Italy Portends the Population Implosion

By Michael Fumento

Scripps Howard News Service, Sept. 17, 2003
Copyright 2003 Scripps Howard News Service

No, they won't be duking it out in the Colosseum, but the potential for intergenerational conflict is real.

No, I didn't say that Venice is sinking; I said Italy is shrinking. The decline will begin in two years and, according to the middle of three U.N. estimates, by the year 2050 there will be 28 percent fewer people, 16 million, living la dolce vita.

It's becoming harder to find babies in Italy than it is a bad glass of wine. The birth rate is a mere 1.2 percent, about half that needed to sustain the population. Immigration is substantial, but doesn't begin to make up the shortfall.

At the same time Italy has one of the world's highest life expectancies at birth, so much so that this land of ancient civilizations is becoming a land of ancient people. Rome may soon resemble Leisure World.

Yet Italian demographics, like Italian styles, are only a trendsetter. After decades of fear-mongering books like Paul Ehrlich's best-selling The Population Bomb (1968) and its sequel, The Population Explosion (1990), and exhortations from environmentalists that humans will soon cover every inch of the planet, birthrates are plummeting.

Europe as a whole is expected to lose almost 100 million people by 2050. The populations of several Soviet-bloc nations already are falling because of declining birth rates and emigration. Japan will peak out right after Italy and lose about 14 percent of its population, almost 20 million people, by 2050. Germany will experience a similar decline, while Russia will lose about a third of its population and Hungary a fourth.

The United States will continue to grow, only because of essentially unfettered immigration and births to those immigrants. The U.N. middle estimate puts the U.S. population at about 409 million by 2050.

Birth rates are also falling fast in the underdeveloped world, so much so that by 2050 the world population will increase by only 2.6 billion more and then top out at about 8.9 billion, according to the U.N. That's less than the projection from just two years earlier, which in turn was less than the prediction two years before that.

At that point, with fertility rates at around 1.85, world population will go into free-fall.

Still, isn't it nice that we're not about to overrun the earth like a plague of locusts? Actually, the analogy was never correct. The Earth has never been in danger of overcrowding. There's a reason some Manhattan high-rises contain almost as many people as North Dakota. Most of us like living close to others, leaving huge swathes of perfectly habitable land unused.

Italy's population will soon begin to crumble just as Rome's Forum has.

On the other hand, the population implosion will soon wreak havoc on European nations' retirement systems. The president of the European Commission recently warned that by 2025 nearly one-third of the European population will be collecting government pensions. Taking into account those too young to pay taxes and the unemployed, that could mean one employee per retiree.

Obviously raising children in addition to carrying this burden will prove difficult. And since avoiding taxes is illegal but avoiding having children isn't, guess how this will affect the already-declining fertility rate? Yet even in the growing United States, Social Security can't keep up with the aging population. Medicare is even worse off, even as both Congress and the president have vowed to massively expand its benefits.

The French pension system is slated to be the first to begin failing, in as little as three years. But when the government proposed pushing back the payment of pensions, it led to crippling strikes. While the French are famous for striking at the drop of a beret, the potential for intergenerational conflict is both real and ugly.

Meanwhile, "Ciao, bella Italia!" There may not be so much of you when next I return.

Michael Fumento is the author of numerous books.