‘Dramatic Decline in Global Fertility’: By 2100 Developed Nations Will Fiercely Compete For Migrants, Bill Gates-Funded Lancet Article Predicts

An infant warmer complete with name tags awaits the arrival of a baby.
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Oliver JJ Lane

“Open immigration will be vital to maintain population size and economic growth,” a Bill Gates-funded study published in The Lancet this week claimed, predicting a grim future where people having children in developed countries becomes rare.

The future is “difficult to predict,” the study conceded, but nevertheless urged readers to prepare for a rapidly shrinking global population, where most newborns worldwide are in sub-Saharan Africa and where wealthy countries compete ‘fiercely’ for immigrants to prop their economies up. This is a vision of the year 2100 provided by a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded study from the University of Washington Seattle’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) published in the increasingly woke Lancet journal that counsels birth control for Africa and open borders for Europe to survive the coming decades.

While the scenario may sound alarming, the paper and a hefty press release accompanying it describes the collapse in global birth rates as a “success story.” Fewer humans means less carbon emissions, the paper – which also received funding from the British, Norwegian, and New Zealand governments – observed:

Although sustained below-replacement fertility will pose serious potential challenges for much of the world over the course of the century, it also presents opportunities for environmental progress. Alongside strong pro-environmental regulations, a smaller global population in the future could alleviate some strain on global food systems, fragile environments, and other finite resources, and also reduce carbon emissions.

According to the paper’s co-author, the facts of life will require explicitly left-wing solutions, and society will have to be rebuilt to suit. Lead Research Scientist from IHME Dr. Natalia V. Bhattacharjee said: “The Implications are immense … These future trends in fertility rates and livebirths will completely reconfigure the global economy and the international balance of power and will necessitate reorganising societies.”

“Global recognition of the challenges around migration and global aid networks are going to be all the more critical when there is fierce competition for migrants to sustain economic growth and as sub-Saharan Africa’s baby boom continues apace,” she added.

The press release on the study predicted that by 2100, “half the children born on the planet will be from sub-Saharan Africa … primarily in Western and Eastern sub-Saharan Africa.”

“In low-fertility, high-income economies, policies that support parents and open immigration will be vital to maintain population size and economic growth,” it continued. “In these locations, populations will shrink unless low fertility can be offset by ethical and effective immigration.”

Far from Western nations arguing over how best to manage migration, the paper prognosticates a future where states fight each other to get their hands on as many migrants as possible. And according to the IHME’s modelling, the only six nations on the earth that will have an above-replacement fertility rate by 2100 will be Samoa, Somalia, Tonga, Niger, Chad, and Tajikistan.

Any hope of countering these issues – by encouraging growth in fertility rates in developed countries, for instance – is close to pointless, the paper assured. Discussing the Total Fertility Rate (TFR), which in general means 2.1 children per woman in a society to achieve self-sustainment, the IHME professes to have determined “that even under optimistic assumptions” the impact of pro-natal policies will be low. Abortion is inevitable too, the paper noted, so don’t try interfering with that, either.

“There is no silver bullet”, cautions Dr. Bhattacharjee.

The distribution of births in the future is going to be very uneven, it predicted. While the global TFR is thought to be around 1.6 and about 1.5 across much of Europe and the United States by 2100, areas like South Korea and Eastern Europe are said to be looking at a real demographic winter with TFRs heading towards one child per woman. In other words, the natural-born population of such areas would halve every generation.

Bhattacharjee explained, “most countries will remain below replacement levels. And once nearly every country’s population is shrinking, reliance on open immigration will become necessary to sustain economic growth. Sub-Saharan African countries have a vital resource that aging societies are losing—a youthful population.”

While the IHME warns of a high-migration future where policies to encourage births in the developed world have failed to do anything but take the edge off, the body does concede such long-term forecasts are difficult.

Indeed, German newspaper Die Welt cited the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, which notes: “Projections that go more than 25 years into the future are super uncertain” given the sheer number of unpredictable factors. One of these factors, as the IHME itself noted, is changing technology. Acknowledging the impact of artificial intelligence and robotics is “difficult to predict”, nevertheless they could “reduce the economic effects of changes in age structure.”

 

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