The global population pyramid
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
There is something wrong with rich modern secular society here or anywhere (it happens to all societies right now whether they are European, Japanese, Chinese, etc) in that it currently leads to sub replacement reproduction. This is the next global issue as it will lead to instability in modern rich societies in that they are not sustainable.
Japan is the future of all other rich societies, rapid shrinkage if you exclude immigration.
And if you encourage immigration as the solution to shrinkage you end up with rising racism and other reactionary trends to these changing demographics.
Right now the only societies that are growing or even stable are either developing/poor or highly conservative/religious societies.
If we do not address this issue then the world's future is likely poor or highly religious (most likely both) as demographics is the future whether we like it or not.
Also societies with shrinking populations will tend to have horrid economies and probably negative growth as the pyramid is inverted. Probably again like Japan.
One of the worst things about using immigration as a solution is that it's merely a bandaid. The worst thing is that people who encourage mass immigration are (likely) unknowingly saying their country is more deserving of the temporary benefits of immigration, and the source country can go to hell.
Many countries that are currently sources of large numbers of immigrants are rapidly approaching sub-replacement levels (e.g. Mexico), if they haven't already reached that point (e.g., Vietnam, China). The idea behind mass immigration is that you have a constant supply of workers and tax payers to subsidize the welfare of the retiring natives of a country. The idea of having a class of people subsidize others is troublesome enough, but the real problem is those less wealthy countries that immigrants come from are now lacking in workers and losing their own future. For countries that are still only beginning to develop, such as Vietnam, their future is a hell of a lot more at risk than something like Canada.
First world countries relying on immigrants have infrastructure and various frameworks built up that'll last them for quite a while after populations begin to dip. Poor countries do not have that benefit. Shit will hit the fan and hard. Young people who struggle to meet basic daily needs are going to be pissed when they're working for dollars a day and expected to support the social nets given to 3 generations above them while being told there's nothing left for them.
Right now, the government is saying we should mass import Vietnamese people to change the diapers of our old and do dirty construction jobs. What's Vietnam going to do in 25 years when its population crisis catches up with it, and every country around it is going through the same problem? Nobody's changing their diapers and their streets are going to crumble from insufficient laborers.
States are not people. They have no rights - rights are for people and they have no right to them.
People and countries often make choices, some choices allows them to prosper while others don't. Think of Venezuela for example, the people chose to vote for a populist government and the government's decisions destroyed their economy. The individual living there now has to make a decision to stay and whether the storm or to leave in search of a better life. Is it the fault of Colombia, Brazil, Canada, US, Mexico that Venezuelans are looking for a higher quality of life? Is it the fault of these Colombia,et al that they look to find a way to sell it to their people that they should accept migrants? Although this is an extreme case, it puts things into perspective since you can do the same exercise for famines, wars, etc at different scales and different times in history.
On another point, some countries and families are dependent on remittance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remittance) to support their policies/themselves.
They might not be able to find jobs in their home country which could be a burden on the country. If they move and start working in another country. They might get a job that is harder to recruit to and not only just fill that spot but also pay taxes.
Most studies I have seen claim that the more exposure one have to people of other cultures, the more acceptance it will have. So it is actually the opposite. The more immigrants, the more acceptance there should be.
Politicians run up deficits and then cover their boo boo via immigration. I'm not making a value judgement on immigration here, but politicians have a bad habit of sacrificing the future for current benefits largely because their political career is a relatively small slice of time. It's why we have debt and pension problems. True, voters play a part by having short memories, voting for instant gratification.
Western society is moving away from traditional families. When I ask my son what he wants to become when he's older, he says he wants to be a police officer.
When I ask my 2 girls, they both want to become a mom. My social engineered response to this was "maybe you should become a school teacher, that way you can work with kids and be home when your kids are home". Because let's face it, being only a mom as a girl is not socially acceptable. It's a weak position to be in. We are told to push them into engineering, STEM fields, becoming CEO's, world leaders, whatever. That's what we should do. But my girls, at this age, just want to become a mom.
