This is a very insightful essay. Implicit in your argument is the following notion: that population projections don't just reflect ideology.
They actively construct the legal and policy architectures that then shape demographic outcomes.
When a UN projection about Nigeria's 2100 population becomes the basis for immigration policy, aid conditionality, or sovereign debt ratings, it creates feedback loops that make the "forecast" partially self-fulfilling or self-defeating.
This is legal realism and Jean Baudrillard's simulacrum applied to demography: the map changes the territory.
The real epistemic task isn't to produce "better" century-scale forecasts, but to map the feedback loops between projection, policy, behavior, and demographic outcome and perhaps to ask whose interests these loops serve
It should also be noted that Nigeria's population is considered by most experts to be massively overstated, due to governors rigging the census to get more federal funding.
> Meanwhile, sub-Saharan Africa retains relatively high fertility rates, though these have also been declining fast enough to embarrass the most-cited long-range projections.
Given how inaccurate population statistics are for much of Africa, I'm kind of skeptical that the present has data either. Nigeria hasn't done a proper census in a long time, and they're far from alone in that. And even in the countries that do conduct censuses - they're not conducted to the standards (or accuracy) that you would see in Europe, or the US.
I suspect that declining populations are baked in for societies that are structured like western ones. While there are variations, and one can speculate on reasons for those variations (precarity and misogyny seem like important factors), the trend everywhere seems to be downward, and it's hard to see what would reverse that.
But I rather suspect that in the next 50 years we're going to see massive sociological shifts due to climate change, that make today's discussions seem very silly (famine and disease tend to change how societies function).
Whether or not that is a problem is obviously a separate debate. My personal view is that, like most shifts, there will be good and bad aspects to it. And any attempt to predict how it changes societies will look very silly after the event. The only thing I think you can confidently predict is that it will change things. Probably.
This is a very insightful essay. Implicit in your argument is the following notion: that population projections don't just reflect ideology.
They actively construct the legal and policy architectures that then shape demographic outcomes.
When a UN projection about Nigeria's 2100 population becomes the basis for immigration policy, aid conditionality, or sovereign debt ratings, it creates feedback loops that make the "forecast" partially self-fulfilling or self-defeating.
This is legal realism and Jean Baudrillard's simulacrum applied to demography: the map changes the territory.
The real epistemic task isn't to produce "better" century-scale forecasts, but to map the feedback loops between projection, policy, behavior, and demographic outcome and perhaps to ask whose interests these loops serve
It should also be noted that Nigeria's population is considered by most experts to be massively overstated, due to governors rigging the census to get more federal funding.
💯— they haven’t done a proper census in decades
> Meanwhile, sub-Saharan Africa retains relatively high fertility rates, though these have also been declining fast enough to embarrass the most-cited long-range projections.
Given how inaccurate population statistics are for much of Africa, I'm kind of skeptical that the present has data either. Nigeria hasn't done a proper census in a long time, and they're far from alone in that. And even in the countries that do conduct censuses - they're not conducted to the standards (or accuracy) that you would see in Europe, or the US.
I suspect that declining populations are baked in for societies that are structured like western ones. While there are variations, and one can speculate on reasons for those variations (precarity and misogyny seem like important factors), the trend everywhere seems to be downward, and it's hard to see what would reverse that.
But I rather suspect that in the next 50 years we're going to see massive sociological shifts due to climate change, that make today's discussions seem very silly (famine and disease tend to change how societies function).
Whether or not that is a problem is obviously a separate debate. My personal view is that, like most shifts, there will be good and bad aspects to it. And any attempt to predict how it changes societies will look very silly after the event. The only thing I think you can confidently predict is that it will change things. Probably.
Excellent!!!
The FT recently ran an article on falling birth rates, attributing the trend not to women’s fertility choices per se but rather to declining rates of couple formation tout court, due in no small part to the effects of smartphones on socalisation: https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/72276c8f-6393-4246-bf98-d9cd7ff9b32dl
What do you make of the argument? And how does it change your reading of population projections?
Terrific piece
My own completely unscientific, and not at all back tested, hypothesis is that its all related to housing availability.