Chapters 1 and 2 traced, articulated and critically engaged with two distinct British left positions on Europe: one that supports what we have termed a market Europe and the other that opposes membership in any integrative project. The former owes much to the gradual accommodation to capitalism of the British left, particularly within the Labour Party. Labour's acquiescence peaked with its Third Way ideology that came to inform the turn to Blairism and New Labour. The latter, rooted in a left Euroscepticism, can be traced back to at least the 1970s and 1980s, led by prominent figures on the hard left and old right of Labour such as Tony Benn and Peter Shore. Such positions re-emerged amid Brexit in, respectively, elements of Corbynism and a more socially conservative Blue Labour.

To summarize, both perspectives – the former implicitly, the latter much more explicitly – tend to reject the idea that the EU can operate as an effective locus of resistance to the distributional costs of neoliberal globalization. The market Europe position understates the need for the EU to confront those costs, whereas the against Europe position places its faith in the British nation-state as the appropriate site of any such confrontation. In contrast to both, and without being naive about the challenges of reforming the extant EU, we suggest that sole reliance on the British state is a dead end for the left. The EU both can and should be repurposed, not only to manage but to actively ameliorate and sometimes resist the excesses of a globalization, which is in any case presently morphing into something different to what is conventionally thought of as the neoliberal variant (see Bishop & Payne 2021a). As such, the British left must, from our perspective, look beyond these two positions to shape its Europe policy. In so doing it must look to re-establish closer relations with the EU, especially European progressive parties and actors. But it should also actively develop a vision for Europe, including for reshaping the extant EU. While remaining clear-headed about the difficulties of such reform (discussed in Chapter 2), this chapter seeks to make the case that the British left, including the post-Brexit British left, should champion closer relations with, and ultimately membership in, a reformed social Europe.

We can see from Figure 1.1 that the rapid increase in population in stages 2 and 3 of the DT begins to lessen as fertility rates decline. The birth rate levels off and can even decline as women, for a variety of reasons, have fewer children. But the legacy of the population spurt continues to flow through the population pyramid, first as a youth bulge, then as an increase in the middle aged, and finally into a top-heavy, aged and ageing population. In this chapter we examine these different bulges, including the youth bulge and the gender bulge and the possibility of a demographic dividend.

THE YOUTH BULGE

Population surges work their way through the demographic pyramid to create distinct bulges. The rapid increase in births because of a decline in infant mortality creates a larger than average cohort. At first, it is a large cohort of babies that then ages into a large youth cohort. Take the case of Jamaica. In 2001, the country's largest ten-year cohort was aged 0–10. This created a high youth dependency ratio with a consequent drag on economic performance as resources had to be devoted to a largely non-productive population. By 2011 birth rates had fallen and the largest cohort was now 10–20, and then 20–30 in 2021 as the baby boom turned into a youth bulge.

The youth bulge is generally considered a larger than average cohort aged between 15 and 29. This is an age when many people are either still at home or just starting their independent lives. There has been a lot of theorizing about this youth bulge. Revolutions and major social upheavals tend to tend occur more often with large proportions of young, frustrated men. Young people tend to have more energy than older people, and they often have less commitment to the existing order, being less bound by tradition and often critical of their elders. They are the basic raw material of social revolution and political violence. The German sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn (2021) was perhaps the first to promote the notion that an excess of young people, especially young males, leads to a greater tendency for social unrest, war and terrorism.

On the other side of the DT life was more fleeting. Most people lived directly off the land and were more reliant on the bounty of the earth and subject to the fluctuations in ecological conditions. This other world, in comparison to ours, had slower rates of growth, lower life expectancy and higher mortality rates, especially among children. It was a time of population vulnerability. The population lived on a knife's edge as even small deteriorations in living conditions could easily reduce population levels very quickly and sometimes almost to the point of annihilation. Rapid and large-scale population loss leads to the undermining of the basic functioning of society as lives were lost, keystone societal positions remained unfilled and cultural practices were wrecked. In this chapter I show how the consequences of this pre-transition demography shaped and continue to shape our present world.

