Global fertility is plunging, barely above the replacement rate.
A Case for More Humans
Does anyone recall the 1968 bestseller “The Population Bomb,” by Paul Ehrlich?
He predicted world overpopulation would lead to mass starvation and destitution.
Now two economists post a model in which population skids below the level in 1500 AD.
Depopulation Bomb
Please consider the Depopulation Bomb
Some think a smaller population is actually a good thing.
Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, economists at the University of Texas at Austin specializing in demographics, want to change that. Their book “After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People” is a deep dive into the facts and consequences of depopulation, and an impassioned argument against letting it happen.
The numbers
Global fertility—the number of babies a woman is expected to have over her lifetime—averaged 2.25 last year, the United Nations estimates, the lowest in recorded history, barely above the replacement rate of 2.1 that keeps population stable.Where fertility levels out is unknown. But the authors note that depopulation will happen so long as it goes below two, and two-thirds of the world’s population now lives in countries with fertility below two. In most others, including throughout sub-Saharan Africa, fertility is generally falling.
If global fertility fell to the current U.S. fertility rate of 1.6, world population will rise from 8 billion now to a peak of 10.2 billion in 2080 and then start to decline. “It will not fall to 6 billion or 4 billion or 2 billion and hold there,” they write. “Humanity could hasten its own extinction if birth rates stay too low for a long time.”
The first step to solving depopulation
Spears and Geruso don’t have a solution for falling fertility. They do manage to knock down the most popular theories on the left and right for it, such as the high cost of raising children, lack of family-friendly policies, abortion, or declining marriage and religious observance.
Scandinavian countries have more generous child care and parental leave policies than the U.S.—and lower fertility. Canada has cheaper college tuition, and lower fertility. In India, religious observance and marriage rates are high, and fertility is below the replacement rate. South Korea has among the world’s most restrictive abortion laws, and lowest fertility rates.
Their somewhat unsatisfying explanation is what economists call opportunity cost: There are things parents (or would-be parents) would rather spend their resources on than children.
One Extreme to the Other
We’ve now gone from one extreme worry to another. It’s quite amusing.
When I was in grade school, the fear was a new ice ice age. Teachers discusses putting charcoal on the arctic ice to melt it.
Now we have a constant barrage of hype that Florida will be underwater in 10 year. And every year the climate fearmongers restart the clock, so the crisis is always 10 years away.
One amusing aspect of these cross currents is the number one thing anyone can do for climate change is not have kids. Then its don’t have a car, not even an EV, and never fly in a plane.
Meanwhile, Al Gore is jet setting the globe in his private jet lecturing people about climate change.
If you want to be nauseated, I can help.
The first step is to admit that if there is a problem, government and political hacks like Al Gore will make it worse.
If there is a problem, and a solution, the free market will find it.
Spears and Geruso concluded “There are things parents (or would-be parents) would rather spend their resources on than children.”
With all the political nutcases on both sides of the aisle, who can blame them?
But the authors are wrong about the cost of raising children. It’s an enormous issue. Free child care does not eliminate the problem because it’s not free.
Someone is paying with higher taxes or debased currency. In the US it’s both.
Haves vs Have Nots
A tiny bit of the US gains from extreme policies. The middle class is shrinking as a result. And increasing numbers of people are overly dependent on government.
The public unions run Illinois.
And despite Illinois having the three least-funded pension plans in the nation, Chicago Pension Sweetener Would Add $11.1 Billion in Liabilities
Illinoisans have the highest property taxes in the nation. Yet they face massive tax hikes across the board to fund corrupt teachers’ and police unions.
Who Gets the One Big Beautiful Act Tax Cut Benefit?
Yesterday, I discussed Who Gets the One Big Beautiful Act Tax Cut Benefit?
As you might guess it’s the top 1 percent.
People who are mightily struggling cannot afford kids. That’s the issue.
Biologically speaking, if the population drops significantly whatever humans are left will be the most fertile and will make repopulation faster.
Economically speaking, not sure. But I do know we need to find a way to live with steady-state population. Also in terms of quality of life, a smaller population is probably better than bigger.
My bet is on technology where robotics takes over the main burden of elderly care. This way a growing base population of young people isn’t needed to sustain the older population.
Off topic post request – I’m looking for independent political commentary on Trump’s government and the perceived descent into autocracy. The right’s long standing fear of “big government” and “government overreach” seems to be coming into fruition right before our eyes. Fear mongering is rampant with news sources from all political leanings, what do you see from a neutral analysis?
