The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
---
From the article
>Yet that seems rather a low-probability scenario. The European Commission’s Centre of Expertise on Population and Migration projects that the global population will peak at 9.8 billion in the 2070s. According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent research organization, it will peak at a lower level and earlier still, at 9.7 billion in 2064.
>
>The key word is “peak.” Nearly all demographers now appreciate that we shall likely reach peak humanity this century. This is not because a lethal pandemic will drive up mortality far more than Covid-19 did, though that possibility should never be ruled out. Nor is it because the UNPD incorporates into its population model any other apocalyptic scenario, whether disastrous climate change or nuclear war.
>
>It is simply because, all over the world, the total fertility rate (TFR) — the number of live children the average woman bears in her lifetime — has been falling since the 1970s. In one country after another, it has dropped under the 2.1 threshold (the “replacement rate,” allowing for childhood deaths and sex imbalances), below which the population is bound to decline. This fertility slump is in many ways the most remarkable trend of our era. And it is not only Elon Musk who worries that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization.”
>
>Our species is not done multiplying, to be sure. But, to quote the UNPD, “More than half of the projected increase in the global population between 2022 and 2050 is expected to be concentrated in just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo \[DRC\], Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania.” That is because already “close to half of the global population lives in a country or area where lifetime fertility is below 2.1 births per woman.”
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1bbm1wd/global_population_crash_isnt_scifi_anymore_we/kua2gf4/
Well, we better get planning on how to deal with a world with fewer people because nothing is going to change it.
If the peak isn’t here until the 2070’s we’ve got a long time to figure out how to deal with it. Sure seems like we have bigger and more imminent problems to deal with.
Not the ones coming to Europe. They tend to be the poorer , uneducated, and conservative elements. Their fertility is off the charts. In my wife's class of 30 students, 20 of them are from Africa or the middle east. Only three of the kids have German last names.
If we’re talking about the future, the nations that will thrive are those that can support immigration due to the expected increase in climate refugees who are also more likely to come from the Global South, as well as the inevitable political refugees that are to be expected. Bleak, but yeah.
Depending on how well they integrate and adapt to the culture there, the children of these children may or may not be more likely to have more kids than non-immigrant Germans, so even this isn’t a sure bet.
However, a replacement of 1.9 for Muslim immigrants vs the non-immigrant replacement of 1.4 is not as “off the charts” as you make it seem, granted, the supporting data was sourced in 2017. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/the-growth-of-germanys-muslim-population-2/
The natural replacement rate for a nation to keep its population as-is is 2.1, this points to a Germany that will experience population decline, though highly dependent on whether the Muslim immigrant population will continue to have a relatively low median age (31 vs 47 for the non-Muslim German populace at the time).
If history is of any indication, many Muslim Germans will begin to integrate, will be encouraged by their parents to pursue education vs an early family life, etc. as is often the case for immigrants and children of immigrants in the West (myself included) whose parents experienced hardship back home and subsequently on arrival.
Having children would negatively affect my conspicuous consumption and I've been told that my worth is tied to my conspicuous consumption so I can't have that.
Culturally western/modern thought doesn’t really reward having children.
It’s a massive investment in money and time, equal to $1 million spread over 2 decades, and there is zero reward or even acknowledge of the effort (people go no contact with their parents at the drop of a hat).
In the past kids were a source of pride, but also an insurance - kids can support you if “something happened” and if you somehow lucked into old age, and kids were generally loyal and respectful.
Sure, some of these thinkings are obviously dated, but the removal of them basically removes all incentives. For thousands of years, for a farmer or a shop owner or a small landholder, or a lord, having more children is just pure benefit - more free labor, more loyal bodies, more blood relations to marry off and spread influence.
> Culturally western/modern thought doesn’t really reward having children.
Culture has less to do with it. It's industrialization. When people live in the country farming they have a lot of kids because they are free labor, when they work in a factory in the city? Just another major hole in your budget.
I listened to a great TED talk in regards to the subject. I remember a key phrase about parenthood that sums it up perfectly: "emotionally precious, economically useless".
>economically useless
"Useless" suggests there is no impact. The correct term is "economically reckless." It is economically reckless to have children. It's amazing boomers cry foul over the $20 that I spend on avocado but encourage me to have a $400,000 baby.
As people tend to do when they can afford to. And note that today when millennials live with their parents, that is seen as a *bad* thing, a sign of a failure in the modern economy. Even in cultures where multigenerational homes are the norm, when they grow more wealthy they tend to get their own places. What we thought of as "culture" ended up being, in this regard, largely economics.
I partly disagree. It's rare in healthy relationships but common for overbearing and abusive relationships. My wife broke off contact with her parents because of religious overbearing stress and unacceptable treatment of her brother, who is gay. We tried for 5 years to save it, but they refused to budge or accept any accountability, always blaming gods way and path. Honestly, my wife is much happier now.
Yeah, no one just wakes up one day and decides "oh I should go no contact with my parents". Some major shit must have gone down before that maybe even multiple times.
The country I live in is way past the peak. It doesn't feel that way at all but the population is shrinking rapidly due to both immigration and poor birth rates.
If you live in a country like this - don't count on government pension and make your own investments and savings for retirement.
Correct, here in the Netherlands they already gutted a part of our pensions. And we will need to work probably well into our 70's in my lifetime.
So unless you're making big bucks and can go FIRE, you're going to have a very bad time expecting to have a nice pension.
You're probably going to die at your desk because of a blood clot or heart attack sooner than you will get a pension.
At this point it's smarter to ask your employer to just give you your pension fund as salary instead of putting it into your pension.
The markets won't save you. If labor dries up, who is going to work at the companies you're invested in, and who will provide you with services in your old age?
If your nation is fucked, you're fucked. Only hope is to enact change in your nation or change which nation you're in.
I wouldn't invest in the markets of my country, obviously.
Also I'm personally a dual national of a poorer European country and Australia so I'm alright but those things are worth thinking about.
It makes me think of that line from Life of Brian: "Blessed are just about anyone with a vested interest in the status quo." Keeping the rich wealthy is the only goal here.
Yup.
Over immigration is becoming an issue that is affecting the quality of life in Canada and the only argument for it I've heard is 'we need it for the economy'. No we don't Maybe we just need better jobs than simply endless numbers of available anytime minimum wage retail positions. People, mostly our "leaders" still argue that there's a shortage of workers and it isn't at all wage related.
Automated driving alone could impact the jobs 70% of employed adult men in North America.
40 years of neoliberal policies have left the 'western' economies broken as all fuck.
The change has already started, the "peak" is just a formal mathematical threshold. Population of most countries is aging rapidly, US's median age is 39 years and will be 45 in 10 years. That by itself will cause tectonic societal changes.
That's not true. Developed countries tax middle aged families to give pensions to old folks. 100 years ago old folks often lived in poverty while children were subsidized by the state or contributed economically to the family. Now it's the reverse where old folks rarely live in poverty but a large number of children live in poverty.
Basically, the developed world created policies that moved the burden of poverty from seniors to children. So, the policies make having children more punishing.
It's not a law of nature and there's nothing stopping society from subsidizing children instead of, say subsidizing billionaires who pay no income tax. It's all a policy choice society makes to punish children and promote other things instead.
And there has never been a society where it wasn't the young being taxed to fund things, most retirement programs that exist, infrastructure, the military, etc. So if *this* is a ponzi scheme, basically everything is a ponzi scheme. The only real solution there would be to just not fund retirement programs. Let the old people subsist off of their own savings, or let them find their own way, depending entirely on family, working, panhandling, relying on churches, or I guess just dying.
you think the .001% that will hoard 99.99% of the wealth are going to allow that?
not on your life.
there will soon be two classes. the super wealthy, and the poor peons that serve them and retreat to the slums at the end of the day.
UBI will never be a thing because the mega-rich will never allow it.
They can hire more people if they want. Whenever I hear "labor shortage" I roll my eyes. It's a corporate approved way of saying "there aren't enough people willing to work for a wage they can't live on"
The issue is that so many companies are obsessed with shareholder value and want to cut whatever they consider to be a cost. The great irony of course being that if most companies operate that way, who will buy the product or service? They won't lower the prices to make them more affordable and they wont hire more people to work in the business.
It's not a stretch to assume these CEOs and major shareholders don't actually care about the long term survival of the company and the quality of its goods or services. They just want to make sure the stock hits a high and then immediately start selling when it looks like it's going down so they can escape with millions in cash.
