“Italy is disappearing!”, shrieked like a vulture circling on his prey Elon Musk on Twitter, the platform now known as X, that the richest man in the world had bought as his world loudspeaker at the inflated price of 44 billion dollars.
The date was April 24, 2023. The message was seen by 5.3 million viewers and promptly sank like a lead balloon. There was no reaction. Italy did not even bother to issue a complaint. Why? The short answer is that statistics is a complicated science that should be left to statisticians.
Politicians and oligarchs with far too much cash and power, and inflated egos–when they venture into things they barely know–tend to get it wrong. Witness, among other examples, the barely disguised admiration of fascism by Henry Ford in the Roaring Twenties Gilded Age.
In reality, barring a disaster of cosmic (or nuclear!) proportions, Italy is “not” disappearing anytime soon. Its shaky demographics, however, places it with other countries in the danger zone of a serious population decline between now and the end of this century.
The warning, carefully non-political and wrapped in technical language, is contained in the World Population Prospect 2024, the comparative survey published by the UN every two years. Global population, it projects, will decline by 14 percent in thirty years.
It is anticipated that China, recently overtaken by India as the most populous country, will lose 204 million people in 2024-2054. Japan and Russia will follow, with population losses respectively of 21 and 10 million. In Europe, despite Italy’s demographic decline, from 59.4 million residents last year to 50.4 in 2054, the overall population should remain relatively stable, in parts due to emergency migrations caused by the war in Ukraine.
On a global scale, the UN projections expect that migrations from the Global South to the Northern Hemisphere will continue. About the anti-migration rhetorics, a point that diplomatically the UN are trying to make is that unilateral measures such as forcible repatriations or mass expulsions, like tariffs and sanctions never work. They mostly destroy wealth.
The message applies also to Italy that now, even with historically low unemployment down to 5.7% (lower than Sweden) suffers from an acute shortage of qualified manpower, restrictive union practices, antiquated bureaucracy and low productivity- all reforms that Italy urgently needs, and non-obstructive migrant policies could provide.
