The Next 100 Years

the popul ation bust and the way we live
What does all this have to do with international power in the twenty- first 
century? The population bust affects all nations, as we will see in later chap­
ters. But it also affects the life cycles of people within these nations. Lower 
populations affect everything from the number of troops that can fight in 
a war to how many people there are in the workforce to internal political 
conflicts. The process we are talking about will affect more than just the 
number of people in a country. It will change how those people live, and 
therefore how those countries behave. 
Let’s start with three core facts. Life expectancy is moving toward a high 
of eighty years in the advanced industrial world; the number of children 
women have is declining; and it takes longer and longer to become edu­
cated. A college education is now considered the minimum for social and 
economic success in advanced countries. Most people graduate from college 
at twenty- two. Add in law or graduate school, and people are not entering 
the workforce until their mid- twenties. Not everyone follows this pattern, 
of course, but a sizable portion of the population does and that portion in­
cludes most of those who will be part of the political and economic leader­
ship of these countries. 
As a result, marriage patterns have shifted dramatically. People are put­
ting off marriage longer and are having children even later. Let’s consider 
the effect on women. Two hundred years ago, women started having chil­
dren in their early teens. Women continued having children, nurturing them, 
and frequently burying them until they themselves died. This was necessary 
for the family’s well- being and that of society. Having and raising children 
was what women did for most of their lives. 
In the twenty- first century this whole pattern changes. Assuming that a 
woman reaches puberty at age thirteen and enters menopause at age fifty, 
she will live twice as long as her ancestors and will for over half her life be in­
capable of reproduction. Let’s assume a woman has two children. She will 
spend eighteen months being pregnant, which is roughly 2 percent of her 
life. Now assume a fairly common pattern, which is that the woman will 
have these two children three years apart, that each child enters school at the 

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age of five, and that the woman returns to work outside the home when the 
oldest starts school. 
The total time the woman is engaged in reproduction and full- time nur­
turing is eight years of her life. Given a life expectancy of eighty years, the 
amount of time exclusively devoted to having and raising children will be 
reduced to an astounding 10 percent of her life. Childbearing is reduced from 
a woman’s primary activity to one activity among many. Add to this analysis 
the fact that many women have only one child, and that many use day care 
and other mass nurturing facilities for their children well before the age of 
five, and the entire structure of a woman’s life is transformed. 
We can see the demographic roots of feminism right here. Since women 
spend less of their time having and nurturing children, they are much less 
dependent on men than even fifty years ago. For a woman to reproduce 
without a husband would have created economic disaster for her in the past. 
This is no longer the case, particularly for better- educated women. Marriage 
is no longer imposed by economic necessity. 
This brings us to a place where marriages are not held together by need 
as much as by love. The problem with love is that it can be fickle. It comes 
and goes. If people stay married only for emotional reasons, there will in­
evitably be more divorce. The decline of economic necessity removes a pow­
erful stabilizing force in marriage. Love may endure, and frequently does, 
but by itself it is less powerful than when linked to economic necessity. 
Marriages used to be guaranteed “till death do us part.” In the past, that