The Century of Uncertainty

There are a lot of people on this little planet of ours. In the time period it took me to write the first draft of this book (30 days), the number of people populating the Earth rose from 7,174,521,162 to 7,183,196,576.1 That’s 8,675,414 additional people! If you’d like another alarming statistic, despite famine, war and pestilence, we are incredibly good at producing people. From 1804 to 2011 we managed to increase the world’s population from one billion to seven billion — and it’s only going to take another 15 years to get to eight billion. The big issue is that a very large proportion of them would like a job. More than that, in even the most inhospitable spots, we are living a good deal longer. In Western Europe life expectancy rose from 47 in 1900, to 67 in 1950 and now it is 80. In mega-rich Monaco, citizens and tax exiles alike can expect to go on counting their coinage to a world-beating 89.5 years. There’s just one problem: in most developed countries the population is in decline. We of the industrialized nations live longer but have fewer offspring — we’re re too busy working to have babies. In some places around this overcrowded globe of ours the decline is almost climatic as countries run out of people to do the jobs that keep society’s wheels in motion.