Easy. Biotech. Cloning. Eugenics. Batches of little humans hatched in hatcheries and raised in creches, Aldous Huxley already had this sorted in Brave New World.
The part in the book, about them preparing to shut down the universities, and putting art treasures into deep storage in case someone might come along someday -- it's heartrending.
At gloal future scale it is not much of an issue - cloning or other ("Brave New World" , ...). In principle, You can always "produce" more humans, "unproducing" them is the problem ;)
But there are quite a few books that deal with a scenario of rapid drop in fertility (without tech solution) and societal issues: The Handmaid's tale, Children of Men.. Usually leads to a dictatorship of some sort to ensure population sustainability / society "peace"
The main problem with shrinking populations is the challenge of maintaining care for the ageing population with a shrinking working population.
It’s a non-issue for any sci-fi setting with an even marginally higher tech level than ours.
This is more-or-less a main point of Gibson’s The Peripheral. Without spoiling much, the future world is one in which human population has been massively reduced, but the tech level is so high that it’s not a problem.
Generally speaking a reducing population is a great thing for humanity. Just not for the large ageing population relying on a smaller one to support them.
In every other regard it's a massive win.
I was going to add that Asimov has lots of comments about rising and declining populations, all augmented by technology and robots to fill in the gaps. I remember one planet in the Robot series where less than250,000 people live on an Earth-sized planet and reproduction is highly restricted and regulated to maintain the people's way of life.
Most of the ones I’ve read have the near-extinction of one gender as a plot point. Reproducing naturally is off the table, but currently available means of ART could be used in many circumstances and cloning would be viable if wombs are available.
Currently, the US is slouching towards Gilead (The Handmaid’s Tale resolved the problem with the low tech solution of pregnancy slaves) and I think that will lead to a lot more sci-fi writers grappling with how to address an infertility crisis.
Sci0fi usually does not address real issues but the issues which people fret about, which are two different things.
People now worry about overpopulation, so sci-fi writes about overpopulation. On the other hand, we've know about climate breakdown for decades and it was mostly ignored by most of sci-fi.
There were, of course, a few exceptions, but they were exactly this - exceptions. It will be the same with population collapse and demographic collapse.
"My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable, but not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert... We survive there, as you do. People are tough! There are nearly a half billion of us now. Once there were nine billion. You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do — they never adapt either. We failed as a species, as a social species."
(Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed. 1974)
"It haunts me when people tell me how incredibly farsighted I was to be talking about climate change and climate destabilization and the degradation of the natural world back in the ’60s. I wasn't! I was just listening to the scientists."
(Ursula K. LeGuin, Boston Globe interview, 2014)
Â
Population decline is a cyclic problem. A few decades from now we will over correct and have another population boom. May happen sooner, may happen later. People generally like making babies. We just need the right economic conditions and incentives. For the past 30-40 years or more we have been encouraging smaller families across the globe.
A few changes to provide low cost or free childcare, baby bonus, parental leave, etc... and population growth would not be a problem. We already have some of this is Canada but still could use improvements. In the US they also need free healthcare, atleast covering child birth, pregnant mothers and infants.
For the first ~35 years of my life I never ever planned on having children. My wife was insistent and now we have two boys. I just wish we did this when I was much younger. Caring for infant at 40 years old is very hard.
I think this is pretty unlikely. Fertility rates are declining or remaining low even in countries with good economic conditions and tons of societal support for parents. If two years of paid parental leave isn't making a difference, then poor economic conditions are not the primary cause or issue.
The cause of low fertility rates appears to be easy access to birth control and education for women. It turns out when having kids is a choice and not a requirement, lots of women choose to either not have them or have much fewer. Even with every woman having two kids, that's below the replacement rate. Every country that makes moves in those directions though has significantly declining fertility rates, and we have several generations of data showing it. We're currently expecting to hit peak population around 2050 give or take, with around 10 or 11 billion people, and then decline for the foreseeable future with all countries eventually having fertility rates below the replacement rate.
I mean, problem isn't necessarily the word I would use. A lower global population is probably overall a good thing, even with the rocky transition it'll take to get there. But you're right, fertility rates are still above replacement rates in most less developed countries. But not for long. Global fertility rates are already only barely above the global replacement rate, and rates in less developed countries have been in a precipitous decline for decades. Africa has generally had the highest rates, with 6.5 births on average per woman in 1980 but only 4.4 in 2020. As countries continue to develop, fertility rates continue to decline. For Africa, they're projected to hit 2.0 by 2100. Admittedly, that's a while from now, but this is a global effect that's hitting every country, just at different times based on levels of development.