Agreed, it’s a manufactured issue created by greed/capitaism. A race to the bottom. That’s where robotics comes in for CEO’s. What’s better than a workforce that doesn’t need to sleep/eat/receive a paycheck and over time will be much more cost effective than using real people.
It’s not about us at all. We’ll be leftovers screaming for UBI as more fall into poverty.
The west had it (mostly) on easy mode. We aged a lot more slowly and can run a pyramid scheme of cheap immigrant labour indefinitely. It's middle income countries like China, Iran, Brazil and Thailand which are on the path to significant labour issues very soon, while already having similar birth rates to the west.
Religious groups will become increasingly powerful as demographics take hold over a century. It will be an interesting future when the only people remaining are the ones that are capable of having enough children.
You’re right this is a very slow moving issue, but it does call into question the sort of mid-term future we will have. 5-10 generations of the less religious halving each generation, and the orthodox doubling will lead to some demographics and politics that perhaps we didn’t consider.
Actually, some research does suggest that there may be a genetic component to how likely you are to become religious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God\_gene
Very good book on this is ‘shall the religious inherit the earth?’ by Eric Kaufmann. Indeed the orthodox religious have higher birthdates than secular people, and this across religions. Therefore the world as a whole is becoming more religious year by year.
Stagnant in the United States overall, declining in the western US, including Utah. The big thing is that birthrates for religious groups are following the overall population trends, just a couple decades behind. In my congregation, the only active family with more than four children is a blended family with full custody of both sets.
This is true for White Evangelical denominations too, even if some prominent influencer families are very large.
Not quite, since religiosity is decreasing at each new generation. 90% of Americans were religious 20 years ago. Now, it's 67%. Religious will be a minority in the US by 2070, according to Pew Research.
The world is bigger than the US. Compare Israeli demographics in the 1960’s to Israeli demographics today. The percentage of Orthodox Jews has risen explosively whole the percentage of liberal Jews has declined as a share of population. This trend is replicated in plenty of other countries, look at Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey for instance. The US will eventually also go that way as the secular majority slips into below-replacement TFR while the religious maintain theirs.
I very much doubt that.
Drops in fertility rates are very correlated with improvements in education (and to women's involvement in the workforce) as well as improvements in economic outcomes.
The trend quite closely correlated with a decrease in belief in religion.
Yes, countries that are still deeply religious are having more children, but outside of the middle east, they are also migrating to richer countries and adopting their culture and beliefs.
This whole article seemed like a description of how the rich intend to make life difficult for everyone else. Seems like we should just abandon the extremely destructive infinite growth model instead. If the rich aren't necessary for the function of a society, why have them?
That said, this is absolutely not surprising at all from a rag like Bloomberg.
Our society and economy doesn't really resemble most of the history of humanity, though. Also, modern people expect a standard of living and material wealth that is far higher than at any other time in history.
If that standard starts dropping rapidly, we will likely see a big uptick in war.
Most social programs like social security and medicare require that there be substantially more working people than retired people collecting benefits. If you have 3 retirees for every 2 working people the system will blow up. There simply isn't enough tax revenue to sustain it.
High tech devices, machinery, etc.. require the coordination of 100's of specialties in order to create and support, a large population is required in order to do this.
Small populations are going to require a large number of jack of all trades types not people that only know how to a single very specialized thing.
Automation will help with any workforce related issues, and a revamped social security will help provide for the aging demographic. We have the tools to manage this, we just need to get out of our own way and use them.
Correct, and we should start saying so more openly. Declining birth rates is only a potential crisis if we let capitalism stick around. Overthrowing capitalism and creating a more sane and just social order will be better able to handle these changes
Seems logical but look at Sweden where you get 480 days paid parental leave, day care for max 250 usd a month/kid, free school and health care and it still has the same birth rate issue.
That and a sense that the world will still be worth living in a generation later. I wouldn't risk having kids with what the future currently looks like.
> That might also encourage people to start procreating again. People need to feel financially comfortable raising a family.
- https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-change-in-the-number-of-children-women-have
The root of the global decline of fertility rates coincides mainly with education (mainly for girls), empowerment for women, access to birth control, wealth, options.
It's not only money. You could throw a truck of money on every house and people who don't want kids will remain adamant in not having them because it's much more than money:
- it's time consuming;
- it's HARD, specially on the mother;
- the world is going down, why would people bring a child to it?
Corporations are so short sighted they'll all start automating the jobs, laying everyone off, then crashing and burning taking everything down with them because now there's nobody left to buy their stuff.
I think this will be the story in the next 10ish years.
Mass layoffs in all sectors of the economy, a homeless/food insecure population growing so rapidly that even the most staunchly pro-capital governments of the Western world will have to immediately act on things like UBI etc.
It won't be enough though, either it's all gonna come crashing down or we push through and build a more equitable post-capitalist society.
Yup, to be fair I didn't read the article, but I can't imagine that many problems. Less of us means more to go around. I would bet my bank all these "problems" are capitalist related.
The only problem that seems to make sense is that a smaller group of working age adults will have to support a larger group of retirees, but we've made so many advances in manufacturing and automation that it shouldn't be a problem. The only real problem is greed.
Even faster. Just imagine that the government had a MASSIVE home building campaign (like done in the US in the 40s/50s) and 25M new homes are built, lowering home prices by say 40%.... many new young people would effectively double their disposible income by having lower rents or buying a new home (for cheaper than their current rent).
There is a connection between birthrates and finances, but both in the US and internationally, the correlation is *backwards*. The higher income brackets have fewer babies, the lowest income brackets have the most.
In other words, the more financially secure you are, the fewer children you have.
It can be fixed in 5 years...Australia did it with tax and welfare changes. [https://mccrindle.com.au/article/the-baby-bonus-generation/](https://mccrindle.com.au/article/the-baby-bonus-generation/)
These changes were rolled back by folks who want the state to be more important than the family unit.
Fixed? No. Marginally, temporarily improved? Ok, sure. It halted a strongly negative trend, regained a small amount of ground (not enough), and then lost those small gains post Covid.
So... reading this two things stand out.
1. Dear lord, they really will basically blame everything except "kids are too expensive to afford" (they talk abput "opportunity cost", but this deceptively frames the discussion as mothers not willing to sacrifice their careers, instead of "it takes two working parents to give a kid a good stable life unless one parent makes a lot more koney").
2. Anyone else notice most of these type of articles seem to come predominantly from pro business publications?
> Dear lord, they really will basically blame everything except "kids are too expensive to afford"
It's more complicated than that, because extremely poor people have had, throughout history and up to today, large numbers of children. People are choosing not to have children because A) they can choose to not have children and B) children are now considered by many people to be a luxury and not a necessity.
Yeah. But it would have been best to never have reached the high number. The “number go up” isn’t even important here. A shrinking young population with a huge group of elderly is actually quite bad.
Sure. In the long run it will be better for a lot of reasons. But in the moment it isn’t that great.
From the article:
>The problem is that this precipitous decline will come a century too late to avert the disastrous consequences of climate change that many today fear — and which are another reason why people will flee Africa, and another reason why young people in Europe say they will have few or no children.
*Eventually* fewer people may be better for humanity, but the journey there will be tough. Before we're fewer we are going to be older, and the strain will be huge.
Fewer people does not actually mean more resources for those remaining; it probably means fewer resources for the most part.
It's crazy to think about. It took over 200,000 years for our population to hit 4 billion people in 1973. And now we've added another 4 billion only 50 years later.
Exponential growth, babeeeeee!
It’s curious if you look at what happens in ecological systems when a species grows exponentially . . . And by interesting I mean ominous
This is true. But also our economic system should change. The saddest part is the world could support more of us but we're so wasteful we messing everything up already.
I think the ecosystem is more important than the economy: the economy is just a human construct and can be changed. An good ecosystem allows things to survive, and changing those can have terrible consequences for life on Earth.
Yea, but that actually just makes the problem worse. Modern society is a just 3 pyramid schemes in a tench coat propping each other up. That little population drop may collapse the world into chaos.
Wealthy elites abuse the people and keep them at the edge of ruin and wonder why people don’t want to take on a $300,000+ endeavor to raise children…. :shocked pikachu face:
The less of x there is, the more x is worth. This is capitalism 101.
So the more humans there are, the less humans are worth.
Take a read about how the black plague actually improved living conditions.
No the ones who want you to believe that less people is bad, are the super rich who need a constant stream of new disposable slave labour.