THE GENETIC LEGACY OF POPULATION BOTTLENECKS

One legacy is that genetic characteristics of today's population are a result of previous bottlenecks. Population bottlenecks occur when there is a marked decline in the overall size of the population. They become more important the smaller and more isolated the population. Bottlenecks are caused by war and famine, disease, pandemics and the collapse of environmental support systems.

It is now generally agreed that the human population originated in Africa. From 100,000 years ago, small groups of migrants left Africa in successive waves to settle the world. It is estimated that fewer than 6,000 people were part of the first wave. They constituted just a small part of the genetic diversity of the total African population. The difference remains to this day so that the farther a traditional group lives away from Africa the less the genetic diversity. Ashraf and Galor (2013) propose an interesting idea: that there is an optimum level of diversity for long-term economic growth. Too much genetic diversity, as in the case of Africa, can lead to lack of cooperation. Too little diversity, as the case of the Americas, can lead to lower levels of innovation. They tested their hypothesis on conditions before colonialism, to concentrate on endogenous rather than exogenous factors, and used population density as a proxy for the level of development. They concluded that an increase in diversity in more homogeneous societies and a decrease in more heterogeneous societies led to an increase in population density.

Between 1800 and 1850 the human experience began to change. Before 1800, life was short and few made it into what we would now consider old age. Most women spent much of their life having and caring for children. The total human population was small, and with high mortality rates and low life expectancy, population growth was slow. After around 1850, major changes occurred, at first slowly and only in the richer countries, then more quickly as the transition diffused across the globe. Mortality rates declined, women had fewer children, people lived longer and the population increased.

Three basic statistics make the point. In 1700, the global average life expectancy was only 27 years of age; the global average fertility rate was six children per woman and only 4 per cent of the world's population was aged over 65. By 2020, the average life expectancy was 72 years of age, the average fertility rate was 2.4 and 9 per cent of the population was aged over 65. People lived longer, fertility rates fell and the population aged. This change is referred to as the ‘demographic transition’ or sometimes as the DT model. Remember, it is a model that simplifies the complex reality of the world. Demographic patterns before 1800 were more complex than the model posits. There were periods of rapid growth. In England, in the eighteenth century, as Tony Wrigley and colleagues have shown, there was a marked increase in marriage fertility and a consequent increase in population growth and in total population (Wrigley & Schofield 1989; Wrigley et al. 1997). War and famine reduced the population while peace and prosperity allowed population levels to rebound and grow.

There were also variations over space. Studies of both Belgium and Spain, for example, uncovered different fertility levels by region in the past and more recently. The differences are in part a result of varying levels of secularization, which is a reminder that variations in local cultures can produce marked differences in fertility levels (Lesthaeghe 1977; Lesthaeghe & Lopez- Gay 2013).

There are two important features to point out. First, there were and still are vast social differences behind global and even national averages. The rich tend to live longer than the poor.

The aim of this book is to reveal the demographic forces that shape our modern world and evaluate the policies that have been devised to control and affect these forces.

The term demography was first used in a book by the Belgian Achille Guillard, published in 1855 under the title Elements de statistique humaine ou demographie comparee (Elements of Human Statistics or Comparative Demography). The term is now commonly used to refer to important trends such as rising population, ageing population and changes in life expectancy and birth rate. Demography is also a flourishing academic discipline producing a statistically sophisticated body of work. This book draws heavily on the work of professional demographers, clarified for a more general audience. However, the focus of this book is less on the statistical modelling of population trends and more on their economic, political and social implications.

