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For thousands of years, human population numbers barely budged, increasing by just 0.04 percent a year between 10,000 BCE and 1700 AD, according to Our World in Data.

Then, as the Industrial Revolution and its resulting increase in human life expectancy began to spread around the world, population began growing exponentially, leading to the hockey-stick graph to end all hockey-stick graphs.

Graph showing global population over human history Courtesy of Our World in Data

Today, Sciubba writes, the world is on the precipice of 8 billion people, meaning that those alive today “represent around 7 percent of the 108 billion who have ever taken a breath.”

But the days of exponential growth are already behind us. In China, still the world’s most populous country, the number of babies born has fallen for five straight years, despite the government’s repealing of its one-child policy.

In South Korea, the birth rate has dropped to a record low 0.92, and in 2020 the country’s population fell for the first time in its history. In the US — which has long been more fertile than many of its developed peers — the fertility rate is already well below the replacement level of 2.1 children, and will likely continue falling.

While countries in sub-Saharan Africa still have huge and growing young populations and much higher fertility rates than more developed countries, the slowdown is universal, with “fertility trending downward pretty much everywhere,” Sciubba told me in an interview. We know we’re headed toward a world with smaller families and older people — and eventually, fewer of them.

Why? That’s a trickier question. Sciubba notes that while demography is the study of large-scale population changes, “at the end of the day it’s about individual people — just aggregated.” And individual people around the world — responding to shifting economic, cultural, and even religious factors — have made the decision to have fewer or even no children.

Governments can and will try to influence those decisions in a desired direction, but Sciubba told me that public policy — whether anti-natalist like China’s coercive one- child law or pro-natalist like the many countries that now pay citizens to have children — has generally taken a back seat to individual preference. Policies “may accelerate things for a time, but it doesn’t work” over the long term, she said.

Old World, young world

If the global trend is largely moving in a single direction — fewer children — the impacts of changing demographics in the 21st century will be anything but shared.

Developed nations will be forced to grapple with the consequences of an aging and eventually falling population — Japan, Sciubba writes, “could eventually disappear altogether” if current trends hold. They’ll need to figure out how to keep their economies functioning with an ever-shrinking pool of young, productive workers, a problem no nation has ever faced before.

But even as fertility is expected to continue to fall, many nations in the global South still have decades of exponential population growth in front of them. Sub-Saharan Africa’s population is projected to grow sixfold over the 21st century, while by 2050 countries like Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo will likely be among the world’s 10 most populous countries.

Those burgeoning young populations could be an economic boon for the world’s poorest region. The East Asian economic miracle was built in part by a demographic transition that led to a huge pool of young workers, greatly expanding per-capita productive capacity. We can hope that the 21st century’s dwindling number of young countries could enjoy the same demographic dividend.

There’s no guarantee, though. If young workers can’t be put to good use, that dividend can become a penalty. Many of the world’s youngest countries are also among the most fragile and the most susceptible to the worst effects of climate change. Masses of young people with little to do is a historic recipe for instability.

We need to move

If government policy is unlikely to significantly change the choices individuals make around reproduction, it can help soften the effects of demographic change. Sciubba suggests that aging, developed nations could raise retirement ages, reduce benefits, increase the percentage of the population that works, and increase immigration — all fairly controversial policies.

The last option is especially fraught. If the future is one of empty rich nations and overflowing poor ones, allowing far more people to move from the global South to the North could address both challenges. Think of it as globalization, just for people.

The problem, as Sciubba notes, is politics. Even in an age of unprecedented refugee flows, migration remains rare — as of 2015, just 3.3 percent of the world’s population was living outside the country where they were born. Political barriers to migration are mostly rising, not falling.

“While it makes sense on paper that we would do with people what we do with capital, and have them flow freely to where they would get the most bang for our buck, economic concerns are not the top concerns,” Sciubba told me. “It’s always politics.”

Every day, we actively choose to bring about the future we will have. Choosing to have fewer children is in many ways, as Sciubba notes, “a sign of human progress,” the result of the fact that many of us can have far more confidence that a child born today will make it to adulthood than our ancestors had through most of history. How the world deals with the consequences of those decisions will be a choice as well.

A version of this story was initially published in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe!

  1. “So that’s why instead of taking a gradualist approach, we’re prepared to start with sanctions at the top of our escalation ladder and stay there.”

    Just two days after Russia’s invasion, the US, the European Commission, and major European countries imposed sanctions on Russia’s Central Bank. The next day, Japan joined. The central banks of petro-states like Venezuela and Iran have been sanctioned before, but a country the size of Russia took it to a whole new level. And since then, new sanctions are being rolled out almost every week against individuals, companies, and banks. Russia’s energy sector is perhaps the last arena that the US has yet to comprehensively sanction with its partners and allies. All told, 30 countries that consist of more than half of the global economy have joined the coalition.

    The Biden administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity emphasized that major Russian financial and banking institutions have been sanctioned without causing major global disruptions. “We’ve really carefully kicked the tires on these measures before we’ve done them,” the official said. “We’ve managed this in a way that has been remarkably effective at minimizing collateral costs.”

    The central bank sanctions had to have been prepared methodically and well in advance, says Daniel Fried, a former ambassador to Poland who coordinated sanctions on Russia in Obama’s State Department. “And I thought, ‘Damn, they’re good,’” he told me.

    In 2014, Fried traveled Europe with Singh, then a senior Treasury official, in advancing sanctions against Russia during its initial invasion of Ukraine. “Jack Lew, the Treasury secretary, basically sent Daleep [Singh] on my delegation to make sure that ‘Wild Man’ Fried wouldn’t trash the world financial system with my sanctions on Russia,” said Fried, who then quickly realized that Singh was a huge asset and supported his work.