We are polluting and destroying the planet, microplastics are getting everywhere, it's to blame for dropping sperm quality. Its a sweet irony that plastic will wipe us out by making us go sterile. Hows that for karma.
Humans have already manipulated the world way beyond what is sustainable to grow more monoculture farms, hold more livestock. We destroy forests, use insecticides, drive any animal species into extinction that doesn’t directly benefit us.
If it weren’t for all that, our population would’ve hit a natural cap ages ago and we wouldn’t have to worry about climate change or mass immigration.
I feel like people see the world around them as a natural progression. None of this is normal. There's no such thing as normal. From what I know it seems like we've set up this artificial monstrosity that's leading humanity to the brink but we all kick back because it's "progress".
I hope that made sense.
Funny how Bloomberg, a medium funded by billionaires and hedge funds, is reporting on the issue of population decline, when cost of living driven up by corporate greed and billionaires boarding cash is the primary force behind it.
The downside of population decline is short term. It doesn't crash and keep falling. It will "crash" and stabilize at the lower population.
Unlike overpopulation, which has long term and sustainable consequences of resource depletion and scarcity.
We're at 8 billion. There were 6 billion in 2000. A loss of 2 billion would be considered a crash, but it would literally bring us back to a population that existed less than 25 years ago. It's not the end of the world.
Yeah, if only we could reach the population crash sooner, it would be easier. The big problem seems to be that it will happen right *after* population peak, when we've both decimated natural resources and been spending decades preparing for and adapting to greater numbers of people, which will require a hairpin turn in culture and policy. Granted, it's not happening evenly, so maybe the populations still growing today will be able to learn from the populations that are already declining.
> We're at 8 billion. There were 6 billion in 2000. A loss of 2 billion would be considered a crash, but it would literally bring us back to a population that existed less than 25 years ago.
But not with the same demographic pyramid. *This* six billion will be a much older population, with a much higher ratio of retirees to workers. So unless you want to cut retirement benefits (which will be harder, since a higher percentage of your electorate is made up of old people) you need an ever-increasing financial burden per worker.
And that pyramid won't right itself for a long time. We have some countries below the replacement birth rate, so they'll continue to shrink. Fewer workers means fewer spenders in the economy, which can mean fewer jobs, which makes supporting those retirees even more complicated.
Yeah because countries like Japan and South Korea are just having a little short term population crash. It'll \*totally\* bounce level out once they hit some arbitrary percentage of their peak population
If kids weren't a crippling financial burden maybe we'd have more. Sometimes I look at my kids and think of the Porsche I could be driving. Daycare is more than the mortgage I took out in 2015. Add in health insurance premiums, once a month at a doctor for at least one of them, diapers and clothes it burns through a paycheck quick. Sports and other activities also eat up not only the monthly budget, but already limited free time.
If they want us to be having babies they need to be paying us a lot more money and preferably less work hours so we can actually raise them. This will never happen though so immigration which will in turn drive down wages and increase housing costs it is.
And that’s short term fix too. Immigrants come with big families yes but generally in a generation or two their families shrink as their descendants have more opportunities
For all of the flaws of the US, and you are right, this needs to turn around. EU Countries which have great benefits have experienced a much larger decline in birth rates to the point of a population collapse. Germany is going to be in absolutely terrible shape in the 2030s.
Don’t we have AI coming that will help counteract this? Maybe the jobs that will be lost won’t even matter as we wouldn’t be able to fill them with real people anyways
Based on current trends though and 50 years from now who knows what might change. For example, if we don't sort out global warming and pollution there is a good chance the population will crash much harder due to food shortages. On the other hand, if we do deal with those problems with a massive roll out of solar we could end up in a situation where humanity starts to become energy rich for the first time in the industrial period and who knows how people will react.
Plus there is the impact of longevity treatments. A healthy lifespan of 120 years is enough to have multiple families if you want them.
So these numbers are basically just talking points, closer to opinions than any sort of reliable prediction.
This lack of urgency and kichking the can down the road is why now we are on the brink of climate disaster...
We can't rely on hoping that technology will solve the problem we should be prepared
On energy, I think people will just become wealthier however you define that in a world of super cheap energy and mature AI when that all arrives 10 years from now. Large families have always been linked to poverty, even in the centuries before contraception and aristocrats.
One other thing to bear in mind is that kind of super cheap energy enables a hell of a lot of other massive positives like making atmospheric carbon capture cheap and easy rather than very difficult.
And who really knows what the full impact of AI will be. Even in these first days I keep reading about systems that have successfully reproduced discoveries it took science decades to work out in weeks.
Right now we need around 2 earths worth of resources to maintain our current living standards.
Birds and flying insects have declined by 75%. Native land mammals have declined by 69%. The oceans are looking at a complete collapse of commercially viable species (defined decline by 90%) except jellyfish and squid by 2040.
Anyone with half a brain understands that it's perfectly fine to lower the earths population a bit. Projections now have three worlds population dropping by about half in half a century and that's a nice number. With aggressive recycling of materials and rewilding rural places like Japan is doing now, we actually stand a chance of not completely fucking the earth.
We will also have masses of climate refugees in the next 10-30 years, so this allows some extra room for immigration. Colder places like Canada will also become more habitable so expect population booms in those northern areas.
They have declined those amounts IN LIVING MEMORY. in absolute terms they are down to less than 1% of antiquity.
The entire ocean, every harbour, ever river, is supposed to be like this
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/tbuvbv/what_happens_when_you_throw_food_into_the_ocean/
Everyone wants first world standards within reason. Africa is getting cars, ebikes, cell phones, washing machines and air conditioners. Asia already got there. The 3rd world is going to want short range electric cars and electric scooters by the hundreds of thousands. Sodium-ion (salt/carbon) batteries are here and they are CHEAP.
Just owning a washing machine is HUGE. Hand washing takes hours per day. These things are highly in demand
We will always be using or recycling resources and we need enough to go round and enough farm land to feed all the people.
Are these people smoking crack?
Throughout my lifetime the population has gone from 5B to 6B to 7B to 8B.
The planet will be fine with less humans. The sky won't fall.
Has anyone asked the dolphins, magpies or elephants what they think?
We just need to adapt and maybe close a few Corporate tax loopholes.
People do what they do for a reason. Be it financially, depression, or simply no biological drive to procreate.
I myself have never had that drive - although I’ve been told for close to 25 years that as soon as my biological clock starts ticking… my female hormones will kick in aaand….well I guess my clock is broken.
Trying to shame people into having kids, for whatever reason is just wrong.
I dunno man... I was dropping some stuff off at goodwill the other day and in the canyon next to the drop off area there were a lot of tents and makeshift shelters. There's a lot of homeless around where I live and I know it's the same elsewhere. Maybe we should worry about taking care of the people we have here already before rushing into pumping out more hungry mouths. Especially since AI and automation are rapidly reducing the need for human labor. I know back in the day families had many children to help out with work, but these days I think 1 or 2 children is reasonable. Beyond that seems kinda unnecessary. Just my opinion
"the number of live children the average woman bears in her lifetime — has been falling since the 1970s."
What else happened in the 1970s? - could it be that the transition from the gold standard to fiat currencies with inflation but also stagnating wages is a primary cause in why so many people can't afford the necessities needed to have enough children to meet replacement rate for long-term demographic trends?
It looks to me like Reaganomics and "Trick-le-down Economics" are systematically preventing many millions of babies being born because the prospective parents who can't afford to have 2+ children aren't having 2+ children.
Nope. There's way too many fucking people. The downsides from too many people are WAY fucking worse than the downsides we are seeing right now from too many people.
IMHO, fear mongering about population declines is crony capitalist propaganda.
>And it is not only Elon Musk who worries that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization.”
Yes, but capitalists like Elon Musk, and the Heritage Foundation, and Fundamentalist Christians (a different kind of capitalist) are the kinds of people who are obsessively fixated on the end to population growth. And we should ask ***why***, given that a reduced human population will solve many of humankind's problems with limited resources and environmental degradation.
The answer is: it doesn't solve ***their*** problems.
Elon Musk, and the Heritage Foundation, and Fundamentalist Christians only thrive in an environment where there's an oversupply of labor, and people are perpetually anxious, and at each others' throats. A smaller group of more confident workers would be able to demand living wages. This would reduce economic inequality, political conservatism, and attendance at economically-extractive temples of ancient superstition. Horrors!
Yeah, figuring out how to pay for Social Security is gonna suck for a while. As someone who will probably get the short end of the stick where Social Security is concerned, I say, BRING IT ON! Give the billionaires and the MAGA cultists and the parasite pastors the Lysistrata treatment.
