No fewer than 23 leading nations—including Japan, Spain, South Korea, and Italy—will see their population cut in half by 2100. China’s will drop by a stunning 48 percent. . .
. . .Another 34 countries will see dramatic population declines by 25 to 50 percent by 2100. Beyond this, the projected fertility rates in 183 of 195 countries will not be high enough to maintain current populations by the century’s end. That is called negative population growth and once it starts, it probably won’t stop. These scholars predict that sub-Saharan and North Africa, as well as the Middle East, will be the only super regions fertile enough to maintain their populations without dramatic immigration policies.
The article refers to a Gates Foundation projection.
Professor Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine and head of the Gates study, told the BBC, “I find people laugh it off… they can’t imagine it could be true, they think women will just decide to have more kids. If you can’t [find a solution] then eventually the species disappears.”
Have a Happy New Year.
Some people think human extinction would be the best choice for the planet. I suspect that wars in a collapsing population will have much worse side effects than continued high populations.
Prof. Murray doesn’t mention it, but childbearing rates are path dependent.
This issue doesn’t keep me up at night, at least not for the U.S. I’m banking on those from the lower SES groups to pickup the slack…and they have without fail. What could possibly go wrong? Go homo sapiens! I’m rooting for us!
That is called negative population growth and once it starts, it probably won’t stop
Just like positive population growth never stopped once it started?
If you can’t [find a solution] then eventually the species disappears.
Let’s say 50% every 100 years. 7800000000 * ((1/2) ^10) = 7617188
So even after a thousand years of continued low fertility the species doesn’t disappear.
sub-Saharan and North Africa, as well as the Middle East, will be the only super regions fertile enough
That means the human species doesn’t disappear. The population of the rest of the world is replaced by the population currently leaving in those regions. It’s a very different situation.
And that’s the result too many people are afraid to talk about, but which the UN is trying to force on us — all the civilized nations get overrun by barbarian hordes, and life goes back to being nasty, brutish, and short worldwide. I think it is worth a nuclear war to prevent this from happening.
To get some intuition, 2 to the tenth power is 1,032. So a halving every 100 years for a thousand years would reduce the population to 1/1,032 of it’s present number. That’s almost exactly equal to moving the decimal point 3 places. So a present population of 7.8 billion becomes approximately 7.8 million.
On the other hand, the rate of decrease results from millions of individual decisions. Some groups have a greater rate, some a lesser rate. Some groups are even increasing. If each group keeps the same rate, those with higher rates will “outbreed” those with lower rates.
When I was a youngin, my liberal Unitarian parents were afraid that conservative Catholics would outbreed us. That seems less likely today. There seem to be three groups with high birth rates today–who will accordingly make up larger and larger parts of the population. 1. Natalist denominations (e.g., Orthodox Jews). 2. the many who have not yet passed the “demographic transition” (where parents are sure children will not die before adulthood, and those children are now economic drains rather than economic contributors). 3. those with poor impulse control, less future orientation, etc.
To the extent that the latter is inherited, fewer and fewer people will be able to maintain a high standard of living.
As long as some populations are reproducing themselves, than our species will continue (for specific values of “our”). The questions “Who is having the most children?” and “What are we becoming?” are actually the same question.*
* Assuming no change in mortality large enough to offset the fertility differences. Covid doesn’t even come close.
This is closely linked to the importance of government and the deficiencies of our current international elites:
Because it is apropos and coincidental:
“Liu Zhi ruled China from 146 to 168. He took the throne as a teenager, with Empress-Dowager Liang Na and her brother Liang Ji acting as his regents. Later, after Liang Na’s death in 150, he allied with a powerful bloc of eunuchs at the court to kill Liang Ji and consolidate power. As Mark Cartwright explains for Ancient History Encyclopedia, eunuchs—typically individuals taken from border territories, castrated and enslaved in the royal household—held favored positions at Chinese court, as their lack of family ties ostensibly endeared them to the emperor. In practice, however, eunuchs often used their proximity to the ruler to gain political influence.
“As 11th-century chronicler Sima Guang wrote in an essay later translated by historian Rafe de Crespigny, “[T]he ruinous disorder inherited by Emperors Huan and Ling was compounded by their own stupid tyranny.” Plagued by instability and corrupt leadership, the Han dynasty collapsed in 220. ”
In short, selecting the political elite for their very lack of family ties, predicated on the notion that without nepotism, they would not be corrupt, was a short road to complete corruption and disintegration. The same can be seen anywhere the multigenerational investments of family are denigrated in service to ‘purified’ markets or government. Much better to have government corrupted, market distorted, so that all three legs of the stool are represented effectively in society.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/mausoleum-identified-resting-place-second-century-chinese-emperor-liu-zhi-180976668/
Newborn babies double their weight in about six months. At that rate, a baby who weighs eight pounds at birth will weigh eight tons before his sixth birthday.
