The Power of Numbers: Why Europe Needs to Get Younger

Over the next fifty years Japan, Russia and many European Countries face a sustained, outright fall in population - something that has never happened in any advanced economy. For most other European nations the prospect is one of ageing stagnation and high immigration. In stark contrast to the developed countries of the first world, across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the Americas population numbers are rising rapidly and will continue to do so for some time yet. By 2050 most demographers think that population growth in the developing world will also stall. Long before that happens, however, demographic divergence between today’s developed and developing worlds will have revolutionized the economic, political and military balance of power across the world. The Power of Numbers will set out the figures and projections, identify the winners and losers and conflicts that are likely to result from the coming upheaval.

The word jingoism originated from a music hall ditty of the Boer War: We don t want to fight , it ran, but by jingo if we do, we have got the men, we ve got the guns, we ve got the money too. A hundred years later it often seemed that Tony Blair was intent on pursuing the reverse policy always up for a fight but painfully short of the means to pursue it. The pressure that this put on our Forces is well known. But another factor that has had a huge bearing on our ability to wage war in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq has received much less attention. For decades, strategists have maintained that raw numbers should no longer be a decisive factor in military thinking. In an age of high-tech warfare, professionalism, training and technology are supposed to be the keys to military success, not population. Yet in Iraq and Afghanistan none of this has helped anything like as much as the experts predicted and demography has had a lot to do with it. The problem has been that, even for a power as mighty and sophisticated as the US, occupying a Third World country with a fast-growing population means putting an uncomfortably large number of boots on the ground. In Iraq, the Pentagon struggled right from the start to find enough troops to control the country after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Now much the same thing is happening in Afghanistan. Britain discovered this 90 years ago when we occupied Iraq in 1918 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. Iraq s population at the time was 2 million, compared to about 45 million in the United Kingdom. Even so we had to deploy more than 100,000 troops to hold the country in the face of tribal unrest and nationalist insurgency, and even with that many men we were hard pressed to keep control. In terms of numbers the West still held the upper hand compared to the Middle East until well after the Second World War. In 1950 all the Arab countries together had a combined population of only 60 million, compared with nearly 160 million in the US and a combined total of 120 million for Britain, France, and Spain the three European powers that then still ruled territory in the Arab world. By 2000 the demographic balance had changed dramatically. The Arab world had increased fourfold to just over 240 million, not far short of America s 284 million. Over the same period the population of Iraq increased even faster, from under 6 million in 1950 to 25 million in 2000 and 30 million today. In Afghanistan (which is not an Arab country) it went up at a similar pace, from 8 million to 20 million by 2000, and approaching 30 million today. Thanks to their high fertility, these countries are also now much younger than the West. Between 1950 and 2000, the average age in America rose from 30 to 35, and in Europe from 30 to nearly 38 the oldest of any continent. In Iraq and Afghanistan the average age fell over the same period; in Iraq it was only 18 in 2000 and 16 in Afghanistan. The result, as America and Britain have discovered to their cost, is that both have disproportionately large reserves of fighting-age men. In a region that is already unstable, fast-growing young populations usually with plenty of time on their hands are highly likely to spell trouble, even if Western nations steer clear of them. Across the Middle East, youth unemployment was estimated by the International Labour Organisation at 25 per cent in 2003, the highest in the world. And, as elsewhere in the developing world, more and more of the population are concentrated into the slums of large cities. Within ten years more than 70 per cent of the region s population will be urban, with a quarter living in cities with populations of one million or more. For any potential invader, demography like this is a nightmare. --Times July 3 2009

The power of numbers is very great. Richard Ehrman, my colleague at the think tank Policy Exchange (and a father of four, incidentally, so he has put his money where his mouth is), publishes a short book with that title next week (The Power of Numbers: Why Europe Needs to Get Younger, Policy Exchange/University of Buckingham Press). Ehrman sets out clearly how what he calls the demographic crunch increases costs to the taxpayer, shifts power and wealth to countries with higher birth rates and forces countries with low ones to bring in more and more immigrants (hence the workers passing our door). He shows that the welfare state as we know it is essentially the creation of the post-war baby boom, and cannot survive a baby bust. In 1950, there were 5.5 million people in Britain aged over 65. There are 10.5 million today. If I am still alive in 2035, I shall be one of 15.25 million pensioners, while the number of those working, and therefore paying for me and the other 15,249,999, will have fallen steeply. Now that the national debt, because of the credit crunch, will double in less than a decade, Ehrman argues that the growing public cost of pensions, health and long-term care for the elderly will be "completely unsustainable". Many of those who obsess about the "population explosion" fear that it will condemn the world to poverty. This is the great illusion. Wait until population implodes if you want to rediscover what being poor means. --Charles Moore Telegraph July 3 3009

If you need to know why the IMF s prognosis is so bleak, seek out Richard Ehrman s The Power of Numbers, to be published next month by the University of Buckingham Press and the Policy Exchange think tank. It is a devastatingly clear exposition of how unprepared we are in this country for the consequences of demographic decay. As Ehrman reveals, the European commission set things out explicitly in a report on fiscal sustainability published two years before the credit crunch the sort of report nobody wants to read, especially not the finance ministers and prime ministers of national governments. It declared that the demographic timebomb was about to go off in the hands of our children and grand-children, presenting them with a burden that is simply not sustainable. This is a problem that needs to be tackled through both a reduction of public deficits and debt and further reform of the pension, healthcare and long-term care systems . --Dominic Lawson Sunday Times June 28 2009