The Brooklyn Rail

“It is in this manner that the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men; quickens it when it goes on too slowly, and stops it when it advances too fast. It is this demand which regulates and determines the state of propagation in all the different countries of the world, in North America, in Europe, and in China; which renders it rapidly progressive in the first, slow and gradual in the second, and altogether stationary in the last.”— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

“It would be utterly absurd … to lay down a law according to which the movement of capital depended simply on the movement of the population. Yet this is the dogma of the economists. ”— Karl Marx, Capital

By the end of this century, Nigeria’s population, now just 218 million, will be larger than China’s, currently 1.4 billion. These projections were arrived at by complex demographic modeling, but the mathematics behind them are elementary. The African nation’s overtaking China in terms of total population is the simple result of diverging fertility rates: over five children per woman of reproductive age in the former, just over a single child in the latter (the rate necessary to reproduce a given population is a fraction over two). Put another way, the number of Nigerians will quadruple over the next seventy-five years, while the population of China will be halved.

The discrepancy between these two fertility rates depicts two societies at different stages in an historical transformation sociologists call “demographic transition.” This process is set in motion when traditional agricultural societies, whose populations are shaped by equally high fertility and mortality rates—which tend to offset one another, resulting in stable or slowly changing population sizes—move out of sync, short-circuiting, so to speak, their apparently “homeostatic” equilibrium. This disconnection typically occurs when the mortality rate, and especially that for mothers and infants, begins to fall rapidly, usually due to improvements in health care (clean drinking water, better nutrition, access to medicines, etc.). As mortality rates fall, however, fertility will remain robust for some time; it is the breach opened between these two rates that triggers explosive population growth. Eventually, perhaps over the course of half a century, as living standards rise, and as women gain access to education and contraception—and presumably more control over their bodies and their ability to give birth—family sizes will rapidly decrease, so that the two rates converge at much lower levels. The outcome is once again a stable population size, with little to no growth, or even a decline in population, if households do not reproduce themselves at a sufficient level. This is what is currently happening in East Asia, Europe and North America, and parts of Latin America (Mexico’s fertility rate currently equals the replacement rate). Everywhere, that is, save sub-Saharan Africa, the sole region of the world where this transition has not been completed. In 1900, just nine percent of the world’s population was African. By 2100, two in five humans will live on the continent.

Sub-Saharan Africa is undergoing a “youthquake,” to cite the title of a recent book on African demography.¹ The rest of the world is experiencing a different kind of disturbance. Speculation that Nigeria’s population will be larger than China’s by the end of this century comes amidst other recent demographic projections that predict the world’s population will peak and begin to decline as soon as the 2060s.² Net demographic change reflects, of course, the combined result of different regional fertility rates. Birth rates in Nigeria, for example, are just slightly higher than they were in Britain in the 1860s and 1870s, a period of economic expansion. But this rate is roughly four times that of high-income countries like Japan, Italy, or South Korea, whose populations, like that of one-time demographic juggernaut China, are likely to be halved by 2100. Many countries have completed the so-called demographic transition; Japan and Italy have had fertility rates below the replacement rate for decades. Both have already seen their populations begin to contract, having peaked in 2008 and 2014, respectively. Extrapolating prevailing trends even beyond the end of this century, it is likely that Japan’s population will fall to the level “of the population during the Edo period before the Meiji Restoration in 1868 by the end of the next century”—that is, to a threshold last seen in the demographically and economically stagnant feudal era, when the peasantry was bound to seigneurial estates and population growth was regulated by the availability of land.³

After the global population crests somewhere under ten billion as soon as forty years from now, it will be the first time the number of people on the Earth’s surface will decline since the ravages of the Black Death seven hundred years ago. For much of recorded time, the size of the human population changed very little, growing at a glacial pace, periodically offset by outbreaks of war, famine, and disease. Studies suggest that by 1000 BCE, at the hinge between the so-called Bronze and Iron Ages, there might have been as many as 100 million humans scattered across the Earth’s continents; this sum roughly doubled over the next thousand years. But with the onset of the common era, and over the next millennium—between the founding of the Roman Empire and the establishment of the Song Dynasty, say—the global population remained stationary, in Asia as well as in Europe. By 1700, it had inched its way up to around 600 million, doubling in the meantime—having replenished the population wiped out by the plague—but still just forty percent of the current population of India.

What came next is well-known. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, humans began reproducing themselves at historically unheard-of rates, at a moment often identified with the onset of the industrial revolution. Over the past hundred years, their numbers have quadrupled, swelling from just two billion in the 1920s to eight billion today. Yet sub-replacement fertility rates were registered as early as the 1970s in much of the industrialized world, and by the mid-to-late 1980s (Taiwan, South Korea) and the early 1990s (China) among countries that later developed high-growth, export-driven economies. It is this unexpected development that set in motion the eventual cresting of the wave of centuries-long population growth, Africa notwithstanding. Some observers suspect it will fall still more rapidly than it rose. Only half a century after the chattering classes, and not a few “intellectuals,” fretted over a ticking population bomb, it is now clear that the epoch of explosive demographic change will have been a succinct episode—an anomaly—in the annals of human time. In just a few hundred years, a mere blink in the history of human habitation of the Earth, our numbers will revert to 1920 levels, making “the 400-year span when more than 2 billion people were alive … a brief spike in history.”⁴ They are likely to fall still further, before stabilizing at some unknown level—if ever—in the far future.

So far as can be told, there have been two broad and relatively abrupt—given the appropriate historical scale—surges in population size in the history of humanity. Both of these demographic revolutions occurred in close proximity to a vast civilizational upheaval, marked by root-and-branch changes in the way humans arranged their own reproduction. Though more remote historically than its industrial counterpart, and less easily reconstructed, scholars concur that the first significant augmentation of the human population coincided with the Neolithic revolution, roughly around 8000–6000 BCE. This is a paradoxical outcome, since the rise of agricultural civilization, typically defined by the settling of once-nomadic populations, the cultivation of grains, the domestication of animals, and the accretion of proto-urban population centers, equally created the conditions for the cultivation of new pathogens and the flourishing of disease. Compared to the hunter-gather groupings that preceded them, these societies had pronounced levels of infant and maternal mortality; but they also reproduced at much higher rates than their nomadic ancestors. In his book on the “deep history of the earliest states,” Against the Grain, James C. Scott accounts for the population growth of this epoch—from 5 million in 10,000 BCE to 150 million by 1000 BCE—by emphasizing the easing of constraints on reproduction that regulated the size of migratory groups. Their very mobility required the customary practice of birth control, especially the maintenance of wide (four-year) child-spacing intervals, due to the physical difficulty of carrying more than one child; their form of life and diet, in turn, shortened the period during which women could bear children, resulting in a relatively late onset of puberty and early menopause.⁵ But this revolution did not merely lift the constraints on reproduction, and induce physiological changes in women. The practice of cereal cultivation also imposed a positive demand for labor, since agricultural societies were organized on the basis of the production of grain surpluses that were appropriated by newly-constituted elites.

