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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"?
At least there will always be an infinite supply of hype and silly speculative "news" stories. They'll be just as insightful when the writers are all robots.
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.
The slow down in population especially in "1st world nations" is due to many factors which are not environmental, or resource base.
* The availability of cheap, safe and effective birth control.
* The microeconomics costs in having a child.
Currently our economic model, while on the large scale more population is better for the economy on the whole. It is a hindrance to the family, as a child is expensive and can set a middle class family back years in terms of money. This combined with birth control has turned raising a child as something almost considered a Hobby for a lot of people. In rural countries, a child become a member of your workforce, thus becomes an economic strength to your family.
I can see the population dropping for a while, but as we are starting to see in ageing countries like Japan and France, additional intensives to try to increase child birth.
In terms of resources, our technology to increase output still seems to be able to keep up with growth. Sure we get some Hippy dippy stuff with people complaining about GMO, preservatives, and radiation treatment. But we have the ability to feed the world for a while.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
I'm not about to dive into the crazy numbers, but it's not that unreasonable a prediction. It won't go down to zero as then the conditions will change and people will change their behavior again.
We can all basically say that most of the developed world is in a condition of low birth rate and that includes most of Asia as well. North America, Europe, China, Japan...
That's a huge chunk of the Earth on the 2 kids or less bandwagon. You can probably throw in a whole bunch of other places like Brazil and parts of Latin America as well.
You then have to factor in the social changes going on throughout the world. Women's rights and what not are being found in even the most remote places on Earth. In often doesn't manifest itself in ways you think. Remember that Malala Yousafzai girl from tribal Pakistan who shot to fame fighting for education. These issues really are reaching even the most remote areas.
I'm from a conservative Muslim background, which I guess people still see as patriarchal, but even there we see the issues. Men and women alike not wanting to get married or limiting children. Even in a place like Saudi Arabia where you might picture the most patriarchal, the fertility rate is close to 2.
The idea of being the head patriarch to huge numbers of kids isn't appealing to many men in most countries. It's seen more as a liability today, perhaps limited to the truly wealthy or very remote regions.
You also take into account technology which means a lot of kids to work the farm or provide for the family is lessened.
Anything can happen in the world, but you can easily see how in one or two generation we could be facing population stabilization or even decline. It doesn't sound implausible at all.
There's good evidence that female education is the dominant factor affecting fertility rate. A stable government is generally necessary, but not sufficient, for high female education rates.
There are lots of examples of stable governments that had big population growth problems though. Bangladesh is the usual case study. The government tried all kids of programs aimed at reducing the birth rate and nothing much worked. Then the education department, completely independently, decided it would be a good idea for girls to go to school, and the fertility rate fell from one of the highest in the world to close to replacement.
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.
Every country that undergoes industrialization shifts into a negative growth pattern eventually, with only some extremely limited exceptions (e.g. the high birth rate among the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel keeps that country in growth mode).
Early in the process government policy can distort this (the high birthrates encouraged in China and Saudi Arabia in the 1950s and 1960s) but as industrial society touches more of the population this rate inevitably falls. China pushed this along in the 1970s with its "One Child" policy, now abandoned, but China will not shift back into positive growth, the normal process of falling birth rates has taken hold.
But industrialization is not the only process that brings down birth rates, and may only be an enabling factor, rather than the true driving force. Bangladesh is the poster example for this. A conservative Muslim nation, that is one of the poorest in the world, it is now below the replacement rate. It did not take industrialization or becoming wealthy to do it, it was entirely the choice of the female population there. This phenomenon was entirely unexpected, until it happened, That is what this book is alluding to - educating women brings down birthrates by itself, and may be why it correlates with industrialization and wealth in the first place.
If you look at UN population projections by region you see every region in the world is projected to peak in population during this century and begin declining. Except for one, Africa. Continuous growth is projected there. What this book is arguing is that female education will bring down the birthrate there also, like it did in Bangladesh. The difference between UN and author projections for population in 2100 is due almost entirely due to differences in population projections for Africa.
I think the authors are likely correct in this regard.
But is the world population fated to shrink away to nothing now?
We don't know of a trend that will reverse it at present. Some countries are already heavily affected by declining (and aging) populations - Japan, Italy, Russia, Serbia (perhaps the lowest birthrate in the world), for example - and none of these has found a way to halt it yet.
But the Industrial Revolution was not predicted, the Green Revolution was not predicted, the fall of birth rates with industrialization was not predicted, and the fall in the birth rate of Bangladesh without industrialization was not predicted. That some future change in world human societies might stabilize populations globally certainly cannot be ruled out. It may be simply that no society currently affected by declining population has yet undergone a sufficient and necessary transformation - providing enough support and incentive to make higher rates of child-bearing attractive.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Japan is the canary in the mine, in my mind, regarding social stability and an aging population.
Very old population (26% of population above 65 in 2014, # of elderly surpassed # of children in 1997, and this bit of info: " and sales of adult diapers surpassed diapers for babies in 2014.").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
BlameBillCosby.com
The Greeks and Romans weren't destroying entire ecosystems and devastating entire oceans and sources of fresh water....
Yes, yes, they were. In fact, even the indigenous folks of the North American content were doing it -- they hunted the Woolly Mammoth to extinction and they didn't even have running water or horses.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The Greeks and Romans weren't destroying entire ecosystems
Yes they were. North Africa was known as "the breadbasket of the Roman Empire". Today it is the Sahara Desert. Destructive farming practices destroyed millions of tonnes of topsoil. They also exterminated many species, including the North African Elephant.
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.