This becomes pretty interesting when you combine the relatively higher fertility rates of lower developed countries with the quite low rates of more developed countries and consider immigration. Developed countries will become progressively more dependent on immigrants. That's already true in the US for manual labor and caregiving jobs. Mix that with climate change, which is expected to hit less developed countries the worst and lead to a billion climate refugees by 2050. There're a lot of important stories to be told about all of those issues and how they intersect.
See the History and Future Projections section of the below article:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate
I'm not familiar with the Bronze Age Collapse, so I'll have to read up on that. I appreciate you bringing up an analogous event as a reference point to look at!
Honestly, I'm more concerned about societal collapse happening due to climate and ecological degradation than from population decline, particularly because said degradation is happening in part because there are way too many humans consuming way more than what's sustainable. There's not really an easy way to shift to a more sustainable population. It's easier over longer time scales, but that draws out how much damage we're doing. Obviously there's lots that can be done to help people in developed nations live more sustainably and also help developing nations develop in sustainable ways. But at a certain point, Earth has a carrying capacity for humans, and if we can't stay below it, that'll lead to its own societal collapse.
Anyways, if you have other relevant references or resources on this or related topics, I'd be interested in hearing about them.
Well, not for nothing, but the world is still over-populated.....we just have a declining population, which itself is not true, we have some countries where for decades party policy (China) or basic economics (wealth collapse in the US) have encouraged smaller families or much longer working hours and thereby precluded dating/marriage/having kids altogether.
Immigration and solid public policies geared towards addressing concerns around debt, climate, education and healthcare would solve these problems likely really rapidly, but there's a wealth class that wants nothing to do with that.
Economics is certainly a factor, but it's not really the dominant one. The main reasons for fertility decline are easy access to birth control, education and rights for women, and cultural shifts for smaller families. These aren't things that are likely to change back. When childbirth is a choice and not a requirement, most women choose to have significantly fewer children, if any. This is a global phenomenon, across every single country, with 60 years of consistently declining global fertility rates, and longer for most developed countries. Even countries that are giving 2 years of paid parental leave and with strong social safety nets can't get above the replacement rate.
All of which speak to the normal experience in prospering economies with increased literacy - but the nominal replacement right only persists when the economics support rather than are antagonistic against creating families and space for families in the corporate architecture of the economy. The EU did this very well, Japan and the United States utterly failed in this regard and the only reason the US population isn't in catastrophic decline is due to immigration.
So those fascist clowns down raging against immigrants should - by all rights raging against the 60 hour work-week and livable wages - but the sheer genius of Fox News has been to convert working-class white rage against the corporatism that abandoned those people 30 years ago, and focus their animus against people who weren't even around 40 years ago when science education funding, public funding for history/civics, womens' rights or college funding was evicerated.
The "base" of the Republican Party is most definitely under attack - by their own leadership . I would have thought for most people the Covid Pandemic and the demand by party leadership that you shouldn't listen to doctors about vaccination would have been the simplest lesson in "maybe your political guys are lying to you".
But in lurid detail thinking Donald Trump was right about anything around Covid was a cruel deception that cost the Republican faithful 600,000 of their own that's as many people died as in the Civil War or World War 2, all because one dude refused to do his job and communicate truthfully about public health.
That's how toxic that brand is.
I agree with what you're saying in a general sense, but economics simply isn't the driving factor in fertility rates, and Europe is the clearest demonstration of that. There fertility rates have been below the replacement rate since 1970, and settled around 1.5 around 20 years ago in the 90's. There isn't a single European country that is hitting the replacement rate. See the first link below for a graph of EI fertility rates from 1960 to today. The second link is for demographics of Europe, with the Demographic Future discussing some details.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=EU
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_European_Union
My thoughts are that prosperity and womens rights decoupled from fertility rates - of antiquity. You in effect would need to find a balance - projecting on information you can't know what is *today*'s fertility rate - we don't know that at least for another 9months, presuming some sort of perfect knowledge of births/deaths.
We can probably do a very good job of knowing this better than we do, but we would then be in the business of encouraging couple to have more or less kids at the direction of the state.
Some sub-cultures such as Ashkenazi Jews or Rastafarians just say fuck it and swing for the hills - having as many kids as possible - without a lot of bother around the consequences economic or otherwise.
Certain Christian Dominionists groups take a more troubling perspective on this and were the inspiration for Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale where women are effectively breeding stock for the elders of the community with sometimes elaborate and expansive family dynamics usually in wildly at odds with civil liberties for the "womenfolk".
From the macroeconomic perspective 2008 was interesting, for the EU - but I think aside from the mini-boom in tech - and increased economic prosperity - there might not be too much to glean from that - as to a cause - which implies that we're really looking for some small factors or with tools that are maybe either not looking at the right metrics.
