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'The World Might Actually Run Out of People' (wired.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: By 2050 there will be 9 billion carbon-burning, plastic-polluting, calorie-consuming people on the planet. By 2100, that number will balloon to 11 billion, pushing society into a Soylent Green scenario. Such dire population predictions aren't the stuff of sci-fi; those numbers come from one of the most trusted world authorities, the United Nations. But what if they're wrong? Not like, off by a rounding error, but like totally, completely goofed?
That's the conclusion Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrel Bricker come to in their newest book, Empty Planet, due out February 5th. After painstakingly breaking down the numbers for themselves, the pair arrived at a drastically different prediction for the future of the human species. "In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline," they write. "Once that decline begins, it will never end." But Empty Planet is not a book about statistics so much as it is about what's driving the choices people are making during the fastest period of change in human history.
That's the conclusion Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrel Bricker come to in their newest book, Empty Planet, due out February 5th. After painstakingly breaking down the numbers for themselves, the pair arrived at a drastically different prediction for the future of the human species. "In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline," they write. "Once that decline begins, it will never end." But Empty Planet is not a book about statistics so much as it is about what's driving the choices people are making during the fastest period of change in human history.
Most trusted world authorities - the UN?! The same UN that puts Sudan on the "Human Rights Committee"?
Clearly, demonstrably, populations reproduce and continue to exist barring extinction events like asteroid strikes, famine, and plagues.
Social changes, where it is too expensive to raise children so couples frequently have only a single child. If your birthrate falls below 1.0 and nothing convinces people to reverse the trend then the scenario is quite realistic.
It's all bullshit futurist conjecture and there is zero evidence to support it. So while it is a plausible possibility, it is not a cause for concern.
A journalist and a political scientist... sure seems like the right team to look into this.
It took us what, 200 years to go from around 1B to 7B. Unless we have a nuclear war, or a plague - and even the latter ain't gonna kill 90%, it's not going to happen.
As it is, we know - 1:1 correlation - that the higher the educational level of the woman, the lower the birthrate. HOWEVER, the idea that 80+% of humans will just not want to reproduce is ludicrous. Even if the world is in such bad shape that folks don't want to inflict it on their children, people will still want kids. There is this thing called hardwiring in biology.....
And you vastly underestimate the access to health care and education in the "shithole countries". The world view of the West often is stuck in the 1970ies and 1980ies and has not gotten much update since then. 80% of the world population now has better health care coverage than Western countries in the 1960ies, when the baby boom came to an end, and the average time a girl somewhere in the world of today visits school is eight years. And thus, the baby boom for 80% of the world has actually ended.
Health care and women's education are the main factors that drove reproduction rates down, not stable governments or wealth. They do help, but are less important than you think.
People don't change.
People might not change but their environment surely does. Up until recently, most humans lived in mud huts and were one poor harvest away from starving to death. Half their children died before age 5. And by "recently" I mean 50-100 years ago, compared to 10,000 years of recorded history.
Compare that to today. About a billion people today live in dire poverty, out of 7 billion. A billion people is a lot but having "only" one seventh of our population in that situation is revolutionary. We've never been this wealthy or healthy, historically speaking. And being healthy and wealthy definitely changes how you behave.
Please don't misinterpret me. I'm not saying six billion people are living in McMansions and have trouble deciding which sports car to drive to work. Most of the world is still pretty poor compared to my neighborhood in California. All I'm saying is they're much better off than the subsistence farmers throughout most of human history.