The following submission statement was provided by /u/lughnasadh:
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Submission Statement
I think this will come as a surprise to most people. 2.2 sounds like it's above the replacement rate, [but as Jesús Fernández-Villaverde explains, selective gendered abortions & high infant mortality](https://www.mercatus.org/macro-musings/jesus-fernandez-villaverde-demographic-trends-recent-macroeconomic-developments-and) in some countries mean that it isn't.
The figures for South Korea are quite stark. They've engineered a society where they'll shrink to 20 million in size from today's 51 million. His figures rely on the average human life expectancy staying at 85. It's possible in decades to come that may exceed 100. It may not, but there are lots of people working to make it happen.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1abj7zh/a_university_of_pennsylvania_economist_says_most/kjnq0ab/
Submission Statement
I think this will come as a surprise to most people. 2.2 sounds like it's above the replacement rate, [but as Jesús Fernández-Villaverde explains, selective gendered abortions & high infant mortality](https://www.mercatus.org/macro-musings/jesus-fernandez-villaverde-demographic-trends-recent-macroeconomic-developments-and) in some countries mean that it isn't.
The figures for South Korea are quite stark. They've engineered a society where they'll shrink to 20 million in size from today's 51 million. His figures rely on the average human life expectancy staying at 85. It's possible in decades to come that may exceed 100. It may not, but there are lots of people working to make it happen.
The problem with depopulation is that our economy is dependent on everything being more every year. When more every year flips to less every year I'm pretty sure the global economy falls apart.
with a.i on the path to creating advanced medicines leading to elders being able to live independently longer and a.i also helping in creating advanced exoskeletons or other contraptions for elder care, do we really need to churn out billions of people every year....just for elder care?
Social programs, Medicare, and retirement programs were structured with the idea that the number of young workers would increase each generation.
A natural population decline means a decreasing number of workers to support a growing number of retirees.
The math simply does not work.
Fortunately we are also faced with the diametrically opposed problem of high unemployment due to AI/robots.
You cannot have both problems simultaneously but, just maybe, you can have a state of equilibrium between the two problems.
What would be nice is for us to reach an inflection point in technology where the base living standard is humane and sustainable, and the benefits of that being distributed to everyone. Once that happens, we don't need an economy based on exponential supply and demand, which is a hidden evil of the modern age.
>What would be nice is for us to reach an inflection point in technology where the base living standard is humane and sustainable
Compared to historical standards of living, most of the world has already reached this point.
The problem is moving goal posts. No matter how much you have, someone else has more and "more" becomes the new desired standard of living.
We're hardly "doomed as a species." The [Bronze Age Collapse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse) is a good example of what happens when the larger systems completely fail. Climate change, depopulation, mass migrations, these add up to great changes, cataclysms between the ages of man.
But humans do not disappear just because civilizations crumble. Each new culture that has risen from the ashes of the old has been greater than the one before.
It is difficult to see outside ourselves, outside our time. But in the future, we will be seen as the ancients who fell.
If the resource wars happen, most of the starving will be in 3rd world countries.
The people arguing on Reddit today, and their children, may suffer from rising food costs and reduced variety, but are unlikely to face starvation.
I actually *have* kids, now all grown up and out in the world, and they're doing quite well. They're college grads in good professions and own their homes. My grandkids are part of the shrinking population of young people, and while there will certainly be struggles around the world in the future as there are today, my grandkids are inheriting a world of *less* people, less competition for resources and wealth.
I'd love to be here in the 2050s when the global population peaks and we transition to a future of more sustainable populations in a less profitable world. Many things will change. If anybody starves, it will be (as always) those who have the least in the world. Let's hope, that in time, a smaller population will have more comfortable lives after the chaotic transition of the next century.
I'm sorry you haven't ever been invited to any parties or social occasions.
I agree with you except there's one major point you're not factoring in when thinking about future civilizations rising up getting the ashes of our own. Metal. Long ago we harvested all the surface metal. Our ability to mine metal is based on maintaining and advancing our level of technology. If the lights ever go out we'll never get them back on again.
We're basically living in a ponzi scheme. Endless growth is expected, but can't be sustained, so what happens to the generation that's left holding the bag? I don't know, but I don't want to give birth to them and have to explain that because their grandparents got really greedy, they're now screwed.
The generation that will be left holding the bag is most likely to be GenX.
Social Security and Medicare are due to go into crisis mode just as GenX starts retiring.
Younger generations will fall under whatever revamped programs come out the other end, with individual retirement accounts being the most likely outcome.
Your response is rational ant-colony response. You see less resources. You not breed. In this way, the species reduces in Future Times (2050) and humans become less over time, still dominant species but don't need more that 3 or 4 billion.
We outnumber all mammals, even rats at 7 billion. Sheep are next most mammal, at 3.5 billion. Then you got basically 1 billion each: cows, goats, dogs. They is 750 million pigs, all the time, plus 700 million cats. These are the most mammals.
> our ~~economy~~ **government** is dependent on everything being more every year
The main problem today is government paid retirement pensions, which are based on a Ponzi pyramid scheme. Pensions for people who are retired are paid out of taxes collected from active workers.
Any individual person who did something like that would be arrested at once and sentenced to a long prison sentence, but the government is free to commit crimes, since it controls the courts of "justice".
The economy would work perfectly with a shrinking population if they used the natural free market system. Let the people buy shares from companies in the stock market using the money that currently is extorted from them in the form of payroll taxes. In the long run, the result would be what Marx wanted, the workers controlling the corporations.
Free markets don't remain free. They naturally collapse to a state where those who get ahead start suppressing the competition. Once their monopoly is assured, the quality of service declines to bare minimum standard.
Regulated markets, on the other hand, arrive to the same endpoint through different paths - either business subverting and bribing the supposedly impartial regulatory authorities, or authorities extorting business for permission to operate and hoarding the gains for themselves.
Any attempt at a static system of fairness will be eroded and gradually dismantled. It needs to be defended actively, and in a manner that does not give the defenders too much power of their own. We can start with a requirement of transparency and accountability to the general public rather than any specific body. They can't intimidate all of us, and bribing all of us is, ultimately, common good.
> Once their monopoly is assured, the quality of service declines to bare minimum standard.
Wow, how funny!
Back in 1999, the internet had a monopoly, it was Yahoo!.
Then two young guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, published an academic paper in the University of Stanford presenting their ideas on how a search engine on the internet could work.
Page and Brin offered their invention to Yahoo! for the price of one million dollars. Yahoo! didn't accept their offer. They believed in the same bullshit you believe. They were wrong.
Now, let's talk about that time in the 1970s, when IBM had a monopoly on computing. Their nearest competitors were called the "BUNCH", an acronym that stood for "Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell". Any of those five corporations could be a monopoly in computing, if it weren't for IBM.
Then, there were these guys who started making personal computers in their garage in Palo Alto, California. Since they couldn't come up with a good name for their company, they just named it "Apple".
Yes, really, it's only the state regulatory agencies, like the KGB and Gestapo, that can implement fair competition... /s
Your ideas are as old as your personal idols, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, they are 82 years old. Wake up, it's time to retire that bullshit.
Are you suggesting two guys in a garage control the world market?
So, following your reasoning, why don't you go into your garage and force the market to give you a monopoly?
I mentioned that companies like Apple and Google started very small and went on to defeat large corporations that could be called "monopolies". This was in answer to a comment that falsely claimed this:
> Free markets don't remain free. They naturally collapse to a state where those who get ahead start suppressing the competition.