Western society is trying to make boys out of girls, and girls out of boys. I have no problem with women working in tech fields, and I worked with many great ones. But the question needs to be asked is if our society will survive such a thing.
On one hand it's great that women have all these new rights, are getting more "equal" to men. But if your own culture is unable to produce enough children, and you have to import families and children from regions where womens rights are questionable, you need to ask how sustainable your democratic equal society is.
This is still a big question for myself, so any real discussion is welcome, because maybe I'm overlooking something (so please don't just downvote).
Maybe if we want our society to survive, we need to accept that although women are equal to men, they are very different. A family is made up of a man and a women, who support each other in their strengths and interests, and raise children together. Maybe our society should steer away from pushing women into a 'male' role that on one hands makes sense, but on the other hand is questionable. Maybe instead of pushing women into 'male' roles, we should support them better in how they benefit our society.
I know this comes across as really terrible, because history has shown that stay at home moms are in a really weak position. But on the other hand, modern society is unable to produce enough kids, and so import people from 'stay at home mom' cultures.
Any constructive discussion is welcome.
I don't understand how supporting families means devaluing women. What exactly do you mean by "devalue"? If motherhood is the stated goal of a woman, and she achieves it, how/why is she "devalued"? If it brings her meaning and fulfillment, isn't that something to be celebrated and respected?
I'm also bothered by your swipe against traditional families. Children who grow up in two parent homes are overwhelmingly biased towards success than children in single parent homes. Traditional families have been the norm for the entirety of human existence (until very recently). We discard them at our peril.
Edit: also to the gp comment, which suggests that women are ‘naturally’ better at parenting. Fuck all that, I’m a kickass dad, I’ll go toe to toe any day with any mother.
It's not clear to me. It seemed to suggest that there are complementary roles that cannot be completely subsumed by either individually.
How do you see the GP comparing two mutually exclusive roles in child rearing?
In Canada, it's based on household income. In 2016, the max was $6,496 per child under age 6 and $5,481 per child age 6 through 17.
If you have two kids (2 years old and 10 years old) with a household income of $50k, that works out to roughly $10k per year. When you consider that you don't need to pay for childcare (which could be more than $20k per year for a 2-year old in Toronto) and the constant care and support those children will receive, that's actually pretty good. And once the kids get a bit older and can be trusted to care for themselves once they get home from school, the stay-at-home parent can easily start working full-time again.
I believe the query here is to devalue women in order to support the idea of a nuclear family. Traditional nuclear families (as mother stays home to raise the children) have never been the norm. I'm Chinese and where I am from the is the grandparents that raise the children while both parents work! From what I understand stay-at-home-motherhood has only ever been possible within a single generation in "western" society.
I believe the devaluation comment is associated with the fact our society is capitalist, and one has to purchase basic living and education with money. Income and quality of life have a correlated effect which peters out well above median wage, and many fields that offer the flexibility required for motherhood are less high paying, which often means if one wishes to become a mother they may need to take a less well paying job and thus have a lower quality of life.
Of course, this also means a SAHM who does not bring income is culturally not valued because their work does not directly bring in income (even though attempting to outsource this work would be often equivalent to the salary of a single laborer!). I would argue this is not a problem specifically on the shoulders of women but the shoulders of society as a whole not putting in the framework to support parenting- this would include generous parental leave, flexible work hours, opportunity to WFH, lower medical expenses for children, etc.
My impression that, unfortunately, many such attempts to (essentially) make life better for working mothers appear to have pushed us away from families-with-kids, and towards ever more singletons (including single mothers). They tend, I think, to move us from a system in which the family is the economic unit, to one in which its personal compromises are not necessary.
In today's society, what's fair is for the non-custody parent to help support the children by reimbursing the custody parent. Or in cases of joint custody, the one with higher income reimburses the one with lower income. Which I believe is the way it's done in my state.
Custody of Infants Act 1839. Prior to this, men both "made the money" and received custody of the children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custody_of_Infants_Act_1839
FredW
As you note yourself, stay at home mothers are in a precarious position (and, curiously, enthusiasm among males for traditional motherhood is NOT correlated with enthusiasm for lifelong alimony payments, or for generous government benefits for stay at home single mothers).