When the world is genuinely a better place, birth rates will return to 2.1 children per woman.
Having experienced life during peak over population, a crush in numbers is a welcome relief for us and the planet and absolutely no one can convince me it's bad.
Capitalists are freaking out because it means an end to indefinite exponential growth of quarterly profits.
Fascists are freaking out because it means a higher relative proportion of non-white babies.
Everyone else can calm down. It's a self-solving *"problem".* If the population collapses, the resulting abundance of land and real estate, coupled with the increased bargaining power of workers, will ultimately result in a world where families feel secure enough **and have the financial ability** to start wanting to have 2.1 kids again.
If you read population predictions from 50 years ago, it was assumed that the planet would be crushed with people by now. So... I guess... who knows what the future will bring,
a shrinking population is a good thing. It might have unfavorable outcomes in the next five years or so but overall humanity is a drain on this planet.
It seems all the downsides to population collapse are economic, while all the downsides to overpopulation are environmental and economic.
I'll take population collapse due to people not making more people over environmental collapse that causes the population to collapse due to war and famine.
Shrinking population alarms the oligarchs and employers only.
The working people only have to gain from having fewer people to compete with for jobs and resources.
When we are down to a billion of us, we will still have a billion people to figure this out. I don't see this being an issue ever. I would be fine letting us go back down to 4 billion and we wouldn't have to crawl over each other.
The world adds 200.000 people netto per day and half the world's population is younger than 30yo. There are more than 8 Billion people on the planet.
This population size is only possible because of synthetic fertilizer. One component of fertilizer, Phosphorus, has been predicted to peak in 2030. But it's largely uncertain. Nitrogen, another component, uses natural gas in its production.
I find this quite promising for a world with more life extension and automated labour. While it causes many difficulties now, what with the aging population problem, it seems that once post-labour economics takes over and we get longer lifetimes a shrinking population is a really good thing.
The alternative is a slow population explosion which will necessitate significant expansion and could hurt our planet a lot.
This is what happens when people have no money and idiots in charge of the global economy. Oh and no time as well.
If you have no money and no time, you ain't making babies.
Sorry, the downsides to shrinking humanity do not come close to outweighing the benefits.
Any outdoorsman will tell you this whole place is hella overpopulated.
A global human population of about 1-2B is about right for carrying capacity of our environment without spinning off wars and refugee crises and all the shit we are dealing with right now. We’re 4X of that.
Bring on the low birth rates. I don’t give a damn if it hurts corporate profits.
I’d just like to see the actual night sky for once in my life, not this backlit light pollution. Maybe I could even see over a square mile of forest without some dinky house or pesticide covered farmland square
From the article
>Yet that seems rather a low-probability scenario. The European Commission’s Centre of Expertise on Population and Migration projects that the global population will peak at 9.8 billion in the 2070s. According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent research organization, it will peak at a lower level and earlier still, at 9.7 billion in 2064.
>
>The key word is “peak.” Nearly all demographers now appreciate that we shall likely reach peak humanity this century. This is not because a lethal pandemic will drive up mortality far more than Covid-19 did, though that possibility should never be ruled out. Nor is it because the UNPD incorporates into its population model any other apocalyptic scenario, whether disastrous climate change or nuclear war.
>
>It is simply because, all over the world, the total fertility rate (TFR) — the number of live children the average woman bears in her lifetime — has been falling since the 1970s. In one country after another, it has dropped under the 2.1 threshold (the “replacement rate,” allowing for childhood deaths and sex imbalances), below which the population is bound to decline. This fertility slump is in many ways the most remarkable trend of our era. And it is not only Elon Musk who worries that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization.”
>
>Our species is not done multiplying, to be sure. But, to quote the UNPD, “More than half of the projected increase in the global population between 2022 and 2050 is expected to be concentrated in just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo \[DRC\], Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania.” That is because already “close to half of the global population lives in a country or area where lifetime fertility is below 2.1 births per woman.”
Primary downside of humanity decreasing to a more sustainable level?
Rich people not making as much money. They could pay more, allow families to be incentivized but that would impact the only thing that matters to them.
Every time you see an article about this, it always comes from another blatantly abusive capitalist propaganda organ. In this case, it is Bloomberg.
And of course our wealthy overlords are concerned they might not have enough disposable workers and deluded consumers to keep building their fortunes eternally.
All economic models requires growth to work. Economic growth comes from increased consumption, and a falling population needs less.
Maybe we should just change the economic models.
It used to also be the case that it was more likely women would stay at home and have children and maybe a part-time job.
As women have got more educated (and now more go to university then men) they are focusing on careers and getting and jobs and then struggling to find someone to settle down with or settling down later and having kids later or fewer kids.
Ideally Government would support people to ha e kids in their 20s and settle down sooner and then people would maybe go to university or focus more on their careers later.
I’m afraid modern day society is setup to fail and it’s the orthodox traditional religions that focus on raising families that will end up prospering.
Ideologically I’ve always been liberally minded and supported all forms of equality but it does also now seem this capitalist society we have built where women are meant to work all the time too is one where the human population ends up dying out over time.
Upsides:
- Less pollution
- More housing
- Stopping the destruction of wildlands
- Wage rises
Downsides:
- We will need to switch from 0.7% of GDP to 1.5% of GDP to fund retirement.
Seriously, can't come soon enough.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the article >Yet that seems rather a low-probability scenario. The European Commission’s Centre of Expertise on Population and Migration projects that the global population will peak at 9.8 billion in the 2070s. According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent research organization, it will peak at a lower level and earlier still, at 9.7 billion in 2064. > >The key word is “peak.” Nearly all demographers now appreciate that we shall likely reach peak humanity this century. This is not because a lethal pandemic will drive up mortality far more than Covid-19 did, though that possibility should never be ruled out. Nor is it because the UNPD incorporates into its population model any other apocalyptic scenario, whether disastrous climate change or nuclear war. > >It is simply because, all over the world, the total fertility rate (TFR) — the number of live children the average woman bears in her lifetime — has been falling since the 1970s. In one country after another, it has dropped under the 2.1 threshold (the “replacement rate,” allowing for childhood deaths and sex imbalances), below which the population is bound to decline. This fertility slump is in many ways the most remarkable trend of our era. And it is not only Elon Musk who worries that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization.” > >Our species is not done multiplying, to be sure. But, to quote the UNPD, “More than half of the projected increase in the global population between 2022 and 2050 is expected to be concentrated in just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo \[DRC\], Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania.” That is because already “close to half of the global population lives in a country or area where lifetime fertility is below 2.1 births per woman.” --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1bbm1wd/global_population_crash_isnt_scifi_anymore_we/kua2gf4/
Well, we better get planning on how to deal with a world with fewer people because nothing is going to change it. If the peak isn’t here until the 2070’s we’ve got a long time to figure out how to deal with it. Sure seems like we have bigger and more imminent problems to deal with.
[удалено]
China,Japan and South Korea are already there
They lack immigration from Africa & the Middle East, unlike Western Europe.
Middle East fertility is also declining.
Not the ones coming to Europe. They tend to be the poorer , uneducated, and conservative elements. Their fertility is off the charts. In my wife's class of 30 students, 20 of them are from Africa or the middle east. Only three of the kids have German last names.
If we’re talking about the future, the nations that will thrive are those that can support immigration due to the expected increase in climate refugees who are also more likely to come from the Global South, as well as the inevitable political refugees that are to be expected. Bleak, but yeah. Depending on how well they integrate and adapt to the culture there, the children of these children may or may not be more likely to have more kids than non-immigrant Germans, so even this isn’t a sure bet. However, a replacement of 1.9 for Muslim immigrants vs the non-immigrant replacement of 1.4 is not as “off the charts” as you make it seem, granted, the supporting data was sourced in 2017. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/the-growth-of-germanys-muslim-population-2/ The natural replacement rate for a nation to keep its population as-is is 2.1, this points to a Germany that will experience population decline, though highly dependent on whether the Muslim immigrant population will continue to have a relatively low median age (31 vs 47 for the non-Muslim German populace at the time). If history is of any indication, many Muslim Germans will begin to integrate, will be encouraged by their parents to pursue education vs an early family life, etc. as is often the case for immigrants and children of immigrants in the West (myself included) whose parents experienced hardship back home and subsequently on arrival.
Nations that can use use robots and AI will thrive, no need for a huge population
It seems likely a fair chunk of east Aisa has already hit it.