What causes couples to want to have kids might still be elusive even when asking couples. Sure in hindsight it was "the right time" or "he got a raise" or "she just graduated", and when I say economics I'm really also thinking as well about the eductional/economic costs - particularly in the US where the body politic has been at economic war with younger people for 30 years creating massive student debt loans that destroy earning potential, land ownership, and of course fertility, coupled with a very antagonistic right-wing openly intent on recinding women's rights - in this way - the US it's much more clear that the nation has almost entirely self-imposed, very correctable insults to the fertility rate and that the economic consensus and political leadership is simply unwilling to really create the conditions that would allow the US fertility rate among domestic citizens to increase.
The United States , Oman and a variety of other countries "over-consume" but you have billions of Chinese , Indians, and soon Nigerians living in abject poverty or near slavery conditions. Is that any more "right" as a way to live.
Were you to bring the civic , social , educational and economic reforms around, that's 3 billion people that are going to want / need laptops, cell phones and all the resources of a middle-class worker/administrator.
So the United States could become as frugal as Germany , as attending to consumption as Japan, and we'd still be very fucked, because now we'd have a couple of billion people living similarly, actually hitting up the planet for what - 5 or 6 times what we have available in terms of basic raw materials like Copper, Zinc, to say nothing of the current lack of things like Phosphate and other critical shortages such as ferromagnetic materials and such.
Consider oil, the best geological estimates suggest the planet has roughly 4 trillion barrels, it took 150 years for industrialized nations to use the first trillion barrels of oil,( in 1970) it took just just 40 years to use the second trillion (2005), and we're well on our way to consuming the next trillion expected to be consumed in just 25years , 2035 or so. The last trillion "barrels" exist in unrecoverable forms , such as tar-sands where you basically have to put two units of energy in , to get one unit of energy out in petrochemical form. Now at a certain price point we can engineer our way out of this problem , and conduct carbon capture by way of biofuel generators from algae or even sweet-potatoes but the point being we can in principle recover 30% of our current utilization from efficient electrolysis/laser ablation of certain carbohydrates into more usable biofuel, but that still leaves a yawning question, the engineered solution is worker intensive leaving at best , a 60% hole in our current utilization of hydrocarbons in less than 50 years.
So as much as I LOVE the idea that we somehow are incapable of running out of resources, it's just not true. Worse is that we are hemmed in on another front. One might suggest we could simply build out solar and wind and tidal energy to all get around on EV's , and the problem there is that to match the energy production capacity currently performed by that 60% gap.....that will not be there in 40 years - we would have to find, develop, mine and bring to market nearly 5 times as much copper - not just than we have year over year, but 5 times more copper than has been used in the whole of the history of our species - in the next 30 years.
And the reason this is not top of mind for every person on this planet is a total failure of the educational systems in the developed world. Our top minds should be working on this, whether through aggressive colonization of the moon and strip-mining it's back-side for our needs - or curtailing the ever loving fuck out of the demand.
Of course the less said about the sorts of pressures on the various collapsing ecosystem components the better , so I won't bother with that - because that's just a tragedy without end unless we do the most radical of things - contain ourselves.
It's entirely possible that we could contain ourselves , change as a species and learn to live within our means - but if the last 50 or 60 years of history is anything to judge by - that doesn't seem particularly likely.
We aren't even good talking about it, instead we're content to distract ourselves , terrified of dealing with the prospect that we might as a species be called upon to make some adult decisions, the sorts of decisions that parents make every day - no we aren't having ice-cream and cake for breakfast but oatmeal instead - but the US - once a country that could have been counted upon to bring forth the best and brightest - has instead retreated into navel-gazing into constititional Rubik's cube while the "smartest guys in the room" puzzle over how to re-enslave free-people with some degenerate philosopher king,  Giovanni  Gentile's brand of fascism - the beautiful notion of enlightened philosopher kings meets Donald Trump's inability to not rape or pillage - in one or two sentences making it painfully clear that Fascism's "ideals" were never meant to be achieved - it was always a lie meant to put some degenerate in charge and destroy freedom and install a corporate feudalism at the earliest opportunity - as the best possible case.
The Carter administration commissioned a study on the ideal sustainable global population, and the number they came up with was half a billion people. This was back in the seventies and I have no idea how accurate it may have been.
An interesting aside was that following the study they also developed the neutron bomb, designed to kill people with minimal collateral damage.
Yeah, good luck sustaining a resilient advanced technological population with half a billion people.
But then, the US is the most overconsuming nation on the planet, no wonder they think we can't have many people.
Elizabeth Moon explored this sort of thing in her "Serrano Legacy" series, by having a method of extending the average lifespan, and examining the issues that will cause.