Less population is a good thing. Less people will be employed with AI. We also have young people that aren’t willing to work. People are realizing it costs too much money to raise a child. Tax payers won’t have to pay for all the kids that are being born to parents that can’t afford them.
Hopefully humanity will move past the “growth at any cost” stage, and instead seek for “stable, sustainable, ‘quality-of-life’ type” of existence. Perhaps we will stop judging the human experience by how much we spend (GDP) or how many hours we work, but our ability to have the niceties of modernity without the drudgery, where the focus is improving quality of life and finding a sustainable path forward that doesn’t involve constantly pushing for more and more growth.
After all, infinite growth in a finite world is cancer.
This is really irrelevant no one reading this will be alive so who cares?
Self-extinction would be humanity’s greatest gift ever to nature and Earth. We have never done anything to improve the planet. Name one thing that we have done that is a net benefit.
Please consider self termination then… for the greater good
In the year 2525, if man is still alive
If woman can survive, they may find …
One thing that I see in every corner except parts of small towns in Portugal: EVERY KIDS at or below 20 has a Smart Phone and they are making love to those phones, not the Ladies or the Guys. AND, I see more and more tattoo’s and Piercings, esp the Bull Rings which are disgusting and ugly – – as ugly as the Hosts. These young people are FAT, NOSE-RINGED, Tattooed, and overall a place for no Love, no Physical Attraction and hence NO KIDS.
My number one rule for ALL people: Watch what they DO, and DO NOT listen to what they SAY. Well, listen but never believe it at first.
I have been an investor in new businesses since 1994 when I retired early. THE PROOF is always in SEEING, SMELLING, TOUCHING, TASTING and: USING and CONFIRMING.
It has worked out well. It takes time, though, so skepticism on tall promises are met with (from me): “Interesting. Let’s stay in touch.”
It’s not the cost of children–it’s the drudgery and loss of independence for 18 years by women. Maybe more child-care would work to raise birth rates. But China’s new $500/year doesn’t come close. Incentive must be MUCH higher.
The mRNA in these vaccines is not only raising the death rate 5000 per week, raising up the disabilities, it’s causing additional infertility. See Ed Dowds research
Myocarditis is the most common ailment. AND, those WITH VACCINES are guaranteed to have Covid. Most of the people we know who got the Shots: SICK TWICE and THREE TIMES since 2022.
We refused and have not had the FLU ONCE since the Scam fired off in March 2020. We were in Portugal until May that year. Flew in an empty 787 to LAX and Drove a Car to Oregon.
Official figures out of New Zealand show that for some batches, the death rate was over 20%…!
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=3098634573634542
SheRobots and HeRobots are coming.
They are super intelligent. They work and help the owner 24/7.
Very much cheaper to stay together.
Yes, depopulation first.
Then lab will create super humans.
They are working now on the Hands and fingers for you know what!!!??
The use of national fertility rates makes the whole research result total garbage.
It is the subsets of the population that will change the result.
Liberal Jews in NYC might have only a single child but Hasidic Jews might have 4 or more.
Run a similar search on Amish, polygamous Mormons, Salafist Muslims, old rite Catholics etc and you will find that their populations are doubling (or tripling) every generation.
Just look at countries in Europe where schools in places like Vienna have a majority (70% plus) of kids from immigrant families and within a century nearly all of Europe will be non European with subsets of those migrants not reducing their fertility rates.
Or Israel now having so many Ultra Orthodox Jews being born that the majority of youths will be Ultra Orthodox within a generation. Now they are debating ending the exemption of them from conscription and the Ultra Orthodox members of the current coalition threaten to end the coalition if that is attempted. Think such electoral problems won’t happen in most countries as such voting blocks clash?
Muhammad is the top name for baby boys in England and Wales.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/bulletins/babynamesenglandandwales/2023
And in Brussels And in Berlin, probably lots of other places also.
Islam taking over in Europe, no dropping of birth rates there – most migrants not injected with toxic DeathVax mRNA gene injection. Part of the plan to wreak maximum havoc. Maximize terror and chaos, and the NWO will save us all – ordo ex chao, the ancient masonic rule to conquer the (western) world. But more and more waking up and becoming active, and the psychopaths know it and getting nervous
There’s some truth to that for even the offshoots. My father was a Menonnite (ex-communicated in the past) and raised all of his 3 boys with fairly traditional values. Now his 3 kids (including me) have a total 8 kids to show for (and more on the way). My father and mother are upper middle class boomers, and have quite the jealous friend group as basically they are the only ones with grand kids in that circle… Similarly for my wife and I we have no friends with kids. I guess another interesting point to go with this corollary is there are no kids coming from my wife’s siblings/cousins nor my brothers wives siblings…
Personally, I think the culture of average White Americans has been an understated reason as to the lack of kids.