And as far as the children are concerned, I don't think even the most conservative advocate of traditional gender roles would argue that they are better off being raised almost exclusively by one parent, and having the other confine themselves to cutting checks.
So the solution, it seems to me, is to build a society that helps BOTH parents to spend time raising their children.
In western society there is a lot of value in independence in general. But a lot could be gained/saved from grandparents being able to help take care of children, and be able to get by on their retirement pension/savings much easier. Perhaps this is one aspect of non western societies that could/should be adopted more in the west.
If that's how you see the environment that a stay-at-home parent produces, with a full-time employed parent functioning only as a vending machine, then how could two working parents be an improvement?
This is a contentious claim, as there are different measures of “enough kids”. Some examples I can think of are:
Enough kids to support the economic 2% growth assumptions? Enough kids to reduce natural resource consumption to prolong the number of years the Earth is habitable? Enough kids to prevent another country or group of countries from walking in and taking over? Enough kids to take care of the older people and the rest of the country’s infrastructure and still make advancements?
I don’t know what all the answers are, but it’s super complicated. From what I can tell though in my peer group, the biggest thing stopping people from having kids is lack of funds, job security, lack of parental leave, and an inability to find what they consider suitable partners within child bearing ages.
How much of that is due to women entering the workforce versus other things such as declining real wages and job opportunities, I don’t know.
I want to say that's fiction in the US but it's worse than fiction. The social security system pays out about what a person puts in over their lifetime. It is not the young paying the old as you say. But that's not the whole story. The "fund" has been robbed by congress by "investing" the money in government bonds. In other words, other parts of the government "borrowed" the money and spent it. So it isn't spent on old retired people, it's spent on society at large. We're at a tipping point where the net flow of money into the fund should reverse - more paying out than going in - which means those bonds will have to be repaid without taking out new ones. Congress has gotten so used to treating it as a general revenue source that they act like SS is going to be insolvent, when the reality is they can't figure out how to pay it back - it's the government that's really on the edge here.
Politicians have tried to paint this many ways to avoid the truth. One even asked the federal reserve to verify that they don't really need to pay off those bonds and the response way basically "um yes you do".
> I want to say that's fiction in the US but it's worse than fiction. The social security system pays out about what a person puts in over their lifetime.
Does that payout account for inflation? Why are we forced to give up a percentage of our wealth to let the government manage for us if it's a 1:1 distribution?
Furthermore, how would you even implement it? Do young people right now have to pay for the upkeep of the old generation right now and will then have to additionally pay for their own retirement fund? It seems to me that somebody's going to get screwed here.
In addition, the situation is a bit better in this regard for small countries, who can just invest elsewhere. If the whole world tried to do this, it's not clear what they could invest in, as what they want to withdraw in 30 years time is actually the services of cooks and nursing staff etc. who must be of working age at that time.
I don’t agree with the comment you’re replying to, but I should add that while there are different measures, the range is extremely narrow. Most western countries are at fertility levels where without immigration they will cease to exist entirely in relatively short order.
Do you mind if I ask how old you are? The rights of women to freely choose careers, and to make their own reproductive decisions, are at least several decades old.
> Western society is trying to make boys out of girls, and girls out of boys. . .
Can you provide examples of this? Not to preempt your arguments, but this is an oft-repeated conservative platitude that is mostly code for, "I wish women would stay out of the workforce and bear children."
i think OP of this subthread means "new" in the context of human society "new". Several decades is still pretty "new" if you take into account human history.
The "woman stays at home taking care of the children and the man goes out and earns enough to feed the family" concept is also new if you take into account human history.
It got introduced for the most part during the 19th century. Before that you couldn't afford to not let the women work anyway. Actually, during the industrial revolution and the growing social disorder there, you also couldn't afford to not let women and children work but often you had to.
And if you look at the whole of human history, the most common model of raising children was by a whole community. From groups of 5-10 individuals to even larger communities, all were somewhat responsible for and watching the growing children.
The idea that everybody could raise a child with only two or even worse just one parent is laughable if it weren't so sad that it's a common view.