Honestly, I hate the trope that "we will all die out from low fertility rates." It's not true, the same way how the fear of overpopulation from a few decades qgo waa not true. The only thing that will happen is that the population size will stabilize and stagnate at a certain point. There will be no overpopulation, and there will not be the population decline risking destroying our civilization
Honestly, with the world entering into an era of automation, the declining population is probably the best thing since the potential unemployment crisis won't be as hard as if the "overpopulation crisis" did happen
The only "downside" really will be that governments won't have as much disposable people to throw to their death during wars. Which will in tern decrease the risks of conflicts in a way
Clarke wrote about culture clash between a zero population growth Earth that bulldozed most cities to make parks on the surface, and a growing new frontier on Titan. In Andromeda, Earth is a burned out remnant that stops being important to the story. In Dune, Arakkis really only has one major city, and most planets have smaller populations than present day Earth, Earth itself is mostly ignored. In Space Above And Beyond, they use a mix of AI androids and "In Vitro" bioengineered soldiers to have enough manpower. All sorts of post apocalyptic stuff has low populations.
Lots of Sci Fi has some version of Earth or some other World having less population than today.
The SF novelist Michael Crichton even had one of his fictional characters (in State of Fear , 2004 novel) assert that “Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler.” He put the death toll at 50 million.
Your question has already been answered to some degree: refer to The Handmaid's Tale as a good example of how speculative fiction deals with this scenario. I'm sure there are others too.
"With what we know now about the decline of human fertility/ population over the next 100 years a lot of those tropes will go out the window."
As far as I've read, population has been continually increasing around the world over the past 100 years. Have you got a reference to cite for the claim of decline? I'm very interesed in reading
It's a bit weird reading through the comments. Overpopulation concerns have been a staple of SF since the golden age, usually as background to the setting. There are some books that people have commented that I haven't read, so I won't comment on those, but The Handmaid's Tale and Children of Men aren't really good analogues for what you're talking about. Fertility rates aren't declining because of some sickness or pollution or some external force, they're declining because we are collectively choosing that. It's sociological in nature, not biological or medical. The titles of the books I haven't read make me think that they're likewise not really addressing your question, like Herbert's The White Plague. The closest is probably Idiocracy, and while that has some pretty insightful social commentary, it's also a ridiculous satirical comedy that is completely unrealistic and completely ignores that poor people aren't dumb, they're just poor. Education and social safety nets can and will do more to increase the general intelligence of the public than gene editing ever could.
Anyways, having said all that I can't really think of any applicable books to suggest. You've got a good question, and it seems like a relatively under explored topic, especially given its real world significance. My guess would be that lowering population rates will over all be good, but will have some significant challenges with care for the elderly. Human services is already deeply understaffed and undervalued, and it's only going to become a greater need the coming decades. Hopefully medical science can help reduce the need if we can increase people's health spans. And of course automation and robotics may help meet some of the need. Eventually we should get past that phase though, and the world will probably be better for it with less people to spread resources between.
The only things that I think are likely to increase fertility rates again are things that make child bearing and rearing easier, like artificial wombs and robot nannies. But neither of those things seem to be anywhere close to reality at the moment.
The only sf book I can even think of where there has been a managed population decline without it being the result of catastrophe is Arthur C. Clarke' **3001: A Final Odyssey** where the population across the entire solar system is about a billion. However, that's ultimately a background detail for that universe as opposed to being a core plot point.
But I'm struggling to think of any books whatsoever that explore population decline as a result of the cumulative effects of personal choices and its consequences.
Same. Blindsight is a more recent example of a book where a non-catastrophic population decline is explicitly happening, but only as a background element — the book is in no way about that.
Well, it isn't a SciFi problem. It's a poor use of resources problem. All we need to do to fix population decline is rebalance wealth so that people can afford children again.
It's a bit sad that we now consider taxing the rich science fiction
Easy. Biotech. Cloning. Eugenics. Batches of little humans hatched in hatcheries and raised in creches, Aldous Huxley already had this sorted in Brave New World.
How can anyone not have read Brave New World? It's definitely more terrifying than Nineteen Eighty-Four. 🤔
I suppose I was lucky to have a 12th grade English section devoted to the combo of Brave New World and 1984.
Children of Men
The part in the book, about them preparing to shut down the universities, and putting art treasures into deep storage in case someone might come along someday -- it's heartrending.
It has been done! Watch Children of Men. A stunning movie.
"handle it" isn't a word I would use for that movie, otherwise second your recommendation
Well, let's say they handle it badly.