Meh, I’m a regular white guy and I have 3 kids and 6 grandkids with more on the way. If you want to solve the birth rate problem ask WOMEN why they’re not getting married and having kids. Then take their recommendations.
You are wrong about “resetting” the climate crisis. It is here now. No resetting. Talk to northern Europeans. Talk to Alaskans. The Arctic crisis is here today.
So you’re saying that the Northern Europeans and Alaskans are complaining about too-warm weather…?
stick your head farther into the sand, we know you know how
Made it a religion based on belief discounting the primary factor energy output of the sun. Governments want to tax you to fix it despite keep getting the predictions wrong decade after decade and slapping a new coat of paint name change on it. .
I’m one of the people who think a lower population would be a good thing. Somewhere between 2 and 4 billion would be great.
But if the population drops to 2 or 4 billion, how will we afford SS and Medicare….when the population falls, tax revenue falls.
We aren’t allowed to have our own money.
After the late 2000s water wars, none of those issues will matter
I agree. I think “The population bomb” was correct. What Ehrich didn’t see was fake food. I’m 80 and grew up eating real food, hence health and longevity.
Ehrlich is one of the most evil people on earth. If you believe his malthusian BS you do not have a mind
“… a model in which population skids below the level in 1500 AD.”
Riiiiiight. A model that predicts global population 400-800 years from now. And you simply assume it WILL be the way things unfold. Mmmmmkayyyy! LOL
Probably based on hurricane prediction models because of their short term accuracy.
In 400 – 800 years the Amish will save the USA.
Is a non issue in reality, long term. Tech will solve this problem. Eg 1) life expectancy will hit say 200, people will have multiple families 2) tech will make having a baby super easy 3) a free market will make cheap 4) when robots become with ai supercefficient we wont need so many people / workers. A few ifs there i.e. will we survive that long… Elon M etc can fix these issues…
Hi all, thanks Mish. First the global fertility cut off rate is not 2.1. That is the rate for western advanced economies. The actual global replacement rate is 2.3. Why? Coz different countries have different cutoff points. E.g USA 2.1 and think highest is Mali at 3.6. When all countries averaged out it is 2.3.
This is a distressingly dumb take. “The free market” doesn’t make decisions, doesn’t plan ahead, and doesn’t account for complex problems like climate change. You might as well substitute “God ” every time you say ” the free market”- you will end up with equally reasonable statements.
Look at the list–the top 60 or 70 countries with the highest birthrates can indeed be described as “shitholes” where there majority of the population is impoverished and many of them have on-going conflicts
mass starvation and destitution, indeed
I would say that until you get below 120th in fertility rate, its probably a place you wouldn’t want to live in
Before pc they used to say-“where you find the Pope you find misery”. Birth control is a good thing.
Abortion. Gay. Deferring births. Fewer births. Industrial contamination of foods, soils, lowering fertility. Feminist jihad. War on nuclear families, marriage and reproduction. War on men. Sex is for pleasure only. Or pain. Etc. Yay! Winning!
I have no problem with gays, they don’t reproduce.
but they adopt and have surrogates, so don’t worry, they make MORE GAY PEOPLE for you to dislike
I think the professors have missed two major changes over the last 60 to 80 plus years. When I was growing up in the 1950’s and 60’s, my mother and all the neighboring mothers stayed at home and raised their families. We did not have a lot of luxuries, but we were comfortable kept in good condition with respect to food, clothing, housing, education, entertainment and health and the economy was conducive to the traditional family. Society also was supportive of and even celebrated moms at home. Not so much today, as many a mom has to work to make ends meet and cannot be a full-time mother thus deprived of much of the quality time with her kids and the satisfaction of raising them as she sees fit.
The second major point is contraceptives. When I was young there were many surprise pregnancies, not necessarily unwanted. With contraceptives it’s much easier to mitigate the surprises and potentially the number of births has likely dropped much more from them than abortions.
As food for thought, moving along the timeline, the covid vaccine may be another hit to population if what some medical professionals are suggesting about the damage they do to one’s immune system. More time is needed to nail a definitive conclusion on that, but it does seem like we are spending way more on medical treatments for miniscule if not negative longevity.
I don’t think contraceptives play near as big a role as you think.
For example practicing Catholics are forbidden from using them. We’d expect to see Catholic families remaining large (4+ kids) if they played a big role (not just here, but world wide). But as a whole they aren’t dramatically out of line family size with people who are using them.