The industrial revolution dating from the late eighteenth century can be seen as overturning, in part, the sedentary nature of agricultural civilization, whose scope was limited by the scarcity of fertile land. The salient feature of this social reordering was not the technological breakthrough its name suggests, but a prior separation of the peasant population from their rural fetters, from the land as well as from feudal bondage. The onset of capitalist social relations generated a newly nomadic laboring class, sometimes assuming the form of a floating rural population, which streamed across the countryside, and then into factory towns and large cities. Above all, this process of proletarianization removed prior constraints on household sizes, while rapid capital accumulation would soon require an ever-larger labor force, as if the expansion of capitalist social relations themselves governed—as Adam Smith called it—the “production of men.” This revolution is still ongoing, having expanded unevenly in both space and time. Between 1850 and 1950, the British population surged some 250 percent, while the population of China remained stagnant, growing just 20 percent over the same period. It was the throwing off of the imperial yoke, the prosecution of ferocious civil wars, unprecedented land reforms, and the wholesale reorganization of production relations that triggered China’s population explosion over the last seventy-five years. China was hardly an exception; it provided the model, and the limit-case, of a pattern that played itself elsewhere in east Asia. Nigeria, and with it the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, remain outliers, experiencing breakneck population growth with no corresponding social transformation.⁶

Pyramid Schemes

The demographic crisis looming over much of the world, and especially its highly capitalized economies, has elicited a flood of articles in the media and especially the business press over the past decade, with vivid graphs and predictably alarmist titles and pull quotes. In 2022, The Financial Times published a four-part series devoted to what it headlined a global “baby bust,” interrogating the effect the COVID pandemic might have on this secular trend, while underlining the futility of recent state-led pro-natalist policies to reverse it. These treatments are distinguished by a rhetoric of blind natural forces, with an attendant air of fatalism and haplessness: wave, momentum, or avalanche. The current pope, addressing the matter in his turn, evokes the sterile gray of a “demographic winter.”

For the governing elites of the countries coming to grips with this slow-moving tectonic slippage, the burning issue is not slowing population growth—or even outright decline—per se, so much as the changing age structure of these populations, and how these shifts might reshape, perhaps in some near future, the organization of society. Demographers sometimes describe these shifts as changing dependency ratios, a notion which differentiates a laboring or putatively “economically active”—as defined by national accounting standards—part of the population from those whose reproduction depends directly or indirectly on that labor. But since the economically inactive by this definition includes the non-working young, it is more useful to speak of a slowly inverting population pyramid, an image representing aging societies as top-heavy, and precarious, formations supported at their base by an ever smaller “productive” part of the population. This upside-down configuration is usefully set off against the age structure of societies still caught up in the earlier phases of the demographic transition, in which an initial divergence of mortality and fertility rates generates a so-called youth bulge, whose maintenance drains social resources, and whose large numbers are only with difficulty (if ever) absorbed into existing labor markets. Their disaffection, fueled by joblessness and postponed entry into adulthood (including the formation of families), is often said to be a source of social unrest, “demographic turbulence.”⁷ Societies able to integrate this cohort into the workforce stand to profit from an eventual demographic “dividend,” as labor and capital pour into the economy, accelerating growth. Wealthy countries have already exhausted this bonus, however, and must now pay for it on the back end. These are societies in which the least dynamic fraction of the population consumes an outsized share of social resources, a demographic deadweight that is from time to time openly resented.

Just this past March, a Japanese maker of paper products called Oji Nepia announced it would soon discontinue its production of children’s diapers, to focus exclusively on the adult variety instead. This decision makes business sense in a nation in which the average age of farmers is sixty-eight, and where there are three times as many construction workers over fifty-five than in their twenties. Across what were once fast-changing, dynamic societies, in East Asia, Europe, and North America, schools are being shuttered at an alarming rate, for want of children, while nurseries are being converted, emblematically, into nursing homes for the elderly. This watershed is made more pronounced by the exodus of young people from the countryside and regional cities, whose populations might have peaked decades ago, before easing into a slow death spiral. As municipal governments in many countries raze large parts of these once vibrant cities—in Germany, they are transformed into “parks”—young people less escape to the big city and from the obligations of provincial life than get sucked into an urban trap of low wages and sky-high rents, the latter due as much to decades of artificially low interest rates, enriching property owners, as to scarce housing stock. In South Korea, where fertility has fallen to a world low of .72 children per woman of reproductive age, government ministers fret about national “extinction,” while the number of Koreans over sixty-five who commit suicide is four times higher than it was just a generation ago.⁸ While few are so unflinching as to broach the idea of a humane practice of senicide, perhaps along the lines of the mythical Japanese Ubasute, the isolation, neglect, and desertion of the old is a massive feature of contemporary life in mature capitalist societies.