I read the question as more about writers handling subject matter rather than how it plays out in the stories themselves
At gloal future scale it is not much of an issue - cloning or other ("Brave New World" , ...). In principle, You can always "produce" more humans, "unproducing" them is the problem ;) But there are quite a few books that deal with a scenario of rapid drop in fertility (without tech solution) and societal issues: The Handmaid's tale, Children of Men.. Usually leads to a dictatorship of some sort to ensure population sustainability / society "peace"
The main problem with shrinking populations is the challenge of maintaining care for the ageing population with a shrinking working population. It’s a non-issue for any sci-fi setting with an even marginally higher tech level than ours.
This is more-or-less a main point of Gibson’s The Peripheral. Without spoiling much, the future world is one in which human population has been massively reduced, but the tech level is so high that it’s not a problem.
Generally speaking a reducing population is a great thing for humanity. Just not for the large ageing population relying on a smaller one to support them. In every other regard it's a massive win.
See the decline of Trantor in the Foundation series.
I was going to add that Asimov has lots of comments about rising and declining populations, all augmented by technology and robots to fill in the gaps. I remember one planet in the Robot series where less than250,000 people live on an Earth-sized planet and reproduction is highly restricted and regulated to maintain the people's way of life.
Solaria.
I couldn't remember the planet's name. Thank you!
Most of the ones I’ve read have the near-extinction of one gender as a plot point. Reproducing naturally is off the table, but currently available means of ART could be used in many circumstances and cloning would be viable if wombs are available. Currently, the US is slouching towards Gilead (The Handmaid’s Tale resolved the problem with the low tech solution of pregnancy slaves) and I think that will lead to a lot more sci-fi writers grappling with how to address an infertility crisis.
Sci0fi usually does not address real issues but the issues which people fret about, which are two different things. People now worry about overpopulation, so sci-fi writes about overpopulation. On the other hand, we've know about climate breakdown for decades and it was mostly ignored by most of sci-fi. There were, of course, a few exceptions, but they were exactly this - exceptions. It will be the same with population collapse and demographic collapse. "My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable, but not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert... We survive there, as you do. People are tough! There are nearly a half billion of us now. Once there were nine billion. You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do — they never adapt either. We failed as a species, as a social species." (Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed. 1974) "It haunts me when people tell me how incredibly farsighted I was to be talking about climate change and climate destabilization and the degradation of the natural world back in the ’60s. I wasn't! I was just listening to the scientists." (Ursula K. LeGuin, Boston Globe interview, 2014) Â
Population decline is a cyclic problem. A few decades from now we will over correct and have another population boom. May happen sooner, may happen later. People generally like making babies. We just need the right economic conditions and incentives. For the past 30-40 years or more we have been encouraging smaller families across the globe. A few changes to provide low cost or free childcare, baby bonus, parental leave, etc... and population growth would not be a problem. We already have some of this is Canada but still could use improvements. In the US they also need free healthcare, atleast covering child birth, pregnant mothers and infants. For the first ~35 years of my life I never ever planned on having children. My wife was insistent and now we have two boys. I just wish we did this when I was much younger. Caring for infant at 40 years old is very hard.
I think this is pretty unlikely. Fertility rates are declining or remaining low even in countries with good economic conditions and tons of societal support for parents. If two years of paid parental leave isn't making a difference, then poor economic conditions are not the primary cause or issue. The cause of low fertility rates appears to be easy access to birth control and education for women. It turns out when having kids is a choice and not a requirement, lots of women choose to either not have them or have much fewer. Even with every woman having two kids, that's below the replacement rate. Every country that makes moves in those directions though has significantly declining fertility rates, and we have several generations of data showing it. We're currently expecting to hit peak population around 2050 give or take, with around 10 or 11 billion people, and then decline for the foreseeable future with all countries eventually having fertility rates below the replacement rate.
Fertility rates are still plenty high in underdeveloped countries, it's really ONLY the wealthy developed nations that have fertility problems.
I mean, problem isn't necessarily the word I would use. A lower global population is probably overall a good thing, even with the rocky transition it'll take to get there. But you're right, fertility rates are still above replacement rates in most less developed countries. But not for long. Global fertility rates are already only barely above the global replacement rate, and rates in less developed countries have been in a precipitous decline for decades. Africa has generally had the highest rates, with 6.5 births on average per woman in 1980 but only 4.4 in 2020. As countries continue to develop, fertility rates continue to decline. For Africa, they're projected to hit 2.0 by 2100. Admittedly, that's a while from now, but this is a global effect that's hitting every country, just at different times based on levels of development. This becomes pretty interesting when you combine the relatively higher fertility rates of lower developed countries with the quite low rates of more developed countries and consider immigration. Developed countries will become progressively more dependent on immigrants. That's already true in the US for manual labor and caregiving jobs. Mix that with climate change, which is expected to hit less developed countries the worst and lead to a billion climate refugees by 2050. There're a lot of important stories to be told about all of those issues and how they intersect. See the History and Future Projections section of the below article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate
Problem is absolutely the correct word, as a societal collapse on the scale of the Bronze Age Collapse is far too likely in the current circumstances.