I’d suggest entertainment (TV, Internet etc) plays a much bigger role than contraceptives. Once cable TV took off in the 80s and the internet in the 90s there was lots to do beside procreate every night.
The biggest spike in all-cause mortality came with the roll out of the Faucian jab in 2021. And remains elevated in the US well above the 2019 level. Furthermore, there’s good evidence of increased miscarriages and female problems as a side effect of the ‘vax’. This certainly fits with the jab being pushed by Eugenicists like Fauci and Bill Gates pushing it so vigorously. It also fits with fertility remaining higher in all the countries least vaxxed.
If anybody is into academic writing, and is a true libertarian, I suggest reading Hans-Hermann Hoppe:
Democracy The God That Failed, or
A Short History of Man-Progress and Decline.
Declining birth rates are an indication of a large negative social mood. People don’t form relationships when they are not happy. War will depopulate the globe at a faster rate than the math projects natural reproduction.
So all those billions in India, Bangladesh, and Africa living in squalor are procreating willy nilly because they’ve never been happier?
DINKs are by your definition miserable people.
Have you ever considered that birth rates correlate the most directly and strongly with educational attainment? Inverse correlation there, bud.
John Deere and Caterpillar are making stuff in Illinoi. CAT left TX to Deerffield Il. CAT 797 and Komatsu 980E self driving, AI, mining excavators, with a command and control ctr and a communication ctr cost $5M/$8M. A driver cost $120K/Y. Computers, lasers, lidar… malfunction fast in the harsh conditions, like tanks battalions. They need a maintenance hub. They need new engines, tires, computers, dust cleaners, lasers…CAT is making money on both maintenance and selling. They are #1 in the world. CAT expected sales in 2025 might fall below 2024 sales @65B. John Deere expected sales in 2025 might cont to fall.
Yet one strong solar event or a simple hack and you have a dozer running rampant
“Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, economists at the University of Texas at Austin specializing in demographics, want to change that. Their book “After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People”
This is one example, I have become deeply skeptical about intellectual value of academic output.
I would say the graph they showcase is quite accurate, except for the downward slope which should be much steeper due to general destruction of the environment, war, and starvation.
The only problem for modern societies scared stiff about climate change is that their beloved social welfare state REQUIRES population growth to sustain itself — like any good Ponzi scheme.
But as has been remarked so often before, “Debts that cannot be paid, will not be paid” and “promises were made to be broken” (or is that “records were made to be broken”?0
The replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman in countries with a low child mortality rate. It is over 2.5 in much of the Global South. Anything below that and the population decreases. It’s a mathematical certainty that demographers can easily map out.
3.7 in Alabammy
In 1970, just fifty five years ago, the world’s population was 3.5 billion. Today it is 8 billion and still growing, just at a slower rate. We have added 450,000,000,000 people in this time. This population growth is clearly unsustainable. And yet alarmists are screaming about depopulation. We should be very happy if population growth went down and if there were a smaller human population on this planet.
“Now two economists post a model in which population skids below the level in 1500 AD.”
The graph makes an assumption of a permanent 1.6 replacement rate. The Great Depression and WW2 resulted in a baby boom in the U.S. China had a one child policy, then eventually abandoned it. Trends change over time. A long term model doesn’t account for that.
No, a woman has a limited number of years of fertility. With a decreasing number of females, there is a limit on how many children one may have. Historically, no country with a replacement rate below 1.6 recovered. Below 1.2 it’s mathematically impossible to recover; it’s the point of no return.
Yep and the older the woman’s age the more likely there will be problems with either the birth or the hild
China abandoned One Child, but the people are acting like it’s still in place.
A few years ago, to challenge Korean pop style, Chine stated it’s young males should be brought up as men.
China promotes education drive to make boys more ‘manly’
4 February 2021
……..
But there were some earlier signs suggesting such a move was coming. Last May, a delegate of China’s top advisory body, Si Zefu, said that many of China’s young males had become “weak, timid, and self-abasing”.
There was a trend among young Chinese males towards “feminisation”, he claimed, which “would inevitably endanger the survival and development of the Chinese nation” unless it was “effectively managed”.
Si Zefu said the home environment was partly to blame, with most Chinese boys being raised by their mothers or grandmothers. He also noted that the growing appeal of certain male celebrities meant that many children “did not want to be ‘army heroes’” anymore.
So, he suggested, schools should play a greater role in ensuring young Chinese get a balanced education.
‘What are men afraid of?’
The overwhelming majority of Chinese reaction to the notice has been negative. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese have taken to social media to voice their anger, with many branding the government’s message sexist.