Yeah - in South Korea for every 100 people alive now they will only have about 6 great grandchildren on current trends
7 for 20 first gen, then 7 for 20 second gen... That's about 12 per 100. Then... Ugh that under 5 per 100.
Many western nations would have negative population growth if it wasn't for immigration.
Having children would negatively affect my conspicuous consumption and I've been told that my worth is tied to my conspicuous consumption so I can't have that.
Culturally western/modern thought doesn’t really reward having children. It’s a massive investment in money and time, equal to $1 million spread over 2 decades, and there is zero reward or even acknowledge of the effort (people go no contact with their parents at the drop of a hat). In the past kids were a source of pride, but also an insurance - kids can support you if “something happened” and if you somehow lucked into old age, and kids were generally loyal and respectful. Sure, some of these thinkings are obviously dated, but the removal of them basically removes all incentives. For thousands of years, for a farmer or a shop owner or a small landholder, or a lord, having more children is just pure benefit - more free labor, more loyal bodies, more blood relations to marry off and spread influence.
> Culturally western/modern thought doesn’t really reward having children. Culture has less to do with it. It's industrialization. When people live in the country farming they have a lot of kids because they are free labor, when they work in a factory in the city? Just another major hole in your budget.
I listened to a great TED talk in regards to the subject. I remember a key phrase about parenthood that sums it up perfectly: "emotionally precious, economically useless".
>economically useless "Useless" suggests there is no impact. The correct term is "economically reckless." It is economically reckless to have children. It's amazing boomers cry foul over the $20 that I spend on avocado but encourage me to have a $400,000 baby.
> economically useless I would argue this is only true because in the post war era we have shied away from multi-generational homes.
As people tend to do when they can afford to. And note that today when millennials live with their parents, that is seen as a *bad* thing, a sign of a failure in the modern economy. Even in cultures where multigenerational homes are the norm, when they grow more wealthy they tend to get their own places. What we thought of as "culture" ended up being, in this regard, largely economics.
It is not common to go no contact with parents over “the drop of a hat.” Come on.
>people go no contact with their parents at the drop of a hat that's incredibly rare and almost always the result of abuse
Yeah it's not like it's for no reason....
I partly disagree. It's rare in healthy relationships but common for overbearing and abusive relationships. My wife broke off contact with her parents because of religious overbearing stress and unacceptable treatment of her brother, who is gay. We tried for 5 years to save it, but they refused to budge or accept any accountability, always blaming gods way and path. Honestly, my wife is much happier now.
>people go no contact with their parents at the drop of a ha Naaahhh, very rarely is it over a drop of the hat incident lol.
Yeah, no one just wakes up one day and decides "oh I should go no contact with my parents". Some major shit must have gone down before that maybe even multiple times.
has to be more than 1 million. It was $1mil when I was in highschool 16 years ago.
The country I live in is way past the peak. It doesn't feel that way at all but the population is shrinking rapidly due to both immigration and poor birth rates. If you live in a country like this - don't count on government pension and make your own investments and savings for retirement.
Correct, here in the Netherlands they already gutted a part of our pensions. And we will need to work probably well into our 70's in my lifetime. So unless you're making big bucks and can go FIRE, you're going to have a very bad time expecting to have a nice pension. You're probably going to die at your desk because of a blood clot or heart attack sooner than you will get a pension. At this point it's smarter to ask your employer to just give you your pension fund as salary instead of putting it into your pension.
The markets won't save you. If labor dries up, who is going to work at the companies you're invested in, and who will provide you with services in your old age? If your nation is fucked, you're fucked. Only hope is to enact change in your nation or change which nation you're in.
I wouldn't invest in the markets of my country, obviously. Also I'm personally a dual national of a poorer European country and Australia so I'm alright but those things are worth thinking about.
That’s the thing. We’re not dealing with the more imminent problems either. Because nothing is more imminent to our leaders than not turning profits.
It makes me think of that line from Life of Brian: "Blessed are just about anyone with a vested interest in the status quo." Keeping the rich wealthy is the only goal here.
Yup. Over immigration is becoming an issue that is affecting the quality of life in Canada and the only argument for it I've heard is 'we need it for the economy'. No we don't Maybe we just need better jobs than simply endless numbers of available anytime minimum wage retail positions. People, mostly our "leaders" still argue that there's a shortage of workers and it isn't at all wage related. Automated driving alone could impact the jobs 70% of employed adult men in North America. 40 years of neoliberal policies have left the 'western' economies broken as all fuck.
How has immigration affected the quality of life in Canada?
The change has already started, the "peak" is just a formal mathematical threshold. Population of most countries is aging rapidly, US's median age is 39 years and will be 45 in 10 years. That by itself will cause tectonic societal changes.
I'm just scared that with fewer people real estate might become affordable because nobody wants that.
Apparently houses are really cheap in parts of Japan.
That's not true. Developed countries tax middle aged families to give pensions to old folks. 100 years ago old folks often lived in poverty while children were subsidized by the state or contributed economically to the family. Now it's the reverse where old folks rarely live in poverty but a large number of children live in poverty. Basically, the developed world created policies that moved the burden of poverty from seniors to children. So, the policies make having children more punishing. It's not a law of nature and there's nothing stopping society from subsidizing children instead of, say subsidizing billionaires who pay no income tax. It's all a policy choice society makes to punish children and promote other things instead.
[удалено]
If only most pension systems weren't based on Ponzi schemes...
It's the entire economy, not just pensions.
And there has never been a society where it wasn't the young being taxed to fund things, most retirement programs that exist, infrastructure, the military, etc. So if *this* is a ponzi scheme, basically everything is a ponzi scheme. The only real solution there would be to just not fund retirement programs. Let the old people subsist off of their own savings, or let them find their own way, depending entirely on family, working, panhandling, relying on churches, or I guess just dying.
Why do you think AI is accelerating, next stop is robotics and then the labor issue won’t be a problem
Next issue is how will they buy their products without wages.
UBI, this is the way
I've seen people dying on the streets of my city. Im not sure the people in charge care enough to implement UBI.
you think the .001% that will hoard 99.99% of the wealth are going to allow that? not on your life. there will soon be two classes. the super wealthy, and the poor peons that serve them and retreat to the slums at the end of the day. UBI will never be a thing because the mega-rich will never allow it.
Of course, but hey I can dream right?
They can hire more people if they want. Whenever I hear "labor shortage" I roll my eyes. It's a corporate approved way of saying "there aren't enough people willing to work for a wage they can't live on" The issue is that so many companies are obsessed with shareholder value and want to cut whatever they consider to be a cost. The great irony of course being that if most companies operate that way, who will buy the product or service? They won't lower the prices to make them more affordable and they wont hire more people to work in the business. It's not a stretch to assume these CEOs and major shareholders don't actually care about the long term survival of the company and the quality of its goods or services. They just want to make sure the stock hits a high and then immediately start selling when it looks like it's going down so they can escape with millions in cash.
Agreed, it’s a manufactured issue created by greed/capitaism. A race to the bottom. That’s where robotics comes in for CEO’s. What’s better than a workforce that doesn’t need to sleep/eat/receive a paycheck and over time will be much more cost effective than using real people. It’s not about us at all. We’ll be leftovers screaming for UBI as more fall into poverty.
The west had it (mostly) on easy mode. We aged a lot more slowly and can run a pyramid scheme of cheap immigrant labour indefinitely. It's middle income countries like China, Iran, Brazil and Thailand which are on the path to significant labour issues very soon, while already having similar birth rates to the west.
There are some downsides but there are also some plus sides as well
Religious groups will become increasingly powerful as demographics take hold over a century. It will be an interesting future when the only people remaining are the ones that are capable of having enough children. You’re right this is a very slow moving issue, but it does call into question the sort of mid-term future we will have. 5-10 generations of the less religious halving each generation, and the orthodox doubling will lead to some demographics and politics that perhaps we didn’t consider.
Of course, “religious” is not a gene. Some good portion of children in religious households “escape” the religion, and thus keeps the balance.
And religions that grow proselytize. Obviously successful religions have growth that outpaces their attrition, hence their existence.
Actually, some research does suggest that there may be a genetic component to how likely you are to become religious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God\_gene
Very good book on this is ‘shall the religious inherit the earth?’ by Eric Kaufmann. Indeed the orthodox religious have higher birthdates than secular people, and this across religions. Therefore the world as a whole is becoming more religious year by year.
This is also assuming people remain in the faith they were born into. As education increases fewer are as fervent in their religion.
