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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.
You change the laws so that childcare, health care for kids, lunchs, and college are all free, all without any paperwork and we will have a baby boom the likes you never saw.
Lots of Europe has free health care annd college; the childcare is becoming a thing too. The birthrate is still low. Your notion that people cannot afford children does not explain the size of poor people's families and immigrant families. It's not that people cannot afford children: it is that some cultures do not want them. Or, to put it another way, I know that many poor farmers in my family tree had ten to twelve children in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that was before childcare, college, anything resembling healthcare or free lunches even existed. They got no handouts, and they were poor, and they bred. Demographics are not a result of economic changes but of a change in social values. Women's rights and the decline of religion are probably more important than the cost of college.
My concern is not quite geometric population growth in the face of sustainable abilities to service that growth. We fail that that, and fail consistently, as the greed model thwarts any appreciation for what happens to the next generation. We kick it forward. We answer the call of our biology and have lots of children, eschew birth control and even abortion in the name of population sustainability, which creates constant profit growths for the greed model.
Except we don't. That's the whole point. The facts on the ground say the UN is full of shit (to no one's surprise) and you're wrong too (even less surprising).
The US's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1973, returned to above replacement in 1989, then dropped below again in 2011.
South Korea's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1984 and has never risen above it since.
Japan's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1975 and has never risen above it since.
Germany's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1971 and has never risen above it since.
I could go on for another 100 countries. Most never return to above replacement once they drop below it. The US is very unusual in returning even for a while, but first generation immigrants tend to have more children than natives and the US still allows more immigration (both legal and illegal) than practically any country in the world.
Everywhere that infant mortality drops below about 24 per thousand live births, the birth rate drops below the replacement rate. There is some variance depending on whether or not women are allowed/provided better than elementary education and depending on the local religion, but even in places with (nominally) very strong religious objections to birth control, if women are educated and infant mortality is low enough, the birth rate drops below replacement. Why this should be has not been definitively explained, but it is happening, across the entire world, and the correlations with education and reasonably capable medical practices are statistically significant.