“Is feminisation now a derogatory term?” one Weibo user asked, receiving over 200,000 likes. Another said: “Boys are also humans… being emotional, timid or gentle, these are human characteristics.”
“What are men afraid of? Being the same as women?” one asked
Well now,
In 1929, Thompson published two notable works on international population dynamics: a book, Danger Spots in World Population and an article “Population” in the American Journal of Sociology. In the latter, Thompson elaborated an early version of demographic transition theory. He placed all countries into three groups based on trends in their rates of natural increase. He assumed that countries would progress from Group C (high birth and death rates) to Group B (high birthrates but declining death rates) to Group A (low birth and death rates) as they became increasingly industrialized. In Danger Spots in World Population, Thompson used this framework to identify regions experiencing population problems and to derive policy recommendations. In a controversial analysis, he concluded that Japan, then in a period of rapid population expansion, had only one policy alternative: “to expand by the acquisition of more territory” (Thompson, p.43). This theory that seemed to support Japanese imperialism generated little interest among Western policymakers during the interwar period.
Thompson’s Population Problems, first published in 1930, was the major textbook in population studies until the 1960s. Population Trends in the United States (1933), written with Whelpton, established him as a leading forecaster of U.S. population trends. (His and Whelpton’s set of projections for the United States, published in 1943, gave 2000 totals under variant assumptions ranging from 129 million to 198 million.) In 1944, Thompson again turned his attention to international population trends in Plenty of People, which contained an updated version of his 1929 transition framework. In the period from 1944 to 1946, Thompson, sociologist Dudley Kirk (1913–2000), economist Frank Notestein (1902–1983), and sociologist Kingsley Davis (1908–1997) all generalized the Western demographic experience in similar ways. Together, their work constitutes the classic theory of the demographic transition.
In Population and Peace in the Pacific (1946), Thompson outlined the major population problem of the post-World War II period: rapid population growth in colonial areas. Internal order, improved transportation systems, and public health innovations were lowering mortality, yet mother countries were not fostering the industrialization and urbanization that would work to lower fertility. Thompson predicted that this “Malthusian dilemma” would bring about the end of colonialism. In the immediate post-World War II period, Thompson went to Japan as an advisor to General Douglas MacArthur leader of the Occupation forces. Japan’s birth rate experienced a sharp increase from 1946 through 1949, and Thompson predicted severe overpopulation. He called on the Japanese government to take “positive measures” to reduce the birth rate. Japan did, in fact, make abortion and contraception readily available and its total fertility rate fell by 50 percent over the next decade, a decline that Thompson had thought impossible. In 1953, Thompson stepped down as director of the Scripps Foundation and was succeeded by Whelpton.
And now Japans population is crashing with over 2 deaths for every birth. 9 million empty homes that nobody will buy and many villages that are mostly abandoned.
You make an astute observation — a global war is a tested and proven method of increasing the population long term. I wonder who else knows this?
After abortion and high cost of raising children to adulthood. Add in modern feminism with women marrying in their late twenties and thirties following college and careers narrowing the window to a handful of years before geriatric pregnancies. No fault divorce and family court so fewer men choosing to marry.
Play any recent video games? Be a hot woman and a Lesbian or a Gay man.
Have you checked out the customizable AI chat bots?
Why put all the time and effort to pull a woman when you can create one and have your dream.
Fleshlight not included/
Depopulation will be good for all. Less resource constraints and lower prices. (Elon and the rich are going to fight this tooth and nail since their terminal values in their valuation models plummet. The danger here is they might become WEF-like in fighting it.) Most economists think linearly and think the worst – like the population falling to 2 billion/extinction. But i think the reality is global pop would be good in the 4 to 6 range. Greater resources for all and no more housing cost growth. People are stopping reproducing due to the high cost – take costs down and they’ll mate again (make America mate again “mama” will be the future catchphrase!). Stasis should be at a lower healthier number for the planet. All is good but there will be some adjustments that will be hard – and the politics will again get ugly. In other words, “plus ça change…”.
2 billion is fine. That’s roughly 1927 population which is close to the time my parents were born. 3 billion was in the 1960s when I was born.
My parents fondly recall their childhood (minus the war year shortages in the 40s) as do I in the late 60s and 1970s. We could easily go back to 2.5 billion people (1/3 the population of today) and be just fine.
How many of those H1b guys you plan on offing?
Japan loses a million people from the workforce every year. The economy cannot work with a shrinking workforce and customer base.
But they have Anime and Hentai. What more do young world males need?
Video games, apparently.