Demographers sometimes use the term “vital statistics” to refer to population-related numbers. “Vital” has many meanings, but, for me, two stand out from the Oxford English Dictionary's (OED) numerous definitions: “Imparting life or vigor” and “Supreme importance”. The vital statistics of a society are, as the OED definitions imply, of “supreme importance”. They are not simple reflections of social forces; they impart the life and vigour that help direct these changes. They are not just dependent variables. They are independent variables that play a significant role in shaping specific societies and global trends. Demography, in other words, is of great importance, perhaps best summed up in the phrase “Demography as Destiny”. It is often attributed to Auguste Comte (1798–1857), but no formal citation has ever been found. Demography may in fact be destiny, but not in a simple mechanistic way. The relationships are often more subtle and elusive to the shallow analysis. We need to delve below the surface to reveal demography's powerful influence. But we should be wary of too mechanistic a narrative. The book avoids the simple causal argument that demography is the major source of all social changes but instead shows the complex interactions between social and demographic processes. The book highlights how demography is important but avoids the simplistic notion that it is a predetermined destiny.

In stages 4 and 5 of the DT, birth rates fall further and average life expectancy extends. The baby boom of previous generations has moved through the demographic dividend and become an older population. This shift poses both new opportunities and challenges for all societies but especially those that do not have a strong social safety net. The richer countries have more resources to cope with a greying population.

FALLING BIRTH RATES

The total fertility rate (TFR) is defined as the average number of children born to each woman. It is also more commonly known as the birth rate. The population is stable with a birth rate of 2.1, which is considered the replacement rate. Higher than this leads to population growth, lower means population decline.

One of the most significant and globally widespread demographic changes is the decline of birth rates. Figure 6.1 shows the global trend. The birth rate has been dropping for the past 70 years. In 1963 the global birth rate was 5.3 births per women. By 2020 it had fallen to 2.3 births per woman and by 2050 it is estimated to drop to 2.1, approximately replacement level. At that stage population growth will stabilize. Of course, there is tremendous variation across the globe. There are still significantly regions with high birth rates. In 2020, in Nigeria, Somalia and Chad, for example, there were over six births per woman. The figure for Niger was eight, making it the country with a highest percentage, almost 57 per cent, of its total population aged under 18.

In many other regions the birth rate has plummeted below replacement level. There are now at least 72 countries where the birth rate is below 2.1, whereas there were none in 1950. South Korea has the lowest birth rate at 0.78. Countries below the replacement level include Bangladesh (2.0), Sri Lanka (2.0), Vietnam (1.9), El Salvador (1.8), Brazil (1.6), the United Sates (1.64), the UK (1.56), Japan (1.34) and Italy (1.24).

This declining fertility is the main reason behind the slowing down of population growth and, in association with increased life expectancy, the greying of the population.

Look again at Figure 2.1, where you can see that stages 2 and 3 of the DT initially involve a rapid decline in death rates while birth rates remain high. Then, death rates decline as birth rates start to slow down. The two stages combined are associated with a rapid rise in total population. This occurred first in the global North, then, by the last half of the twentieth century, in the global South. In this chapter, we consider the dynamics and consequences of this expanding population.

DECLINING INFANT MORTALITY

A dramatic change resulted from the decline in infant and youth mortality. This is an important demographic variable because up until the mid-twentieth century, infant mortality rates were responsible for almost half of total mortality. Infant mortality measures those who died in their first year of life. Youth mortality measures those who died before reaching the age of 15. Throughout most of human history, almost half of newborns died in the first year of life, and for those that survived around 50 per cent died as youths. Today, the global infant mortality rate is 4.3 per cent and under 5 per cent for youth mortality. It is a staggering decrease and is a major reason for rapid population growth. Figure 4.1 depicts the rapid fall-off in rates in just one country, the UK.

There was a historical and geographical dimension to these fundamental demographic changes. The decline of child mortality occurred first in the global North in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, while it mainly took effect in the global South much later, in the final third of the twentieth century. Some statistics reveal these differences. Even as late as 1990, the child mortality rate in Burkina Faso was almost 19.8 per cent while it was only 1.2 per cent in the USA. But by 2017, Burkina Faso's rate was only 8.1 per cent and it was below 1 per cent in the USA

Newborn babies and youths are particularly vulnerable to a variety of diseases and ailments. But with adequate care and attention they can survive, and with improved survival rates the population can climb very quickly. The main reason behind the fall in infant mortality was the improvements in health and nutrition. We can look at just one example to stand in for many.