    Lew told me the Treasury Department had studied “how Russia was interconnected to the European global economy” to ensure that sanctions didn’t kick off a recession. “State was pushing to do more, and Treasury was making the case to do it in a surgically targeted way, to have the maximum impact you’re looking for with the minimum unintended consequences that could undermine the whole effort,” Lew said.

    The combined effort put pressure on Putin that, according to Lew, brought Russia to the negotiating table and culminated in the 2014 Minsk agreement. “If State and Treasury are knit up, who’s gonna stop us?” Fried added.

    Now, the stakes are higher. The sanctions against Russia aren’t just about Ukraine, but may impact the future of sanctions — a coercive tool that policymakers think might be the route of first resort in a potential conflict against China. Julie Friedlander, a former career Treasury official, said that if sanctions fail to achieve Biden’s goals in Europe, new questions will be raised about the tool. “Can we really pretend to have faith in this kind of maximum pressure and financial sanctions again?” she said. “Maybe we have to realize that we’ve been barking up the wrong tree.”

    Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP via Getty Images
    Pedestrians walk past a screen displaying Russian President Vladimir Putin during a news broadcast about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in Tokyo, Japan, on May 4.

    It’s also not been articulated yet what lifting sanctions would look like. Singh said last month that “we’re not at the point at which we’re talking about sanctions relief.” And an administration official declined to speculate about what circumstances might lead to sanctions being lifted. Limited congressional oversight means the president is not required to spell out goals, say how the administration is tracking them, or describe humanitarian fallout from sanctions.

    Critics worry that the administration is overselling how effective sanctions will be. In March, for example, Rosenberg spoke to anti-money laundering (AML) specialists. She went so far as to say, “The fate of Ukrainian democracy and the strength of democracies to push back against autocracy writ large depends on whether we do our jobs — and whether you do AML and Russian sanctions compliance work well.”

    Unintended consequences of sanctions

    Those who praise the Biden administration’s coordination of sanctions also express concern about their unintended consequences. “I do think that no one has really had the time to plan out what the longer-term implications are going to be of essentially annihilating the Russian economy,” Friedlander, now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told me.

    The truth is that Russia will adapt — it already has, and the ruble has begun to bounce back.

    Research indicates that sanctions aren’t a very effective tool unless formulated within a broader foreign policy strategy. A 2019 report from the Government Accountability Office found that government agencies aren’t great at assessing whether sanctions are working. “We need more accountability around sanctions policy — when and how they’re successful,” said Michael Wahid Hanna of the International Crisis Group.

    “US and European policymakers have never clearly defined how weakening or diminishing the economic welfare of ordinary people creates the conditions for a possible political or diplomatic resolution to something as significant as a military conflict,” said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj of the economic research institution Bourse & Bazaar Foundation.

    The intensive sanctions on Russia will also change the way countries think about the free movement of capital. Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute for International Economics has argued that these sanctions on Russia will have a corrosive effect on the world economy that might result in the “end of globalization.”

    Above all, the humanitarian effects may be staggering and could elevate international food prices by up to 22 percent, with vulnerable people bearing most of the war’s costs. As a result of US sanctions, Iranians suffered from limited access to medicine, especially early in the pandemic. In Venezuela, sanctions contributed to the collapse of the health care system.

    Humanitarian exemptions are built into sanctions for foods, agricultural items, and medicines, as well as licenses for some international organizations and nonprofit groups to operate in Russia. “Even so, they don’t always work to mitigate those unintended impacts in the way that the designers and implementers of sanctions law or executive orders intend,” a Democratic congressional aide told me.

    Lew explained that sanctions at this level will inevitably hurt Russians. “When you’re in a war, like the war that Russia has created here, it’s impossible to protect all the quote-unquote innocent people, and there’s a question of what innocent means when your country is doing things like that,” he told me.

    Dmitri Lovetsky/AP
People stand in line to withdraw US dollars and euros from an ATM in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 25. Ordinary Russians faced the prospect of higher prices and crimped foreign travel as Western sanctions hit.

Since OFAC is so understaffed, former Treasury officials explained, it can be difficult to create enough licenses and waivers for humanitarian reasons.

The humanitarian consequences “can never be a secondary issue,” said Adeyemo, who says he and his team are “thinking about how we can get more consistency around our humanitarian carve-outs.”

Banks tend to overcomply with sanctions: they want to avoid potential hits to their reputations, and are generally overcautious. More than 250 companies have already left Russia, including airlines, banks, consulting firms, and retailers. One bank executive told me that they were working 15-hour days since December to understand the overlapping layers of Biden’s sanctions.

There are concerns the humanitarian fallout becomes collateral or peripheral to the immediate crisis. “If you really want to amp the pressure up as much as possible, you’re obviously going to affect the population,” Friedlander said. So when the Biden administration announces that they’ve taken the humanitarian dynamic into account, as the White House often does in press releases, it’s only part of the story. “You’ve taken it into account but then you bagged it,” she explained. “And then you try to mitigate it afterward.”

Narges Bajoghli, an anthropologist at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who is writing a book on sanctions, says the fact that the sanctions team uses military terminology suggests that the humanitarian consequences are, to some extent, intentional.

“It’s similar to the way in which the humanitarian aspect is thought about in some ways in a hot war situation,” she said, “where, yes, it’s unfortunate, but it’s a necessary byproduct of going up against the state.”

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