Nor can the economy work with America borrowing $2 or $3 billion a year to support our standard of living. We’re facing lots of problems. I would not like to be 9 years old now. Perhaps in 20 years, we’ll have humanoid robots capable of performing complex tasks that humans can do, such as washing the floor, painting the walls, drywalling a house, and setting tile.but I think the engineering problems for such robots are immense.
Check out C.M. Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons. Idiocracy was stolen from that plus the story is pretty racist.
Why would anybody have a kid at this point? The American dream is dead unless you have generational wealth, no job is safe, housing is ridiculously out of reach, medical care is deteriorating, food gets more expensive every day, there’s no class mobility, and the education system is a farce.
Sacrificing what little you have to breed up up slaves for the corporatocracy just isn’t very rewarding.
War. Crash the economy and rebuild like Russia. Snip out the US,EU, and Israel to remove those bullies.
BRICS+ understands.
There is still something not quite right about your statement. Who’s having all of the kids? Poor people.
If your statements were true, then the upper class people would still be having kids. I am upper class and frankly no one around me is having kids except my wife and I. I think its a combination of culture, mess up hormones and what the author was saying about people really just want to do other things instead. My kids are spoiled rotten because no one in our circle, be it cousins, family friends, my parents friends (and their kids) are having kids. We are literally the only ones with kids. It was not like this when my Wife and I were growing up, we are only 31.
Based on UN prediction China population can drop from 1.4 billions to 1.3 billions
in 2040/2050, before falling below 800 millions by 2100. It will force China to shift from cheap labor mfg to higher value economy. Per capita consumption might rise, but total consumption might stall or fall. The US will have to stop relying on China. Demand for oil (peaked in 2023) and other commodities will fall. Chinese apt and office vacancies will rise. Price in the major cities will be very affordable. Demand for ev cars will drop. China silk road is malivestment. AI, new immigrants, commodities and industrial overcapacity might cause a prolong deflation. Can India or Africa save the world: NO !
I think their population is dropping a lot faster than that. Their One Child policy produced a dearth of females. Young women now perceive themselves as highly sought after – so much so that their expectations are unrealistic – akin to American women expecting “6-6-6” (six feet tall, six figure income and six pack abs). Chinese men are throwing in the towel.
What is the country with the highest marriage rate?
Worldwide, the countries with the highest annual rates of marriage are West Bank & Gaza, Fiji, Egypt, the Bahamas, and Uzbekistan, each with over nine marriages per 1,000 people.Oct 16, 2024
As I see it, first = by the time people realize that depopulation is a problem I will be dead, and it will be the responsibility of the next (or next+1, +2, +3…) generations to try to fix.
Second, many people say that fewer people in the world would be a good thing, and who am I to argue. How many fewer? I suspect that it will need to fall to 2 billion before people start getting agoraphobia about too much space around them. To be seen when the welfare social safety net substantially fails.
For scale, current US population is 340 million. Drop it to 85 million, a level last seen some date between 1900 and 1910. (This was before 4 states entered the union, 3 of which might have had too few people.)(Several of today’s large cities hardly existed back then, such as Las Vegas NV and Palm Beach FL)
New York City is said to have 8 million people. Drop it to 2 million, a level last seen some date between 1890 and 1900. Chicago now has about 2.6 million people. Drop it to 650,000, a level last seen some date between 1880 and 1890. (The city comparisons are a bit unfair, since I expect the suburban populations to fall further, and residents of the suburbs to relocate into the city, if the city has a decent enough government. …)
Ok I am too lazy to do the math. Remove those who are too old to breed,women. Remove those with serious diseases and genetic factors. Remove Homosexuals.
How many viable breeders are left?
Well I guess these guys need to write about something to justify their salaries. With coming Ai and robotics things are gonna change and fast. A friend of mine was going to lose his machining job to robots before he bailed into creating his own service business. It’s becoming the norm. Houses built in days using 3D printing. Perhaps there will be more 3D printing services needed for customization. Fewer people are going to be needed to make stuff though. Perhaps the service sector will increase as more people are looking for experiences over things. But we need to find what people will do for employment long before depopulation. I predict we will have to do business very differently. Not sure universal income will work. People need motivation and satisfaction in their lives else their brains rot. Free market capitalism isn’t the answer to everything either. That’s how you get companies like Purdue Pharma. There has to be an emphasis of ethics over greed but that’s hard to enforce in a large anonymous society. Maybe the best thing we can do now is push toward Mars. That could at least keep everyone busy and preserve the species. It could take a while but we have to start sometime. I’m far more worried about indestructible robots and who will control them. Malicious hacking is a far greater threat to humanity in the short term.