Demography plays an important although often hidden role in contemporary global change. In this chapter I examine some of the ways in which demography is entangled in certain significant shifts in the global order: climate, political economy and geopolitics.

DEMOGRAPHY AND CLIMATE CHANGE

Because of the importance of human activity in shaping earth systems, some commentators have described a new geological age, the Anthropocene. Increasing population with growing per capita environmental impact has transformed the world. We have cleared the forests, reduced habitats and diminished biological diversity. And because of our use of fossil fuels, we have modified the climate. Our planet is warming to such an extent that we can identify a new subcategory of the Anthropocene: the Pyrocene.

Demography plays an important role in this new era. In one sense it has created the new era. The steady increase in global population in association with a large and an increasing per capita carbon footprint has generated enough greenhouse gases to change the climate regime to one that is warmer and more vulnerable to extreme climate events. The 100-year flood turns into a five-year flood, punishingly hot summers become commonplace and the once in a generation hurricane becomes a more regular event.

The current demographic distribution of population was based on a different climate regime. A world in which major floods were irregular events and extreme warming in many regions was rare. The current population distribution is now faced with a different set of conditions. These include but are not limited to the very rapid warming in cold latitudes, extreme warming in the mid-latitudes and a greater risk of sea level rise and flooding in river basins and coastal regions around the world. The current global population distribution was better suited to past climate regimes and is now faced with greater vulnerability because of the greater frequency of extreme weather events. It has resulted in various forms of climate refugee population movements. In Bangladesh, for example, residents are being flooded out from many of the rural areas by more powerful monsoonal rains and greater glacial melting from the Himalayas washing away their farmland.

GETTING OLDER

The world's population is getting older. In 1970, the global median age was 20. Fifty years later it had increased to 30. There are still “youthful” countries such as Niger with a median age of 14.5 years of age, a figure that has held constant over the last two decades. Compare that with Japan's 48.4. The ageing of the population is prevalent in countries with very low birth rates, low immigration rates and/or high emigration rates. Table 7.1 highlights the super-aged countries with a large percentage of the population aged over 65. They include Japan (29.9 per cent) and Italy (24.1 per cent). Japan's median age in 1950 was 20.2 and has effectively doubled. Italy's median age almost doubled from 27.5 in 1950 to 46.8 in 2020. Aged countries now include most of East Asia, Europe, North and South America and Australasia. While most rich countries are ageing, some are ageing faster than others, with East Asian and European countries ageing faster than the USA. By 2050, South Korea will have 39.6 per cent of people aged over 65 to overtake Japan's predicted 37.5 per cent. By 2050, almost 33 per cent of the population of Germany and Italy will be aged over 65, but only 21 per cent for the USA.

From 1950 to 2100, the world's population aged over 65 will rise from 5 per cent to over 16 per cent. Across the globe, population profiles are shifting from population pyramids to population pillars (see Figure 7.1). In the case of Japan, the profile has changed from a broad-based pyramid to an overhanging cliff. The country's population pyramid is shown in Figure 7.2.

Countries with the highest old-age dependency ratio – the number of people older than 64 relative to the number in the working population aged 14–64 – include Japan at 50.9 per cent, Italy at 37.1 and Finland at 37.1. Across much of Europe the figure rarely dips below 30 per cent whereas in 1950 it rarely peaked above 15 per cent.