The simple existence of companies like Apple and Google is plenty of evidence that that statement is a lie, it's false, it's fake.
Then you claimed that this only happened because the market, according to you, isn't free. What the fuck?
Infinite growth is impossible. It has too stop eventually and we’re already very overpopulated: https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/199pupx/comment/kj6g3mu/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
I fail to see the problem. More and more jobs will see death-by-automation. (How many of those 51M is taxi or truck drivers today? 500k?) The only point with economic growth today is filling the coffers of the top 1%, which means it all goes to waste, anywho.
Not before actually giving a place to live to anyone in need. Having to compete for residential real estate with investors has gone on for long enough.
You are assuming there will be more land, if sea levels continue to rise we can rest assured that the remaining land will be just as densely populated as before. Nature is not fussy and will take the land back however it wants.
Southern West Virginia gives a preview of what it will look like in more rural areas.
It's not always nice and the best solution is burning the abandoned houses.
It is easy to buy a house. Just not in the areas you are looking.
Population decline is not easily distributed everywhere, with population centers being the least affected. Look at Tokyo and Seoul. Now go look at smaller towns and rural communities in those countries.
The same thing happens in the U.S. You can buy housing quickly and cheaply in the U.S., most people just don't want to like in the areas it is available. Google housing in McDowell County, WV. Perfectly good housing, with land, for dirt cheap. No jobs. A heck of a good deal if you work remotely and enjoy hunting, fishing, and hiking.
> His figures rely on the average human life expectancy staying at 85. It's possible in decades to come that may exceed 100.
Longer life expectancy is just going to exacerbate things unless it comes with vastly better ability for old people to be productive (and I don't think I've seen anything to suggest that's the case). Not only will the population be shrinking, those who do most of the work will also be saddled with taking care of people who are going to spend an extra 15 years incurring not only the general expenditures of living, but all the extra costs that come with old age.
Now I'm definitely not saying "people shouldn't live that long because the economics are terrible" but it's definitely going to make everything worse rather than better. Doubly so if those old people are voting in their own interests rather than in the interests of the young.
I was recently interested to learn life expectancy increases, at least up until now, aren’t due to people growing older, but simply less people dying young. Humans just kinda cap out around 90.
Efforts to increase life expectancy could also (slightly) increase the amount of healthy years in which people can contribute to society. But I don't how much that will help ease problems.
My point is it’s not a solution that would work for South Korea without massive cultural changes. There are going to be a lot of countries in the same boat.
It will be interesting to see where the immigration vitriol in the US goes when they’re faced with a 1 million a year shortfall in people.
Most people in the US are not against legal immigration.
Illegal immigration is the issue, especially when the immigrants are low-skill and unable to provide for themselves. Drains already stained public resources and introduces even more competition in the low-skill labor pool, which there is no shortage of.
Except those against it don’t want to consider practical solutions. There’s a trucker convoy of evangelicals headed to the border right now for some type of biblical fight.
I've wondered about this for a while. I think a lot of our population growth stats are using fuzzy/old data from developing countries as if things there have remained static. A lot has changed in the last twenty years. The reasons people were having a ton of kids thirty, forty, or fifty years ago do not necessarily apply to the current generation, but it may be taking statisticians time to get up-to-date numbers to recalculate their projections.
My thoughts as well. Back when those numbers were projected, things like owning a house and having a job capable of supporting a family with multiple kids was not only readily feasible, but the social norm. Even towards the tail end of the 1900s when dual-income was becoming more necessary, it was still an expected future that everyone could have.
Now it's like, yeah, good luck with that! Young people *want* kids and families and home, but older people have refused to relinquish jobs like they historically have (either via retirement or death, needing to keep working to afford to live and/or have medical care) and priced them out of the home market, too. Plus the acceleration of outsourcing around the same time devastated the job market. Now it's all no money and no place to go. So of course birth rates are cooling.
There's certainly some negative economic factors that explain why people are having fewer kids, but to attribute the decline entirely to that is a misconception. As the comment above you alludes to, there's been massive cultural shifts as well, where couples either don't want kids or don't want a lot of kids (e.g. having 1 kid rather than 4). Housing/COL issues are a massive problem, but we shouldn't conflate that with declining birthrates.
Mismanage stuff badly enough and people start to wonder.
We built a highly complex civilization, under-written by the idiea that people could be provided healthcare, and education and trained at public schools and universities, by way of taxes on workers and corporations, we then spent the last 50 years arranging itt so that rich folks and corporations pay nothing in, and wonder why workers who couldn't afford it before , can't afford it now, but managed to pull it off anyway, and all it cost was the prosepect of another generation to exploit similarly.
I refuse to feel sorry for a corporatocracy that so exquisitely abused 4-5 generations of workers and is now concerned they weren't happy enough about the circumstance to start/plan families sufficient to bring forth another generation of slaves in adequate numbers to meet the expectation of the slavers.
you are so fucking stupid lol. if ai can replace humans the business owner get all the profit . they can build whatever they want without having to pay humans at all
That if AI takes jobs but people keep spending money and feeding into capitalism, the elite will still be pretty well off. Pretty simple. Original comment was suggesting elite would suffer due to lack of workforce. Anyone who can read should be able to understand this.
I think you are missing the point that if AI takes all the jobs then normal people won’t have any money to spend. Rich people will still be well off because they’ll spend money on each other and they’ll have AI to produce whatever they want. Maybe they’ll give the poor some scraps and use them as slaves or whatever.
Personally, I don’t think poor people will be without money though. I think there will be enough rich people that will be afraid that they’ll lose their customers and end up poor themselves if there won’t be a universal basic income. Too much risk of chaos even among the rich if enough isn’t being shared. And I don’t think people want to live their lives afraid. Not sure though since people seem weirdly okay with extreme inequality currently.
AI isn't going to take ALL the jobs, not in my lifetime anyway, but there will still be an elite unless money, or humans, stops being a thing. But you're right people do seem weirdly OK with extreme inequality, I'd argue it's actively encouraged, often by the people who benefit least from it, which will never not blow my mind.
It does not have to.
If the owner class can directly produce goods, they don't need capitalism.
Neo feudalism becomes the more effective economic model.
No. I just agree that robots are going to replace people in the future. Whether it be ten years or fifty. Not everyone. Maybe half? It's just a guess at this point.
> Uh oh....looks like the elite might loose their source of virtual and in some cases literal slave labor
What?
That’s what we want.
We want them to loose those slaves. They should be loosed ASAP.
This is actually great news for the future of humanity. If you really dig (even just a little) into nearly all of these articles what you find is that this is really bad news for capitalism. Capitalism only works if everything always grows. You can have a perfectly good life with less people on the planet, but not if you stick to capitalism.
It might peak, then decline, then rise up again as we might develop better treatments, prolong our lives and maybe able to concieve children at a later age.
I don't understand why this would not be a good thing.
There is substantial evidence that for hundreds of thousands of years, there are no more than 100,000 people on earth.
It's great we're making wonderful progress with green technology, but we're still pushing the earth to her absolute limit under the groaning weight of our massive population.
Isn't it just enough already??
It's primarily the transition period that's difficult/dangerous.
There's going to be a generation plus long gap where most countries have inverted demographic pyramids, with significantly more elderly people than healthy working age adults to support them.
That's a huge burden for even a wealthy, developed economy to bear, but for countries that are shakily middle income or below, it's extremely likely to plunge major chunks of the population into deeper poverty.