Your point about the 19th century is also interesting as its (mother at home) origins in that time period may explain why it's so ingrained and also deemed the default. It arose during the time of the biggest jump in human technological advancement (industrial revolution). Most of the propaganda for it references this correlation and uses it as a justification.
I don't agree with this sort of connection, but it is interesting to note.
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/?from=world#$state$marker$ax...
I made up my mind a long time ago about "more women in tech". It's the same as "teach everybody to code". It's big co looking to get supply higher than demand so they can cut costs.
Having children directly increases the risk of falling out of a financially stable position, as well as the negative effects of falling out such as raising a child in a tent City. Considering that most of our young population is either fighting against stagnant wages or student loan debt, it's not surprising that child birth rates have also fallen.
And it worked, kinda. People from those Kubbitz contribute disproportionately more to the economy, and those things are still going with several generations of people living in them.
However newer generations became much less strict about the egalitarian aspect, as a lot of women preferred just to take care of the kids and leave the men to go out and start companies. Leading to funny confrontations between girls and their grandmothers :)
Anyway I'm sure I'm grossing over a ton of stuff and its best to research on your own, but what I wanted to add is that different types of societies are possible, both free egalitarian capitalistic and even natural.
States could pay parents caring after children. In fact this already happens in modern western societies with some resemblence of a social state.
But I think the problem is that a "family" gets the benefit. And the "family" shares the benefit. And then the mentality is: I spend all day at work, and if I lose my job, we will lose my income. But no one is seriously thinking: If a stay-at-home mom/dad stopped caring for their child, they would stop getting the state benefit.
Of course these benefits are usually comparatively small to the full-time salary of a working person. But we could adjust those values. And we could say: This money belongs to the stay-at-home parent. They contribute: by caring for the children. Society should value this equally.
It's a bit of social engineering, but it could work quite well. It's related to the idea of universal income, in some ways.
I think the main problem with continued population growth is our unwillingness to build cities, tearing down old buildings. This is a serious problem that is causing unsustainable hike in cost of living. We also build expensively, compared to the 50s (in some parts of the world).
VR and remote-working might counterbalance this somewhat. Maybe new cities will be build. It all needs really visionary leadership, and increased willingness to move forward, a-like to the pink-glassed 50s.
Still, paying out benefits does mean a sacrifice from somewhere else--even if it'll be a long-term gain for all. Education and life experience changed my entrenched views, so perhaps it can do the same for others.
(Full disclosure: I've worked for employers with no parental leave whatsoever.)
It is how Americans define the term, and administer resources, but it has never in previous history been an meaningful description. It is a problem because it is a very fragile construct. The definition we evolved with is what is lately called the "extended family", stripped of significance in the modern US.
Its fragility is a consequence of the small number of roles and participants. One health problem is an instant crisis.
I want to attack the premise that a shrinking population is inherently a problem. The only clearly stated problem that I've seen is how social security will likely crumble since the fewer younger people won't be able to support the large aging population.
But this ignores how productivity has been and will continue to rise thanks to machines. I think we can easily take care of an aging population if we make proper use of new technology.
In fact I think that reducing our numbers is necessary for our survival.
We live in a capitalist world, where constant growth is assumed and expected, but the earth is a relatively closed system and you know what happens with bacteria in closed systems? They reproduce until they exhaust the system's resources and then they all die.
It's not really a problem, it survival. Not having kids is not really a problem, but the fact is that you genes will die along with you.
Same for culture. Your own culture dying might not be a problem, but it means that your values will die along with it.
Having equality between individuals is something to strive for (in my western opinion), but does this same value mean that your culture will die out, together with its values? Another culture might survive, because they have less 'favorable' values.
I get it, this is why I haven't already had a vasectomy, but your genes are nothing special, just a sample of the alleles in the population.
I'm much more concerned about producing ideas that will outlive me and spreading those. Newton died a virgin yet he profoundly influenced the world.
Similar with cultures, ancient greeks are long gone but their culture shaped the world.
But the question here is: Will the value of "men and women should fulfill the same roles in society" survive or die out?