In this chapter I consider a selection of important demographic narratives that are often framed as moral panics. Demographic narratives are stories about demographic issues that inform public opinion and debates. A moral panic has been defined as a widespread feeling of fear that is commonly an exaggerated response to social issues. Moral panics often work their way through the media and moral entrepreneurs to influence public opinion. They take social concerns to the level of threat to the existing order. In this chapter I look at how some demographic narratives blend into moral panics. I examine four in particular: global “overpopulation”, the “right” composition of national populations, the “threat” of specific cohorts and the idea of a decline of “family values”.

OVERPOPULATION

In 1968 an entomologist at Stanford University, Paul Ehrlich, published a book called The Population Bomb. It became a bestseller; millions of copies were sold, and it became a very influential text for people trying to understand global demography. It was co-written with his wife Anne Ehrlich, but her name was dropped from the final text. The book was less a measured analysis and more a polemic with incendiary remarks such as “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” and that “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate”. With this doomsday scenario of overpopulation leading to famine, pollution and social and ecological collapse, it moved up the bestseller list and had an influence on popular opinion that persists today. It heightened concerns about rapid population growth, especially in what was then called the Third World (what we would now call the global South).

Apart for the lack of social sensitivity and the inability to see human population dynamics as different from animal populations (a form of the biologizing of human behaviour common among other sociobiologists such as E. O. Wilson), it had a racial bias. The problem was configured as: there were too many people from the so-called Third World. The population problem, in this reading, was in effect too many Black and Brown people overwhelming not only their own societies but the earth's ability to cope.

POOR, NASTY, BRUTISH AND SHORT

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is credited with the description of life as “poor, nasty, brutish and short”. It was a pithy description employed to highlight a life lived outside of society and part of his argument for a social contract to ensure social peace. In contrast to the lauding of the state of nature by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who argued we are born free but everywhere in chains, Hobbes posited the need for a social contract because, in a state of nature, there would be “[n]o arts, no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. His last four adjectives could well be used to describe the lot of most people before the DT. It was a time of high infant mortality, low life expectancy, poor nutrition and inadequate medical care. When Hobbes published his book Leviathan in 1651, from which the quotes are taken, the average life expectancy in England was 43 years, and six out of ten children died before they reached adulthood. Women gave birth to between five and eight children and in most cases only reared four to early adulthood. One in eight women died giving birth.

Population growth was slow and subject to fluctuations as failed harvests, social chaos, war and disruption could increase mortality. The Black Death and the Little Ice Age led to population decreases across the globe with instances of very marked population decline at the more regional level.

There were cultural consequences of this demographic situation. Death was a common presence; many children died in childbirth and people did not live very long. Our ancestors were surrounded by death in their everyday lives. The presence of death did not make the loss any less wrenching. Traditional societies had complex mourning rituals to cope with the loss of loved ones. Australian Aborigines, for example, had weeks, sometimes months, of ceremonies and rituals, called “sorry business”. But the constant presence of death meant that it could never be ignored and had to be accommodated into cultural practices and belief systems.

Nudging is a subtle, but surprisingly controversial, technique for changing people's behaviours. This may seem like an unusual time to write a book about nudging. The formal practices of nudging have been around for over a decade (they have been informally present for much, much longer). “Nudge Units” and associated initiatives have been established in over a hundred states and nudges are an accepted part of the policy world. Despite being well established, the value of nudging is being challenged from various perspectives. Some question whether subtle nudges are up to the task of tackling the daunting global political, economic, socio-cultural and environmental challenges of our age (Pedwell 2022). Others have cast doubt on the scientific insights on which nudging is predicated. In these contexts, it is to be expected that readers may think one of two things (or maybe even two of two things): everything that needs to be said about nudging has already been articulated; and why write about something which may already be outdated?

