Are demographers liars?

A recent article published in Le Monde (https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2020/01/18/le-nombre-des-naissances-en-chine-au-plus-bas_6026398_3210.html) recently caught my attention and raised a number of questions. The journalist Frédéric Lemaître started his article by reported the latest somewhat shocking Chinese birth rates, which have dropped to its lowest since 1949, to nearly 1. (Population sustainability is around 2). Birth rates below demographic sustainability frighten capitalist countries – I put China in the capitalist countries for its relationship with growth and its relation to conquest. Why? The reason is fairly simple: a young and growing population is perceived as the fuel of production, thus growth. According to this view, and roughly presented, a world with a birth rate at or below 2 is a world in recession. I am not going to enter the socioeconomic debate of diclinism, degrowth, although I’d find such conversation invigorating.

The argument Lemaitre presents is that of researcher Yi Fuxian, who suggests official Chinese data is flawed at best, intentionally wrong, at worst. He suggests that Chinese demographics have started declining – and rather quickly. Instead of the official 1.4 billion, he claims Chinese population is around 1.28 billion. While China is not the only greatly populated country in the Word, such possibility of data manipulation raises fundamental questions, are capitalist countries ready to admit population decline and how far are they ready to go to hide real figures. Why does it matter?

I previously wrote about how the occurrence of two demographic phenomena contributing to the ageing of the population simultaneously biases our perception of world demographics. We are ageing because 1. People make less children and 2. Life expectancy increases. When these two phenomena occur simultaneously, the decline of population associated with the decline of fertility is hidden by the increasing number of older people. In fact, whenever a country has a fertility rate below 2, its population declines, you just need to wait. Let me be clear, a world population decline is not a bad thing, quite the contrary. However, what is a problem is a world population declining without a socioeconomic structure that permits such fundamental demographic change. Still now we hear poorly informed – yet loud – people stating that the demographic explosion will be our doom and that we must take all measures necessary to prevent people from making children.

That our politicians lie about the demographics of our countries profoundly misleads policymaking: housing, healthcare, education, etc. Many projections around these policy areas are based on demographic projections. Should we not be able to embrace a demographically declining world, the consequences may be dire.