“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” – Herb Stein
THANK you. Brilliant pushback.
We humans are so programmed to look at a trend and see it as a permanent progression (or regression).
Fact is, indefinite straight-line trends are vanishingly rare.
Whew, I got worried there for a second.
The immediate problem is social insurance programs (e.g., Social Security and Medicare) that were predicated on an ever-rising population.
I wonder if there is not a fallacy of division (what is true for the whole may not be true for a part) at work when making these forecasts.
Suppose one-third of a population has preferences such that they decide to not have children. However, the rest of the population has children at replacement levels. The one-third who do not have children will not pass along their genes or preferences, but the remainder do. I propose that, looking at the distribution of preferences over number of children, the child generation will have less weight on levels below replacement than the parent generation. Evolution will thus keep depopulation from its ultimate conclusion.
Another scenario is the Idiocracy scenario, whereby higher IQ people have fewer chidlren than lower IQ people. However, one implication is that you are reducing the supply of high IQ people, which could lead to them having higher incomes.
Along these lines, historically something like one-third of men have made no impact on the gene pool. By contrast, most women historically have had children. Countries that are depopulating are also seeing larger numbers of women not having children than happened historically, partly due to their much better economic opportunities. Fewer women who have success in the labor markets having children also could lead to a similar Idiocracy situation. The difference is that success in the labor market is correlated with IQ, but also with a number of other traits.
Finally, the depopulation theory does not consider intergroup conflict. For instance, consider if you went back in time 1000 years and a population had similar dynamics (so that they would cut their population in half in a hundred years). The country would become weaker militarily, and be less able to defend itself from attacks from other groups. They may be invaded and the men killed off and the women forced to have more children. This is how patriarchal societies outcompeted others. Nowadays, intergroup military conflicts are rare between countries of similar levels of technology. One way to view this is it has meant the end of the dominance of the patriarchal society. People are free to raise however many children they choose without fear of being invaded if they let up. However, this also depends on the absence of intergroup military conflict. If wars return, then people will have more children.
Has anyone estimated the environmental, technical innovation. and wage effects?
The assumption of a path dependent decline in births is troublesome. Surely at some point or for some people, the incremental value of a child will be high enough to stimulate additional births.
“Surely at some point or for some people, the incremental value of a child will be high enough to stimulate additional births.”
Yes, come over to Texas and have a look at the large (3+ kids) upper middle class families.
This just raises another interesting question. If red families have the reproduction equation figured out, will blue families become extinct?
Blue families will be replaced with people from the equator in order to maintain political power.
The white TFR in Texas was 1.7 in 2017. It has only declined since then.
Births lost to COVID hysteria will likely exceed lives lost to COVID, and that’s before talking about life years.
Nobody will replace East Asians with their rock low fertility, but it’s a question as to whether a society with that many elderly as a % of population can be fiscally sound. We just learned that the old will literally shut down society to cling on to live a tiny bit longer.
The UN actually has not done all that bad on population projections. Nico Keilman “Data quality and accuracy of United Nations population projections, 1950-95”, http://folk.uio.no/keilman/Popstudies3.pdf; UN World Pop. Prosp. 2010 & 2012. If they say that the world population is going to 11 billion it would seem a bit rash to dismiss them out of hand. And looking at global population density, Africa and South America still have relatively low densities. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density Are there sub-replacement level fertility rates in any comparatively low density countries? The campaign by elites to force high density living upon the little people is undoubtedly a factor in recent trends that will decrease in intensity as the little people adapt and find ways to maintain humane density levels.
Coupled with the inanity of forecasting a disappearing human population is the statement that often follows, to wit, because population growth is slowing or turning negative, GDP growth will slow or turn negative because
%-chg(GDP) = %-chg(population) + %-chg(productivity).
So what? What really matters is the standard of living, that is, the path of GDP per capita. I’d be perfectly happy to see GDP shrink if population were also shrinking, so long as productivity continued to improve, as is very highly likely (unless you believe that productivity itself is a function of population growth, but why would that be so?):
%-chg(GDP per capita) = %-chg(GDP)/%-chg(population) = %-chg(productivity)
As we understand and control biology better we will be able to extend (healthy) lifespan at a faster pace than population declines. Up to now we have been extending lifespan by improving nutrition and curing diseases, soon we will understand and control the whole aging process. In the next 50 years it is very possible that we will be able to stop or even reverse aging. This is another “singularity” that is coming soon. When this happens it will radically change the population equation.
