Here Are 50 Questions About Aging, the Welfare State, Japan, and an Irreversible Future (Part 1) | QDaily's Annual Book Recommendations No. 13

Japan's bubble burst, its economy stalled, its population aged, more people swore off marriage, the nuclear family came apart… A cascade of social problems has left people overwhelmed, and the troubles facing the frontrunner look like the troubles waiting for China. Is that really the case?

A year has passed, and China's relationship with the world, society's relationship with the state, and the economy's bearing on our lives have all been governed by enormous questions. In the shock of it, intellectual voices have gone silent or been drowned out by noise, which only deepens the confusion. Or perhaps a turning point is about to appear. In any era, wise thinking is scarce, and people of insight are what allow the rest of us to see the road ahead.

That is why, in our "2018 Annual Book Recommendations," we want to introduce, as diversely as we can, some books we think are worth your time.

As in past years, every book that came within our view has been read by our editorial staff, who introduce it to readers in good faith.

We've also had help from contributing writers in putting this together. They are always ahead of the curve, and their insights run deeper. Our thanks to them here.

This is the ninth piece in our nonfiction book recommendation series, and it looks at Japan's aging society and its population problems. The author, Liu Zhizhen, is a member of QDaily's editorial staff.

"I saw a 90-year-old man on television say he was worried about his future — what I want to know is, how long does he plan to live?" The man who said this was Taro Aso, Japan's finance minister. In a speech urging people, the elderly above all, to spend more, he came out with that deeply politically incorrect line.

But the line also lays out many of Japan's problems at once: an aging population; wealth pooled in the hands of the old; a society with no sense of security; too little consumption; anxiety about the future…

Since the Meiji era, Japan has been China's benchmark — first as a country that transformed itself successfully, with strong ships and powerful guns; then for its institutional advantages, which made it one of the "great powers"; and after several wars, though it ended up on the losing side, it became the world's second-largest economy… In civilization and culture it has always been ahead of the curve, so for China this benchmark has always stood just up ahead.

Only in the past few decades has the picture shifted. On one side, China has grown intensely excited about its own rise. On the other, Japan's bubble burst, its economy stalled, its population aged, more people swore off marriage, the nuclear family came apart… A cascade of social problems has left people overwhelmed, and the troubles facing the frontrunner look like the troubles waiting for China. Is that really the case?

A good many books about Japan's social malaise have been brought into China. Kenichi Ohmae's The Low-Desire Society (《低欲望社会》) exists here in two editions, one genuine and one knockoff — the China Machine Press version corresponds to a Japanese original whose title translates as Old-Age Insecurity (《老后不安不况》). NHK's documentary team has produced A Society Without Relations (《无缘社会》), Women in Poverty (《女性贫困》) and Old-Age Bankruptcy (《老后破产》); there are also The Disparity Society (《格差社会》), The Downward-Mobility Society (《下流社会》), and more. The titles alone give off the gloom — Japanese books read as easily as a slide deck, and interest in Japanese culture and social phenomena runs high, so these books have left the Chinese middle-class readers walking along behind Japan thoroughly rattled.

There are two sides to look at here. On one, the books we import from Japan's publishing world skew negative, showing us the older, poorer face of the place, which hardens our negative impression of the Japanese economy and society and deepens our anxiety about ourselves. On the other, the group in China voicing that anxiety fits what Wang Xing is said to have described: "It feels like everyone around you went to a 985 school, but in fact China's university graduates all together number only 80 million." To put it precisely, this is a middle-class problem. And we have far more to worry about than what Japan has laid out in front of us.

These two pieces probably don't count as book reviews; they are really a collection of questions. They start from a few of Japan's most closely watched social problems and branch out into population structure and the demographic dividend, the welfare state, the division of labor in employment, the middle class, the middle-income trap… Scholars of every stripe have thought about these questions, and we have gathered their views here, but what the views share is the absence of an answer. Everyone hopes for one, and economists and sociologists have proposed all sorts of solutions, yet none of them are really workable, for a simple reason: where population is concerned, most trends are irreversible. And generational change — change that takes twenty years or more to show up — is something most researchers of social problems seem to have no patience for.