Assessments of the ongoing “baby bust” in the high GDP countries, both in the press and within the halls of power, have often touched on the human costs of population decline, even if these concerns tend to shade off into fretting about threats to the nation. By and large, however, these discussions invariably circle back to what John Maynard Keynes in a 1937 talk characterized as the “economic consequences of a declining population.”⁹ The unfavorable ratio between economically active and inactive population shares requires smaller and smaller pools of young workers to generate sufficient economic output to support ever larger groups of aging non-workers, putting undue stress on pensions and social welfare systems, overwhelming existing healthcare infrastructure, and forcing states to raise tax rates on worker and employer incomes alike. The need to allocate an outsized fraction of social resources, and not least labor, to services for the aging is sure to divert investment away from “physical” plant facilities, yet another brake on the prospects of economic expansion needed to fund rising care costs. Other observers suggest already sputtering economies could eventually confront a slow-moving asset market “meltdown,” a prospective collapse in asset prices as retirees liquidate their savings to fund their consumption needs.¹⁰

The overriding preoccupation of the political classes is therefore the threat posed to economic growth, and more specifically output growth, by these demographic headwinds. In simplified terms, output growth results from the combination of two primary factors, population growth and rising labor productivity: more labor hours, and more output per hour. In his 1937 talk, for example, Keynes gauged that in Britain from 1860 to 1913, “about half the increase in capital was required to serve the increasing population.”¹¹ One proposed fix to slowing population growth is importing foreign labor to make up the gap. Goldman Sachs has recently attributed the US economy’s recent exceptional performance—relative to other high-income countries—almost entirely to adding imported labor.¹² High rates of immigration, however, are sure to prove unviable in political environments shaped by robust populist movements, whose success depends on fantasies of cultural and racial decline and replacement. So it comes as no surprise that the favored solution to demographically-induced (or exacerbated) slow GDP growth is a technological Hail Mary.

A demographic study moving the impending global population decline forward to the 2060s warns that “if productivity per working-aged adult does not increase in accordance with declines in the working-age population, growth in gross domestic product will slow,” while British economist Charles Goodhart, formerly of the Bank of England and the London School of Economics, concurs that “overall economic growth will fall…unless you get a productivity miracle.”¹³ The prospect of offsetting the economic effects of slow or even negative population growth by technological change is surely what drives some of the recent euphoria around automation and AI in the media and on the stock market. But the wager on transformative productivity gains will likely be scuttled by what economist Robert Gordon has characterized as a persistent technological stagnation in high-GDP economies, as well as by the pressing need in the near future to allocate more and more labor to nursing, health care, and personal services, which are notoriously resistant to those productivity-enhancing miracles that alone, we are told, can make up for the phantom workforce of the twenty-first century.

The Propagation of the Proletariat

Swedish economist Knut Wicksell is said to have counseled that the first chapter of every economics textbook should address the dynamics of population change. Indeed, demography has long been a preoccupation of political economy, holding a central place in the considerations of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, and even earlier, William Petty. It is de rigueur, then, that in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the social-democratic economist Thomas Piketty devoted an entire chapter to demographic change and its effect on output growth.¹⁴ He, too, decomposes output growth into the two factors of population change and productivity gains, or “per capita output growth,” but is skeptical that any technological breakthrough will deliver productivity gains sufficient to compensate for the coming population decline. His book’s primary concern is that an emerging “low-growth regime” will drive widening wealth inequality: if strong economic growth tends to diminish the importance of wealth accumulated in the past, in low-growth economies the return on capital outstrips income growth.

In this, Piketty is a worthy heir of Keynes, who was one of the few economists in the twentieth century to contemplate how a stationary population, and even negative demographic growth, might threaten “prosperity and civil peace.” Keynes delivered his 1937 lecture before a eugenics society, of which he was vice president; and while he concurred with his audience that population controls are desirable, he warned that rampant unemployment—the fundamental social dilemma of the 1930s across the industrialized world—was a rather worse fate. In the concluding pages of his remarks, he reminded his audience that Malthus was not only a population pessimist, but also the first theorist of underconsumption crises.¹⁵

For the first time in the modern era, in the 1930s the British fertility rate fell beneath the replacement rate.¹⁶ Between 1860 and 1914, Keynes surmises, robust population growth played a significant if poorly-appreciated role in driving the demand for capital, with roughly half of this due to demographic factors. A society experiencing population decline, however far in the future it might be, would be plagued by slowing accumulation, weakening effective demand, and soaring unemployment. While Keynes decomposes capital growth rates into three rather than two factors—population, standard of living, and “capital technique”—he speculates that under current conditions, “we cannot rely on any significant technical [change].” Since population decline reduces the total number of consumers, and changes in capital technique are unlikely without adjustments to the costs of capital, “the demand for a net increase of capital goods is thrown back into being wholly dependent on an improvement in the average level of consumption or on a fall in the rate of interest.”¹⁷ Without the implementation of these distributional reforms, capitalist societies will be plagued by a “chronic tendency towards the under-employment of resources” that, because it might set in motion a prolonged crisis, “must in the end sap and destroy that form of society.” Yet such modest reforms are sure to be resisted, he notes, by those social forces whose standing depends on the current distribution of income and high borrowing costs—the very same social forces whose gentle but definitive “euthanasia” is required for the preservation of “our present system.”¹⁸

Keynes’s speculations are striking for his seeming lack of interest in the causes of demographic change. He was concerned with the effects of a prospective population decline, but not with why British families were deciding, in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis, to have so few children. This apparent disinterest stands in clear contrast with the attitude of the classical political economists, who constructed models reflecting how wages, population growth, and the rate of capital accumulation shape one another. Those authors were writing at a moment when Britain’s population growth was gathering momentum; the slow rise of the eighteenth century would surge upward at unprecedented levels in the first few decades of the nineteenth.

Where Malthus saw sustained population growth constrained by the scarcity of productive land, Smith considered the rate of population growth to be determined by the prevailing demand for labor: “It is in this manner that the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men….It is this demand which regulates and determines the state of propagation in all the different countries of the world, in North America, in Europe, and in China.”¹⁹ Smith’s proposed law of population—his theory of what regulates population change—is embedded in his theory of wages, presented in a famous chapter of the first book of The Wealth of Nations. There, he challenges the prevailing theory, which held that on average wages tend to settle at subsistence rates, the minimum required for the “maintenance” of the worker and his family. This “iron law of wages” would have a long afterlife, in the grim visions of Malthus and Ricardo, then later in the early socialist movement. Smith’s account, in contrast, saw wages settling at the point where the demand for labor and the demographic growth rate are “as nearly as possible in…proportion.”²⁰ The demand for labor, however, reflects the rate of capital accumulation in a given country or region. It is this rate, rather than the amount of capital stock accumulated in the past, that sets wage levels and, consequently, the willingness of working families to “multiply.” The American colonies, Smith notes, were “not so rich as England, yet more thriving”; their quicker pace of accumulation was reflected in higher wages, which encouraged earlier marriages and larger families. The situation in the US colonies and Europe more generally is contrasted with China’s, a country as rich as Britain at the time Smith was writing, but whose subsistence wages and stationary population reflect its slow rate of economic expansion, and the slack demand for labor. The lower living standards in China, and the reluctance of families to reproduce at levels typical of Europe and North America, do not result in ghost towns in the countryside, or the neglect of long-cultivated fields. These appear only with the devastation of Bengal, he notes in referring to the recent famine wiping out a third of its inhabitants, where we witness a nation in full decline, whose wages have fallen below subsistence thresholds, and its population devastated. This state of affairs illustrates with clarity the difference between “the genius of the British constitution which protects and governs North America, and that of the mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies.”²¹