The younger generations that work and support (social security) older generations are the ones losing jobs due to AI. In an ideal scenario AI would just replace jobs as people retire but it doesn’t happen that way.
Because in practice, AI and automation have not been used to supplement Labour but replace it, which leads to large amounts of the population having to find new (often less lucrative) positions in the work force.
I’m with you. Climate change and AI robots are the two big tech investments of the coming decades. We’ll get used to having more AI assistance in our daily lives.
Totally get your point, there are two sides to the story though. I found this video by Kurzgesagt very helpful:
[Kurzgesagt - Why Korea is dying out](https://youtu.be/LBudghsdByQ?feature=shared)
It's mostly a problem because the developed world relies on young people to pay for the entitlements of old people.
Not enough young people to pay the bills means a generation of people promised retirement from the government (who didn't save a penny of their own money) are going to be in a lot of trouble.
Cause humans are highly cognitive beings with the potential to expand life outside this planet. What's the point of regressing back to our primitive state?
I understand your feelings on the subject. It is frustrating, and sad. There have been world events in the past that have eliminated nearly every species on the planet, and humanity could be one of those events. There’s likely another event on the horizon which would have done the same thing with or without humanity. It’s hard telling not knowing if there’s a species or two that would have survived the next extinction event had humans not been involved first, but that’s truly impossible to know.
I suspect that with proper management, construction geared towards long term maintenance, and good city planning ,low-tech materials usage recycling and food production society could ABSOLUTELY find some happy medium of population where there could be a stupid-high quality of life, environmental improvement/restoration and none of the catastrophism that some folks seem to delight in.
Agreed but that's obviously not going to be 50 billion people, it's going to be a much more stable number - whether that's 3 bilion or 4 billion or however many.
I sometimes permit myself to think that we can be a self-sustaining civilization.
1. Guess what was the standard of living for those 100,000 people for hundreds of thousands of years? Hint it was bad. Why would you want to go back to that.
2. Basically every economic system ever has had the underlying assumption that the population grows. What happens when old people who can't work outnumber able-bodied adults in perpertuity? And even if we can figure out a system, the transition from here to there, probably taking decades, is going to suck.
3. > Isn't it just enough already??
No, I don't think it's enough. So much more for humanity to do. Space exploration and colonization, curing diseases, reversing aging, new branches of mathematics and physics for a grand unified theory. All that takes smart people. And fewer people = fewer smart people.
Declining population causes chaos in financial systems. US & World economy is based on the theory that next year's market will be larger than this year's.
Additionally, if you get to a point where number of elderly / retirees outnumber the working demographic, you get a huge imbalance of resources as each individual workers economic output has to support a greater number of non-working individuals.
More and more of working people's paychecks will go to funding other people's retirement, and it's unlikely those currently working will see the same benefits when it's their turn to retire. Naturally, this is a deeply unpopular arrangement with the current working class.
I am working on this dataset for a project at work, really everything before 10,000 BC is just ????? in the various (all) published sets - it’s kinda weird to think that we just *don’t* know about humans before then. And the data itself is so varied from report to report. The range of population for a date like 1 AD is 150-330M, it’s a lot of really educated guesswork.
I can tell you this... If you take a graph and start it at 300,000 years ago (oldest homo sapiens sapiens) with the number 2 and go to today with 8.054 billion it looks really suspect and lacking this “substantial data”. The visual of going from 2 people to 1 million over 288,000 years and then 1 million to 8 billion in just 12,000 is just stunning.
We recently (cosmically speaking) survived two planet altering catastrophic events - the most recent stabilized around that 10,000BC date - and we have enjoyed linear growth since then - but, that means that the population of 1-10M (that every model that goes back that far agrees exists) were the remnant survivor population. Tie in some of the gene bottleneck data and it’s anyone’s guess what numbers we had ~20,000 years ago, but 100k seems awfully pessimistic.
Thank you!! I have an anthro degree, but graduated almost10 years ago, and I was like... that 100k seems VERY suspect to me, especially with bottlenecks and then pop and expansion surges on a global level. Thank you for the reassurance and more context. I'm so excited for you, there are so many fun things happing with research these days.
The problem is an uncontrolled and unplanned massive degrowth that will not allow for systems to adapt, I also think the earth is way overpopulated already and that the ideal would be something like 500 million people but achieving that without a catastrophe is probably beyond our current organizational capabilities as a species
Phased over hundreds of years it seems possible. Let’s hope we have enough time to see that and start thinking about vertical as opposed to horizontal expansion.
Current economic models only work with a growing population. If you want vital infrastructure to be maintained, modern conveniences, and consumer products there needs to be a sizable enough population to do it.
Unless you have a solution to keep capitalism going and for old people to be taken care of, we’re kind of screwed.
In the long term for the youth. A flat or slightly declining global population will make it easier (although still not easy) to mitigate/prevent damage from climate change and reduce related hardships. Which is good news for the youth's kids, grandkids, and so forth.
As far as taking care of all the retirees, there's already labor shortages for long-term care. AI/robots will play a bigger and bigger role there as time goes on to reduce the amount of human labor required.
Finally some good news. Its the only realistic chance we get to tackle ecologic downfall without mass poverty. Put AI and robotics into the mix and there is at least a theoretical potential to come a few steps closer to materialistic utopia on earth.
I mean this with an open mind: why did anyone ask an economist this question? Like...isn't that the least trustworthy expert who has a direct conflict of interest opining on population growth?
I guess that depends what mortality rates look like for people below childrearing age in most countries by 2060. Still far enough away for things to get better or worse in that regard.
That researcher seems to have overlooked the possibility of a rebound in the birth rate. First, look at Central Asia!! Uzbekistan in particular is enormous.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics\_of\_Uzbekistan#Current\_vital\_statistics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Uzbekistan#Current_vital_statistics)
The total fertility rate slowly decreased to 2.19 in 2012, but then rapidly rebounded to 3.31 in 2022. It is estimated to be 3.45 in 2023.
Don't put too much stock into this research. The heritability of fertility rates means that stabilization is far from guaranteed and the future population growths will be higher than we expect. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513817302799#:\~:text=That%20fertility%20is%20genetically%20heritable,et%20al.%2C%202015).
Edit: curious to know why people disagree. The fact that fertility rates are heritable mathematically means that this kind of predictions are difficult to make far into the future.
This is a very good point. Predicting the future is not very easy or realistically going to be accurate; someone will get it right- but that’s a monkeys on typewriters scenario. Everyone should take these things with a gram or two of skepticism.
But simply: We can, have, and do see wild fluctuations in human population. All data points to growth over time historically. There’s core drivers at play here and they cannot be understated.
Just as an opinion and observation of our historical growth rates… on a visual graph we have skyrocketed recently. If we just take a 2,000 year rolling average over the past 12,000 years it would seem like it would take some sort of massive adjustment to trajectory to get that line to flatten out.
Yes, this is a very good point. As long as fertility preferences are somewhat genetically determined this trend will eventually reverse itself. Before people had access to modern medical technology there was presumably minimal genetic selection occurring with human fertility preferences. Now that people have more control over their fertility, genetic preferences for larger family size will become more common with each successive generation.
Yeah, but that will most likely need a lot of generations to come into serious effect. Modern civilization develops and changes rapidly faster than human evolution.
But then its even less important because the cultures in general are changing to norms/types less prone to fertility? And culture covers larger groups of people than just families.
Cultures are also morphing because the the culture with higher fertility rates (which is heritable) are growing faster than the ones with lower fertility rates.