There are Chinese scholars, James Liang among them, who campaign so hard on this that they'd practically jump into your bed to solve the population decline themselves. The spirit is admirable; it doesn't help. What Mr. Liang should watch out for is this: wanting to change the status quo too urgently leads to placing too much hope in policy. And whenever you place hope in the authorities, keep one thing in mind — the power, or the destructive power, of policy in a centralized state. Even when we are pushing hard for an idea we believe is right, and which may well be right, we should be all the more wary of seeing it abused. Put plainly, in the realm of policy we all need to guard against Ceaușescu-style birth policies.

People come first. The right to bear children is a personal choice; policy can encourage, it cannot compel. What critics condemned in the family-planning policy of the previous three decades was likewise its disregard for human dignity and human choice.

These two pieces approach the present state of things through people, society and culture, and argue that we should face aging and population head-on; they don't go far into the solutions economists and sociologists have proposed. It should also be said that we don't endorse every position raised below. We only need to understand one thing: these are problems that any normal society — one that has been through fast economic growth and then the fading of its demographic dividend — is bound to meet.

What Problems Has Japan Run Into

1.

On the Japanese miracle, Paul Johnson sums up several causes: a set of developmental factors that came together perfectly inside the right window of time. It is a foundation for how we look at modern Japan.

By 1953, Japan had completed its postwar reconstruction, lagging Germany by only four years. What followed was a twenty-year stretch of growth averaging 9.7 percent a year — almost twice the pace of any major industrial nation in the postwar period. The only real precedent was the spectacular growth of the American economy in the forty years before 1929. This "miracle" was built on the automobile: passenger car production grew at an astonishing rate of nearly 29 percent a year during the intense 1966-1972 period, and Japanese car ownership grew by a third every year. There was in fact nothing miraculous about it. It was a straightforward instance of Adam Smith economics, only lightly touched by Keynesianism. A high proportion of fixed capital formation, with very little unproductive investment. Moderate taxation. Very low defense and administrative spending. A very high personal savings rate, channeled efficiently into industry through the banking system. Astute licensed imports of foreign technology. A very fast rate of replacing existing plants, made possible by striking wage restraint combined with productivity running far ahead of wages. An abundant labor force, released by the contraction of the agricultural sector, well educated and skilled, because Japan (and market economies in Asia generally) tied the educational expansion we have already noted to industrial needs rather than to social-science ideology. In fact, the East Asian market economies were the only ones to benefit economically from the higher-education revolution of the 1960s; in Europe and North America, that revolution proved to be a liability. One thing is true: Japan genuinely benefited from two windfalls that fell out of the sky — first the Korean War, then the Vietnam War. But all these other elements were of its own making. The Japanese government provided a degree of outside protection and export support. But its main contribution was to build, on the Adam Smith model, a framework of fierce internal competition, and a climate favorable to business.

Paul Johnson, Modern Times

2.

During its years of rapid growth, Japan also passed through a phase of taking itself very seriously indeed. We know the grand gestures — the boast that Tokyo real estate alone could buy all of America — and also the smaller details, like the mood in 1958, which felt much like the relish with which China talked a few years ago about its "Four New Great Inventions."

Tokyo Tower was completed, "Michiko fever" (she was the crown princess, a tennis player) swept the nation, and Fuji Heavy Industries' beetle-shaped "Subaru 360" family car, Honda's "Super Cub" motorcycle and Nissin's chicken-flavored ramen appeared one after another — giving people a vivid glimpse of an age of mass production and mass consumption arriving.

Atsushi Miura, The Downward-Mobility Society (《下流社会》)

3.

But higher income, higher growth… none of it runs on forever.

The era when everyone aimed for an annual income of 7, 8, even 10 million yen has become a distant memory — at least a thing of a few years back. Now more and more people believe you can live a full life on 3 million yen a year. Of course, if someone wants to chase an annual income of 30 million yen, believes that is the life best suited to them, and makes high-risk investments that net billions of yen at a stroke, that is none of my business. If others want to keep climbing the social ladder, let them — I won't pass judgment, as long as my own minimum standard of living is secure. That is how these people think: they see nothing wrong with the life they have, and they have no wish to keep rising along with everyone else. This shift actually began taking shape imperceptibly back in the 1980s, though society was still in a high-consumption phase then, and the new social model that would replace the "1955 system" had not yet clearly emerged. Now, as the economic slump, population aging and continued population decline bring sweeping structural change, concrete shifts in every part of life — family, education, employment — are becoming clear one by one, and the new social model is coming into ever sharper view.