When in a chapter in Capital on the “general law of capital accumulation” Marx declares that it would be “utterly absurd” to “make the movement of capital depend on simply on the movement of the population” he seems almost to be anticipating the accounts of Keynes and today’s commentators. He nevertheless raises the question as to just what relation there might be between changes in a population’s size—progressive, stationary, or declining, to use Smith’s terms—and the accumulation of capital. The point of Marx’s remark is to sever the claimed causal relation between them, attributing this idea to what he calls the “dogma of the economists.” However, the formula readers of this chapter of Capital are most likely to cite echoes Smith’s claim that the “demand for men…regulates the production of men”: “[the] accumulation of capital is the propagation of the proletariat.”²² This is a delicate point. The chapter makes a crucial distinction between what it calls “modern industry” and “capitalist production…in its infancy.”²³ By “in its infancy,” Marx means the pattern of accumulation characteristic of capitalism before the rise of the factory system. Early on, capitalist production merely adopts existing production techniques; later, it radically transforms the labor process itself to meet its need to expand. At the beginning, capital is accumulated extensively, reproducing itself on a larger scale with only “very gradual changes” in what Marx called the composition of capital, the mix between labor and materials, including tools. In the modern factory system, however, capital both grows and changes composition, replacing employed labor with machinery.

Marx ties accumulation to population growth in the context of the earlier, extensive model of accumulation, for which the “growth of capital implies growth of … the part invested in labor-power.”²⁴ When capital expands with little or no technological change, the ratio of machinery to employed labor remains the same, even as the mass of capital grows. Expansion requires additional units of labor—longer working days, or more labor employed—and the demand for labor remains “proportional” to the rate of capital accumulation. But, says Marx, this model of accumulation inevitably “came up against a natural barrier,” namely the “movement of the population” itself. A more literal translation of the last phrase might be “absolute changes in the size of the population.”²⁵

In its earliest phases, then, capital accumulation encounters “natural” limits. In the first book of Capital, we learn of two such limits. In his discussion of the rate of exploitation—the ratio between what workers are paid for their labor-power and the surplus value they produce over and above it— Marx underlines that the production of what he calls “absolute” surplus value encounters a natural limit in the length of the working day; similarly, the extensive form of accumulation confronts an absolute or “natural” limit in the existing supply of labor in a given population. Under these conditions, the rate of capital accumulation is, indeed, dependent on the size of the working population. The “exploitable working population” to which Marx refers can only grow at a naturally determined rate of generational reproduction, since even a rise in wages, which in the demographic transition Marx lived through typically led to a rise in fertility rates, would only expand the supply of labor over a period of sixteen to eighteen years. But, Marx insists, “Capital can by no means content itself with the quantity of disposable labor-power which the natural increase of population yields. It requires for its unrestricted activity an industrial reserve army which is independent of these natural limits.”²⁶

Marx, then, ridicules the “law” proposed by the economists of the early nineteenth century by disqualifying their theory of wages, which he claims “are determined by the variations [progress, stagnation, decline] of the absolute numbers of the working population.” The political economists—he specifically has Malthus in his sights—argue that higher wages encourage workers to produce more children, such that at a certain point the supply of labor outstrips demand for it. This situation forces workers to compete for jobs, which in turn makes wages fall; when wages fall, the mortality rate rises, as living conditions—quality of food and health care—deteriorate, even as working-class families restrict their own “propagation,” on account of low wages. Lower wages will therefore decrease the supply of labor, which in turn will start the process over, as a restricted supply of labor forces wages up, lowering profits and slowing the rate of accumulation. But employers, Marx underlines, simply cannot depend on the “natural” process of population growth to drive down wages, nor is this how accumulation in the context of modern industry actually unfolds. Capitalist accumulation requires the ready availability of a “reserve army” of unemployed laborers, who can be drawn into production in periods of expansion and thrown out on the streets during cyclical downturns. This “reserve army” is created by the shift to intensive accumulation, with the growth of mechanization and the decline of labor-power as an element of capital. Mechanization creates a surplus of labor, in periods when capital grows more slowly. The demand for labor depends on where one is in the business cycle, and wages are regulated by the expansion and contraction of this surplus of laborers, not by slow-moving changes in the size of the population as a whole.

Marx summons a contemporary example to draw out this point. During the 1850s, he notes, agricultural labor was in short supply, and capitalist farmers found themselves forced to pay higher wages for field hands. These employers did not, naturally, wait for these workers to reproduce themselves sufficiently to increase the supply relative to the demand for labor, so bringing down wages: that would have taken well over a decade. They introduced labor-saving machinery that reduced the demand for labor, and therefore the labor-market leverage of farm workers, who now had to compete with one another for the remaining jobs. By changing the ratio of machinery to labor-power employed, capitalists can reduce the quantity of labor they require, and thereby regulate the supply of labor itself, which in turn allows them to offer lower wages. What defines the pattern of accumulation on which modern industry depends is the emancipation of the needs of accumulation from the natural limits of the population: “The demand for labor is not identical with increase of capital, nor is supply of labor identical with increase of the working class. It is not a case of two independent forces working on each other.”²⁷ Here we see technical change working as a means to shape both sides of the labor market. In its developed form, capital accumulates more rapidly than the demand for labor, at once increasing its demand for labor—through expansion—and increasing its supply of labor—through labor-saving technical change.