We claim that while much has been written about the pros and cons of nudging there is significant uncertainty about its long-term prospects and direction of travel. In a recent review of nudging Ed Bradon made two interesting observations (Bradon 2022). First, he claimed that despite nudging's global spread, nudging-related practices are still relatively underutilized policy tools. Bradon estimates that an average-sized national government which mobilized nudging across all of its departments and policy regimes could be expected to deploy 6,000 nudges. He contrasts this to the 165 nudge trials that have so far been developed in two of the most prominent nudge units in the United States. Second, he claims that approximately 80 per cent of attempts to change people's behaviours, or reform organizational practices, fail. In this context Bradon argues, “Nudges are a valuable, modestly resourced and […] dramatically underused way of improving people's lives. Abandoning them now would be like discovering Aspirin then immediately shutting down production because it doesn't cure cancer” (2022).

This book is based upon the premise that we are still in the relatively early phases of the use and development of nudging, and that the future is likely to be characterized by significant innovation and change (some of it good, some of it not so good) in the use of this policy tool.

Armed with our knowledge of the emergence and development of nudging as a set of concepts and principles deployed by governments, corporations and designers, it is time to turn our attention to the practical application of nudging in different geographical and sectoral contexts. Geographically, the spread of nudging has been impressive. According to an OECD (2017) report, behavioural insights are being applied within public policy in over 200 public bodies throughout the world. The sectoral spread of the use of behavioural insights has been equally impressive. From relatively humble beginnings, behavioural and psychological insights are now being used to influence policy development and delivery in relation to a wide variety of policy sectors, including pro-environmental behaviours, energy use, economic behaviour, voting and minority language promotion. There is no clearer indication of the current significance of nudging than the fact that it has become over a few short years since the publication of Thaler and Sunstein's 2008 book, a mainstay of the political and popular lexicon. Although the specific details might remain abstruse, few are now unaware of the broad meaning of nudging in policy contexts.

Such a proliferation of nudging begs a series of questions, and it is these that we shall seek to answer in this chapter. First, what explains the widespread appeal of nudging? Why has it become such a popular approach to addressing different kinds of problematic behaviour? Why now? Or, in other words, what have been the specific conditions that explain the remarkable uptake of nudging principles and practices from 2008 onwards? We discuss how the current appeal of nudging derives largely from its ability to act as a relatively low-cost, technocratic and, allegedly, politically neutral way of enabling organizations, including the state, to grapple with a series of modern-day challenges.

Second, what forms have contemporary examples of nudging taken in different geographical and sectoral contexts? Even though behavioural insights are now being employed across the world, are they more popular in certain jurisdictions than others? Is nudging more popular in particular policy sectors than others? Is nudging more effective as a way of addressing certain policy ills than others?

According to Google's English Dictionary, the action of nudging is to “prod (somebody) gently with one's elbow to attract attention” or “to coax or gently encourage (someone) to do something”. In everyday life nudging is thus synonymous with genteel actions of social notification and encouragement. Although gentle, and often innocuous, nudging is actually a powerful way to exert social influence. In his influential 1936 book How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie reveals the operational logics and power of social nudges. According to Carnegie, the key to long-term social influence is not to be found in aggressive coercion but in a deep understanding of human nature and interpersonal relations. Carnegie's central insight was that all people want to feel important. So, the key to lasting social influence was not to force people into behaving in certain ways, but to make them feel significant and valued. Carnegie advocated a series of genteel actions to promote change in others: showing sincere appreciation towards other people; demonstrating an interest in the needs and desires of others; recognizing your own mistakes before drawing people's attention to their own errors; constructing reputations for people that they will want to live up to; and even doing something as simple as remembering other people's names. There was no science behind Carnegie's insights. His philosophy of gentle social influence was derived from his experience as a salesman and public speaker. Carnegie did not use the term nudging to describe his techniques. However, as we shall see, his ideas reflect early iterations of the practices of nudging that we aim to explore in this book.

Few of us enjoy forcing people to do things. The appeal of Carnegie's insights lie in the fact that they suggest that subtle persuasion is both a more socially agreeable and often more effective way to shape the behaviours of those around us than coercion. In addition to their effectiveness, the forms of subtle persuasion promoted by Carnegie carry with them a kind of moral virtue. They suggest that one of the best ways of achieving our goals may be found in being nice to others.