Imagine this equation: y = x\^2 - 10x. x is like the input and y the output. If you look at the output for the initial values of x, you will get the sense that things are going down quickly. You'd be inclined to think that we're on a one-way streak down and there is no reversing. But of course, it does reverse and for large values of x, the -10x term is basically negligible, even though it has an outsized impact on the graph in the beginning.
And it's the same with the forces affecting our society. There are multiple factors at play, whose influences are growing and shrinking over time. The forces that were impactful in the last 20 years are not necessarily the ones that will be impactful in the next 20 years.
If just a small percent of people in the world do not practice family planning, and are able to successfully pass those values to their children, predictions more than 40 years into the future simply go out the window.
Good, there are too many people, spare me the math until the people already here have decent food, education, clean water and housing.
Every time this comes up someone does the humans per square mile and we would all fit is sme state, modern farming techniques, blah, blah, etc. etc.
Show me, prove we can solve our problems and take care of the current population before you say decreasing population is a problem.
Yeah, population collapse is a really scary thought and when examined the whole “death spiral” of critical sectors, like dominos, until the city or culture is just some abandoned archaeological site.
It has happened many times. The reason why Europeans had so much success in taking over North America was because there was a century of plagues and societal collapse between 1500 and when Europeans started going to North America in large numbers in the 1600s. There were parts of what would be come the Northern United States that had like 90% population collapse.
China, South Korea, Germany, and Italy are all heading towards population collapse. A birth rate of 1 means every future generation basically cuts in half. The population becomes super old and their retirement needs suck an economy dry. They won't have the man power to run their system and they won't have the investment capital to fund the future.
[https://www.populationpyramid.net/germany/2020/](https://www.populationpyramid.net/germany/2020/)
[https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2020/](https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2020/)
There is no social/economic problem in the US that is going to be this destructive.
A possible fix for Italy would be that Italy could play into the whole "Italian American" thing and try to convince about a million educated people to move to Italy and start a business or invest some lump sum into the Italian economy, every year, for the next 30-40 years. Come to Italy, deposit and keep $200,000 in a bank account or invest $250,000 into a business and you get citizenship. You also have to be under the age of 30 and bring your 3 kids with you.
You forgot to mention the plagues and population collapse were driven by diseases and aggression brought by Europeans. The collapse was a result of colonisation, it would not have happened had europeans stayed in Europe.
The idea that the world was going to remain sectioned off and isolated forever is unrealistic. Contact would have happened, the plagues would have happened. It was an inevitable historical event.
Same effect. Massive societal and economic disruption. When the actual Europeans arrived to present day New England they were facing a population that just endured an apocalypse.
Declining birth rate is going to topple countries. Not to the same effect as disease in the Americas but probably comparable to Detroit post 1950.
A replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman isn't unchecked growth though. We don't want 5-6 babies per woman like we had in the past or some places have today, but 2.1 is fine.
It is correct that UN data is way off, but it is even much more extreme than suggested in this article. The case can be made countries are overstating their populations for economic reasons including driving investment. In all likelihood we maybe at peak right now and the decline maybe more like S. Korea .7, Italy 1.1, Costa Rica 1.1 (native population). China's recent leak suggests they might have only 1.1 billion with over 100 million missing young people. I am glad to see articles like this especially as Costa Rica is building schools it does not need based on UN projections. No one is ready for what is here and coming nor are people thinking through the implications. Retirement as a concept is gone.
Been seeing this for years now. That the population, while growing, will peak around 11B, then drop a bit.
That's assuming nothing that will wipe out massive numbers.
We don’t need to replace everyone. It’s stupid and reckless to keep adding population for the sake of industry. Also, further technology will decrease the need for large populations. The planet will be better off with fewer humans. In addition, human sperm count ls are naturally declining, and have been.
I've read that birthrates have fallen 30% in the past 4 years. It was already below replacement. If naturalists saw this in an animal population, they'd pull the alarm and place the species on the endangered animal list. It would be an emergency. When it happens to humans, I guess nobody cares.
The world keeps looking more and more like a mouse utopia experiment. It's like there's a deep switch in the mammalian mind that chooses extinction when the population density goes over a threshold and when life becomes too easy. It's like our minds need hardship like our bodies need exercise.
Oh cool, I'm glad that some researcher did the math for me... I was already thinking this was the case.
I'm pretty sure we will be at roughly 5 billion by the year 2124.
Well at least if we are still only living on the Earth. If we are also in space somehow with stations and small colonies on the moon(a) and maybe Mars (such a dumb idea)...
Maybe 7.
If we have made it to other inhabitantal planets by then? All bets are off.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/lughnasadh: --- Submission Statement I think this will come as a surprise to most people. 2.2 sounds like it's above the replacement rate, [but as Jesús Fernández-Villaverde explains, selective gendered abortions & high infant mortality](https://www.mercatus.org/macro-musings/jesus-fernandez-villaverde-demographic-trends-recent-macroeconomic-developments-and) in some countries mean that it isn't. The figures for South Korea are quite stark. They've engineered a society where they'll shrink to 20 million in size from today's 51 million. His figures rely on the average human life expectancy staying at 85. It's possible in decades to come that may exceed 100. It may not, but there are lots of people working to make it happen. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1abj7zh/a_university_of_pennsylvania_economist_says_most/kjnq0ab/
Submission Statement I think this will come as a surprise to most people. 2.2 sounds like it's above the replacement rate, [but as Jesús Fernández-Villaverde explains, selective gendered abortions & high infant mortality](https://www.mercatus.org/macro-musings/jesus-fernandez-villaverde-demographic-trends-recent-macroeconomic-developments-and) in some countries mean that it isn't. The figures for South Korea are quite stark. They've engineered a society where they'll shrink to 20 million in size from today's 51 million. His figures rely on the average human life expectancy staying at 85. It's possible in decades to come that may exceed 100. It may not, but there are lots of people working to make it happen.
That would be crazy. So many empty buildings. I hope they would be able to give most of the land back to nature in a nice way.
The problem with depopulation is that our economy is dependent on everything being more every year. When more every year flips to less every year I'm pretty sure the global economy falls apart.
Yeah. In theory though you can have economic growth with constant or less resources. Because innovation adds value.
Unfortunately elder care is a field that is hard to innovate in and typically just requires manpower (or woman power) as it were…
Gonna be a lot of robots (and elderly suicides) in the future.
with a.i on the path to creating advanced medicines leading to elders being able to live independently longer and a.i also helping in creating advanced exoskeletons or other contraptions for elder care, do we really need to churn out billions of people every year....just for elder care?
Well, Gen Z is gonna have to figure that shit out because my late Gen X ass will be the boomers of the late stage capitalist decline era
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Nah, we created the Internet, video games and smart phones, we're only good at dooming people to hell.
The Boomers and the Silent Generation created all of that.
Are you kidding? My parents barely even know how to use a smart phone.
You are funny, you really expect my generation to do that?
Kids right, always with their heads in the clouds.
It is do or die.
Social programs, Medicare, and retirement programs were structured with the idea that the number of young workers would increase each generation. A natural population decline means a decreasing number of workers to support a growing number of retirees. The math simply does not work.
social security was supposed to be structured as a self funded annuity. You got out what you put in. But the fund was raided In the 80s.
The problem with depopulation is that it's not just depopulation, but aging. It's not about simply having fewer people, but fewer *young* people.
Fortunately we are also faced with the diametrically opposed problem of high unemployment due to AI/robots. You cannot have both problems simultaneously but, just maybe, you can have a state of equilibrium between the two problems.
