Great article! I think that a big problem about the future demographics is the % of the world population that will be elderly could increase substantially. This will deplete retirement plans and healthcare plans if there are not enough young people to replace retirees in the workforce.
It's a massive issue and it hits full steam well before a population gets to absolute decline (though it worsens after). The simple and unsettling fact is we have no experience with major population aging or population decline so our policy responses are, essentially, flying blind. So far, Japan is coping. But that's the best they can say.
Not to mention that we allocate significant amount of our healthcare dollars to extending life rather than enhancing it (i.e. difference between Life Expectancy and QALYs). By focusing on quality people would have lower healthcare costs in retirements and would likely be more independent.
This is a good article. For your growth curves, some people don't see to understand the difference between velocity and acceleration. I also appreciate that you try to be an empiricist. As for quoting articles from Scientific American, indeed, it isn't the 80s any longer (when Scientific American was good). Today SA is replete with political nonsense, so seeing a dumb article such as the one you describe, is today, par for the course.
Loved this! But what are the reasons why wealthy millennials and Gen Z opting out of parenthood? Most of my gen z friends are saying they're afraid of climate change, they think we are overpopulated & there are not much opportunities for kids in the future. Also Anti-natalism is on the rise in gen Z. They think having children is a burden. What role does the new cultural movements play when it comes to Anti-Natalism?
As far as I know, little or none. For one, there has long been anti-natalism. (Zero population growth was a major movement in the late 1960s and 1970s.) But more importantly, the trends that have pushed fertility rates down are very long term (in some countries, you can see amazingly smooth downward curves dating back all the way to the 19th century, interrupted only by the post-war Baby Boom.) The principal issue is simple: Children went from being an insurance policy and economic resource, prior to the 20th century, to a straight economic drag today. And the cost of raising children has only increased in recent decades. Unsurprisingly, when you ask people "if money were no issue, how many children would you have?" and then calculate what overall fertility rate would be if people actually had that many children, the number is considerably higher.
Thank you for answering! But how can we make having kids feel like a personal responsibility for the advancement of humanity? What will be the practical steps for that?
Well, the cynic in me says one way to churn out babies again is to make parents dumb .
Wait, wait -- before anyone throws tomatoes at me for saying that ^
I also have friends & family who aren't having kids, or only have 1 child. Myself included. So what I'm saying points a finger right back at me and my partner.
Dan's post (and others) basically show a correlation between an educated population, especially educated females, and birth rates. So, if your goal is to get births back up, history shows us there IS a way to do that has worked in the past: don't educate the masses, especially women.
What Dan's post didn't mention is the time when each of country ramped up public education. I also suspect a correlation between public school funding and population decline. If true, which University is going to make a big stink about it?! That's a rhetorical question; because universities that are publicly funded have a bias. (Maybe private Uni's would poke a stick at going deep into this topic. But their history is educating the landed gentry, religious zealots, and men.)
Perhaps the idealist thinks there's a way to both educate women, protect women's rights, AND see many mothers creating larger families. I'm not an idealist. The pragmatic side of for any 3 options tells me we usually get 2 of the 3. So we could get large families + educated women but women's rights become infringed, etc.
I think this begs the question: what is more valuable to us now? Being educated, especially educated women, or being populous?
My guess is GenZ and Millennials value being educated. And, now that we're educated, I think our generations are paying closer to anyone poking holes at women's rights.
What rights does mothers of more than three kids lack? Are they denied freedom? Right, they have to take care of their kids. But kids will grow & be self sufficient in a few years. This is just a short term pain compared to the great deed she's doing. By bringing more kids to this superabundant world!
All of this is fine and relevant, and I agree with much of what’s been noted, both in the comments and in the essay. Humanity was at about three billion people when I was a nerdy pre-adolescent, and I’ve been making population projections in my head ever since.
But there’s a new elephant in the room. I know some people will scoff or sneer, but the expansion of humanity beyond Earth seems likely this century unless there is a dramatic collapse of global tech civilization beforehand. While such a collapse seems distinctly possible, that possibility itself is one reason an increasing number of people are talking about establishing self-sufficient habitats beyond Earth. I’m one of them. I even created a bumper sticker in the late 1970s: “Conserve Earth - Colonize Space” … and a button: “Decentralize - Get Off The Planet.”
(I don’t have any problems with the word “colonize” because I’ve always used it in the biological sense, and the term is often used in ecological studies.)