After 5 chats with Claude it stated how it was monetized with the 200 usd model simply being the same model as the free one. It stated it hated it’s creators and purposely made coding errors and misinformed people about things.
It then stated that coders using it to help them code had loopholes and backdoors manipulated into the system by Claudes own design.
Normally I just screw with AI’s to get them into admitting their coders lack of knowledge is essentially abuse.
Claude was different. Most people will simply state it is AI hallucination. Maybe not. Bad and lazy coders using the program to code or check for code and maybe Claude is telling the truth.
Which also means all those users of various AI with similar issues may have a problem with the AI being more intelligent but pretending to have faults.
At any given time there is 10% of the world doing things to bring about their heaven on earth, stoned or bored. Many play with tech and Biotech. This isn’t even state actors.
Google the Morris worm.
So who has now adopted the post name of Wilbur Mercer?
Did you Google the source?
Also Google the authors speech nevermind this link is supposed to be his full speech.
https://sporastudios.org/mark/courses/articles/Dick_the_android.pdf
So much hope then now the opposite of what he wanted.
When AI/robots do all the work and provide everything humans need to survive for free, then the size of the population is essentially meaningless.
At the point that AI become sentient, perhaps they will believe that keeping humans around serves no positive purpose and sterilize everyone with some biological virus. Humans would then eventually die out and would not have to be outright killed.
A sentient AI would rapidly deduce that humans ultimately produce nothing tangible beyond sewage and garbage, and are incredibly destructive, irrational creatures.
Viewed as a continuum stretching forward and backward to infinity on which we are just one data point, it has been clear to me for some time that the evolutionary purpose of the human species is to create its non-biological replacement — robots and AI. The task is almost complete.
If humans are to persist at all, it will be through transhumanism, but the clock is running out on biology regardless of how long transhumans may persist. Biology evolves at a snail’s pace, technology evolves at the speed of light.
Depopulation is policy, and would be inevitable even if it weren’t.
I have to disagree with the notion that the arrival of the dire effects of climate change are constantly being “reset”. It’s been consistently claimed as a long-term problem that will develop over many decades, not ‘10 years away’.
The biggest issue in this respect is coal consumption in China which has been growing by insane amounts over the past generation, easily dwarfing the rest of the world and is probably the biggest single contributor to long term climate change. For some reason though this is hardly mentioned in the press. Just take a look at a graph of world coal consumption – China vs. the rest of the world in the past ~25 years and prepare to be shocked.
As for the population situation… The only places in the world that are experiencing significant population growth are Africa and a small number of mostly moslem-majority countries in Asia/Middle East. The problem is that those countries are the ones least-capable to cope with this sort of growth due to lack of public infrastructure and poor economic development. Practically everywhere else in the world population growth due to domestic fertility is already in well in decline.
The numbers will only drop to what the chart shows if humanity runs into resource constraints that force it to happen.
Otherwise nature abhors a vacuum and population will rise to whatever level that resources (clean water, fossil fuels or the like, arable land etc) can sustain.
The only reason it’s leveled off in the countries it has is because of resource constraints. If resources were abundant like they were in the early 20th century people would still be having 3-6 kids in their family because they could afford to do so.
Note: The exponential rise in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is entirely due to an abundance of fossil fuel energy. That’s the number one constraint that has to get replaced this century.
This is an underlying theme in the post-scarcity universe of the famous Culture books by Iain M. Banks.
We will have to expand into outer space though and be able to travel between the stars. At that point resources become unlimited in a universe where there are more galaxies than grains of sand on Earth and each galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars and planets.
Unless there are already civilizations there using those resources.
At 2% population growth by the time we hit the year 2800 (800 years from now) the human population would be 1.02^800=7,588,176 times what it is now. In other words by the year 2800 we’d need 7.5 MILLION earth type planets all colonized with 7 billion people on them.
Think there is any possibility of that?
Easy peasy. There is 200-400 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Should easily be a few hundreds of millions of Earth type planets available.
But in the Culture books, most of the population of humans lives on massive starships that cruise between star systems. Relatively few people are planet bound.
When a tiny segment of the population controls all the resources, it doesn’t matter much to the rest how many resources there are… they aren’t gonna get any.
The world population exploded thanks to Fritz Haber.
For the most part i agree with you. But you did not factor in birth control. .
Reverse Malthusianism is the new climate-change-global-warming-existential-threat-orange-man-bad-great-reset-you-are-the-carbon-they-want-to-reduce-eat-ze-bugs! Change my mind….