And no I don't think that this value is under threat from other cultures just because they reproduce more.
The value didn't get established in society because the people who held it reproduced more. Also, those who oppose it won't necessarily continue to reproduce more forever.
Atheists have smaller fertility rates than any religion, yet atheism is spreading more and more
While true for most of recorded, human history; that kind of assumption combined with hard limits like physics make your second point a more likely outcome. Unless you're suggesting humanity will re-engineer itself into a more sustainable form.
EDIT: forced typo
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jul/babies-from-bone-marrow
That's a much more complex problem. I'd be highly skeptical that we could scale an alternative development environment that even approximated the benefits of having a loving family that wanted to commit to your upbringing being their main focus in life.
To say that "women" should be "women" and not do "men" things is an attitude that belongs in the dark ages. It's sexist. It's degrading. It treats women like mindless children who can't make their own choices about what work they want to do.
Nobody is forcing women to go into STEM. We are encouraging them because unfortunately they have to deal with toxic attitudes all the time and simply don't stick around.
And seriously to act like western society is forcing transgenderism is utterly ridiculous and ridicules the stressful and tough choices these people have to make.
The "toxic environment" is just what the field is. Dehumanizing by definition. It's got nothing to do with patriarchy or whatever else trending buzzword corporations push promoting more people take a career path working for them.
> To say that "women" should be "women" and not do "men" things is an attitude that belongs in the dark ages
We need more women on construction sites, mines, fighting on the front line, fighting men in MMA, etc. If you say no you are soooo dark ages. /s
Maybe we need _fewer_ people - men and women - giving each other head injuries in combat sports. Fewer people fighting in senseless wars.
Maybe we need safer worksites, so that people - men and women - can work in construction or mining if it appeals to them.
Are you implying that construction site work is almost exclusively a male domain because it is relatively unsafe work?
I'm not saying that I'd disagree with that statement, not at all.
You could say I have a split view on things. I grew up in the western world with all of it's values. I greatly appreciate individuals being equal, etc. I myself am a father very involved with my kids, I take parental leave, and my wife has a career.
I work in the tech field with the majority of men, but still a lot of great women. Some women I worked with preferred to be in an all male team (this is Europe, not US).
So yes, I greatly value women having the same chances, being able to do anything they want, etc.
But then there is this other side, where I see that our culture is dying. We have certain values, but are not producing enough kids. And now we import people that seem to have an "attitude that belongs in the dark ages", as you called it. But why do we import them? Because they have enough kids.
So maybe I expressed myself wrong, and the real question is: How can our western values survive, when we don't have enough kids to pass these values to?
Then we have parental leave, which is 4 months for each (can be taken fulltime, or part-time for 8 months, or 4/5th for 20 months). Then we have yet another 4 years each if you really want to take those.
I have 3 kids, and took more of my parental leave than their mom. I also enjoy taking care of my kids. So in practice I don't really live the traditional role ;).
The OP says nothing of the kind. It's quite scary that so many people try to shut down any proper discussion about gender roles these days, with comments like this.
But the question still remains: The sexists and degrading cultures seem to produce a lot of kids. While the modern cultures do not produce enough kids. So which values will be passed on?
So what do we do? Is it intrinsic to these equality values, or can we keep these values and have another cultural change to make sure we produce enough kids to pass our values onto?
Actually my kids don't want to do the job their mom is doing, since she's away/abroad all the time.
Nice try, but you are talking to the wrong person for that argument.
Why would it be an issue, assuming we weren't fighting a way, for a country to shrink? There will of course be some economic hurdles to over come as constant and unsustainable growth is done away with, but after that what is the issue?
For a long time, I've been hoping to see better theories of "managed decline". (Or perhaps "managed contraction", to avoid nastier implications.)
There's room to bicker about what economics says will happen to per-capita income as population rises and falls - does lost comparative advantage outweigh decreased marginal costs of goods? But it's pretty obvious that none of this theoretical stuff is sufficient to drive what we actually see, where even modest shrinkage leads to economic and often social collapse.