The primary purpose of Marx’s account of the capitalist labor market is to isolate its internal dynamics from larger patterns of demographic change. What differentiates his theory from that of the “dogmatic” political economists is its contention that the growth of capital does not depend on an exogenous supply of labor. Smith had argued that capital accumulation creates its own labor supply: the demand for labor regulates the production of men. Marx, too, argues that capital creates its own supply of labor; but what he means by this is something quite different. Smith’s model implies that the population grows at the same rate as capital accumulates. Marx’s model posits a discrepancy between these two rates. This is because the expansion of a given sum of capital implies a rising share of machinery relative to employed labor-power. This will mean that, for the economy as a whole, the growth of demand for labor will be slower than the speed at which capital expands; the amount of labor employed might grow in absolute numbers, but it will do so less rapidly than units of capital added. This happens precisely because, as labor markets tighten and wages rise, employers can replace workers with labor-saving devices; newly unemployed workers, needing money to survive, stand at the ready to replace employed workers at lower wages, or to be thrown into new industries, where rapid infusions of labor are needed.

We must keep in mind that Marx made this argument in a very specific demographic environment; British fertility rates in 1870 were almost as high as current Nigerian rates. His argument’s upshot is simply put: periodic episodes of high unemployment cannot be attributed to surging rates of proletarian propagation, but to the tendency to replace labor-power by machinery, together with the peculiar dynamics of capitalist accumulation, structured by the boom-and-bust fluctuations of the business cycle. How valid does this argument remain at the present day, when the absolute supply of labor—the size of the “working-age population”—in the industrialized nations appears to be contracting?

During the 1990s, when the Spanish workforce was shrinking, the unemployment rate spiked across southern Europe—doubling in Italy, tripling in Spain. This seems in conformity with the point of Marx’s anecdote about rural labor shortages in the 1850s, meant to demonstrate that capital accumulation can proceed by wringing more surplus labor from a given hour of labor, rather than simply by adding more workers. Other examples can be given worldwide. But we need to remember that in high-income nations today most job growth occurs in the service sector, and especially in low-wage personal services. These types of labor processes are, by their very nature, difficult to mechanize, just as they are hard to outsource to areas with large numbers of surplus workers. Because they cannot be mechanized, or automated, productivity gains—much less, miracles—are equally hard to come by. Expansion in these lines of production often do not entail replacing workers with machines; accumulating surplus labor requires hiring more employees. Marx described these conditions as capitalist production “in its infancy.” To what extent does the convergence of these two phenomena—contracting workforces and job growth in labor-intensive services—render capital accumulation in the high-income countries once again subject to “natural limits” of demographic change?

Demographic Hothouses

There is no such thing as a natural fertility rate, if by “natural” we mean a rate regulated neither by custom nor through the conscious deliberation of households. Even the nomadic peoples of the pre-neolithic area, it is believed, closely controlled the number of children each woman give birth to, through long intervals between children, postponed weaning, aborting pregnancies and widespread recourse to infanticide (a common feature of human communities for much of their existence). But it is such a natural rate, identified with an unchecked and therefore “high” rate of fertility, that the notion of demographic transition presupposes. It is assumed that the population of pre-transition societies, understood to be traditional peasant or agricultural communities, is regulated by an equilibrium between high rates of fertility and mortality; the transition occurs when mortality rates fall, even as fertility rates remain elevated. Mortality rates, the story goes, fall due to higher living standards, but above all access to better health care (vaccines, for instance); fertility rates fall when women have access to education and contraception. But this model and the notion of natural fertility together miss a key demographic feature of peasant societies, namely their tendency to strictly regulate birth rates in accordance with the availability of arable land. “In feudal agricultural villages in Japan,” Makoto Itoh writes, “peasant-serf family members carefully maintained the population and reproduced in accordance with the available food supply from their inherited farm land, after paying annual land tax and under strict communal regulatory customs of marriage (allowed for only an eldest son), birth and Ubasute (meaning to abandon the old and infirm).”²⁸ Similar customary practices were observed in Europe, where marriages were deferred, if they happened at all, until farmland was available, and household sizes were determined by the tension between having enough hands to work the land and the need to avoid fragmenting inheritable holdings. Decisions about household size were hardly left to individual households’ discretion, but they were anything but natural.

When demographers try to explain the transition from stationary populations to rapid demographic growth, they often appeal to vague and misleading sociological concepts like modernization or urbanization. This latter term is especially confounding, since it occludes a more pertinent concept for understanding the persistence, in the early phases of the demographic transition, of high fertility rates even as mortality rates fall: proletarianization, a process that begins in the countryside. Wally Seccombe has described this transformation as unfolding over three phases, with three corresponding household fertility regimes, depending on the production relations required to reproduce it.²⁹ Proletarianization happens to households, not individuals, and while its formal concept signifies the separation of producers from the means of labor, its historical process begins when a family’s reproduction is mediated by market exchange. Seccombe observes that the demographic transition begins in Europe not just with falling mortality rates, but higher fertility rates as well, relative to peasant households. This is because the emergence of independent commodity production in the countryside—“cottage industry” or domestic production—replaced the long-term objective of the integral transmission of farmland with the immediate demands of production for market: the demand above all for labor, which could only be supplied by high fertility rates (conditions which create what has been called a “demographic hothouse”). In regions where this form of production took hold, population growth was especially explosive, and occurred in rural areas rather than in cities.³⁰ It is precisely these conditions that prevail in much of the world’s least industrialized areas.

It is only when families are fully separated from what they need to survive that they are thrown fully onto the labor market to earn their income through the wages of men, women, and children. In domestic production, families often own their own tools or machines, and might even have a small plot of land. Since children’s wages were essential to household reproduction under early proletarianization, large households remained the norm. But while in domestic production children can always be more intensely exploited by their own families, raising output to offset falling prices, in early proletarian households children become liabilities in business cycle busts, when employers put them out of the street. With what Seccombe calls the “mature” proletarian household, first taking shape in the last third of the nineteenth century in Britain, proletarianization is completed. In this period of rapid capital accumulation, and increasingly capital-intensive production methods, the demand for labor fell while wages rose. Child labor was curtailed, and universal schooling made mandatory; the family wage became the norm, if hardly universal, and women’s labor became increasingly unwaged, privately performed in the household. Under these conditions, the labor of children was no longer required to reproduce the household, becoming instead an expense; households assumed control over their own size, though the extent to which women made choices about when and how often to give birth varied greatly and was often minimal, even when they were educated and had access to birth control.

