No one left: Why the world needs more children By PaulMorland. Forum. 2024. pp. 272. £20.00 (hbk). ISBN: 978‐1800754102. £12.99 (pbk). ISBN: 978‐1800754126. £13.45 (ebk). ISBN: 978‐1800754119
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: No One Left is an excellent book on declining fertility and what must be done about it.The author takes a worldwide look at the issue, focusing on Europe, and concludes humanity is "staring into a demographic abyss" (p.212).The book is divided into two parts, the first part looking at the problem and its causes, and the second part considering feminist and environmentalist objections to increasing fertility and then how to actually increase the fertility rate.Morland argues that neither technology nor immigration can solve our demographic problems and that government policy and culture must "embrace a new progressive pronatalism" or "we face disaster" (p.i).Paul Morland, a leading demographer and a senior member of St Anthony's College, Oxford, begins his book by simply outlining the demographic situation we face today and why it is a problem.Given the near-total absence of discussion of this problem in British politics today, thoughtfully raising it is warrant enough for the worth of the book.Morland begins by telling us that most of Europe and much of Asia now has fertility below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman, and that in the UK "we have not had above replacement fertility since the early 1970s" (p.8).Two vivid examples of how the population pyramid is being inverted are Italy and Japan.Concerning Italy: "In 1950 there were 17 under-tens for every one person aged over 80. Today the two groups are matched roughly one-to-one" (p.13).In Japan, while there were nine people of working age for every retiree in the mid-1960s, this if forecast to become just one and a half working age people for every retiree by the mid-2050s.In the UK the old-age dependency ratio is 30 per cent today, but it is due to rise to 50 per cent by 2050.Why is all this a problem?Morland finds there to be at least two problems with a seriously deteriorating old-age dependency ratio.First, public services will not be able to support the elderly because there simply won't be the labour supply available, and, the state won't be able to raise the taxation to finance much of it anyway.In Britain those in their late 80s and older "require six or seven times as much health spending as those in the prime of their life" (p.14), and the number of these older citizens is set to balloon from about 1.5 million today to 6 million by the end of the century.Second, an older population is simply less innovative, which leads to lower economic growth.
Source: Economic Affairs
DOI: 10.1111/ecaf.12692
Author: Charles Amos
Institution: Institute of Economic Affairs
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4407413508