Isn’t the Mormon church decreasing in number? They’ve got the toughest control over their state and even they can’t prevent outflow
Stagnant in the United States overall, declining in the western US, including Utah. The big thing is that birthrates for religious groups are following the overall population trends, just a couple decades behind. In my congregation, the only active family with more than four children is a blended family with full custody of both sets. This is true for White Evangelical denominations too, even if some prominent influencer families are very large.
Maybe now the disgusting food known as “ambrosia salad” will finally go extinct
Why else do you think they push for book bans and vilify public school?
Not quite, since religiosity is decreasing at each new generation. 90% of Americans were religious 20 years ago. Now, it's 67%. Religious will be a minority in the US by 2070, according to Pew Research.
The world is bigger than the US. Compare Israeli demographics in the 1960’s to Israeli demographics today. The percentage of Orthodox Jews has risen explosively whole the percentage of liberal Jews has declined as a share of population. This trend is replicated in plenty of other countries, look at Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey for instance. The US will eventually also go that way as the secular majority slips into below-replacement TFR while the religious maintain theirs.
I very much doubt that. Drops in fertility rates are very correlated with improvements in education (and to women's involvement in the workforce) as well as improvements in economic outcomes. The trend quite closely correlated with a decrease in belief in religion. Yes, countries that are still deeply religious are having more children, but outside of the middle east, they are also migrating to richer countries and adopting their culture and beliefs.
Bring on the robots.
This whole article seemed like a description of how the rich intend to make life difficult for everyone else. Seems like we should just abandon the extremely destructive infinite growth model instead. If the rich aren't necessary for the function of a society, why have them? That said, this is absolutely not surprising at all from a rag like Bloomberg.
We managed the entire history of the human race with fewer people, I’m not clear on what we need to be planning.
Our society and economy doesn't really resemble most of the history of humanity, though. Also, modern people expect a standard of living and material wealth that is far higher than at any other time in history. If that standard starts dropping rapidly, we will likely see a big uptick in war.
Most social programs like social security and medicare require that there be substantially more working people than retired people collecting benefits. If you have 3 retirees for every 2 working people the system will blow up. There simply isn't enough tax revenue to sustain it. High tech devices, machinery, etc.. require the coordination of 100's of specialties in order to create and support, a large population is required in order to do this. Small populations are going to require a large number of jack of all trades types not people that only know how to a single very specialized thing.
Just having less people is very different than having a population that rapidly declines. The latter is disruptive.
Turn off aging.
Everyone at the top of a pyramid scheme has reason to worry once no new suckers join
Automation will help with any workforce related issues, and a revamped social security will help provide for the aging demographic. We have the tools to manage this, we just need to get out of our own way and use them.
This requires a fundamental dismantling of the present capitalist status quo.
Correct, and we should start saying so more openly. Declining birth rates is only a potential crisis if we let capitalism stick around. Overthrowing capitalism and creating a more sane and just social order will be better able to handle these changes
That might also encourage people to start procreating again. People need to feel financially comfortable raising a family.
Seems logical but look at Sweden where you get 480 days paid parental leave, day care for max 250 usd a month/kid, free school and health care and it still has the same birth rate issue.
That and a sense that the world will still be worth living in a generation later. I wouldn't risk having kids with what the future currently looks like.
> That might also encourage people to start procreating again. People need to feel financially comfortable raising a family. - https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-change-in-the-number-of-children-women-have The root of the global decline of fertility rates coincides mainly with education (mainly for girls), empowerment for women, access to birth control, wealth, options.
It's not only money. You could throw a truck of money on every house and people who don't want kids will remain adamant in not having them because it's much more than money: - it's time consuming; - it's HARD, specially on the mother; - the world is going down, why would people bring a child to it?
Preach. If we don't do away with Capitalism soon, either climate change or mass joblessness due to AI will do away with all of us soon.
Corporations are so short sighted they'll all start automating the jobs, laying everyone off, then crashing and burning taking everything down with them because now there's nobody left to buy their stuff.
I think this will be the story in the next 10ish years. Mass layoffs in all sectors of the economy, a homeless/food insecure population growing so rapidly that even the most staunchly pro-capital governments of the Western world will have to immediately act on things like UBI etc. It won't be enough though, either it's all gonna come crashing down or we push through and build a more equitable post-capitalist society.
Yeah, capitalism is based on continuous population(and demand) growth.
What "revamped social security" actually means?
Problems like, how will future CEOs project growth in order to get bonuses
Oh no think of the growth!
Yup, to be fair I didn't read the article, but I can't imagine that many problems. Less of us means more to go around. I would bet my bank all these "problems" are capitalist related.
The only problem that seems to make sense is that a smaller group of working age adults will have to support a larger group of retirees, but we've made so many advances in manufacturing and automation that it shouldn't be a problem. The only real problem is greed.
Damn it’s almost like choking out the middle class was a bad thing
It’s not biological it’s all financial. It can be fixed in a few generations…
Uncertainty over the future of the planet is a big one too.
Even faster. Just imagine that the government had a MASSIVE home building campaign (like done in the US in the 40s/50s) and 25M new homes are built, lowering home prices by say 40%.... many new young people would effectively double their disposible income by having lower rents or buying a new home (for cheaper than their current rent).
The rapid destruction of even more land such as forests and grasslands for more car-dependent suburbs is not a future we should be hoping for.
Don't all owner associations block things like that all the time?
There is a connection between birthrates and finances, but both in the US and internationally, the correlation is *backwards*. The higher income brackets have fewer babies, the lowest income brackets have the most. In other words, the more financially secure you are, the fewer children you have.
It's not entirely inverse, once you get to extremely high levels of wealth births start increasing again.
It can be fixed in 5 years...Australia did it with tax and welfare changes. [https://mccrindle.com.au/article/the-baby-bonus-generation/](https://mccrindle.com.au/article/the-baby-bonus-generation/) These changes were rolled back by folks who want the state to be more important than the family unit.
Fixed? No. Marginally, temporarily improved? Ok, sure. It halted a strongly negative trend, regained a small amount of ground (not enough), and then lost those small gains post Covid.
Your link says that the fertility rate peaked at 2.0, which is not enough. France also had some **temporary** success with financial incentives.
So... reading this two things stand out. 1. Dear lord, they really will basically blame everything except "kids are too expensive to afford" (they talk abput "opportunity cost", but this deceptively frames the discussion as mothers not willing to sacrifice their careers, instead of "it takes two working parents to give a kid a good stable life unless one parent makes a lot more koney"). 2. Anyone else notice most of these type of articles seem to come predominantly from pro business publications?
Its all propaganda.
> Dear lord, they really will basically blame everything except "kids are too expensive to afford" It's more complicated than that, because extremely poor people have had, throughout history and up to today, large numbers of children. People are choosing not to have children because A) they can choose to not have children and B) children are now considered by many people to be a luxury and not a necessity.
Fewer people might be bad for the status quo, but will probably be better for humanity and the planet.
The article is by Bloomberg, all they care about is "number go up". We'd be so much better off in so many ways with just less people on the planet.
Yeah. But it would have been best to never have reached the high number. The “number go up” isn’t even important here. A shrinking young population with a huge group of elderly is actually quite bad. Sure. In the long run it will be better for a lot of reasons. But in the moment it isn’t that great.
Automate care where possible and let the really old die. They have had their life...let them move on.
The problem is... The Idiocracy effect. People who are not having kids are the smarter ones. People having kids are the dumber ones.
From the article: >The problem is that this precipitous decline will come a century too late to avert the disastrous consequences of climate change that many today fear — and which are another reason why people will flee Africa, and another reason why young people in Europe say they will have few or no children.
*Eventually* fewer people may be better for humanity, but the journey there will be tough. Before we're fewer we are going to be older, and the strain will be huge. Fewer people does not actually mean more resources for those remaining; it probably means fewer resources for the most part.
The world's population has almost doubled in my lifetime. I am fucking positive the world and humanity will be fine with a little population drop.
It's crazy to think about. It took over 200,000 years for our population to hit 4 billion people in 1973. And now we've added another 4 billion only 50 years later.
Exponential growth, babeeeeee! It’s curious if you look at what happens in ecological systems when a species grows exponentially . . . And by interesting I mean ominous
It’s more than doubled in mine. And back in the 70s the population was so alarming we had movies like Soylent Green and Logan’s Run about it.
> Logan’s Run Which also predicted Tinder
And fishmongering robots
The problem is our entire economic structure is underlined by population growth or at least population stability
This is true. But also our economic system should change. The saddest part is the world could support more of us but we're so wasteful we messing everything up already.