I’m not a fan of Mars colonization, though, which is what Elon Musk and some other people are working toward. Why leave Earth and go down another gravity well — even it it’s only one-third as strong — when it will be possible to create many different habitats in orbital space, and with any level of spin-gravity desired? (Zero gravity would likely be useful for some industrial processes.)
And no, I’m not suggesting that there will be mass emigration from Earth to space. But space habitats seem likely to offer opportunities for those who want to have children without contributing to an ecological burden on Earth. Determining how this might affect terrestrial demographics is beyond my pay grade and, anyway, I’m retired. But it would seem that space colonization, if it comes to pass, would have a significant impact on fertility projections.
The resources available from asteroids and comets (and likely the Moon with its one-sixth Earth gravity) are calculated by some to be sufficient to create many large-scale habitats able to sustain a human population in the trillions. (Whether that is desirable is for future generations to decide.)
Of course there are many factors that will determine what happens in the future, and any one of them could have a dramatic impact on any trends and demographic predictions. Advancements in artificial intelligence could make robot care-givers the preferred option, and advancements in biotech could reshape what being a human means. (Keep in mind that the brain is part of the body.)
For the present, I take some solace from the fact that I never contributed any babies to Earth’s population, though I know that my life in the United States means that I contributed quite a lot to resource use and pollution, even with my modest lifestyle. I’m also fortunate to have married late in life to a woman whose son and daughter (from a prior marriage) have five young children among them, and I can participate in their development.
Anyway, I think humanity’s plausible expansion into space is too often still ignored in these discussions.
Excellent article. I've been arguing the same points for years and decades. 1987 is not 2023. However, I would say people are still talking as if it were the late 1960s, when population growth peaked.
I'm not sure that Cornucopianism "came to prominence in the 1980s" since I rarely saw it get any attention and I would have noticed since I've read Julian Simon and the other abundance authors since the early 80s.
You are also correct that Africa is the big wild card and could swing the global by a billion either way depending on the path taken. The UN has the highest projections for population. I think the models used by The Wittgenstein Center and even more by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) are likely to be more accurate and given somewhat lower figures. IHME has global population peaking at 9.733 billion in 2064, declining to 8.758 billion by 2100. two thirds of the difference is due to faster reductions in sub-Saharan African fertility and two thirds due to the lower level of fertility expected in populations with below-replacement fertility levels, particularly China and India. Of course, all models including IHME's have different pathways, so the central path is not the only one nor 100% certain.
One fascinating chart from Our World in Data that you didn't include is "How long did it take for fertility to fall from more than 6 children per woman to fewer than 3 children per woman?" It's amazing. For the UK, the answer is 95 years. For Brazil, 26 years. For Bangladesh, 20 years. For China, 11 years. How many people are aware of this?
What we don't seem to have a plan for, is the coming end to growth. Our whole economy runs on it, assumes it. Parts of the economy are so happy about the housing shortage. Jen Gerson, a Canadian journalist, did a much-linked column about how nobody will fix housing, because so many people (the ones with money and power already) are doing so well from it.
Our society runs on income-inequality, and the way it's been engineered since the feudal regimes declined, is that the already-wealthy generally capture nearly all the income that comes from growth, be it housing or social media stocks. Those who *invest* in the growth get nearly all the profits, those who *work* to make growth possible, get scale wages.
So the wealthy are not going to like the End of Growth, I would predict.
Roy, this piece is about population growth, not economic growth. The latter is certainly related to the former, and the end of population growth will be a huge challenge to it, but it is nonetheless a distinct issue.
But the political issue comes from resource consumption. If people could be shrunk like Matt Damon, and consume almost nothing, would anybody care how many there were, intrinsically? Environmental exhaustion is why we're even talking about it.
I raised the "plan for an end" issue, because you are correct to predict a (near?) end to population growth. If our system, as run by those with power over it, depends on continued economic growth, then the 99% of us have no problem, but the major investor class, may see an existential crisis coming for themselves.
This would incentivize them to either push for a return to population growth (already happening), or for endless growth in consumption, (let's build a Transatlantic Tunnel). I can't help but speculate about it, because it's New Problem, with no historical referents.
Nice. I love data-dense articles like this that look at the reality of the world as it is, rather than the fantasy cartoon version of the world we so often see from pundits and prognosticators.
Great article! I think that a big problem about the future demographics is the % of the world population that will be elderly could increase substantially. This will deplete retirement plans and healthcare plans if there are not enough young people to replace retirees in the workforce.