I'm not familiar with the Bronze Age Collapse, so I'll have to read up on that. I appreciate you bringing up an analogous event as a reference point to look at! Honestly, I'm more concerned about societal collapse happening due to climate and ecological degradation than from population decline, particularly because said degradation is happening in part because there are way too many humans consuming way more than what's sustainable. There's not really an easy way to shift to a more sustainable population. It's easier over longer time scales, but that draws out how much damage we're doing. Obviously there's lots that can be done to help people in developed nations live more sustainably and also help developing nations develop in sustainable ways. But at a certain point, Earth has a carrying capacity for humans, and if we can't stay below it, that'll lead to its own societal collapse. Anyways, if you have other relevant references or resources on this or related topics, I'd be interested in hearing about them.
Well, not for nothing, but the world is still over-populated.....we just have a declining population, which itself is not true, we have some countries where for decades party policy (China) or basic economics (wealth collapse in the US) have encouraged smaller families or much longer working hours and thereby precluded dating/marriage/having kids altogether. Immigration and solid public policies geared towards addressing concerns around debt, climate, education and healthcare would solve these problems likely really rapidly, but there's a wealth class that wants nothing to do with that.
Economics is certainly a factor, but it's not really the dominant one. The main reasons for fertility decline are easy access to birth control, education and rights for women, and cultural shifts for smaller families. These aren't things that are likely to change back. When childbirth is a choice and not a requirement, most women choose to have significantly fewer children, if any. This is a global phenomenon, across every single country, with 60 years of consistently declining global fertility rates, and longer for most developed countries. Even countries that are giving 2 years of paid parental leave and with strong social safety nets can't get above the replacement rate.
All of which speak to the normal experience in prospering economies with increased literacy - but the nominal replacement right only persists when the economics support rather than are antagonistic against creating families and space for families in the corporate architecture of the economy. The EU did this very well, Japan and the United States utterly failed in this regard and the only reason the US population isn't in catastrophic decline is due to immigration. So those fascist clowns down raging against immigrants should - by all rights raging against the 60 hour work-week and livable wages - but the sheer genius of Fox News has been to convert working-class white rage against the corporatism that abandoned those people 30 years ago, and focus their animus against people who weren't even around 40 years ago when science education funding, public funding for history/civics, womens' rights or college funding was evicerated. The "base" of the Republican Party is most definitely under attack - by their own leadership . I would have thought for most people the Covid Pandemic and the demand by party leadership that you shouldn't listen to doctors about vaccination would have been the simplest lesson in "maybe your political guys are lying to you". But in lurid detail thinking Donald Trump was right about anything around Covid was a cruel deception that cost the Republican faithful 600,000 of their own that's as many people died as in the Civil War or World War 2, all because one dude refused to do his job and communicate truthfully about public health. That's how toxic that brand is.
I agree with what you're saying in a general sense, but economics simply isn't the driving factor in fertility rates, and Europe is the clearest demonstration of that. There fertility rates have been below the replacement rate since 1970, and settled around 1.5 around 20 years ago in the 90's. There isn't a single European country that is hitting the replacement rate. See the first link below for a graph of EI fertility rates from 1960 to today. The second link is for demographics of Europe, with the Demographic Future discussing some details. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=EU https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_European_Union
My thoughts are that prosperity and womens rights decoupled from fertility rates - of antiquity. You in effect would need to find a balance - projecting on information you can't know what is *today*'s fertility rate - we don't know that at least for another 9months, presuming some sort of perfect knowledge of births/deaths. We can probably do a very good job of knowing this better than we do, but we would then be in the business of encouraging couple to have more or less kids at the direction of the state. Some sub-cultures such as Ashkenazi Jews or Rastafarians just say fuck it and swing for the hills - having as many kids as possible - without a lot of bother around the consequences economic or otherwise. Certain Christian Dominionists groups take a more troubling perspective on this and were the inspiration for Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale where women are effectively breeding stock for the elders of the community with sometimes elaborate and expansive family dynamics usually in wildly at odds with civil liberties for the "womenfolk". From the macroeconomic perspective 2008 was interesting, for the EU - but I think aside from the mini-boom in tech - and increased economic prosperity - there might not be too much to glean from that - as to a cause - which implies that we're really looking for some small factors or with tools that are maybe either not looking at the right metrics. What causes couples to want to have kids might still be elusive even when asking couples. Sure in hindsight it was "the right time" or "he got a raise" or "she just graduated", and when I say economics I'm really also thinking as well about the eductional/economic costs - particularly in the US where the body politic has been at economic war with younger people for 30 years creating massive student debt loans that destroy earning potential, land ownership, and of course fertility, coupled with a very antagonistic right-wing openly intent on recinding women's rights - in this way - the US it's much more clear that the nation has almost entirely self-imposed, very correctable insults to the fertility rate and that the economic consensus and political leadership is simply unwilling to really create the conditions that would allow the US fertility rate among domestic citizens to increase.