If I have retraced this taxonomy of household fertility regimes, it is to return to the question of what pressures dictate population growth and decline today. We started with the anomaly of sub-Saharan Africa, whose fertility rates remain extremely elevated relative to the rest of the world, and in particular with Nigeria, whose population will overtake China’s by the end of this century. Why does its fertility rate remain little changed from what it was in 1960, even though its rural population has halved over the same period? Nigeria’s official unemployment rate is around five percent, yet its “poverty rate”—as defined by the World Bank—is close to forty, some eighty-seven million inhabitants. Significantly, though ninety-five percent of working Nigerians are considered employed, just twelve percent have waged employment, a smaller share than in Afghanistan; the rest are classified as self-employed. Three in four women are active in the labor force, and child labor is common, with as many as fifteen million Nigerian children under fourteen considered economically “active.”³¹ These discouraging data provide a useful context for recent remarks on this matter made by Columbia University historian Adam Tooze. In his treatment of a recent book on African demography, Edward Paice’s Youthquake, Tooze spends considerable energy puzzling over the exceptionally slow rate at which the demographic transition is unfolding across sub-Saharan Africa. There, fertility rates are simply not responding to collapsing mortality rates, even after decades. In the rest of the world where the transition has been completed, he argues, the gap between these two rates closed due to the battery of causes sociologists invariably evoke: modernization, urbanization, education, and access. In Nigeria, however, “educated” women with access to birth control are “choosing”—he stresses the “agency” of women—to have larger families, for reasons he cannot conjure. To his own awkwardly formulated question, “why do Nigerian women use so little contraception?” Tooze responds tautologically: “Because they want large families.”³²

But what kind of families are they? Here is a population in which tens of millions of laborers are cut off from farmland yet are also unable to find waged employment, which in Nigeria is prized for the comparatively high income it provides, though few such jobs even come with employment contracts, much less paid leave or other benefits. This is a society in which the pace of the demographic transition is dictated by the degree of proletarianization undergone by households. In a society in which almost all workers are self-employed, household income is provided by low-productivity goods production and service provision: street vending, personal services, household repairs, “petty trading.” It is no wonder, then, that population growth is so robust in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, where similar conditions—semi-proletarianization—hold sway. It is likely to remain so for decades to come, no matter how much education and birth control is made available to Nigerian women. When household reproduction depends on the labor income of all its members, women can hardly choose whether to have large families or not.

This Race of Peculiar Commodity-Owners

Marx is often cited as having posited that each mode of production has its own “law of population.” His argument in Capital, though, underlines instead how the dynamics of capitalist accumulation ineluctably generates an oversupply of labor—a surplus population—regardless of the actual “movement” of population growth (be it rising, stationary, or declining). Nowhere in his work do we find an articulated account of why capitalist societies undergo what sociologists call demographic transition: an arc of demographic change in which an early phase of dramatic growth is followed by rapid falloff in fertility and population growth rates, and eventually in population altogether. We can assume that Marx thought the population of capitalist societies would grow absolutely, provided accumulation was sufficiently rapid, and real wages rose. Speculation is risky here, since he proposes no comparison, as does Adam Smith, between trends in the United States, China, and south Asia, and because his account of “modern industry” describes a factory system only just emerging, during which large numbers of women and children were employed in production. Marx treats the question of child labor at length in Capital, underlining the way capital’s “werewolf-like hunger for surplus labor”—specifically, the “absolute” surplus-value produced by adding more units of labor, rather than through productivity gains—compelled it to extend the working day as long as was physically possible, and seek out still more labor-power in the form of children under twelve. In the 1860s, the campaign to end child labor was still ongoing, the era of universal schooling still to come, and the British labor movement only in its infancy. And though Marx’s theory of the wage underlined that the “means of subsistence necessary for the production of labor-power must include the means necessary for the worker's replacements, i.e. his children, in order that this race of peculiar commodity-owners may perpetuate its presence on the market,” the norm of the so-called family wage—a single wage sufficient for the entire family’s reproduction—was rarely a reality.³³ He understood very well that wage-earning children represent a burden to families when business cycle downturns put them out of work; it is less certain that he could envision a proletarian family whose decisions about household size would be made according to “the constraints of income, prices, taste and time,” such that children could be considered “consumer durables” or “household produced goods.”³⁴ Above all, he did not imagine the role the modern welfare state would play in mediating social reproduction, or that retired workers would be left to fend for themselves, rather than being cared for by their own children and extended family.

The feminist critique of Marx’s account of social reproduction has primarily focused on the way his theory did not fully account for just how “this race of peculiar commodity-owners…perpetuate[s] its presence on the market,” neglecting in particular the mediating role the family or household plays in carrying out the “production of men.” By identifying the wage with the means of subsistence sufficient not only to reproduce an individual worker’s labor-power but to produce his replacement as well, Marx appears to pass over the sexual division of labor within the household, as well as the way this division of labor shapes gendered wage differentials on the labor market. This critique emphasized both the day-to-day process of producing labor-power as a commodity exchanged on the labor market, as well as the generational reproduction of the “race” of proletarians needed to supply that market over time. At stake in this important transformation of Marxist theory was its redefinition of women as those laborers deemed capable of having children, and how this identification functions as a primary source of gender domination.