Atsushi Miura, The Downward-Mobility Society

4.

Stagnant income, of course, produces poverty.

The OECD compared member countries' nominal wages in its Economic Outlook 2013. Taking nominal wages in 1995 as a baseline of 100, by 2012 the United States stood at 180.8, the European Union at 149.3 and Japan at 87.0. In 2007, Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare published its "Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions." Among the so-called "working-age population" (20 to 64), 32.1 percent of women living alone — nearly one in three — had fallen into poverty. Single-mother households with minor children were in poverty at a rate of 57.6 percent; poverty was concentrated in households where women were the breadwinners.

NHK Special Production Team, Women in Poverty (《女性贫困》)

5.

Society's overall wealth still holds the position of a developed economy, but the uneven distribution across generations has become a glaring problem.

In 2015, households aged 50 to 59 held average savings of 17.51 million yen against debt of 6.45 million yen. Those aged 60 to 69 held 24.02 million yen in savings against 1.96 million yen in debt. Those 70 and older held 23.89 million yen in savings against 830,000 yen in debt.

Kenichi Ohmae, Old-Age Insecurity (《老后不安不况》, published in Chinese as part of The Low-Desire Society, China Machine Press)

6.

Wealth concentrated in the hands of the old means the whole society's spending power is weakening.

Americans in their 60s can still cheerfully frequent singles bars because, men and women alike, they keep a strong appetite for life and want to enjoy it to the fullest. But what are 60-year-old Japanese doing? Growing orchids on the narrow balconies of their apartments, walking dogs smaller than cats around the neighborhood — these modest pleasures are enough to satisfy Japanese citizens. It is hard to imagine people of such low desire dressing up nicely, putting on elaborate makeup and heading eagerly to a singles bar.

Kenichi Ohmae, Old-Age Insecurity (《老后不安不况》, published in Chinese as part of The Low-Desire Society, China Machine Press)

7.

All sorts of problems follow. The most glaring: who is responsible for the debt run up during the years of rapid growth. Kenichi Ohmae is every bit as blunt about this as Taro Aso.

Japan's biggest threat is neither China nor Russia, but its national debt of 1,300 trillion yen. Left alone, Japan will likely find itself unable to repay that debt before long. When that happens, it is the younger generation that will suffer. Yet it wasn't the young who ran up this debt — it was our generation. Old people who have already retired and are enjoying their later years are living off what that debt bought, while the enormous burden will be left to the next generation. Is that reasonable? Settling the debts you incurred within your own generation, rather than dumping them on your descendants, ought to be the traditional Japanese virtue. …… If the elderly agree with me, then I ask them to contribute two-thirds of their assets to the state, so the government can use the money to pay down the national debt — not a single yen wasted. In fact, today's elderly are receiving far more in benefits than the taxes and social-insurance premiums they paid in over the preceding decades. So unless the elderly ultimately hand their assets to the state to repay the debt, the nation's finances will never balance.

Kenichi Ohmae, Old-Age Insecurity (《老后不安不况》, published in Chinese as part of The Low-Desire Society, China Machine Press)

8.

And by this point the population structure no longer favors sustained wealth creation either.

Japan's era of abundant labor was the period of high economic growth in the 1970s, more than 40 years ago now. Back then, young people graduating from schools in the countryside flocked to the big cities looking for work, so factories in the greater Tokyo area never lacked for hands. But by the 1970s, the spectacle of junior-high graduates from the provinces pouring into Tokyo for jobs was fading, and manufacturers on the city's outskirts began relocating to rural areas in the Tohoku region and elsewhere just to find workers. With the severe decline in the birthrate, and university enrollment rates rising, there are now very few workers who stopped their education after junior high. Today's university graduates enjoy something close to full employment, so no one particularly wants to work in a factory.