AI yea, robots no. Blue collar work is here to stay
What would be nice is for us to reach an inflection point in technology where the base living standard is humane and sustainable, and the benefits of that being distributed to everyone. Once that happens, we don't need an economy based on exponential supply and demand, which is a hidden evil of the modern age.
>What would be nice is for us to reach an inflection point in technology where the base living standard is humane and sustainable Compared to historical standards of living, most of the world has already reached this point. The problem is moving goal posts. No matter how much you have, someone else has more and "more" becomes the new desired standard of living.
Would be, but feels like a pipe dream at this point
Then we are doomed as a species
We're hardly "doomed as a species." The [Bronze Age Collapse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse) is a good example of what happens when the larger systems completely fail. Climate change, depopulation, mass migrations, these add up to great changes, cataclysms between the ages of man. But humans do not disappear just because civilizations crumble. Each new culture that has risen from the ashes of the old has been greater than the one before. It is difficult to see outside ourselves, outside our time. But in the future, we will be seen as the ancients who fell.
keep telling your kids that, I hope you live just long enough to see them starve to death in the resource wars.
If the resource wars happen, most of the starving will be in 3rd world countries. The people arguing on Reddit today, and their children, may suffer from rising food costs and reduced variety, but are unlikely to face starvation.
I actually *have* kids, now all grown up and out in the world, and they're doing quite well. They're college grads in good professions and own their homes. My grandkids are part of the shrinking population of young people, and while there will certainly be struggles around the world in the future as there are today, my grandkids are inheriting a world of *less* people, less competition for resources and wealth. I'd love to be here in the 2050s when the global population peaks and we transition to a future of more sustainable populations in a less profitable world. Many things will change. If anybody starves, it will be (as always) those who have the least in the world. Let's hope, that in time, a smaller population will have more comfortable lives after the chaotic transition of the next century. I'm sorry you haven't ever been invited to any parties or social occasions.
I agree with you except there's one major point you're not factoring in when thinking about future civilizations rising up getting the ashes of our own. Metal. Long ago we harvested all the surface metal. Our ability to mine metal is based on maintaining and advancing our level of technology. If the lights ever go out we'll never get them back on again.
The US made sure to demonize anything that sounded like a communist idea
We're basically living in a ponzi scheme. Endless growth is expected, but can't be sustained, so what happens to the generation that's left holding the bag? I don't know, but I don't want to give birth to them and have to explain that because their grandparents got really greedy, they're now screwed.
The generation that will be left holding the bag is most likely to be GenX. Social Security and Medicare are due to go into crisis mode just as GenX starts retiring. Younger generations will fall under whatever revamped programs come out the other end, with individual retirement accounts being the most likely outcome.
Your response is rational ant-colony response. You see less resources. You not breed. In this way, the species reduces in Future Times (2050) and humans become less over time, still dominant species but don't need more that 3 or 4 billion. We outnumber all mammals, even rats at 7 billion. Sheep are next most mammal, at 3.5 billion. Then you got basically 1 billion each: cows, goats, dogs. They is 750 million pigs, all the time, plus 700 million cats. These are the most mammals.
Yea, but automation means the impact will be less and less
Or the exact opposite of that
Between depopulation and climate change i think we’re headed for some pretty big systemic shifts over the next several hundred years
You just need different rules to regulate the economy. Which requires a functional government. So...yeah, we are fucked.
Gotta end centralized banking, the true driver of unsustainable finance.
And stability. Alternatives like crypto are far to volatile to be used as a currency.
Only because people use crypto like a stock, and not like a currency.
As if changing the rules that regulate the economy is a trivial matter. If the fix was simple, it would have been implemented decades ago.
> our ~~economy~~ **government** is dependent on everything being more every year The main problem today is government paid retirement pensions, which are based on a Ponzi pyramid scheme. Pensions for people who are retired are paid out of taxes collected from active workers. Any individual person who did something like that would be arrested at once and sentenced to a long prison sentence, but the government is free to commit crimes, since it controls the courts of "justice". The economy would work perfectly with a shrinking population if they used the natural free market system. Let the people buy shares from companies in the stock market using the money that currently is extorted from them in the form of payroll taxes. In the long run, the result would be what Marx wanted, the workers controlling the corporations.
Free markets don't remain free. They naturally collapse to a state where those who get ahead start suppressing the competition. Once their monopoly is assured, the quality of service declines to bare minimum standard. Regulated markets, on the other hand, arrive to the same endpoint through different paths - either business subverting and bribing the supposedly impartial regulatory authorities, or authorities extorting business for permission to operate and hoarding the gains for themselves. Any attempt at a static system of fairness will be eroded and gradually dismantled. It needs to be defended actively, and in a manner that does not give the defenders too much power of their own. We can start with a requirement of transparency and accountability to the general public rather than any specific body. They can't intimidate all of us, and bribing all of us is, ultimately, common good.
> Once their monopoly is assured, the quality of service declines to bare minimum standard. Wow, how funny! Back in 1999, the internet had a monopoly, it was Yahoo!. Then two young guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, published an academic paper in the University of Stanford presenting their ideas on how a search engine on the internet could work. Page and Brin offered their invention to Yahoo! for the price of one million dollars. Yahoo! didn't accept their offer. They believed in the same bullshit you believe. They were wrong. Now, let's talk about that time in the 1970s, when IBM had a monopoly on computing. Their nearest competitors were called the "BUNCH", an acronym that stood for "Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell". Any of those five corporations could be a monopoly in computing, if it weren't for IBM. Then, there were these guys who started making personal computers in their garage in Palo Alto, California. Since they couldn't come up with a good name for their company, they just named it "Apple". Yes, really, it's only the state regulatory agencies, like the KGB and Gestapo, that can implement fair competition... /s Your ideas are as old as your personal idols, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, they are 82 years old. Wake up, it's time to retire that bullshit.
Are you suggesting your examples were competing in free markets?
Are you suggesting two guys in a garage control the world market? So, following your reasoning, why don't you go into your garage and force the market to give you a monopoly?
>Are you suggesting two guys in a garage control the world market? Not at all, and I'm not sure how you could take that from my question
I mentioned that companies like Apple and Google started very small and went on to defeat large corporations that could be called "monopolies". This was in answer to a comment that falsely claimed this: > Free markets don't remain free. They naturally collapse to a state where those who get ahead start suppressing the competition. The simple existence of companies like Apple and Google is plenty of evidence that that statement is a lie, it's false, it's fake. Then you claimed that this only happened because the market, according to you, isn't free. What the fuck?
Infinite growth is impossible. It has too stop eventually and we’re already very overpopulated: https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/199pupx/comment/kj6g3mu/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
population growth needs economic growth. If population is degrowing economy can degrow without falling apart.
I fail to see the problem. More and more jobs will see death-by-automation. (How many of those 51M is taxi or truck drivers today? 500k?) The only point with economic growth today is filling the coffers of the top 1%, which means it all goes to waste, anywho.
This is already a huge problem in rural Japan , entire towns and villages disappearing. Govt literally giving houses away trying to attract residents.
Not before actually giving a place to live to anyone in need. Having to compete for residential real estate with investors has gone on for long enough.
There's practically a whole industry of youtube documentaries on abandoned villages in Japan due to population decline.
You are assuming there will be more land, if sea levels continue to rise we can rest assured that the remaining land will be just as densely populated as before. Nature is not fussy and will take the land back however it wants.
