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understand what is really going on in our world, next we must set the numbers in the appropriate contexts: historical and international.
The replacement level of fertility is that which maintains a population at a stable level. It is about 2.1, with the additional fraction needed to make up
for girls who will not survive into fertile age. No country has been able to stop the fertility decline at the replacement level and achieve a stationary population.
This nearly global shift has had enormous demographic, economic, and strategic implications. European importance has diminished (in 1900 the continent had about 18 percent of the world’s population; in 2020 it has only 9.5 percent) and Asia has ascended (60 percent of the world total in 2020), but regional high fertilities guarantee that nearly 75 percent of all births during the 50 years between 2020 and 2070 will be in Africa.
Once they slip below 1.5, such reversals appear increasingly unlikely: in 2019, there were record lows of 1.3 in Spain, Italy, and Romania, and 1.4 in Japan, Ukraine, Greece, and Croatia. Gradual population decline (with all of its social, economic, and strategic implications) seems to be the future of Japan and of many European countries. So far, no pro-natalist government policies have brought any major reversal, and the only obvious option to prevent depopulation is to open the gates for immigration—but that looks unlikely to happen.
The best indicator of quality of life?
deaths during the first year of life that take place per 1,000 live births. Infant mortality is such a powerful indicator because low rates are impossible to achieve without having a combination of several critical conditions
that define good quality of life—good healthcare in general, and appropriate prenatal, perinatal, and neonatal care in particular; proper maternal and infant nutrition; adequate and sanitary living conditions; and access to social support for disadvantaged families—and
For every dollar invested in vaccination, $16 is expected to be saved in healthcare costs and the lost wages and lost productivity caused by illness and death.
This is one of the most basic algebraic lessons: you may know the exact numerator, but unless you know the denominator with a comparable certainty, you cannot calculate the precise rate. Uncertainties will never fully go away, but by the time
The lesson is obvious: the easiest way to improve a child’s chances of growing taller is for them to drink more milk.
extraordinary ability to regulate our body temperature, which allows us to do what lions cannot: run long and hard in the noonday sun.
In the race of life, we humans are neither the fastest nor the most efficient. But thanks to our sweating capability, we are certainly the most persistent.
What makes people happy?
Finland was the world’s happiest country for the second time in a row, followed by Denmark, Norway, and Iceland; the Netherlands and Switzerland came just ahead
what actually goes into constructing these national scores: GDP per capita, social support (determined by asking if, when in trouble, people have relatives or friends to count on), healthy life expectancy (taken from the World Health Organization’s assessment of 100 different health factors), freedom to make life choices (scored by answering the question “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?”), generosity (“Have you donated money to a charity in the past month?”), and perceptions of corruption (throughout the government and within business).
Is the US really exceptional?
simply life, death, and knowledge.
Infant mortality is an excellent proxy for a wide range of conditions, including income, quality of housing, nutrition, education, and investment in healthcare.
universal healthcare, the United States being (notoriously) the only modern affluent country without the latter.
is nothing arguable about them. In the United States, babies are more likely to die and high schoolers are less likely to learn than their counterparts in other affluent countries. Politicians may look far and wide for evidence of American exceptionalism, but they won’t find it in the numbers, where it matters.
decades of peace and prosperity have been taken for granted, and lapses and difficulties (some inevitable, some unpardonable) have served to reignite old biases and animosities. My wish for Europe: make it work. The failure to do so cannot be contemplated lightly.
civility. But
We all have to eat, and modern societies have been extraordinarily successful in supplying an unprecedented variety of foodstuffs at a generally affordable cost. We have to energize our buildings, our industries, and our transport by incessant flows of fuel and electricity. We have to produce—and renew—the material foundations of our societies by manufacturing, building, and maintenance. And we need adequate infrastructures (schools, health, and elderly care) to educate people and to care for them in sickness and old age. Everything else is secondary.
In the long run, the fortunes of nations are determined by population trends. Japan is not only the world’s fastest-aging major economy (already every fourth person is older than 65, and by 2050 that share will be nearly 40 percent), its population is also declining. Today’s 127 million will shrink to 97 million by 2050, and forecasts show shortages of the young labor force needed in construction and healthcare.
Both countries are riddled with corruption: the latest Corruption Perceptions Index, from Transparency International, puts India and China at 80th among the 180 included countries (Denmark is the least corrupt and Somalia the most). In both countries, economic inequality as measured by the Gini index is very high—about 48 in India and 51 in China (compared to 25 in Denmark, 33 in the UK, and 38 in the US). And in both countries the moneyed classes compete in ostentatious consumption, collecting expensive cars and palatial residences.
its dependency ratio—the number of people of working age divided by the number of those who are too young or too old to work—has been rising (it is now just over 40 percent). The question is whether the country will become old before it can become truly rich. Both
And yet manufacturing is still important for the health of a country’s economy, because no other sector can generate nearly as many well-paying jobs. Take Facebook, which at the end of 2019 had about 43,000 employees versus the 370,000 or so that Toyota had during the 2019 fiscal year. Making things still matters.
41 ancient empires that existed between 3000 bce and 600 ce, he found that their mean duration was 220 years,
but that the distribution of imperial lifespans was highly skewed, with those empires enduring at least 200 years being roughly six times as common as those surviving for eight centuries.