Kenichi Ohmae, Old-Age Insecurity (《老后不安不况》, published in Chinese as part of The Low-Desire Society, China Machine Press)

9.

Young Japanese, choosing careers, are also unwilling to take manufacturing jobs. And viewed through the global division of labor, through the cost of the wealth each position creates, Japan's young workers are no longer competitive either.

To answer population decline, Japanese companies have already moved their factories overseas. The share of Japanese university students studying engineering and other technology-related fields has fallen by an average of 10 percent a year — a rational choice in an economic system where a chief engineer would rather hire a foreign engineer than pay a domestic worker's high salary. Even parents hesitate to encourage their children to study engineering, because they know that starting salaries for engineers in China, India and Brazil run to only a tenth to a third of what their Japanese counterparts earn. Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications estimates the country is short 500,000 engineers in the digital field alone. Japan's industry associations are working hard to lure young people into filling the vacancies. They produce flashy ads that glorify engineers by every means possible. Some manufacturers offer signing bonuses to talented employees willing to abandon their current company and come work for them — something unthinkable not long ago, since job-hopping has always been considered shameful in Japan. Yet neither the state nor companies can escape the trend they themselves created. As the population shrinks, students become more valuable, and many turn instead to less "dirty" fields like law and medicine — and, perhaps more importantly, fields less exposed to offshoring.

Ted Fishman, Shock of Gray

10.

The downstream effects run on. One small example may carry more of a warning for China: when talented people are encouraged into finance or into starting their own companies, the manufacturing that once powered Japan's takeoff loses its pull, and further problems follow.

The changes among highly paid executives have brought another effect: a problem in how Japan allocates its talent. More and more young people no longer want to work at large corporations or place themselves in brutal competition; they'd rather start their own businesses from the outset. This raises a real worry that companies, especially large ones, will struggle to recruit outstanding talent. Large corporations used to be the pillar of the Japanese economy. They devoted themselves to mass-producing good, cheap goods, supplying not just the domestic market but exports abroad, and in doing so supported and grew the Japanese economy. Large corporations employ huge numbers of people and have contributed enormously to job creation. Toyota is the representative example. Only by gathering excellent engineers and staff could such companies sustain Japan's pillar industries and drive its economy. Imagine what would happen if talented young people all shunned large corporations and thought only of starting their own businesses to earn high incomes. Companies would struggle to hire outstanding talent, the corporations that anchor the Japanese economy would inevitably fall under a shadow, and their productivity could even decline. What's more, among today's high-income executive fields are slot-machine gambling and consumer finance. It is a recent phenomenon that these industries rank among the high-income fields. But think about it carefully — can a society that counts these industries among its top earners really be called a healthy one?

Toshiaki Tachibanaki, The Disparity Society (《格差社会》)

This world was built by a young labor force. Every aging society was once a relatively young one, and if its luck held, it passed through a period of demographic dividend before it grew old.

Set against a larger historical backdrop, young societies created every achievement of industrial civilization.

Let's widen the view, step away from Japan, and look at how population has shaped the rest of the world.

All of Industrial Civilization Benefited From the Demographic Dividend

11.

For a very long stretch, Britain was a "fairly young" country, and that shaped its place in the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution and colonialism gave its young population ample room for employment and emigration.

In 1851, Britons under 24 made up 60 percent of the total population. By 1901, even though British life expectancy had risen, that share had fallen only to around 50 percent. This young cohort was also becoming increasingly mobile. The 1851 census showed that among people aged 20 to 24, 67 percent were urban migrants and 58 percent were rural migrants.

James Vernon, Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern (《远方的陌生人——英国是如何成为现代国家的》)

12.

What follows charts the population explosion of Europe and "Neo-Europe" — Australia, New Zealand and the whole of the Americas. It is also the process by which European civilization became a universal civilization and came to dominate the globe. In fact, every advance since the Industrial Revolution, Britain's included, depended on a young population and a high birthrate.

