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Mercator: a prophetic voice on demographic winter
March 09, 2025
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Nearly 15 years ago now, in a dingy Turkish cafe, a friend asked me if I was interested in editing a blog about demography. I agreed, perhaps because I was still at the stage of life when I said “yes” to things and also because I thought he’d said “democracy”. I knew something about democracy, I lived in one after all, but demography?
What intrigued me about the brief given to me by Mercator’s editor, Michael, was that he wanted to focus on a story that he thought was not getting enough attention: looming demographic winter. Many countries were facing sustained population decline due to below-replacement birth rates. In peacetime, this is historically rare (if not unprecedented), especially on the scale the world is now experiencing.
Lone voice
Oddly, despite the far-reaching consequences of such statistics, no one in the media was talking about it. The man on the street didn’t seem to know anything about it. Instead, the dominant narrative was still largely influenced by The Population Bomb concerns of the 1960s and '70s. Malthus and Ehrlich’s overpopulation scaremongering still loomed large. At that time, we would scour the web for current demographic stories and find almost none but our own.
Thus, for ten years, my wife Shannon and I wrote about 1,000 pieces for Mercator, trying to highlight the new demographic world that was unfolding. Our pieces largely focused on deeply important and concerning topics such as demographic collapse in South Korea, Japan and Spain, the global trends emerging in the 21st century and the economic effects of an ageing population.
However, we also wrote lighter, quirkier pieces. It is these pieces that stick in my memory and were often the most enjoyable to write. In 2015 I wrote about the Japanese “Village of the Dolls”, where elderly residents had replaced the village’s missing children with 160 life-sized dolls. As The Guardian reported:
“Children sit behind their desks in a classroom, gazes fixed on their teacher; a group of elderly people chat while they wait for the bus; on the riverbank, a teenage boy in a baseball cap leans against a pile of chopped wood.”
After re-reading that, it’s probably not surprising that I remember it still – how creepy does that village sound? If my car broke down there, I’m pretty sure I’d walk to the next village to ask for help…
Shannon and I really enjoyed the time we spent writing for Mercator, and enjoyed Michael’s cheerful tone and sharp wit as its long-time editor. For our part, we hope we had at least a little impact on the global demographic debate. Just last week I saw a wonderfully colourful interactive map (I still love a good map!) showing the projected population decline of Europe by 2100 on the front page of The Guardian. It reported that without inward migration, the EU’s population will fall by more than a third by the end of this century. And there was no mention of Malthus or The Population Bomb anywhere. There are other voices on the demographic scene now, thank goodness, and it is heartening to see.
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Marcus Roberts writes from Auckland, New Zealand. He was the co-editor of Demography is Destiny.
Image: Pexels
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