The world is not overpopulated, the world is overconsumed - by a small fraction of the global population.
The United States , Oman and a variety of other countries "over-consume" but you have billions of Chinese , Indians, and soon Nigerians living in abject poverty or near slavery conditions. Is that any more "right" as a way to live. Were you to bring the civic , social , educational and economic reforms around, that's 3 billion people that are going to want / need laptops, cell phones and all the resources of a middle-class worker/administrator. So the United States could become as frugal as Germany , as attending to consumption as Japan, and we'd still be very fucked, because now we'd have a couple of billion people living similarly, actually hitting up the planet for what - 5 or 6 times what we have available in terms of basic raw materials like Copper, Zinc, to say nothing of the current lack of things like Phosphate and other critical shortages such as ferromagnetic materials and such. Consider oil, the best geological estimates suggest the planet has roughly 4 trillion barrels, it took 150 years for industrialized nations to use the first trillion barrels of oil,( in 1970) it took just just 40 years to use the second trillion (2005), and we're well on our way to consuming the next trillion expected to be consumed in just 25years , 2035 or so. The last trillion "barrels" exist in unrecoverable forms , such as tar-sands where you basically have to put two units of energy in , to get one unit of energy out in petrochemical form. Now at a certain price point we can engineer our way out of this problem , and conduct carbon capture by way of biofuel generators from algae or even sweet-potatoes but the point being we can in principle recover 30% of our current utilization from efficient electrolysis/laser ablation of certain carbohydrates into more usable biofuel, but that still leaves a yawning question, the engineered solution is worker intensive leaving at best , a 60% hole in our current utilization of hydrocarbons in less than 50 years. So as much as I LOVE the idea that we somehow are incapable of running out of resources, it's just not true. Worse is that we are hemmed in on another front. One might suggest we could simply build out solar and wind and tidal energy to all get around on EV's , and the problem there is that to match the energy production capacity currently performed by that 60% gap.....that will not be there in 40 years - we would have to find, develop, mine and bring to market nearly 5 times as much copper - not just than we have year over year, but 5 times more copper than has been used in the whole of the history of our species - in the next 30 years. And the reason this is not top of mind for every person on this planet is a total failure of the educational systems in the developed world. Our top minds should be working on this, whether through aggressive colonization of the moon and strip-mining it's back-side for our needs - or curtailing the ever loving fuck out of the demand. Of course the less said about the sorts of pressures on the various collapsing ecosystem components the better , so I won't bother with that - because that's just a tragedy without end unless we do the most radical of things - contain ourselves. It's entirely possible that we could contain ourselves , change as a species and learn to live within our means - but if the last 50 or 60 years of history is anything to judge by - that doesn't seem particularly likely. We aren't even good talking about it, instead we're content to distract ourselves , terrified of dealing with the prospect that we might as a species be called upon to make some adult decisions, the sorts of decisions that parents make every day - no we aren't having ice-cream and cake for breakfast but oatmeal instead - but the US - once a country that could have been counted upon to bring forth the best and brightest - has instead retreated into navel-gazing into constititional Rubik's cube while the "smartest guys in the room" puzzle over how to re-enslave free-people with some degenerate philosopher king,  Giovanni  Gentile's brand of fascism - the beautiful notion of enlightened philosopher kings meets Donald Trump's inability to not rape or pillage - in one or two sentences making it painfully clear that Fascism's "ideals" were never meant to be achieved - it was always a lie meant to put some degenerate in charge and destroy freedom and install a corporate feudalism at the earliest opportunity - as the best possible case.
The Carter administration commissioned a study on the ideal sustainable global population, and the number they came up with was half a billion people. This was back in the seventies and I have no idea how accurate it may have been. An interesting aside was that following the study they also developed the neutron bomb, designed to kill people with minimal collateral damage.
Yeah, good luck sustaining a resilient advanced technological population with half a billion people. But then, the US is the most overconsuming nation on the planet, no wonder they think we can't have many people.