The history of the American Rust Belt is a clear demonstration of why we need better approaches to infrastructure and administration in the absence of population growth. Depopulation there has been a scattershot process that creates empty houses and half-empty neighborhoods, so the tax base has fallen far faster than the cost of providing services like garbage collection and street repair. What's more, the emptying houses are often foreclosed or simply abandoned, leaving them the responsibility of the city. They go unmaintained, driving down property values, and eventually decay until they're uninhabitable liabilities. In places like Detroit, the abandonment rate grew so high that the city couldn't even afford to tear down unsafe properties, creating attractive nuisances and environmental problems. Worse still, many of those cities had debt-financed expansion based on projected population growth, so they immediately and inescapably went broke when it stopped. Very broadly, shrinking to a given population is far more expensive and damaging than rising to the same population.
That doesn't mean shrinkage is inherently bad, I don't think. But we're still terrible at accommodating it, and I haven't seen many good plans for how to do better. Most cities in the US are functionally insolvent with flat population and modest tax hikes, much less shrinking population. For a lot of first-world countries, putting together viable financial and logistical approaches to shrinking populations is going to be a key challenge for the next 50 years.
Could you expand on "high quality of life"? I'm not sure how that follows from decreased population.
In the past we thought that overpopulation is going to be a big global problem. It turned out that rich countries naturally ended up having fewer and fewer children. This stabilized their populations. And now we expect that this trend will continue.
But why? What's to say that some shift in society won't trigger another population growth in rich countries? Then what?
A good example of this would be the Amish population, which has very good retention and fertility rates leading to quite high population growth.
But unfortunately that's a very naive view. Even if all people were removed, arctic have already started melting, and it will continue releasing more and more CO2 and methane from it's huge deposits.
Having orders of magnitude less people have been tried already, and that didn't help mammoths and all the other animals that were driven to extinction by small groups of people.
Having no people at all have been tried too, and that was not particularly helpful for dinosaurs, that got killed by a meteorite, which can be stopped by a larger civilization than what we currently have.
In short I am lucky that i understood, that the belief that it is possible to have too many people, technology is harmful, and that we should go "back to nature", is a harmful and unfounded idea. But i'll be happy to listen to arguments supporting it if you have any:
Automation and longer extent of healthy life will also mitigate many of these issues.
Japan may be the demographic future but need not be the cultural one. An economic system not based on an age-based pyramid scheme and a move away from zero-sum scarcity mindsets will make addressing these issues much simpler.
I hope this is our future. But I am afraid that you are overestimating our society's capacity to change course without some supply shock. We'll keep doing what we're doing until something breaks and then there will be a very uncomfortable few decades and many will struggle to survive or die.
Can you show your work with regards to this statement? With respect to supply & demand, with fewer people around, wouldn't wages have to be higher? Land cheaper?
It turns out it's not very rational to live, and if you do choose to live, it's not very rational to have kids (and spend a huge chunk of your money on them) when you already have a retirement program to take care of you in your old age.
If the fertility rate is around 1.7, then the country should accept around 20% of their population in immigration over a generation to achieve a stable number. Assuming a generation is ~30 years, that's around 60 million new immigrants in the US.
Assuming the immigrants are from underdeveloped nations, it will lead to changes to entire demographics of nations over 2 generations or so.
But if the technological solution doesn't come soon enough the world will have to go through a much harder transition, trying to develop new culture that would combine aspects of secular societies that allow development of science and commerce, with a reasonable desire of growth.
Not to mention the fact that you’re instantly lifting all those people from a third-world carbon footprint to a first-world one. I’m surprised more people in the “the world is overpopulated/global warming will kill us all” camp don’t seem to be too concerned about that.
My understanding is that in the past, due to shorter life expectancies, this was also the generation that was generally in the majority; so each generation got a fair shot at making sure society served their needs during those key years.
However, as life expectancy has increased, it now seems like there is a large enough cohort of people who have already established themselves that they can push for society/government not to spend resources on the policies that benefited them during their formative years.
It is interesting to contrast countries at different points on their development. E.g., in Japan, where the population has already started contracting, vs say, Kenya, where the population is still growing rapidly.