Between 1840 and 1930, Europe's population grew from 194 million to 463 million, twice the growth rate of the rest of the world. In Neo-Europe (Australia, New Zealand and the Americas), the population grew at a rate unprecedented — or at least unrecorded — in history. Between 1750 and 1930, Neo-Europe's total population grew nearly fourteen-fold, while the rest of the world's population grew only 2.5-fold. Because of the population explosion in Europe and Neo-Europe, between 1750 and 1930 the number of white people increased more than fivefold, while the number of Asians increased only 2.3-fold. Africans and Black Americans increased by less than twofold, though the Black population of the United States grew from one million in 1800 to twelve million in 1930. Over the past 50 years, this surge of white population relative to other races has been largely offset by the slower but enormous growth of other races, but that surge remains one of the largest contingent events in the history of population. The 30 million square kilometers of land whites acquired were both the cause and the consequence of their own population surge. That land remains in their hands today, and minority peoples have come to regard the arrangement as permanent. Neo-Europe's population surge came not only from immigration. Its settled population was also enjoying the highest rates of natural increase these countries had ever seen. Mortality was very low, and by Old World standards food was both abundant and good. The people of Neo-Europe bred prolifically and raised large families. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Neo-Europeans in North America recorded the highest birthrates on record, running 5 to 5.7 percent a year. In the 1860s, Australia's birthrate was 4 percent, and in Argentina, where immigrants had just begun pouring onto the pampas, the birthrate was around 4.6 percent. In Australia, the death rate in 1860-1862 was 1.86 percent and the birthrate 4.26 percent, for a natural rate of increase of 2.4 percent a year. By comparison, the natural rate of increase in England and Wales was 1.38 percent, at a time when the population there was considered to be growing fast. New Zealand's Pakeha kept up similarly high birth and natural-increase rates into the 1870s.

Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism (《生态帝国主义》)

13.

Even after European colonialism was widely acknowledged to have failed and ended, Europe's postwar boom — usually credited to peace and the Marshall Plan — in fact also drew on a sudden surge in births, far above the rate of the first half of the twentieth century. In countries that had already formed middle-class societies, such a surge was unusual; it can also be read as Europe's collective stress response to the huge population losses of the two world wars.

Something else happened too. Janet Flanner of The New Yorker noted that in May 1946, the second most sought-after "practical" item in postwar France — after underwear — was the baby carriage. For the first time in years, Europeans were having children again. Britain's birthrate in 1949 was 11 percent higher than in 1937; France's rose by an unprecedented 33 percent. This baby boom mattered enormously, because the continent's main demographic indicators had failed to rise since 1913. In ways most contemporaries probably did not foresee, a new Europe was being born.

Tony Judt, Postwar (《战后欧洲史》)

14.

There is, of course, disagreement. Paul Johnson credits the reversal of France's population decline to the policies of the Vichy government, policies inspired by the emphasis on youth culture during the German occupation. Either way, and in agreement with Tony Judt, France drove the birth of "a new Europe."

France's revival in the 1960s and 1970s is one of the most striking phenomena of the modern era. In the 1930s, as we have seen, such a revival would have seemed unimaginable. The road to it was complicated and absurd. In its final phase, the Third Republic embodied the notion that "small is beautiful": population in constant decline, output, productivity, investment, wages and consumption all low; a near-limitless veneration of the "little man," the small factory, the small farm, the small town. It was dead even before the Germans defeated it, collapsing into a heap of dust in the summer of 1940. It was the Vichy regime that first put into practice the idea of tax-funded family subsidies — an idea the demographer Adolphe Landry had conceived in 1932 to raise the birthrate. Under Vichy, for the first time in more than a hundred years, France's birthrate actually began to rise again. The psychological effects ran deep. Vichy's focus on the young was a fashion it picked up from the Germans. It spent far more on education than the Third Republic had. It was the Vichy regime that created France's mass youth movement.

Paul Johnson, Modern Times

A Byproduct of Industrial Civilization: Irreversible Aging

The direct cause of aging is, of course, the progress of civilization: Pasteur's discovery of germs, and the drop in infection rates that followed, lowered infant mortality and produced a fundamental rise in average human lifespan; public-health systems, and vaccines above all, pushed life expectancy up enormously.

But that only concerns the individual lifespan. Aging in the population structure comes from the decline in the number of young people being born. Shifts in ideas about affection, family and society are a byproduct of civilization's progress.

15.

