Demography ought to be one of the more exact human sciences. If I know the number of 25-year-olds in a certain population today, I can predict with good accuracy the number of 35-year-olds in that population 10 years from now. Some slight adjustments will need to be made for immigration, emigration, and early mortality, but the relevant statistics are easy to find.

It is therefore curious that one of the most sensational prediction failures in the sciences occurred in demography. That was, of course, Paul Ehrlich’s telling us in his 1968 book The Population Bomb that a Malthusian catastrophe was at hand and that, as a consequence of overpopulation and climate change, “In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.”

Ehrlich’s demographic pessimism had literary company. John Brunner’s novel Stand on Zanzibar (the title alludes to the idea that the Earth’s entire population could fit on the East African island of Zanzibar, but not for much longer) was published the same year. Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! had appeared in 1966; it inspired the 1973 movie Soylent Green. 

This was all old hat to me. A sci-fi addict since childhood, I had made my first acquaintance with the demographic subgenre via Cyril Kornbluth’s 1951 short story “The Marching Morons.”

Kornbluth gives us a mid-20th-century American real-estate agent thrown into suspended animation by a botched dental procedure in 1988. When accidentally awoken some centuries later, Earth’s population has doubled and has separated by intelligence. There are 5 billion dumb, useless people with an average IQ of 45—the morons of the story’s title—and only a reserve caste of 3 million high-IQ supervisors who labor thanklessly to prevent the chaos brought by the 5 billion. Here is a bit of dialogue from the book:

Barlow had another idea. “Why don’t you sterilize them?”
“Two and one-half billion operations is a lot of operations. Because they breed continuously, the job would never be done.”
“I see. Like the marching Chinese!”
“Who the devil are they?”
“It was a—uh—paradox of my time. Somebody figured out that if all the Chinese in the world were to line up four abreast, I think it was, and start marching past a given point, they’d never stop because of the babies that would be born and grow up before they passed the point.”

What a turn there has been! Today’s predictions of demographic woe are all about population decline. If Cyril Kornbluth were still among us he might smile to know that China, whose population growth so terrified our grandfathers, is now a leader in the general collapse. China’s post-Mao rulers were just as terrified as Grandpa, so in 1979 they instituted a one-child policy that lasted until 2015. 

That policy collided with a traditional preference for male children—and with ultrasound, selective abortion, and infanticide—to produce a surplus of men, and that collided with adult mating preferences to produce a badly skewed dating market and an inevitable baby bust. 

The high status of oldsters in Chinese culture doesn’t help. My wife, who was born and raised in China, is in touch with her high school and college classmates over there, now in their early-to-mid 60s. Most are retired and greatly enjoying themselves. Every week she gets happy pictures of so-and-so with spouse on a jaunt to some holiday resort or beauty spot. Pre-COVID provincial Chinese parks were, in good weather, full of informal geezer clubs dancing and singing.

China and her East Asian neighbors, with other civilized nations not far behind, are now confronting a demographic catastrophe the opposite of the one that worried Grandpa 50 years ago. Instead of too many healthy adults fighting over an inadequate food supply, there will be a surplus of retirees scoffing up inadequate government funds while the number of work-capable young people dwindles and their inclination to bring forth a new generation fades.

Will the worker deficiency be made up by robots (blue-collar), AI (white-collar), and drones (military)? Will the birth dearth be artificially reversed, perhaps by “hatcheries” like those in Brave New World? If the focus of our panic could turn from overpopulation to underpopulation in just two generations, might not our grandchildren return to Malthusian home base? 

And might China take the lead, as she did last time? There are some suggestive cultural markers that might twist the arithmetic—a millennia-long obsession with longevity, for example. At my lady’s insistence, prominent among the tchotchkes decorating my work desk is a small wooden statue of Shouxing, the god of longevity in Chinese folk religion. An unknown but large number of Chinese emperors died from poisoning by bogus elixirs of immortality. A popular brand of cigarettes in early-1970s Taiwan, and still available today, bears the marque “Chang Shou,” which means “Long Life.”

Shall our societies, and Asia’s, separate by intelligence on the Kornbluth pattern—marching morons kept under control by overworked smarties? Possibly. Or perhaps the opposite. In H. G. Wells’ 1895 novel The Time Machine, an overclass of idle Eloi hedonists enjoy the sunlight while ugly, brutish Morlock workers keep the utilities functioning underground, taking an occasional break to kidnap and eat an unwary Eloi. That’s a lot of demographic questions. Our children will learn the answers. ◆

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/columns/demographys-great-turn/