However, these curves should come with error bars that grow as you go farther out. There could be all kinds of black swan events we know nothing about right now. A major antibiotic resistant bug could sweep the world, there could a nuclear war, risks of climate change could be worse than we are projecting. If someone in 1900 had made similar curves, I wonder how they would look to us. On that count, I wonder if there are similar projections from, say, 1950 that we could look at and see how they turned out.
Thomas Malthus attempted to describe the future of the world population in 1798 in his book, An Essay on the Principle of Population. He predicted a doubling of the global population every 25 years until a lack of food limited the population through hardship or famine and death. Pierre François Verhulst went on to mathematically model this bounded exponential growth and, in doing so, created the logistic function. The necessary data to create a chart like the one in the article didn't exist then, but Malthus' book did contribute to the passage of the Census Act of 1800, which enabled the first census of England, Scotland and Wales.
The fact that exponential growth of population was a rare and short-lived phenomenon in world history (he had numbers from new england or quebec, and knew they were highly unusual) led him to conclude that there must be other forces. The equilibrium population is set by the balance of such forces.
And not just in humans, obviously. Any animal could reproduce exponentially, but the world is not 100-km-deep in rabbits just yet. And this observation was an important ingredient for Darwin.
The projections from different research teams differ in when they expect the population population to peak. IIASA suggests what you say, the UN expects it later. I looked at the different projections (and what is behind the differences) here https://ourworldindata.org/peak-child
In 1950 he'd have been about 6 years old. If you then look at the 2018 curve for 74 year olds, you can see a fairly large part of his cohort has passed. Looks like more than half actually, if I'm interpreting this right.
If you look at it, he's also on that part of the chart where your annual hurdle rate is rapidly increasing. Nobody's surprised that people in their 80s and 90s pass away.
What's maybe a bit more surprising is for younger people, even though your annual loss is quite low, it's still there and accumulating. If you look at 1980, those of us nearing 40 in 2018 are slightly fewer, but it's noticeable.
I'm also of an age where a few of those have started to hit home. I went to a small high school, maybe 90 people in my year plus the two adjacent years. At least 4 have passed away.
All of this backstory lends this visualization a bit of a different meaning or context for people like us who are in the middle of these situations.
> What's maybe a bit more surprising is for younger people, even though your annual loss is quite low, it's still there and accumulating. If you look at 1980, those of us nearing 40 in 2018 are slightly fewer, but it's noticeable.
This struck me, as well. But, for different reasons. My graduating class was marked with death by the 5th grade. We lost 7 kids between the 5th grade and graduation (a couple of suicides and a terrible car accident involving 2 cars of class mates). We lost 3 or 4 more before we had turned 20 (suicide, drugs and alcohol related deaths). Another half dozen or so in our 20s (drug and alcohol related deaths). In our 30s, cancer and other terminal disease have claimed a few. My graduating class was < 100 people, so for a while there this was a frequent topic with the group of people that I remain in contact with. I suppose that there have to be instances like this but it's interesting to see it presented in this visualization. Thinking about it now, we actually haven't lost anyone that I'm aware of since in the second half of our 30s. Maybe we're turning a new leaf.
For me the surprise was that two of the four were murdered. Your chances of dying at all in a given year before 40 is something like a quarter of a percent. Your chances of being murdered has got to be some tiny fraction of that.
We cannot save without children, and the only answer is more automation, or just tough it out until the hump is past and we can have a more stable population. Toughing it out is not easy: young people put off having children or avoid it altogether if they feel they can't afford it. Of course, young people today don't have to deal with the privations of yesteryear -- they have no idea, but no matter, they won't have children if it feels too difficult.
Well, people describe their behavior that way, and it may be true to an extent over very short timescales (like a short recession), but economic development empirically leads to decreased population growth overall; people don't have more kids because they are prosperous and less because they are not, but the reverse.
Economic growth ->
longer life expectancy / lower child mortality ->
population boom ->
people figure this out ->
baby bust ->
??? ->
stable population.