It's a massive issue and it hits full steam well before a population gets to absolute decline (though it worsens after). The simple and unsettling fact is we have no experience with major population aging or population decline so our policy responses are, essentially, flying blind. So far, Japan is coping. But that's the best they can say.
Yes, we badly need to do something about aging!
Not to mention that we allocate significant amount of our healthcare dollars to extending life rather than enhancing it (i.e. difference between Life Expectancy and QALYs). By focusing on quality people would have lower healthcare costs in retirements and would likely be more independent.
This is a good article. For your growth curves, some people don't see to understand the difference between velocity and acceleration. I also appreciate that you try to be an empiricist. As for quoting articles from Scientific American, indeed, it isn't the 80s any longer (when Scientific American was good). Today SA is replete with political nonsense, so seeing a dumb article such as the one you describe, is today, par for the course.
Loved this! But what are the reasons why wealthy millennials and Gen Z opting out of parenthood? Most of my gen z friends are saying they're afraid of climate change, they think we are overpopulated & there are not much opportunities for kids in the future. Also Anti-natalism is on the rise in gen Z. They think having children is a burden. What role does the new cultural movements play when it comes to Anti-Natalism?
As far as I know, little or none. For one, there has long been anti-natalism. (Zero population growth was a major movement in the late 1960s and 1970s.) But more importantly, the trends that have pushed fertility rates down are very long term (in some countries, you can see amazingly smooth downward curves dating back all the way to the 19th century, interrupted only by the post-war Baby Boom.) The principal issue is simple: Children went from being an insurance policy and economic resource, prior to the 20th century, to a straight economic drag today. And the cost of raising children has only increased in recent decades. Unsurprisingly, when you ask people "if money were no issue, how many children would you have?" and then calculate what overall fertility rate would be if people actually had that many children, the number is considerably higher.
Thank you for answering! But how can we make having kids feel like a personal responsibility for the advancement of humanity? What will be the practical steps for that?
Well, the cynic in me says one way to churn out babies again is to make parents dumb .
Wait, wait -- before anyone throws tomatoes at me for saying that ^
I also have friends & family who aren't having kids, or only have 1 child. Myself included. So what I'm saying points a finger right back at me and my partner.
Dan's post (and others) basically show a correlation between an educated population, especially educated females, and birth rates. So, if your goal is to get births back up, history shows us there IS a way to do that has worked in the past: don't educate the masses, especially women.
What Dan's post didn't mention is the time when each of country ramped up public education. I also suspect a correlation between public school funding and population decline. If true, which University is going to make a big stink about it?! That's a rhetorical question; because universities that are publicly funded have a bias. (Maybe private Uni's would poke a stick at going deep into this topic. But their history is educating the landed gentry, religious zealots, and men.)
Perhaps the idealist thinks there's a way to both educate women, protect women's rights, AND see many mothers creating larger families. I'm not an idealist. The pragmatic side of for any 3 options tells me we usually get 2 of the 3. So we could get large families + educated women but women's rights become infringed, etc.
I think this begs the question: what is more valuable to us now? Being educated, especially educated women, or being populous?
My guess is GenZ and Millennials value being educated. And, now that we're educated, I think our generations are paying closer to anyone poking holes at women's rights.
What rights does mothers of more than three kids lack? Are they denied freedom? Right, they have to take care of their kids. But kids will grow & be self sufficient in a few years. This is just a short term pain compared to the great deed she's doing. By bringing more kids to this superabundant world!
Brilliant analysis, Dan. Embarrasses me, as I would have made the same mistake that Oreskes--who is a colleague of mine--made!
Thanks, Ruth. A compliment is as good as its source so I treasure this.
All of this is fine and relevant, and I agree with much of what’s been noted, both in the comments and in the essay. Humanity was at about three billion people when I was a nerdy pre-adolescent, and I’ve been making population projections in my head ever since.
But there’s a new elephant in the room. I know some people will scoff or sneer, but the expansion of humanity beyond Earth seems likely this century unless there is a dramatic collapse of global tech civilization beforehand. While such a collapse seems distinctly possible, that possibility itself is one reason an increasing number of people are talking about establishing self-sufficient habitats beyond Earth. I’m one of them. I even created a bumper sticker in the late 1970s: “Conserve Earth - Colonize Space” … and a button: “Decentralize - Get Off The Planet.”
(I don’t have any problems with the word “colonize” because I’ve always used it in the biological sense, and the term is often used in ecological studies.)