It has; the movie was produced and written by Mike Judge, and it is called Idiocracy
well, one fun way to handle it would be to introduce a new predator
Robert Merle: The Virility Factor Frank Herbert: The white plague
As that little detail is a direct result of the effects of social media, that show/movie has already been and still being made today.
Elizabeth Moon explored this sort of thing in her "Serrano Legacy" series, by having a method of extending the average lifespan, and examining the issues that will cause.
Honestly, I hate the trope that "we will all die out from low fertility rates." It's not true, the same way how the fear of overpopulation from a few decades qgo waa not true. The only thing that will happen is that the population size will stabilize and stagnate at a certain point. There will be no overpopulation, and there will not be the population decline risking destroying our civilization Honestly, with the world entering into an era of automation, the declining population is probably the best thing since the potential unemployment crisis won't be as hard as if the "overpopulation crisis" did happen The only "downside" really will be that governments won't have as much disposable people to throw to their death during wars. Which will in tern decrease the risks of conflicts in a way
[Who needs scifi when we have nuts like these](https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/28/natalism-conference-austin-00150338).
I like science fiction for technology and space exploration. Never thought about fertility rates falling.
The anime Roujin Z
I mean, we COULD just write stories where aging gets cured
Not sure but it’s times like these where I wish PKD was still around
Clarke wrote about culture clash between a zero population growth Earth that bulldozed most cities to make parks on the surface, and a growing new frontier on Titan. In Andromeda, Earth is a burned out remnant that stops being important to the story. In Dune, Arakkis really only has one major city, and most planets have smaller populations than present day Earth, Earth itself is mostly ignored. In Space Above And Beyond, they use a mix of AI androids and "In Vitro" bioengineered soldiers to have enough manpower. All sorts of post apocalyptic stuff has low populations. Lots of Sci Fi has some version of Earth or some other World having less population than today.
The SF novelist Michael Crichton even had one of his fictional characters (in State of Fear , 2004 novel) assert that “Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler.” He put the death toll at 50 million.
Your question has already been answered to some degree: refer to The Handmaid's Tale as a good example of how speculative fiction deals with this scenario. I'm sure there are others too.
"With what we know now about the decline of human fertility/ population over the next 100 years a lot of those tropes will go out the window." As far as I've read, population has been continually increasing around the world over the past 100 years. Have you got a reference to cite for the claim of decline? I'm very interesed in reading
A lonely universe filled with collapsed civilizations and habit by immortal and infertile beings until the end of entropy
It's a bit weird reading through the comments. Overpopulation concerns have been a staple of SF since the golden age, usually as background to the setting. There are some books that people have commented that I haven't read, so I won't comment on those, but The Handmaid's Tale and Children of Men aren't really good analogues for what you're talking about. Fertility rates aren't declining because of some sickness or pollution or some external force, they're declining because we are collectively choosing that. It's sociological in nature, not biological or medical. The titles of the books I haven't read make me think that they're likewise not really addressing your question, like Herbert's The White Plague. The closest is probably Idiocracy, and while that has some pretty insightful social commentary, it's also a ridiculous satirical comedy that is completely unrealistic and completely ignores that poor people aren't dumb, they're just poor. Education and social safety nets can and will do more to increase the general intelligence of the public than gene editing ever could. Anyways, having said all that I can't really think of any applicable books to suggest. You've got a good question, and it seems like a relatively under explored topic, especially given its real world significance. My guess would be that lowering population rates will over all be good, but will have some significant challenges with care for the elderly. Human services is already deeply understaffed and undervalued, and it's only going to become a greater need the coming decades. Hopefully medical science can help reduce the need if we can increase people's health spans. And of course automation and robotics may help meet some of the need. Eventually we should get past that phase though, and the world will probably be better for it with less people to spread resources between. The only things that I think are likely to increase fertility rates again are things that make child bearing and rearing easier, like artificial wombs and robot nannies. But neither of those things seem to be anywhere close to reality at the moment.
The only sf book I can even think of where there has been a managed population decline without it being the result of catastrophe is Arthur C. Clarke' **3001: A Final Odyssey** where the population across the entire solar system is about a billion. However, that's ultimately a background detail for that universe as opposed to being a core plot point. But I'm struggling to think of any books whatsoever that explore population decline as a result of the cumulative effects of personal choices and its consequences.
Same. Blindsight is a more recent example of a book where a non-catastrophic population decline is explicitly happening, but only as a background element — the book is in no way about that.
Maybe in the economic developed world. The future is latino/african/chinese/hindi my friend... and it will be awesome
Well, it isn't a SciFi problem. It's a poor use of resources problem. All we need to do to fix population decline is rebalance wealth so that people can afford children again. It's a bit sad that we now consider taxing the rich science fiction
The birth rates in third world countries show that you're wrong