It seems to me there is at least a correlation around the time a 2 parent household more or less became a requirement for the middle class to simply survive and when it became such a burden to raise a child. Since everyone is now more or less competing with 2x dollars for the same amount of fixed cost "stuff" (housing, education, healthcare, etc.) prices for those things rose substantially faster than inflation.
Then you add in the second or third highest cost a dual-income family has (child care) that didn't really exist 40 years ago.... It seems at least obvious on it's face that this was going to happen. We removed any and all slack from our family lives, and wonder why we can't seem to get ahead when we have multiple decades of income hyper-planned in advance.
I also think car culture and suburbification of many western countries also heavily contributed - at the same time we were forcing parents to both work outside the home, we also decided it wasn't cool to live near extended family or within a close-knit multi-generational community. Thus making the need for child care even more acute.
I'm not entirely sure the point I'm making really - just that it seems so obvious. This outcome was practically written in stone on the policies (fiscal, social, and energy) western governments put in place since WWII.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E&t=19m12s
Further on he explains why we may not have to worry about resource use given growing prosperity:
1. The first five curves (1950–1990) are all in 10-year increments, so for instance, 1950's 20-year-old population maps very directly to 1960's 30-year-old population (hence the "rippling" effect produced by those six curves).
2. What's with the sudden pinch in the population of 20-year-olds in 2018? It tapers in very heavily from the corresponding point on the 1990 curve, and apart from the newborn population, is the only local maximum anywhere on the chart. Did I miss something in the news? Why would such a large number of kids born in 1990 be dead by now, compared to previous generations?
3. Why do curves for previous years have such pronounced staggering, while projections for the future are comparatively much smoother?
This is largely due to China's population dynamics.
Here I've made a chart that shows the number of births (and deaths) in China over the last 69 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/births-and-deaths-project... 30 and also 50 years ago China had large cohorts of newborns, these are the 'ripples' you see going through the global population pyramid.
The number of births is always determined by two factors: the number of children per woman in the reproductive age bracket (called the Total Fertility Rate). And the number in the reproductive age bracket.
Here is the Total Fertility Rate for China: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab...
The large cohort born around 50 years ago is the parent generation of the large cohort born 30 years ago.
So the question is what explains the large cohort in the 1960s? That is the cohort born right before the rapid reduction of the Total Fertility Rate (from 6.4 children per woman in 1965 to half of that 15 years later as the chart above shows; this is largely before the introduction of the strict one-child-policy by the way). And it is the cohort born after one of the largest mass deaths in history. The Great Leap Forward Famine from around 1951 to 61 https://ourworldindata.org/famines#great-leap-forward-famine... Around 30 million died and as in all famines the fertility rate declined substantially, to then jump again right after the famine.
Good questions! I should have mentioned them in the post. Let me know if you want to know more.
So the chosen UN projections for this graph don't stagger like the historic data because they assume no famines or other high-death-toll events in the given period then?
On the one hand, I imagine we must have a big disaster coming our way eventually. On the other, if you factored it into your projections, you'd have to guess at the approximate time and magnitude of such an event, which I'm sure is not the business of whoever's making these projections.
I'm no expert on this but I would guess the peak of China's one-child policy? Someone more knowledgeable might know more about the history of specific exemptions (city vs rural) and such.
There's also implications for reporting bias, which might explain why the older data doesn't look so peaky.
From my reading it looks more like these children weren’t born at all rather than that they all died. My best guess is something related to the collapse of the Soviet Union caused a decrease in birth rates.
And I was saying this exact point for some time. "We are at a turning point in global population history. ... Not children will be added to the world population, but people of working age and old age."
Super important post this one!
Will be it the next Asia? The next continent we outsource our industries to? Does it have any significant advantages or disadvantages owing to its geographical location?
To look at the number of people of a given age in a given year, you follow the line for that year, go down the left to find the given age, and see where it lines up at the top to get the number of people.
The shading between the lines is irrelevant and just serves to confuse: the area under the line doesn't mean much.
Conflict will happen in a persons head when holding oppositions simultaneously or inevitably between persons opposing heads simultaneously.
Self interest is true, self negating and both.