Niall Ferguson: China’s Demographics Spell Decline Not Domination

As I've been telling you for two decades now.

NOTE: I called this correctly two decades ago. Now Niall Ferguson and the United Nations are saying it. — RDM

by Niall Ferguson
August 14, 2022

Demography isn’t destiny. If population size was history’s major determinant, China might have conquered Europe in the 15th century, and Britain certainly would not have conquered India in the 18th.

Little countries are capable of great things. Wee Scotland, the population of which was perhaps 1.3 million in the mid-18th century, made an outsized contribution to the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of the British Empire. Big countries can amount to very little. By population, Indonesia is the world’s fourth-largest country. But most Americans are barely aware of its existence.

Nor is population growth always a good thing, particularly in the absence of gains in productivity that keep a rapidly procreating people from starving. Yet population decline is rarely good news. The rise of Britain and then the US to positions of g…