are working will have a very hard time. They will have to struggle to put together a welfare that is enough for just over 25 percent more than today’s professional workers.

It goes without saying that this will present society with major challenges. Pension systems, care for children and the elderly will not be able to be organised in the same way as today. The working-age population will have to work highly efficiently. Jobs with low knowledge content will be replaced by robots, AI or something that we do not know about today. Plus a lot of other things that we have not yet fully grasped.

But it will probably also reshape the global balance of power. A growing population almost always leads to a growing economy. The opposite, a shrinking economy, invariably leads to a weaker voice in the international arena. One can therefore predict reduced global power for, for example, the EU and China and increased power for Africa. This is assuming that the global world order as we know it today remains in its main features in the future. If it does not, predictions will be even more difficult to make.

One of the world's greatest mysteries is not about space research. But about why women and men refrain from having children, a normal investment in the future for millennia. An almost equally big mystery is exactly what it will lead to. We don't know. At least not yet.

THREE SURVEYS

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