Women’s struggles in Europe and North American since the 1970s have prioritized increasing women’s control over reproduction and family size, including the right to terminate unwanted pregnancies. These struggles intensified at a moment of generalized profitability crisis in the late 1960s and early 1970, one effect of which was the undermining of the family wage. Women began entering the labor force en masse in the early 1970s; it is no coincidence that fertility rates began declining at the same time. Lower birth rates in the high-income economies cannot simply be accounted for by women “choosing” to work outside the home, though many individual women did just that; they are an historical phenomenon representing at once an advance in women’s control over their own lives and a symptom of a broader crisis of capitalist accumulation. Control over family size and the choice to reproduce must also, it warrants underlining, include the choice to have children as well. If in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa the particular ways in which households reproduce themselves do not allow women simply to choose smaller families, access to education and birth control notwithstanding, in the industrialized nations real wage compression and the high cost of raising children mean small families are not simply chosen, nor are they testimony to the unequivocal success women have had in gaining control over their bodies and their laboring capacities. We can be certain, however, that in the coming decades the purported “existential” threat posed by the prospect of demographic collapse will mean women and “feminism” will be singled out as scapegoats.³⁵

When we speak here of choices being made by women and by families, we are referring less to their particular agency in the matter than to the fact that, in the capitalist mode of production, the reproduction of labor-power is carried out privately, in a process only indirectly mediated by the state and the capitalist class. If the proletarian family can be identified, negatively, by its dispossession—it owns only its own children—it is equally defined by the fact that it is directly responsible for its own maintenance. But Marx’s argument seems to point to a more important feature of this way of organizing social production, namely that the dynamics of accumulation (“the movement of capital”) do not directly shape the “movement of the population.” It is in the gap between these two movements that states intervene to adjust household behaviors, and population growth, to the needs of accumulation. Though pronatalist policies were effective in France after the First World War, the economic doldrums of the 1930s depression forced them downward again; only the devastations of the Second World War, then the post-war economic “miracle,” would drive them upward again for a few decades. But generous pronatalist programs in many wealthy countries plagued by low fertility rates today have not made a dent in the prevailing trend; absent a global conflagration, and subsequent sustained economic boom, we should not expect any reversal, even as sub-Saharan fertility rates remain high long after the demographic transition “model” predicts they should drop. When “family-friendly” pronatalist policies—longer parental leave, child tax credits, subsidized child care, etc.—are deemed to have failed, a more punitive (i.e. American) approach might be adopted, in which women are denied access to abortion, and perhaps contraception altogether.³⁶ A generalized and perhaps novel form of misogyny will likely be the result, with childless women shunned and shamed, not just by their communities, but directly by the state; under such conditions, violence against women, deemed narcissistic and against life, would be normalized.

What would it take, supposing it were desirable, to raise fertility rates in the high-income countries? And what would it take to “balance,” as it were, the divergent rates between the wealthy world and sub-Saharan Africa? History suggests that African fertility rates will only subside in response to rapid capital accumulation, and corresponding wage growth. Some commentators have noted, for example, that since establishing high rates of immigration to replace disappearing workers in the capitalist heartland is a politically explosive proposition, the most promising prospect is to move production to where the workers are now, and “turn Africa into a ‘new China’—where capital and managerial expertise move to Africa to produce goods.”³⁷ But much of the demand for labor in the more developed countries is for in-person services, which cannot be relocated to Lagos or Accra. In the high-income countries, Keynes’s solution might seem rational if implausible: redistributing income shares toward labor might modestly stimulate consumption, but pronatalist policies, which are forms of targeted income redistribution, have had little to no effect where they have been recently tried. A working-class demand for a larger share of income in exchange for the uncertain prospect of future population growth is not promising, particularly if the more palatable alternative of importing cheap labor from abroad is on the table, populist backlash notwithstanding. We can no longer count on the capitalist class to act in the name of its own long-term interests as a class, in any case, as is evidenced by its decades-long refusal (or inability) to invest at rates adequate to spur sustained growth, replace collapsing infrastructure, or to make more than the most minimal gestures against impending climate collapse, which is sure to be the next great “exogenous” shock to the system.

One of the lessons of historian Robert Brenner’s account of the Black Death’s aftermath is that the divergent outcomes in regions—greater mobility and higher wages for some peasants, the reimposition of serfdom for others—with similar demographic patterns can be traced to the prevailing class relations in each.³⁸ A similar polarization of outcomes might occur in the next century or two, in response to eventual demographic decline. We can be excused for imagining the near term will be rough going, as the capitalist class tries to impose stricter controls over the supply of labor, both indirectly, through punitive actions toward women and families, and by instituting serf-like labor conditions for imported labor detachments, as happened in the US in the nineteenth century, for example, or like the arrangements—the “kafala” system—that prevail in oil-rich statelets in the Persian Gulf. But these more probable scenarios should not blind us to what might also unfold, at least in the margins: the complete socialization of the costs of reproducing society, including the costs of caring for the elderly. Such a scenario might produce disparate responses among households, with many foregoing children altogether, others having large families by current standards. Under these conditions, the very structure of the family or household might fray, since it would no longer bear exclusive responsibility for privately mediating the relation between the demand for labor and demographic replacement of the labor-force. Socialization, in this sketch, would give greater room for women and kinship networks to choose how large their families would be, while no longer relegating the reproduction of these demographic clusters to the private efforts of those who form them. And children would no longer be fetishized or adored as emblems of futurity, or as sites for projecting fantasies of vulnerability and innocence; they would no longer be invoked as the beneficiaries of the violence carried out in their name.

The political classes of those nations that have completed the so-called demographic transition, and whose populations will rapidly decline over the next several decades, have begun to ask—incoherently, but loudly—whether humanity is not facing a third, and perhaps final, demographic revolution. They are confronting the apparent fraying of the transition model itself, which projects an eventual restoration of the equilibrium between fertility and mortality rates, resulting in a newly stable population size. The current short-circuit represents an inversion of the one that detonated the population growth to begin with: fertility rates are still plummeting, even as life expectancy rises. What is especially disorienting for most observers is that no model or precedent exists for what is about to happen, unless it is the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century. It is no accident that this event is frequently invoked in discussions of twenty-first century demographic decline, since the outcomes are numerically similar in one aspect: in medieval Europe the population was halved, as it soon will be in China, Japan, Italy, and South Korea. This culling took just three years in the first case, of course, rather than a short century. The rhetoric surrounding the current contraction evokes what unfolded centuries ago, though: we are warned of collapsing labor supplies, eventual breakdowns in social reproduction, and the need for still tighter state controls over the management of populations. Yet the enigma of the present decline is due to its fundamental difference from the traumatic shock of that first collapse; in our case, the decline seems to be working out the inner logic of this society’s way of reproducing itself. And unlike prior demographic revolutions, the current freefall seems less set in motion by a corresponding mutation in the mode of production than a manifestation of the current one’s unraveling. A recent feature in Financial Times expresses, in muffled form, the widespread anxiety among its readers that the ongoing demographic revolution will bring about some deep structural, or even civilizational, shift: “The EU is on the brink of a demographic revolution,” one observer notes, one necessitating “profound rethinking of our institutional, political, economic, and cultural frameworks.”³⁹ Lurking beneath this litany of “frameworks” are the core institutions of capitalist society—the family, state, and private property—the foundations of which are made vulnerable by the revolution underway.