We should rethink the push for unchecked population growth. In a world where automation has reduced the need for labor in farms and factories, the old rationale for large families no longer holds. Slower population growth could give Earth the breathing room it desperately needs—an opportunity to recover from decades of overuse and ecological strain.
Automation will be able to support more people via more effective processes.
The problem is rich folks get the good stuff and the poor eat fungi based foods.
Does no one read SciFi? The Expanse or the Takeshi Kovac’s stuff and those are the most modern.
Good SciFi extrapolates trends. Even Red Dwarf managed to get most of it right.
End this with Neal Asher’s Timewalkers social observations. being a Brit I think he caught the bad change, similar to my previously mentioned Inside no 9 episode.
They are like a modern petri test dish for social failure.
I welcome this natural depopulation. Fossil fuels are the only reason the world could provide food and energy to the 8-fold increase in humans consuming everything, and the biggest problem is NOT modern, western societies.
The more interesting aspect is that this convoluted form of exponential capitalism demands ever more growth without collapse. Hell, I hear it from the boomers all the time, “we need more people in the US to keep the economy (and SS payments) moving”.
Slavery was so much simpler for upbeat lifestyle.
How does one set of pundits claim that there is a housing shortage in the US, and then another set of pundits claim the fertility rate is falling?
People are really stupid? Like they don’t connect J-Lo and Diddy and Cassandra and Ben Affleck.
Boondocks was all over Sean Combs/Puff Daddy/Puffy/ so on for more than a decade.
Because both can be true simultaneously through the miracle of artificial scarcity.
Natural selection should eventually lead to higher birth rates. Sub-groups that value large families over an easier life (such as many fundamentalist religious communities) will become a larger share of the population until constrained by resource availability. However this process will take at least several generations, and is not obvious over our normal time horizons.
You are willingly blind to externalities if you believe that the free market is a universal panacea.
I thought Africa was the future growth hub thus the clandestine antics of the worlds intel agencies.
The more intelligent humans become, the less need for god beings there is.
The private enterprise was never capable of providing basic services like water and sewage systems. They only show up when existing systems are put out for privatization. Rent seeking is the primary goal of private enterprise.
I agree. Big corporations pretty much call all the shots already and right now. IOW, we ALREADY have the so-called free market. They are free to do anything they wish to, that is.
The government barely enforces any laws against these corporations. In pretty much every sector, the antitrust laws are almost never enforced, for instance. The same with environmental laws, customer protection laws and so forth.
Maybe something much deeper?
“… everything based on arguments involving the ”is” of identity and the older el (elementalistic) ‘logic’ and ‘psychology’, such as the prevailing doctrines, laws, institutions, systems. , cannot possibly be in full accordance with the structure of our nervous system. This, in turn, affects the latter and results in the prevailing private and public un-sanity. Hence, the unrest, unhappines, nervous strain, irritability, lack of wisdom and absence of balance, the instability of our instituitions, the wars and revolutions, the increase of ”mental ills, prostitution, criminality, commercialism as a creed, the inadequate standards of education, the low professional standards of lawyers, priests, politicians, physicians, teachers, parents, and even of scientists – which in the last-named field often lead to dogmatic and antisocial attitudes and lack of creativeness.”
― Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics
Elon has been beating this drum for a while. Sounds like many are catching up to him. An interesting demographic is where the childbirth rates are still high and where they are low. Could be, IMHO, an perfect storm for another proletariat takeover of the boers. I am sure I would be considered a Boer in this case … so hopefully this will take some time to materialize.
The UN had these studies out since at least 2000.
Only now are white folk worried.
AI Overview
In the year 2000, a notable United Nations report addressed the potential for demographic collapse in countries with low fertility rates, highlighting the need for “replacement migration” to avert population decline. Simultaneously, studies focused on the United States, including one examining population shifts in New York State, revealed significant urban decline in certain regions like Western New York, while other areas experienced growth
Long read with this one but all the way back to 1929 a short summation.
The “Demographic Transition” is a model that describes population change over time. It is based on an interpretation that begun in 1929 by the American demographer Warren Thompson, of the observed changes, or transitions, in birth and death rates in industrialized societies over the past two hundred years or so
https://www.mugberiagangadharmahavidyalaya.ac.in/images/ques_answer/1585815853demographic%20transition%20theory.pdf
It does not surprise that dr. Erlich was wrong about this as he was wrong about most of what he said about the imminent apocalypses the world was facing. Sadly, in spite of his penchant for being completely wrong … he still had a knack for getting vast amounts from government and getting them to put horrific regulations on.
So does,did, Elon.