No resilience in low fertility

Only in more recent times have feeble attempts been made with material incentives for women to reproduce – the results have generally been insignificant and short-lived. China, which for decades has been legislating for its people to curb their reproduction, is now making efforts to encourage and resurrect the family structures that the Mao Tse-tung era did so much to undermine. The reason for this is that it has no way of introducing the social welfare measures needed to cater for an ageing population. The question many officials and China watchers are asking today is will China grow old before it grows rich?

The problem is further exacerbated by radical green groups who believe that declining birth rates leading eventually to smaller populations are a good thing and should be encouraged. The difficulty with this over-simplistic view is that population decline will not be steady and able to be halted at some acceptable figure – and in the meantime what do you do with vast number of the elderly most of whom will be demanding sophisticated and expensive methods of care to keep them with us as long as possible?

Some demographers are instead producing a nightmare scenario where population decline accelerates out of control leading to the breakdown of the ability of a modern society to maintain itself and the ultimate collapse of civilization – at least civilization as we know it.

We may be literally not breeding ourselves back to the Stone Age.

Beside this, the effects of climate change, earthquakes and the continued machinations of dictators who refuse to recognise when their time is up seem small indeed.

We can mitigate the effects of climate change, it simply requires the will to do so; we can rebuild after earthquakes and tsunamis, and dictators will eventually be removed either by external or internal movements.

But can we persuade the world's populations to breed again when we have created a society that does so much to encourage the opposite?

Can we persuade them to discard their poor diets and sedentary behaviour, when the siren songs of easy, comfortable living lure them to continue?

Answering these questions will give us the true measure of human resilience to the management of change – and it will not be long before we know just how capable we are.