The immigration problem now troubling Europe is, in effect, a fix for Europe's shortage of people. Historically, where it leads is unknowable; up close, you can of course read it as immigrants competing for Europe's welfare — the dividends of past development, the dividends of a position in the global division of labor. Opening up to immigration, as Europe has, brings its own problems; staying closed, as Japan has, only keeps pushing the problem back, perhaps until it can no longer be handled.

Europe is aging. In 2004, of the 20 countries in the world with the highest share of people over 60, every one but Japan was in Europe. Birthrates in many European countries fell far below their death rates. In Spain, Greece, Poland, Germany and Sweden, the average woman bore fewer than 1.4 children. In parts of Eastern Europe — Bulgaria, Latvia, Slovenia — the average was close to 1.1 children per woman, among the lowest fertility rates in the world. On that trajectory, by 2040 the population of many European countries will shrink by a fifth or more.

Tony Judt, Postwar

16.

Shock of Gray surveys the state of aging in the United States, Japan, China, Spain and elsewhere; every country differs in the details, but the trend is unavoidable. Fishman notes that Spanish women's life expectancy at birth is currently 84.4 years, and that by 2050 those 65 and older are projected to make up 37 percent of the population. Spain has also become a destination for Europe's retirees: in 2000, foreign-born residents made up 2 percent of Spain's population; today it's 12 percent. Japan's centenarian numbers tell their own story: 153 people in 1963; 32,300 in 2007; a projected one million by 2050. Japan's population over 65 is expected to reach 40 percent by 2050. Between 2008 and 2050, Japan's labor force is expected to shrink by a third, from 66.5 million to 42 million. By 2050, Japan's total population is projected to fall by 41 million. In China, the population aged 60 and older stood at 167 million in 2009 and is projected to reach 438 million by 2050.

The U.S. National Institute on Aging projects that the American population aged 75 to 85 will grow from 17 million in 2010 to 30 million by 2050, with the number of centenarians reaching 2.5 million. Every age bracket over 65 will grow faster than the general population, with the 85-and-older bracket growing the most as a proportion.

Ted Fishman, Shock of Gray

17.

By comparison, though, the median age of the U.S. population remains at a competitive level. That is a good thing. Against the world's fear of growing old, this American exception helps restore some confidence.

The U.S. population will grow from 280 million (in the early 21st century) to 350-400 million, and by 2050 to 400-550 million. In Western Europe, meanwhile, the population appears to be steadily declining — Estonia's prime minister has even asked the country's men to have sex more often. This imbalance will have major consequences for foreign policy. The United States is bound to focus more of its attention on the countries sending it immigrants — Mexico and Latin America — rather than on old Europe. The U.S. median age will hold at around 35 for the next 50 years, roughly the world median, meaning America is destined to stay younger than Europe and Japan. Europe's median age will rise from 38 to 53, and Japan's from 41 to 53. Europeans and Japanese will have to devote ever more resources to the elderly, and they will find their cultures dominated by people who are conformist and shy of risk.

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation (《右翼美国》/《右派国家》)

"Demography Is Destiny": From the Nuclear Family to Society, From Employment to Welfare

18.

The economic historian Robert Gordon says demography is destiny. The United States is not the country hit hardest by aging, but it is distinctive in this: for the last 30 years of the twentieth century, its culture, society and economy all turned around the Baby Boom generation. Their sheer share of the population, the volume of their voice and the depth and breadth of their influence on policy gave the whole country a Baby Boomer character. As they age and leave the stage, American society is bound to be rebuilt once again.

The Social Security system currently allows retirement at three ages — 62, 66 and 70 — so the impact of Baby Boomer retirements is relatively spread out, beginning in 2008 and extending to 2034. Other demographic issues include a shift in work patterns: the share of people over 55 choosing to keep working has risen, while labor-force participation has fallen among every age and gender group under 55. Taken together, Baby Boomer retirements and declining labor-force participation among younger groups reduce hours worked per capita, which means the rate of improvement in living standards, measured as output per person, must fall short of the growth rate of labor productivity, measured as output per hour. Roughly 10,000 Baby Boomers retire every day and begin drawing Medicare and Social Security benefits. In 1960, five working people supported the benefits of one retiree; by 2030, it will take only two working people to support one retiree. Anyone inclined to dismiss long-term budget forecasts should reread that last sentence. The retirement of 77 million Baby Boomers into the Social Security and Medicare systems is not a theoretical projection. Demography is destiny.

Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth. (The Rise and Fall of American Growth is one of QDaily's annual recommended books and will be introduced in its own separate piece.)

19.

Let's look further afield, at how — once industrial civilization drove a huge rise in average lifespan — the proposition that "demography is destiny" came to matter well beyond the economy and the labor force.

Over a century and a half, British mortality declined slowly. Between 1686 and 1871, British life expectancy rose from 31.8 to 41.3 years, then climbed rapidly, reaching 69.2 years by 1950. Total fertility rose only from 2.17 to 2.54 between 1688 and 1871. Re-examining late Malthusian theory, Cambridge historical demographers proposed that families strictly adjusted their size according to their income level: hence, between 1700 and 1850, women's average age at marriage fell from 25 to 22, and between 1771 and 1881, the average number of children raised per family rose from 5.7 to 6.2.

James Vernon, Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern

20.

Changes in the nuclear family drew the generations closer together.

Rapid population growth and mobility kept families and family life in a highly unstable state. In 1851, only 36 percent of households consisted of just a couple and their children; "44 percent of households included at least one outsider — a lodger, servant, visiting employee, guest or relative." Between 1750 and 1850, British households averaged five members; by 1950, that had fallen to around three. In 1851, the average British (middle-class) household size was just over six, while upper-class and lower-class households averaged just over seven and around five respectively. It was not until the twentieth century that the British family truly became the "nuclear family." In the 1880s, most extended relatives were stripped out of the household, and in the span of just two generations, the number of children per family fell from six to two. As family size and composition changed, so did its emotional dynamics. Children and parents grew closer to each other, and both lived longer than before. The share of children raised by single parents plummeted from 20 percent in 1741 to 3 percent two hundred years later. As rapid population growth and internal urban migration finally leveled off by the 1920s, these smaller but longer-lived family units also became more stable and increasingly independent of the extended family.

James Vernon, Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern

21.

To say that "maternal love," and even the very image of childhood, is also a product of industrial civilization may come as a shock. The historian Barbara Tuchman, in A Distant Mirror, her account of fourteenth-century France, uses the lens of "maternal love" to clear up some deeply entrenched ideas for us.

It is generally believed that maternal love, like sex, is too innate to be eradicated, but perhaps under certain unwelcome conditions it can atrophy. Infant mortality at the time was extremely high, estimated at a third to two-thirds. Given that, investing deep affection in a young child might not pay off, and so, through some natural mechanism (much as caged rodents stop breeding when overcrowded), maternal love may have been suppressed. Perhaps the sheer frequency of childbearing devalued each birth. A child was born, died, and was replaced by another.

Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror

22.

There is more. Tuchman also surveys the image of children in medieval literature — a grim fact: the child characters almost always die, and women rarely appear as mothers.

If a child survived to age seven, their recognized life began — more or less as a miniature adult. Childhood was already over. In medieval behavior, childishness stood out conspicuously, marking an inability to restrain impulses of any kind — and that childishness may owe to the fact that a very large share of this vigorous society was, in fact, very young. An estimated half the population was under 21, and about a third was under 14.

Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror

23.

Have we strayed too far? Back to the point. Social aging is not caused by longer human lives alone; it owes more to the falling birthrate. Because infant mortality has dropped and a child's survival is no longer in doubt, emotional investments like maternal love are no longer at risk of being lost to accident, and so a family no longer needs more children to hedge against risk. Love for children becomes more concentrated, unable or unwilling to be spread across more offspring, and that too lowers the desire to have them. Every culture, religion and ethnicity in the world faces the same thing: poverty is not why people are cautious about having children or have fewer of them. What raises the birthrate is the household's or the clan's demand for labor — the need for more family members earning money.

That raises a string of further questions: women's release from housework, since employment also cuts down the chances to bear children; education, since fewer children means education at a higher level, which also means education that takes longer; and, of course, the most important question of all, welfare.

We'll take these up one by one.

(To be continued)

Cover image: a still from the film Shoplifters, via Douban.