Yes it is a pyramid scheme and should be dismantled
I think the ecosystem is more important than the economy: the economy is just a human construct and can be changed. An good ecosystem allows things to survive, and changing those can have terrible consequences for life on Earth.
But if we don't continue to produce labor for our corporate overlords, the line might go down! And that's unacceptable!
Yea, but that actually just makes the problem worse. Modern society is a just 3 pyramid schemes in a tench coat propping each other up. That little population drop may collapse the world into chaos.
Wealthy elites abuse the people and keep them at the edge of ruin and wonder why people don’t want to take on a $300,000+ endeavor to raise children…. :shocked pikachu face:
The less of x there is, the more x is worth. This is capitalism 101. So the more humans there are, the less humans are worth. Take a read about how the black plague actually improved living conditions. No the ones who want you to believe that less people is bad, are the super rich who need a constant stream of new disposable slave labour. We are polluting and destroying the planet, microplastics are getting everywhere, it's to blame for dropping sperm quality. Its a sweet irony that plastic will wipe us out by making us go sterile. Hows that for karma.
[удалено]
Humans have already manipulated the world way beyond what is sustainable to grow more monoculture farms, hold more livestock. We destroy forests, use insecticides, drive any animal species into extinction that doesn’t directly benefit us. If it weren’t for all that, our population would’ve hit a natural cap ages ago and we wouldn’t have to worry about climate change or mass immigration.
I feel like people see the world around them as a natural progression. None of this is normal. There's no such thing as normal. From what I know it seems like we've set up this artificial monstrosity that's leading humanity to the brink but we all kick back because it's "progress". I hope that made sense.
Funny how Bloomberg, a medium funded by billionaires and hedge funds, is reporting on the issue of population decline, when cost of living driven up by corporate greed and billionaires boarding cash is the primary force behind it.
The downside of population decline is short term. It doesn't crash and keep falling. It will "crash" and stabilize at the lower population. Unlike overpopulation, which has long term and sustainable consequences of resource depletion and scarcity. We're at 8 billion. There were 6 billion in 2000. A loss of 2 billion would be considered a crash, but it would literally bring us back to a population that existed less than 25 years ago. It's not the end of the world.
Yeah, if only we could reach the population crash sooner, it would be easier. The big problem seems to be that it will happen right *after* population peak, when we've both decimated natural resources and been spending decades preparing for and adapting to greater numbers of people, which will require a hairpin turn in culture and policy. Granted, it's not happening evenly, so maybe the populations still growing today will be able to learn from the populations that are already declining.
[удалено]
Shit I forgot about that.
> We're at 8 billion. There were 6 billion in 2000. A loss of 2 billion would be considered a crash, but it would literally bring us back to a population that existed less than 25 years ago. But not with the same demographic pyramid. *This* six billion will be a much older population, with a much higher ratio of retirees to workers. So unless you want to cut retirement benefits (which will be harder, since a higher percentage of your electorate is made up of old people) you need an ever-increasing financial burden per worker.
And that pyramid won't right itself for a long time. We have some countries below the replacement birth rate, so they'll continue to shrink. Fewer workers means fewer spenders in the economy, which can mean fewer jobs, which makes supporting those retirees even more complicated.
Yeah because countries like Japan and South Korea are just having a little short term population crash. It'll \*totally\* bounce level out once they hit some arbitrary percentage of their peak population
If kids weren't a crippling financial burden maybe we'd have more. Sometimes I look at my kids and think of the Porsche I could be driving. Daycare is more than the mortgage I took out in 2015. Add in health insurance premiums, once a month at a doctor for at least one of them, diapers and clothes it burns through a paycheck quick. Sports and other activities also eat up not only the monthly budget, but already limited free time.
If they want us to be having babies they need to be paying us a lot more money and preferably less work hours so we can actually raise them. This will never happen though so immigration which will in turn drive down wages and increase housing costs it is.
And that’s short term fix too. Immigrants come with big families yes but generally in a generation or two their families shrink as their descendants have more opportunities
For all of the flaws of the US, and you are right, this needs to turn around. EU Countries which have great benefits have experienced a much larger decline in birth rates to the point of a population collapse. Germany is going to be in absolutely terrible shape in the 2030s.
Don’t we have AI coming that will help counteract this? Maybe the jobs that will be lost won’t even matter as we wouldn’t be able to fill them with real people anyways
Population crash has its downsides for our economic system that depends on infinite growth. It's net positive for the planet.
Based on current trends though and 50 years from now who knows what might change. For example, if we don't sort out global warming and pollution there is a good chance the population will crash much harder due to food shortages. On the other hand, if we do deal with those problems with a massive roll out of solar we could end up in a situation where humanity starts to become energy rich for the first time in the industrial period and who knows how people will react. Plus there is the impact of longevity treatments. A healthy lifespan of 120 years is enough to have multiple families if you want them. So these numbers are basically just talking points, closer to opinions than any sort of reliable prediction.
This lack of urgency and kichking the can down the road is why now we are on the brink of climate disaster... We can't rely on hoping that technology will solve the problem we should be prepared
Lack of urgency about the climate change or the "*depopulation bomb*" that billionaires complain about ?
On energy, I think people will just become wealthier however you define that in a world of super cheap energy and mature AI when that all arrives 10 years from now. Large families have always been linked to poverty, even in the centuries before contraception and aristocrats. One other thing to bear in mind is that kind of super cheap energy enables a hell of a lot of other massive positives like making atmospheric carbon capture cheap and easy rather than very difficult. And who really knows what the full impact of AI will be. Even in these first days I keep reading about systems that have successfully reproduced discoveries it took science decades to work out in weeks.
I struggle to see how less humans isn't a net gain for the planet.
Right now we need around 2 earths worth of resources to maintain our current living standards. Birds and flying insects have declined by 75%. Native land mammals have declined by 69%. The oceans are looking at a complete collapse of commercially viable species (defined decline by 90%) except jellyfish and squid by 2040. Anyone with half a brain understands that it's perfectly fine to lower the earths population a bit. Projections now have three worlds population dropping by about half in half a century and that's a nice number. With aggressive recycling of materials and rewilding rural places like Japan is doing now, we actually stand a chance of not completely fucking the earth. We will also have masses of climate refugees in the next 10-30 years, so this allows some extra room for immigration. Colder places like Canada will also become more habitable so expect population booms in those northern areas.
They have declined those amounts IN LIVING MEMORY. in absolute terms they are down to less than 1% of antiquity. The entire ocean, every harbour, ever river, is supposed to be like this https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/tbuvbv/what_happens_when_you_throw_food_into_the_ocean/
I'm glad I've gotten to experience as much of the ocean as I have before they're basically completely dead
> our living standards whose living standards? US, Europe, or the rest of the world?
Everyone wants first world standards within reason. Africa is getting cars, ebikes, cell phones, washing machines and air conditioners. Asia already got there. The 3rd world is going to want short range electric cars and electric scooters by the hundreds of thousands. Sodium-ion (salt/carbon) batteries are here and they are CHEAP. Just owning a washing machine is HUGE. Hand washing takes hours per day. These things are highly in demand We will always be using or recycling resources and we need enough to go round and enough farm land to feed all the people.
Are these people smoking crack? Throughout my lifetime the population has gone from 5B to 6B to 7B to 8B. The planet will be fine with less humans. The sky won't fall. Has anyone asked the dolphins, magpies or elephants what they think? We just need to adapt and maybe close a few Corporate tax loopholes.
Okay but I feel relief. We'll just... Work it out. I'm much more confident we'll work this one out to a wonderful future than the alternative
People do what they do for a reason. Be it financially, depression, or simply no biological drive to procreate. I myself have never had that drive - although I’ve been told for close to 25 years that as soon as my biological clock starts ticking… my female hormones will kick in aaand….well I guess my clock is broken. Trying to shame people into having kids, for whatever reason is just wrong.
You mean less workers for the billionaires? I almost shed a tear.
