For most of human history, population dynamics were “boring”: characterized by born a lot and live littlewith global fertility rates of seven children per woman, a life expectancy at birth that was barely around 30 years and infant mortality that decimated half of the children before the age of 10. That began to change about 250 years ago, as societies became more urban, there was more access to education, women joined the labor market and the rights of children and young people gained space in our ideals. As a result, fertility was declining and life expectancy was increasing, steadily.
The trend. In Argentina this process began at the beginning of the last century. Unlike other countries, our trajectory was quite bumpy, with ups and downs. In the first half of the 20th century, fertility fell rapidly (by about 50%), but between 1950 and the early 1980s we stagnated. During the 1990s it began to decline again, stopping again in the early 2000s and, surprisingly, between 2014 and 2023 there was the fastest decline in history. These comings and goings had in part to do with some public policies, but they are fundamentally the result of cultural and social changes.
The sharp decline of the last decade set off some alarms. However, in demography, as in other social sciences, the recent past is not a good predictor of the medium-term future and we should not assume that the trend will simply continue. The history of fertility in Argentina and what happened in other countries show that it is more likely that we will tend to stabilize around current values.
Mortality, for its part, decreased gradually throughout this period. At the end of the 19th century, life expectancy barely exceeded 30 years. In 1950 we had reached 60 and today we are close to 80. The improvements fundamentally had to do with the fact that, thanks to better nutrition, provision of drinking water, vaccines and medical services, we managed to greatly reduce the impact of infectious and communicable diseases, such as tuberculosis, measles, diarrhea or the flu. We were very successful in reducing mortality in the younger population. In 1950, nine out of every 100 born died before the age of 5; today we are below 1%. The future challenge is to improve living conditions and extend the longevity of the elderly.
Understanding what happened is important to think about what will happen in the future and what we can do about it. The Argentine population is changing and will continue to do so in the future. We know that we will not continue to grow as in the past (and it is even possible that the total population will decline slightly within a few decades) and that we will be older, with fewer children and more older adults. This is inevitable and we should not fight it, but rather take advantage of the opportunities it brings and adapt to reduce the risks. From the discussion about what happened, what we believe will happen and its impact on the well-being of the population and public policies, we can formulate some key points:
1.- The reduction in fertility and mortality is the greatest success in the history of humanity. It happened because we managed to defeat diseases that until not so long ago were incurable and caused the death of many of our children, and because we built more developed societies, with more education, well-being and equity, which led to us having better control over the size of our families.
2.-“Population policies” are rarely effective. Trying to reverse this process is not only a bad idea, but it would also be doomed to failure. Policies that seek to promote an increase in birth rates were very ineffective (with the exception of some cases where coercive measures unacceptable in democratic societies were implemented). This does not mean that implementing family protection policies (such as work licenses, care services, access to quality education) is a bad idea. These policies improve the quality of life for families, give many children opportunities to become productive citizens, and make life easier for those who want to have children, but we should not expect them to result in significant increases in total fertility.
3.- The key is to “get rich before we get old.” Demographic change implies important challenges for our societies, to which we must respond proactively. The working-age population will be proportionally smaller in the future, and to counteract this we need each worker to be much more productive. This is possible – the most developed countries did it – but it requires greatly improving the accumulation of human capital, physical capital and the adoption of technologies. Human capital depends on the quality of education, the physical capital of investments in the economy and the openness technology that we have to incorporate innovations in our companies. In all three dimensions we have had poor results in recent decades, we urgently need to reverse this.
4.- The decline in the birth rate is an opportunity to improve the quality of education. For the first time in history, education authorities do not need to hire more teachers or build more schools to absorb a growing student population. Fewer children are being born each year and that means that, now and in the near future, fewer children are entering schools. This allows resources to be reallocated, teachers better trained, more full-time schools offered, and other reforms that should result in better quality of learning, without the need to allocate more budget resources.
5.- Public policies must adapt to the new reality. Just as the demographic situation represents an opportunity for education, it also implies a significant challenge in other areas, such as health or social security. Health services in Argentina tend to focus on the treatment of acute events (that is, when we have a health crisis and we go to a hospital or clinic) but the changes mean that increasingly the care needs will be in relation to chronic and degenerative diseases, which require multidisciplinary and prolonged follow-up. Pension systems, for their part, were designed decades ago in a different demographic context and the serious problems they have (such as their cost, inequities and inefficiencies) will tend to worsen as the population ages.
Conclusions. In summary, Argentina and the world are in a new demographic era, a product of development and social advances. What we see today is the fruit of centuries of progress, we must celebrate it and congratulate ourselves for having achieved it. But that doesn’t mean the future is risk-free. The task is not to try to return to a past of high birth rates, but rather to take advantage of the opportunities and respond to the challenges that this new reality presents to us. Doing so, for better and worse, is up to us.
*Economist and demographer, principal researcher at CIPPEC.
by Rafael Rofman