I’m not a fan of Mars colonization, though, which is what Elon Musk and some other people are working toward. Why leave Earth and go down another gravity well — even it it’s only one-third as strong — when it will be possible to create many different habitats in orbital space, and with any level of spin-gravity desired? (Zero gravity would likely be useful for some industrial processes.)
And no, I’m not suggesting that there will be mass emigration from Earth to space. But space habitats seem likely to offer opportunities for those who want to have children without contributing to an ecological burden on Earth. Determining how this might affect terrestrial demographics is beyond my pay grade and, anyway, I’m retired. But it would seem that space colonization, if it comes to pass, would have a significant impact on fertility projections.
The resources available from asteroids and comets (and likely the Moon with its one-sixth Earth gravity) are calculated by some to be sufficient to create many large-scale habitats able to sustain a human population in the trillions. (Whether that is desirable is for future generations to decide.)
Of course there are many factors that will determine what happens in the future, and any one of them could have a dramatic impact on any trends and demographic predictions. Advancements in artificial intelligence could make robot care-givers the preferred option, and advancements in biotech could reshape what being a human means. (Keep in mind that the brain is part of the body.)
For the present, I take some solace from the fact that I never contributed any babies to Earth’s population, though I know that my life in the United States means that I contributed quite a lot to resource use and pollution, even with my modest lifestyle. I’m also fortunate to have married late in life to a woman whose son and daughter (from a prior marriage) have five young children among them, and I can participate in their development.
Anyway, I think humanity’s plausible expansion into space is too often still ignored in these discussions.
Excellent article. I've been arguing the same points for years and decades. 1987 is not 2023. However, I would say people are still talking as if it were the late 1960s, when population growth peaked.
I'm not sure that Cornucopianism "came to prominence in the 1980s" since I rarely saw it get any attention and I would have noticed since I've read Julian Simon and the other abundance authors since the early 80s.
You are also correct that Africa is the big wild card and could swing the global by a billion either way depending on the path taken. The UN has the highest projections for population. I think the models used by The Wittgenstein Center and even more by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) are likely to be more accurate and given somewhat lower figures. IHME has global population peaking at 9.733 billion in 2064, declining to 8.758 billion by 2100. two thirds of the difference is due to faster reductions in sub-Saharan African fertility and two thirds due to the lower level of fertility expected in populations with below-replacement fertility levels, particularly China and India. Of course, all models including IHME's have different pathways, so the central path is not the only one nor 100% certain.
One fascinating chart from Our World in Data that you didn't include is "How long did it take for fertility to fall from more than 6 children per woman to fewer than 3 children per woman?" It's amazing. For the UK, the answer is 95 years. For Brazil, 26 years. For Bangladesh, 20 years. For China, 11 years. How many people are aware of this?
Excellent tip! I'm going to paste it into the main article. Thanks!
Link for the above chart:
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2014/02/Years-it-took-Fertility-to-fall-from-6-to-below-3-750x525.png
Unaware of anybody still projecting vast growth.
What we don't seem to have a plan for, is the coming end to growth. Our whole economy runs on it, assumes it. Parts of the economy are so happy about the housing shortage. Jen Gerson, a Canadian journalist, did a much-linked column about how nobody will fix housing, because so many people (the ones with money and power already) are doing so well from it.
https://theline.substack.com/p/jen-gerson-no-one-is-going-to-fix
Our society runs on income-inequality, and the way it's been engineered since the feudal regimes declined, is that the already-wealthy generally capture nearly all the income that comes from growth, be it housing or social media stocks. Those who *invest* in the growth get nearly all the profits, those who *work* to make growth possible, get scale wages.
So the wealthy are not going to like the End of Growth, I would predict.
Roy, this piece is about population growth, not economic growth. The latter is certainly related to the former, and the end of population growth will be a huge challenge to it, but it is nonetheless a distinct issue.
But the political issue comes from resource consumption. If people could be shrunk like Matt Damon, and consume almost nothing, would anybody care how many there were, intrinsically? Environmental exhaustion is why we're even talking about it.
I raised the "plan for an end" issue, because you are correct to predict a (near?) end to population growth. If our system, as run by those with power over it, depends on continued economic growth, then the 99% of us have no problem, but the major investor class, may see an existential crisis coming for themselves.
This would incentivize them to either push for a return to population growth (already happening), or for endless growth in consumption, (let's build a Transatlantic Tunnel). I can't help but speculate about it, because it's New Problem, with no historical referents.
Nice. I love data-dense articles like this that look at the reality of the world as it is, rather than the fantasy cartoon version of the world we so often see from pundits and prognosticators.