1. Edward Paice, Youthquake: Why African Demography Should Matter to the World (Apollo: London, 2021).
2. Stein Emil Vollset et al., “Fertility, mortality, migration, and population scenarios for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100: a forecasting analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study,” The Lancet 396 (July 14, 2020): 1285-1306.
3. Makato Itoh, “Japanese Demographic Crisis in View of Marx’s Capitalist Law of Population,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 50, no. 2 (July 2019):1-2.
4. Dean Spears et al., “Long-term population projections: Scenarios of low or rebounding fertility,” PLOS ONE 19, no. 4 (2024), https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0298190
5. James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale: New Haven, 2017), 113-14.
6. Nigeria is one of the world’s leading exporters of oil, but has a per capita GDP less than half that of Morocco’s and barely higher than Sudan’s.
7. One of the most common “explanations” for the Arab Spring of the early 2010s among the punditry was the demographic turbulence produced by the youth bulge characteristic of the region’s age structure. This argument is not wrong, just superficial and one-sided.
8. The South Korean justice minister made headlines by evoking the prospect of an eventual national “extinction” brought about by low fertility rates. The Times was even more melodramatic, envisioning the prospect of “the world’s first self-inflicted genocide.” “South Korea ‘faces extinction’ after birth rate falls sharply again,” The Times (February 28, 2024), https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/south-korea-lowest-birth-rate-world-child-z6jwn3jjt
9. John Maynard Keynes, “Some Economic Consequences of a Declining Population,” Population and Development Review 4, no. 3 (September 1978): 517-523.
10. Nic Johnson, “Times of Interest: Long-Durée Rates and Capital Stabilization,” New Left Review 143 (September-October 2023), 139. Johnson’s sweeping essay traces the secular decline of interest rates back to their roots “in the structural dynamics of the expanding capitalist world-system,” a key feature of which is demographic expansion.
11. “Some Economic Consequences,” 520.
12. Robin Wigglesworth, “Immigration helps explain US economic strength: Goldman,” FT
Alphaville, March 18, 2024, https://www.ft.com/content/96dc9516-22d4-42f1-834b-847a6ccc2b48
13. “Global fertility in 204 countries and territories, 1950–2021, with forecasts to 2100: a comprehensive demographic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021,” The Lancet 403 (2024): 2088; “Global population growth hits lowest rate since 1950,” The Financial Times (July 11, 2022), https://www.ft.com/content/6b131d91-1834-4243-bb8b-dc49060b1450.
14. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2024), 72-109.
15. “For we have now learned that we have another devil at our elbow at least as fierce as the Malthusian—namely the devil of unemployment escaping through the breakdown of effective demand” (“Some Economic Consequences,” 522).
16. It would rise above the replacement again after the war, only to move below it again in the 1970s, at the end of the post-war “boom.” We can usefully speculate as to whether the unique circumstances of the world war and its aftermath postponed the eventual decline of the British population by decades. The UK has seen modest population growth since the 1970s, even as its fertility rate fell rapidly. What growth there has been is due almost entirely to net migration.
17. “Some Economic Consequences,” 520.
18. “Some Economic Consequences,” 523.
19. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of The Wealth of Nations, Book I (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), 89.
20. The Wealth of Nations, 89.
21. The Wealth of Nations, 82.
22. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, tr. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 764. Fowkes translates the German Vermehrung with “multiplication,” perhaps in conformity with Smith’s frequent use of that term. But it can also mean “propagation,” or simply “breeding.”
23. Capital 1, 785.
24. Capital 1, 763.
25. Capital 1, 790. Marx’s German actually says, “make the movement of capital depend on the absolute changes in the size of the population.”
26. Capital 1, 788.
27. Capital 1, 793.
28. “Japanese Demographic Crisis in View of Marx’s Capitalist Law of Population,” 3.
29. Wally Seccombe, “Marxism and Demography,” New Left Review 137 (January-February 1983), 22-47. Much of what follows in this section is indebted to this pioneering essay. On household reproduction and demographics, see Joan Scott and Louise Tilly’s important study, Women, Work and Family (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978).
30. Seccombe, “Marxism and Demography,” 38.
31. Jonathan Lain and Utz Pape, “Nigeria’s dichotomy: low unemployment, high poverty rates,” World Bank Blogs (October 20, 2023); https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/nigerias-dichotomy-low-unemployment-high-poverty-rates
32. Adam Tooze, “Youth Quake. Why African demography should matter to the world,” Chartbook #121 (May 14, 2022); https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-121-youth-quake-why-african
33. Capital I, 275. By “norm” I do not mean that the family wage was universal, only that it constituted a model or ideal, one advocated for by the labor movement. It should also be noted that children of a certain age should have the opportunity to be involved in production, or rather, that ideally there should be no distinction between production, education, and leisure.
34. Martha Gimenez, “Population and Capitalism,” in Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays (Brill, 2019), 191: “households or individuals are free to maximize their utility in any way they choose; e.g. choosing consumer goods rather than children; choosing to have only one ‘high quality’ child or several ‘lower quality’ children, and so forth.”
35. South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol has recently done just that. See Hawon Jung, “Women in South Korea Are on Strike Against Being ‘Baby-Making Machines’,” The New York Times (January 27, 2023), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/27/opinion/south-korea-fertility-rate-feminism.html
36. US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas has noted that a 1965 decision guaranteeing this right to married couples could be overturned in the future.
37. “Charles Goodhart: ‘Growth is bound to fall’,” The Bulletin (Summer 2023), https://www.omfif.org/2023/07/charles-goodhart-growth-is-bound-to-fall/
38. See his criticism of demographic accounts of patterns of income distribution and economic growth or stagnation before and after the Black Death in “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development,” The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. T.H. Ashton and C.H.E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 13-24.
39. “Has Europe already reached its demographic tipping point?,” The Financial Times (May 23, 2024),