“If you can’t [find a solution] then eventually the species disappears.” Well, I can’t find a solution–I’m not even going to try. But there are 7.8 billion of us; it will be a long time before we disappear. We have more pressing concerns.
It’s especially hard to disappear if gene therapies reverse aging in the 2030s.
Does anyone know if these forecasts are incorporated into current climate models?
Non-issue.
We need at least one of our major political parties to be a pro-family party; not pro-family in the tired old sense of promoting values, but rather pro-family formation
things like the child seat law are anti-family formation – the adminstrative requirements for child seats make it impossible to fit more than 2 in most cars at any one time. A pro-family formation party would seek to make it easier for young families to have more children
Car seat laws are not important, except insofar a visible manifestation of regulatory cost disease in child care.
The biggest things families can’t afford are education, healthcare, and “good” real estate (often a euphemism for public order and schools).
The state makes these all too expensive for most to afford, then offers subsidized government run/regulated versions at a price (you can’t control quality and content).
But that means taking on the biggest industries and cultural forces in our society. That’s a lot harder then trying to argue for another couple of grand in a child tax credit (note that if they were serious about the finances, they would be forgiving at least five digits of taxes per year for every kid you have).
And this is bad, why? Well, except economists will have to revamp their theories for a world where population growth isn’t spurring productivity growth to supply the new population with stuff. And maybe figure out how to do a world where constant increase in production is necessary to stay above water. We certainly don’t need the physical labor of an increasing population. We do have social welfare states based on the need for an increasing number of workers to fund others.
So yes, the grand old pre-WWII ideas based on the wrong assumption that the high birth rate spurred by a world needing physical laborers who survived the mortality controls of childhood disease, injury and malnutrition wouldn’t change when modernity cause the shift to fertilty-control (birth control, abortion, late marriage, etc.) for population control. But modernity spread widely after WWII, even Africa is shifting to fertility control.
I’ve long suspected that the middle half of the 20th century was an inflection point in human development. The industrial revolution was producing goods with less labor, advances in medicine and sanitation was letting more kids make it to adulthood. Adult deaths were declining and people were surviving to older age. The last 50 years has been more of plateau as the changes migrated through the populace.
Compare the transformation outlined in ‘The Big Change: America Transforms Itself 1900-1950’ (1952), Frederick Allen Lewis, with the far less overt advances in the last 70 years. Computers were a change but not like going from horse to auto, from lantern to electric light, from woodstove to thermostatically-controlled electric range. Although now, with micro-controllers many of the earlier advances can be made for flexible and cheaper. In 1947, there was on transistor, now almost every one runs around with 100 billion in the pocket.
Fewer births isn’t a problem unless you anticipate needing to do some hands-on killing in a war. The real threat is those fewer births are being damaged in their youth through indoctrination instead of real education. We need more problem solvers and fewer Liberal Arts/social science “educated” problem causers.
How, in the equilibrium, will an immigration policy help anyone when the bulk of the wealthy world is depopulating?
There will be policies against emigration, and tariffs on nations that employ people abroad. If you manage to leave, you will pay your share to ever return. Work visas will be required from the home country as well as the host country.
It’ll be a great time for fishing.
Spain and Italy are receiving large numbers of immigrants and there is pressure for much larger numbers.
Some people think it’s bad that the native population is thinning out and being quickly replaced by a foreign population, others think this is a good thing, but the concern that this post expresses that the population of Spain and Italy is shrinking seems rather absurd because it simply isn’t true.
Next, if you look at Wikipedia’s population density numbers, all four countries mentioned have very high population densities relative to other nations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density
Has any country ever considered affirmative action for mothers? I think many women delay or reduce childbearing because it hurts their careers. We already have so many other groups given affirmative action incentives who I think are less important than mothers.
We have various welfare programs that favor unwed mothers. Unsurprisingly, we’ve gotten more unwed mothers as a result.
Even though your coda suggests you think this is a bad outcome, that would simply take us back to the population of 1971 in many countries. You were around back then, was it such a hellscape, with too few people to get anything done? There were many decrying the “too-large” population then, and I doubt you significantly disagreed with them. It’s good to see most commenters disagree with you now.
The issue isn’t the number of people- a drastic decrease would be welcome- it’s how the current population learns and operates and who we subsidize breeding these days.
And the problem is?