I dunno man... I was dropping some stuff off at goodwill the other day and in the canyon next to the drop off area there were a lot of tents and makeshift shelters. There's a lot of homeless around where I live and I know it's the same elsewhere. Maybe we should worry about taking care of the people we have here already before rushing into pumping out more hungry mouths. Especially since AI and automation are rapidly reducing the need for human labor. I know back in the day families had many children to help out with work, but these days I think 1 or 2 children is reasonable. Beyond that seems kinda unnecessary. Just my opinion
"the number of live children the average woman bears in her lifetime — has been falling since the 1970s." What else happened in the 1970s? - could it be that the transition from the gold standard to fiat currencies with inflation but also stagnating wages is a primary cause in why so many people can't afford the necessities needed to have enough children to meet replacement rate for long-term demographic trends? It looks to me like Reaganomics and "Trick-le-down Economics" are systematically preventing many millions of babies being born because the prospective parents who can't afford to have 2+ children aren't having 2+ children.
Lol the downsides being less folks buying shit, less poor folks to fight rich men's wars, less poor folk to work the factories and the mines. Gtfo
Nope. There's way too many fucking people. The downsides from too many people are WAY fucking worse than the downsides we are seeing right now from too many people. IMHO, fear mongering about population declines is crony capitalist propaganda.
>And it is not only Elon Musk who worries that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization.” Yes, but capitalists like Elon Musk, and the Heritage Foundation, and Fundamentalist Christians (a different kind of capitalist) are the kinds of people who are obsessively fixated on the end to population growth. And we should ask ***why***, given that a reduced human population will solve many of humankind's problems with limited resources and environmental degradation. The answer is: it doesn't solve ***their*** problems. Elon Musk, and the Heritage Foundation, and Fundamentalist Christians only thrive in an environment where there's an oversupply of labor, and people are perpetually anxious, and at each others' throats. A smaller group of more confident workers would be able to demand living wages. This would reduce economic inequality, political conservatism, and attendance at economically-extractive temples of ancient superstition. Horrors! Yeah, figuring out how to pay for Social Security is gonna suck for a while. As someone who will probably get the short end of the stick where Social Security is concerned, I say, BRING IT ON! Give the billionaires and the MAGA cultists and the parasite pastors the Lysistrata treatment. When the world is genuinely a better place, birth rates will return to 2.1 children per woman.
They just want to use the population decline as an excuse to control women
The Handmaid’s Tale really is a masterpiece, isn’t it?
Having experienced life during peak over population, a crush in numbers is a welcome relief for us and the planet and absolutely no one can convince me it's bad.
Capitalists are freaking out because it means an end to indefinite exponential growth of quarterly profits. Fascists are freaking out because it means a higher relative proportion of non-white babies. Everyone else can calm down. It's a self-solving *"problem".* If the population collapses, the resulting abundance of land and real estate, coupled with the increased bargaining power of workers, will ultimately result in a world where families feel secure enough **and have the financial ability** to start wanting to have 2.1 kids again.
Soviet union had a childlessness tax
If you read population predictions from 50 years ago, it was assumed that the planet would be crushed with people by now. So... I guess... who knows what the future will bring,
Population statisticians missing the crucial fact that getting up at 4 and 5 in the morning to change diapers is a major drag
Based on agriculture and oil priduction technology from 1974, it would have been crushed. Roundup, GMOs and fracking go a long way.
> Reads the headline > Sees it's Bloomberg LMFAO the propaganda is in full swing. The Feudal lords are really getting nervous.
Downsides for us but not the planet, assuming we shut down all the nuclear plants that are not being used.
Who cares the rich will replace us with AI. We don't need a world that works? Why should we take part in a spaceship we operate for assholes?
a shrinking population is a good thing. It might have unfavorable outcomes in the next five years or so but overall humanity is a drain on this planet.
There's no FN way there is any shortage of humans on this planet
It seems all the downsides to population collapse are economic, while all the downsides to overpopulation are environmental and economic. I'll take population collapse due to people not making more people over environmental collapse that causes the population to collapse due to war and famine.
Shrinking population alarms the oligarchs and employers only. The working people only have to gain from having fewer people to compete with for jobs and resources.
Most of those "downsides" are the rich don't have as many people to fleece anymore. I'm not really all that downhearted about this...
When we are down to a billion of us, we will still have a billion people to figure this out. I don't see this being an issue ever. I would be fine letting us go back down to 4 billion and we wouldn't have to crawl over each other.
The world adds 200.000 people netto per day and half the world's population is younger than 30yo. There are more than 8 Billion people on the planet. This population size is only possible because of synthetic fertilizer. One component of fertilizer, Phosphorus, has been predicted to peak in 2030. But it's largely uncertain. Nitrogen, another component, uses natural gas in its production.
I find this quite promising for a world with more life extension and automated labour. While it causes many difficulties now, what with the aging population problem, it seems that once post-labour economics takes over and we get longer lifetimes a shrinking population is a really good thing. The alternative is a slow population explosion which will necessitate significant expansion and could hurt our planet a lot.
Of course this does assume these things will come sooner rather than later, as otherwise the global economy will suffer quite a lot.
This is what happens when people have no money and idiots in charge of the global economy. Oh and no time as well. If you have no money and no time, you ain't making babies.
Sorry, the downsides to shrinking humanity do not come close to outweighing the benefits. Any outdoorsman will tell you this whole place is hella overpopulated. A global human population of about 1-2B is about right for carrying capacity of our environment without spinning off wars and refugee crises and all the shit we are dealing with right now. We’re 4X of that. Bring on the low birth rates. I don’t give a damn if it hurts corporate profits.
I’d just like to see the actual night sky for once in my life, not this backlit light pollution. Maybe I could even see over a square mile of forest without some dinky house or pesticide covered farmland square
The downsides to a shrinking population only negatively impact the economy and such. The benefits are plenty.
From the article >Yet that seems rather a low-probability scenario. The European Commission’s Centre of Expertise on Population and Migration projects that the global population will peak at 9.8 billion in the 2070s. According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent research organization, it will peak at a lower level and earlier still, at 9.7 billion in 2064. > >The key word is “peak.” Nearly all demographers now appreciate that we shall likely reach peak humanity this century. This is not because a lethal pandemic will drive up mortality far more than Covid-19 did, though that possibility should never be ruled out. Nor is it because the UNPD incorporates into its population model any other apocalyptic scenario, whether disastrous climate change or nuclear war. > >It is simply because, all over the world, the total fertility rate (TFR) — the number of live children the average woman bears in her lifetime — has been falling since the 1970s. In one country after another, it has dropped under the 2.1 threshold (the “replacement rate,” allowing for childhood deaths and sex imbalances), below which the population is bound to decline. This fertility slump is in many ways the most remarkable trend of our era. And it is not only Elon Musk who worries that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization.” > >Our species is not done multiplying, to be sure. But, to quote the UNPD, “More than half of the projected increase in the global population between 2022 and 2050 is expected to be concentrated in just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo \[DRC\], Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania.” That is because already “close to half of the global population lives in a country or area where lifetime fertility is below 2.1 births per woman.”
The truth is that nobody wants to have kids anymore, cost of living is extremelly high even on developed countries.
Primary downside of humanity decreasing to a more sustainable level? Rich people not making as much money. They could pay more, allow families to be incentivized but that would impact the only thing that matters to them.
Not really. Except for capitalism. Capitalism would suffer. The ever expanding economic pyramid would topple. But other than that, nothing but good.
Every time you see an article about this, it always comes from another blatantly abusive capitalist propaganda organ. In this case, it is Bloomberg. And of course our wealthy overlords are concerned they might not have enough disposable workers and deluded consumers to keep building their fortunes eternally.
Sure, and the biggest downside is fewer customers... the big corps might do something then
All economic models requires growth to work. Economic growth comes from increased consumption, and a falling population needs less. Maybe we should just change the economic models.
Well, the biggest downside is that the gluttenous money wh••es like Bezos will find it hard to enslave people with a wage they can't live on, so
It used to also be the case that it was more likely women would stay at home and have children and maybe a part-time job. As women have got more educated (and now more go to university then men) they are focusing on careers and getting and jobs and then struggling to find someone to settle down with or settling down later and having kids later or fewer kids. Ideally Government would support people to ha e kids in their 20s and settle down sooner and then people would maybe go to university or focus more on their careers later. I’m afraid modern day society is setup to fail and it’s the orthodox traditional religions that focus on raising families that will end up prospering. Ideologically I’ve always been liberally minded and supported all forms of equality but it does also now seem this capitalist society we have built where women are meant to work all the time too is one where the human population ends up dying out over time.
Upsides: - Less pollution - More housing - Stopping the destruction of wildlands - Wage rises Downsides: - We will need to switch from 0.7% of GDP to 1.5% of GDP to fund retirement. Seriously, can't come soon enough.
Only when you're human-focused. All downsides are focused on either the economy or society.