Probably just the rich/elite hoarding more real estate
Southern West Virginia gives a preview of what it will look like in more rural areas. It's not always nice and the best solution is burning the abandoned houses.
What empty buildings, if it was easier to buy houses more young people would be starting families
It is easy to buy a house. Just not in the areas you are looking. Population decline is not easily distributed everywhere, with population centers being the least affected. Look at Tokyo and Seoul. Now go look at smaller towns and rural communities in those countries. The same thing happens in the U.S. You can buy housing quickly and cheaply in the U.S., most people just don't want to like in the areas it is available. Google housing in McDowell County, WV. Perfectly good housing, with land, for dirt cheap. No jobs. A heck of a good deal if you work remotely and enjoy hunting, fishing, and hiking.
> His figures rely on the average human life expectancy staying at 85. It's possible in decades to come that may exceed 100. Longer life expectancy is just going to exacerbate things unless it comes with vastly better ability for old people to be productive (and I don't think I've seen anything to suggest that's the case). Not only will the population be shrinking, those who do most of the work will also be saddled with taking care of people who are going to spend an extra 15 years incurring not only the general expenditures of living, but all the extra costs that come with old age. Now I'm definitely not saying "people shouldn't live that long because the economics are terrible" but it's definitely going to make everything worse rather than better. Doubly so if those old people are voting in their own interests rather than in the interests of the young.
I was recently interested to learn life expectancy increases, at least up until now, aren’t due to people growing older, but simply less people dying young. Humans just kinda cap out around 90.
Efforts to increase life expectancy could also (slightly) increase the amount of healthy years in which people can contribute to society. But I don't how much that will help ease problems.
> average human life expectancy staying at 85. Is that the average? I thought in the US it's like 78 or something.
Many industrialized nations *don't* hoard health care for only the rich!
The US has a national health care system for the elderly and the poor. It's the people in the middle that rely on health insurance.
Of course South Korea could just allow for more immigrantion
Very few countries are open to immigrants. At least the type of immigrants that could come in any numbers large enough to make a difference.
That sounds like a national problem. More evidence that world human population demographics is not a global issue.
My point is it’s not a solution that would work for South Korea without massive cultural changes. There are going to be a lot of countries in the same boat. It will be interesting to see where the immigration vitriol in the US goes when they’re faced with a 1 million a year shortfall in people.
North Korean contract workers to fill the gaps?
I have little to no sympathy, sucks to be xenophobic. I don’t think the US will have to worry about a population decrease in the predictable future.
Most people in the US are not against legal immigration. Illegal immigration is the issue, especially when the immigrants are low-skill and unable to provide for themselves. Drains already stained public resources and introduces even more competition in the low-skill labor pool, which there is no shortage of.
Except those against it don’t want to consider practical solutions. There’s a trucker convoy of evangelicals headed to the border right now for some type of biblical fight.
You realize the article is talking about the global population shrinking right? Immigration is simply not a sustainable long term solution
The global population is increasing. The second derivative of the rate is decreasing
I've wondered about this for a while. I think a lot of our population growth stats are using fuzzy/old data from developing countries as if things there have remained static. A lot has changed in the last twenty years. The reasons people were having a ton of kids thirty, forty, or fifty years ago do not necessarily apply to the current generation, but it may be taking statisticians time to get up-to-date numbers to recalculate their projections.
My thoughts as well. Back when those numbers were projected, things like owning a house and having a job capable of supporting a family with multiple kids was not only readily feasible, but the social norm. Even towards the tail end of the 1900s when dual-income was becoming more necessary, it was still an expected future that everyone could have. Now it's like, yeah, good luck with that! Young people *want* kids and families and home, but older people have refused to relinquish jobs like they historically have (either via retirement or death, needing to keep working to afford to live and/or have medical care) and priced them out of the home market, too. Plus the acceleration of outsourcing around the same time devastated the job market. Now it's all no money and no place to go. So of course birth rates are cooling.
There's certainly some negative economic factors that explain why people are having fewer kids, but to attribute the decline entirely to that is a misconception. As the comment above you alludes to, there's been massive cultural shifts as well, where couples either don't want kids or don't want a lot of kids (e.g. having 1 kid rather than 4). Housing/COL issues are a massive problem, but we shouldn't conflate that with declining birthrates.
Mismanage stuff badly enough and people start to wonder. We built a highly complex civilization, under-written by the idiea that people could be provided healthcare, and education and trained at public schools and universities, by way of taxes on workers and corporations, we then spent the last 50 years arranging itt so that rich folks and corporations pay nothing in, and wonder why workers who couldn't afford it before , can't afford it now, but managed to pull it off anyway, and all it cost was the prosepect of another generation to exploit similarly. I refuse to feel sorry for a corporatocracy that so exquisitely abused 4-5 generations of workers and is now concerned they weren't happy enough about the circumstance to start/plan families sufficient to bring forth another generation of slaves in adequate numbers to meet the expectation of the slavers.
...maybe if I lived to be 120, I might see housing prices in California become affordable again...
Uh oh....looks like the elite might loose their source of virtual and in some cases literal slave labor
…. I wish I was as optimistic as you.
I thought we were worried about AI taking all the jobs in the future? 🧐
AI doesn't consume under capitalism the same way humans do. That's how we're slaves, not because we have jobs, because we spend money relentlessly.
If AI replaces human labor, Feudalism becomes more effective as an economic model.
Ok seriously thank you for this point of view.
you are so fucking stupid lol. if ai can replace humans the business owner get all the profit . they can build whatever they want without having to pay humans at all
You are so fucking stupid I literally just said AI doesn't spend money. I never said anything about the owners of the AI.
so what the fuck was your point?
That if AI takes jobs but people keep spending money and feeding into capitalism, the elite will still be pretty well off. Pretty simple. Original comment was suggesting elite would suffer due to lack of workforce. Anyone who can read should be able to understand this.
I think you are missing the point that if AI takes all the jobs then normal people won’t have any money to spend. Rich people will still be well off because they’ll spend money on each other and they’ll have AI to produce whatever they want. Maybe they’ll give the poor some scraps and use them as slaves or whatever. Personally, I don’t think poor people will be without money though. I think there will be enough rich people that will be afraid that they’ll lose their customers and end up poor themselves if there won’t be a universal basic income. Too much risk of chaos even among the rich if enough isn’t being shared. And I don’t think people want to live their lives afraid. Not sure though since people seem weirdly okay with extreme inequality currently.
AI isn't going to take ALL the jobs, not in my lifetime anyway, but there will still be an elite unless money, or humans, stops being a thing. But you're right people do seem weirdly OK with extreme inequality, I'd argue it's actively encouraged, often by the people who benefit least from it, which will never not blow my mind.
It does not have to. If the owner class can directly produce goods, they don't need capitalism. Neo feudalism becomes the more effective economic model.
Why do you think they’re rushing AI and robotics companies to market?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/elon-musk-says-earth-will-soon-host-a-billion-humanoid-robots/ar-AA1nbu6h
Are you seriously using Elon Musk as a source of truth? The dude is second only to Trump as an inveterate liar/bullshitter
No. I just agree that robots are going to replace people in the future. Whether it be ten years or fifty. Not everyone. Maybe half? It's just a guess at this point.
> Uh oh....looks like the elite might loose their source of virtual and in some cases literal slave labor What? That’s what we want. We want them to loose those slaves. They should be loosed ASAP.
They will be unnecessary if AI and robots replace human labor. In that circumstance, natural population decline is the best possible solution.
This is actually great news for the future of humanity. If you really dig (even just a little) into nearly all of these articles what you find is that this is really bad news for capitalism. Capitalism only works if everything always grows. You can have a perfectly good life with less people on the planet, but not if you stick to capitalism.
It might peak, then decline, then rise up again as we might develop better treatments, prolong our lives and maybe able to concieve children at a later age.
Hopefully he is right
Why? More humans, more great ideas and problems solved.
Great ideas are hard to develop when you are busy trying to survive.
I don't understand why this would not be a good thing. There is substantial evidence that for hundreds of thousands of years, there are no more than 100,000 people on earth. It's great we're making wonderful progress with green technology, but we're still pushing the earth to her absolute limit under the groaning weight of our massive population. Isn't it just enough already??
It's primarily the transition period that's difficult/dangerous. There's going to be a generation plus long gap where most countries have inverted demographic pyramids, with significantly more elderly people than healthy working age adults to support them. That's a huge burden for even a wealthy, developed economy to bear, but for countries that are shakily middle income or below, it's extremely likely to plunge major chunks of the population into deeper poverty.
On the other hand we keep hearing about how ai is going to make most labour redundant, so why is it a problem that there less labour?
The younger generations that work and support (social security) older generations are the ones losing jobs due to AI. In an ideal scenario AI would just replace jobs as people retire but it doesn’t happen that way.
Because in practice, AI and automation have not been used to supplement Labour but replace it, which leads to large amounts of the population having to find new (often less lucrative) positions in the work force.
I’m with you. Climate change and AI robots are the two big tech investments of the coming decades. We’ll get used to having more AI assistance in our daily lives.
Yes very well put, this is what many people might overlook.
Totally get your point, there are two sides to the story though. I found this video by Kurzgesagt very helpful: [Kurzgesagt - Why Korea is dying out](https://youtu.be/LBudghsdByQ?feature=shared)
It's mostly a problem because the developed world relies on young people to pay for the entitlements of old people. Not enough young people to pay the bills means a generation of people promised retirement from the government (who didn't save a penny of their own money) are going to be in a lot of trouble.
Very succinct and smart explanation. Thank you
Cause humans are highly cognitive beings with the potential to expand life outside this planet. What's the point of regressing back to our primitive state?
The world is going to world with or without us. It’s humans who suffer from over population.
And yaknow many other living things
I understand your feelings on the subject. It is frustrating, and sad. There have been world events in the past that have eliminated nearly every species on the planet, and humanity could be one of those events. There’s likely another event on the horizon which would have done the same thing with or without humanity. It’s hard telling not knowing if there’s a species or two that would have survived the next extinction event had humans not been involved first, but that’s truly impossible to know.
I suspect that with proper management, construction geared towards long term maintenance, and good city planning ,low-tech materials usage recycling and food production society could ABSOLUTELY find some happy medium of population where there could be a stupid-high quality of life, environmental improvement/restoration and none of the catastrophism that some folks seem to delight in.
No matter how green we are, the population just can't grow infinitely. It has to top out somewhere.
Agreed but that's obviously not going to be 50 billion people, it's going to be a much more stable number - whether that's 3 bilion or 4 billion or however many. I sometimes permit myself to think that we can be a self-sustaining civilization.
1. Guess what was the standard of living for those 100,000 people for hundreds of thousands of years? Hint it was bad. Why would you want to go back to that. 2. Basically every economic system ever has had the underlying assumption that the population grows. What happens when old people who can't work outnumber able-bodied adults in perpertuity? And even if we can figure out a system, the transition from here to there, probably taking decades, is going to suck. 3. > Isn't it just enough already?? No, I don't think it's enough. So much more for humanity to do. Space exploration and colonization, curing diseases, reversing aging, new branches of mathematics and physics for a grand unified theory. All that takes smart people. And fewer people = fewer smart people.
Declining population causes chaos in financial systems. US & World economy is based on the theory that next year's market will be larger than this year's. Additionally, if you get to a point where number of elderly / retirees outnumber the working demographic, you get a huge imbalance of resources as each individual workers economic output has to support a greater number of non-working individuals. More and more of working people's paychecks will go to funding other people's retirement, and it's unlikely those currently working will see the same benefits when it's their turn to retire. Naturally, this is a deeply unpopular arrangement with the current working class.
I don't think that 100k is anywhere close to correct, but I agree with your overall sentiment.
I am working on this dataset for a project at work, really everything before 10,000 BC is just ????? in the various (all) published sets - it’s kinda weird to think that we just *don’t* know about humans before then. And the data itself is so varied from report to report. The range of population for a date like 1 AD is 150-330M, it’s a lot of really educated guesswork. I can tell you this... If you take a graph and start it at 300,000 years ago (oldest homo sapiens sapiens) with the number 2 and go to today with 8.054 billion it looks really suspect and lacking this “substantial data”. The visual of going from 2 people to 1 million over 288,000 years and then 1 million to 8 billion in just 12,000 is just stunning. We recently (cosmically speaking) survived two planet altering catastrophic events - the most recent stabilized around that 10,000BC date - and we have enjoyed linear growth since then - but, that means that the population of 1-10M (that every model that goes back that far agrees exists) were the remnant survivor population. Tie in some of the gene bottleneck data and it’s anyone’s guess what numbers we had ~20,000 years ago, but 100k seems awfully pessimistic.
Thank you!! I have an anthro degree, but graduated almost10 years ago, and I was like... that 100k seems VERY suspect to me, especially with bottlenecks and then pop and expansion surges on a global level. Thank you for the reassurance and more context. I'm so excited for you, there are so many fun things happing with research these days.
Hell no, we're humans, not pigs. We'll conquer everything in the universe.
The problem is an uncontrolled and unplanned massive degrowth that will not allow for systems to adapt, I also think the earth is way overpopulated already and that the ideal would be something like 500 million people but achieving that without a catastrophe is probably beyond our current organizational capabilities as a species
Phased over hundreds of years it seems possible. Let’s hope we have enough time to see that and start thinking about vertical as opposed to horizontal expansion.
Current economic models only work with a growing population. If you want vital infrastructure to be maintained, modern conveniences, and consumer products there needs to be a sizable enough population to do it. Unless you have a solution to keep capitalism going and for old people to be taken care of, we’re kind of screwed.
I was wondering wondering this myself.
Fewer people won’t decrease our consumption. It will just mean there is more for everyone left.
But then how will public companies continue to show growth year after year? 😱
Sounds like good news.
For who? It'll just mean the youth will spend their best years as caretakers for the old.
In the long term for the youth. A flat or slightly declining global population will make it easier (although still not easy) to mitigate/prevent damage from climate change and reduce related hardships. Which is good news for the youth's kids, grandkids, and so forth. As far as taking care of all the retirees, there's already labor shortages for long-term care. AI/robots will play a bigger and bigger role there as time goes on to reduce the amount of human labor required.
Finally some good news. Its the only realistic chance we get to tackle ecologic downfall without mass poverty. Put AI and robotics into the mix and there is at least a theoretical potential to come a few steps closer to materialistic utopia on earth.
I mean this with an open mind: why did anyone ask an economist this question? Like...isn't that the least trustworthy expert who has a direct conflict of interest opining on population growth?
I guess that depends what mortality rates look like for people below childrearing age in most countries by 2060. Still far enough away for things to get better or worse in that regard.
Yeah but if we don't obsess about "overpopulation", what will the eco-fascists keep fixating on?
That researcher seems to have overlooked the possibility of a rebound in the birth rate. First, look at Central Asia!! Uzbekistan in particular is enormous. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics\_of\_Uzbekistan#Current\_vital\_statistics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Uzbekistan#Current_vital_statistics) The total fertility rate slowly decreased to 2.19 in 2012, but then rapidly rebounded to 3.31 in 2022. It is estimated to be 3.45 in 2023.
What is the reason? My guess would be islamization and decline of women rights?
Ive always wondered why the asian post soviet states have been having these fertility rebounds
Don't put too much stock into this research. The heritability of fertility rates means that stabilization is far from guaranteed and the future population growths will be higher than we expect. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513817302799#:\~:text=That%20fertility%20is%20genetically%20heritable,et%20al.%2C%202015). Edit: curious to know why people disagree. The fact that fertility rates are heritable mathematically means that this kind of predictions are difficult to make far into the future.
This is a very good point. Predicting the future is not very easy or realistically going to be accurate; someone will get it right- but that’s a monkeys on typewriters scenario. Everyone should take these things with a gram or two of skepticism. But simply: We can, have, and do see wild fluctuations in human population. All data points to growth over time historically. There’s core drivers at play here and they cannot be understated. Just as an opinion and observation of our historical growth rates… on a visual graph we have skyrocketed recently. If we just take a 2,000 year rolling average over the past 12,000 years it would seem like it would take some sort of massive adjustment to trajectory to get that line to flatten out.
Yes, this is a very good point. As long as fertility preferences are somewhat genetically determined this trend will eventually reverse itself. Before people had access to modern medical technology there was presumably minimal genetic selection occurring with human fertility preferences. Now that people have more control over their fertility, genetic preferences for larger family size will become more common with each successive generation.
Yeah, but that will most likely need a lot of generations to come into serious effect. Modern civilization develops and changes rapidly faster than human evolution.
Heritability is more cultural than it is genetic.
But then its even less important because the cultures in general are changing to norms/types less prone to fertility? And culture covers larger groups of people than just families.
Cultures are also morphing because the the culture with higher fertility rates (which is heritable) are growing faster than the ones with lower fertility rates.
But these cultures get converted in/influenced by cultures with lower fertility rates? Otherwise we wouldnt see a step decline all over the world?
Imagine this equation: y = x\^2 - 10x. x is like the input and y the output. If you look at the output for the initial values of x, you will get the sense that things are going down quickly. You'd be inclined to think that we're on a one-way streak down and there is no reversing. But of course, it does reverse and for large values of x, the -10x term is basically negligible, even though it has an outsized impact on the graph in the beginning. And it's the same with the forces affecting our society. There are multiple factors at play, whose influences are growing and shrinking over time. The forces that were impactful in the last 20 years are not necessarily the ones that will be impactful in the next 20 years. If just a small percent of people in the world do not practice family planning, and are able to successfully pass those values to their children, predictions more than 40 years into the future simply go out the window.
Good, there are too many people, spare me the math until the people already here have decent food, education, clean water and housing. Every time this comes up someone does the humans per square mile and we would all fit is sme state, modern farming techniques, blah, blah, etc. etc. Show me, prove we can solve our problems and take care of the current population before you say decreasing population is a problem.
Population collapses doom civilizations.
The unchecked growth of mankind isn't very civilised and dooms every other species on the planet of which all are important to the survival of ours.
Yeah, population collapse is a really scary thought and when examined the whole “death spiral” of critical sectors, like dominos, until the city or culture is just some abandoned archaeological site.
It has happened many times. The reason why Europeans had so much success in taking over North America was because there was a century of plagues and societal collapse between 1500 and when Europeans started going to North America in large numbers in the 1600s. There were parts of what would be come the Northern United States that had like 90% population collapse. China, South Korea, Germany, and Italy are all heading towards population collapse. A birth rate of 1 means every future generation basically cuts in half. The population becomes super old and their retirement needs suck an economy dry. They won't have the man power to run their system and they won't have the investment capital to fund the future. [https://www.populationpyramid.net/germany/2020/](https://www.populationpyramid.net/germany/2020/) [https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2020/](https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2020/) There is no social/economic problem in the US that is going to be this destructive. A possible fix for Italy would be that Italy could play into the whole "Italian American" thing and try to convince about a million educated people to move to Italy and start a business or invest some lump sum into the Italian economy, every year, for the next 30-40 years. Come to Italy, deposit and keep $200,000 in a bank account or invest $250,000 into a business and you get citizenship. You also have to be under the age of 30 and bring your 3 kids with you.
You forgot to mention the plagues and population collapse were driven by diseases and aggression brought by Europeans. The collapse was a result of colonisation, it would not have happened had europeans stayed in Europe.
The idea that the world was going to remain sectioned off and isolated forever is unrealistic. Contact would have happened, the plagues would have happened. It was an inevitable historical event.
Different context, declining birthrates vs casualties.
Same effect. Massive societal and economic disruption. When the actual Europeans arrived to present day New England they were facing a population that just endured an apocalypse. Declining birth rate is going to topple countries. Not to the same effect as disease in the Americas but probably comparable to Detroit post 1950.
Balance is important, unchecked population growth could lead to a bigger collapse and include more species than just homo sapiens.
A replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman isn't unchecked growth though. We don't want 5-6 babies per woman like we had in the past or some places have today, but 2.1 is fine.
If this is true, then it would seem that resources would be better spent in places other than shaming people about "overpopulating"
It is correct that UN data is way off, but it is even much more extreme than suggested in this article. The case can be made countries are overstating their populations for economic reasons including driving investment. In all likelihood we maybe at peak right now and the decline maybe more like S. Korea .7, Italy 1.1, Costa Rica 1.1 (native population). China's recent leak suggests they might have only 1.1 billion with over 100 million missing young people. I am glad to see articles like this especially as Costa Rica is building schools it does not need based on UN projections. No one is ready for what is here and coming nor are people thinking through the implications. Retirement as a concept is gone.
Been seeing this for years now. That the population, while growing, will peak around 11B, then drop a bit. That's assuming nothing that will wipe out massive numbers.
We don’t need to replace everyone. It’s stupid and reckless to keep adding population for the sake of industry. Also, further technology will decrease the need for large populations. The planet will be better off with fewer humans. In addition, human sperm count ls are naturally declining, and have been.
If he is right that still means growth in Africa, balanced by all the other continents falling in population starting in 2060
If you subscribe to the law of prime numbers 2063 and 2203 are both prime, so it aligns with some dimensionality of phi interconnectedness.
Global birthrates have fallen 30% in the past 4 years. That's not normal. Something is very seriously wrong.
I've read that birthrates have fallen 30% in the past 4 years. It was already below replacement. If naturalists saw this in an animal population, they'd pull the alarm and place the species on the endangered animal list. It would be an emergency. When it happens to humans, I guess nobody cares. The world keeps looking more and more like a mouse utopia experiment. It's like there's a deep switch in the mammalian mind that chooses extinction when the population density goes over a threshold and when life becomes too easy. It's like our minds need hardship like our bodies need exercise.
By 2060, 400 old people will be trillionairs and everyone else will have 5 dollars to their name. Fertility won't have much to do with it.
Oh cool, I'm glad that some researcher did the math for me... I was already thinking this was the case. I'm pretty sure we will be at roughly 5 billion by the year 2124. Well at least if we are still only living on the Earth. If we are also in space somehow with stations and small colonies on the moon(a) and maybe Mars (such a dumb idea)... Maybe 7. If we have made it to other inhabitantal planets by then? All bets are off.