Seems like the world is getting its act together. Now if we could only get Africa to these levels, things might start looking rosy again…
UNPF lists Niger as the highest remaining, at 6.6. But only 8 countries are still above 5. Several African countries are now below 3 (Algeria, Eswatini, Botswana, Djibouti - all the way down at 2.5), and a clear majority of African countries are below 4.5.
Importantly given its size, UNICEF suggests total fertility for Nigeria might have dipped below 5 for the first time (it's one of the 8 mentioned above, as others still show it at 5.1-5.3). Notably the fertility rate of Nigeria is kept up by rural regions, and should keep dropping as urbanisation proceeds.
Even if you're only looking at it from a atmospheric carbon perspective, there are very complex interactions.
Even when it comes to Africa, the optimal population trajectory is unclear
The interactions are all complex and nonlinear.
Imagine overall numbers are going down, country X is increasing, while it's neighbors are decreasing.
Also imagine country Y has seen a century of improvement powered by population growth dry up. Now it is looking at stagnation and decline as the population ages. This is a recipe for social unrest.
"The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate." (Communist Manifesto)
Whatever one thinks about Marx, the conflict between the continuation of economic growth and resistance to immigration is real. And in the face of a threat of population decline, resistance to immigration will become economic suicide, and so anti-immigrant populists and the economic elites will come to increasingly face off against each other.
The biggest examples are contrasting the US and China.
Both China and the US have similar fertility rates, well below replacement.
However, the US augments and stabilizes the population growth with immigration. Immigrants both add to the total, and have many more children than native born individuals.
China on the other hand has net migration out of the country, and fewer immigrants to stabilize the population and rate.
Because of this, China is much more vulnerable to the impacts of a population bust.
With respect to immigrants having more children, that's true to some extent, but with the caveat that 1) immigrants tends to have children at similar rates as where they come from, and that means you'll see immigrants from fewer and fewer places are likely to have a fertility rate above replacement, and 2) fertility rates among people of immigrant background tends to normalise to their surrounding environment within a generation or two, so it's a short term boost.
But back to China, it will be very interesting to see how they react to this. Odds are there'll be increased pressure to have more kids, coupled with carrots, but that they still won't be able to avoid allowing increased immigration. Then that raises the question of this means they'll start making paths to permanent residency or citizenship easier, or if they'll go the gulf state route of importing a near indentured servant class. The latter might be hard to sustain once other countries also start competing for the same labour sources.
Consider that the faster a population is declining, the more people will live of the productive work of each working age adult.
China, for example, is now encouraging three children. Whether that will work or not, we don't yet know. But we'll see increasing number of countries experimenting with encouraging, then likely rewarding, higher number of children. Even a modest reversal of fertility rates will prolong the time to global decline significantly.
Stats about Arable land (hectares per person) in 2020 ->
SubSaharian Africa : 0.19
Mena : 0.11
China : 0.08
India : 0.11
European Union : 0.22
U.S.A : 0.48
Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.ARBL.HA.PC?name_...
Im not sure either of those is actually true.
See Kenya, once the bread basket of Africa and now no longer because their leadership kicked out white farmers, gave the land to local Kenyans, and unfortunately those locals even after all these years haven't figured out how to get the yields that the old owners did.
The problem comes down to the locals who are either unwilling or unable to farm effectively at yields that support the population. Then the food aid comes in which is where we're at now.
What were you saying instead?
There is a clearly defined path around population control that has worked pretty much everywhere and very effectively. Don’t know why you’re recommending soft genocide instead.
I didn't recommend that at all. It's the cold reality and if it's too much for you to stomach that's your problem.
Not climate change
I agree with Elon on some things but not on this. Certainly this means a new economic system, so there are some tough things that need working out.
No, the world and our civilization can support multiples of the population (a few, not dozens of multiples) with the current technology according to the statistics. The problem is the economic system that induces scarcity in order to facilitate profit mechanisms. With such a system, it wont matter if there are 300 million people or 300 billion on the planet - there will always be scarcity and ensuing problems. Food rotting in warehouses to protect the prices in commodities markets or even by its own producers, immense amounts of food being thrown away from houses and restaurants etc in the West and so on.
Moreover, this 'overpopulation' rhetoric mostly came from the Western literature & press and it was always targeted at the emerging world (Asia, Africa, South America) instead of the entire world. The long-standing rhetoric called for this countries to reduce their birth rates while at the same time promoting having children in Europe through social programs etc.
How so? Population growth isn't free and without cost. I'm tired of these BS claims that "look, if we put everyone on the planet shoulder to shoulder, we could all fit in the space of Texas or Poland, therefore the world is not overpopulated and we can keep the population numbers growing multiple times over."
The problem is not just about real estate or land. People need food and energy to survive, and as the Ruso-Ukrainian war proved it, the global food and energy supply chain is limited and very sensitive, and several developing nations are already on the brink of social collapse because of the increase in food and energy prices this war caused. How will adding billions more people in developing nations fix this or reduce the risk of this happening again?
Making more food for more people also isn't free, it comes at the cost of increase in CO2, and with that, comes more global warming and more extreme weather phenomenons.
These wouldn't be such big issues, if all countries on the planet worked together in peace and harmony for the common good, but that's not the case. Even in the EU we can't get members to work together on hot topics like nuclear energy, migration, China or Russia, as each member is following their own personal agenda at the expense of the others. It's even worse in global politics where every country is keeping their cards against their chest with one hand and a knife behind their back with the other. As desirable land, food and energy get scarce, each global power will try to claw as much of it as possible for themselves, leaving the smaller, less powerful countries to fend for themselves at the cost of social unrest, anarchy or even war.
We need to come to terms with the fact that having modern society and economic systems be dependent on having an ever increasing population in order to function, was a poorly thought out Ponzi scheme that sounded good post-WW2, but won't scale indefinitely, and isn't sustainable long term, but instead of admitting it, we've been kicking the can down the road ever since.
If the system changes to one that prioritizes the fundamentals and well being of others, even the currently existing technology level is enough to support many multiples. Without noting that with new technologies like vertical farming, lab grown food and many more, even more population could be possible.
> China or Russia
The current Anglosaxon war started against China (not Russia) because the US wants to remove an emerging economic competitor is a gigantic indicator of the ills of the current system. The US think tanks & policy makers openly advocated for this for more than a decade. Those who openly sought this by going to the extent of openly declaring that intention during the elections got elected. Now they are implementing this outrageous intent that so openly and bluntly declared for years. Imperialism - peak capitalism in its final form. It does not seek to do anything good, it only seeks to maximize its profits at whatever cost.
Yeah, and all that will come at the cost of more environmental damage and more suffering. There is always a price to pay for growth. There is no free lunch here. You're just buying current growth by selling away your future, or the future of the next generations. This winter set new records for warmth weather in Europe and is the price we're paying for the past 20-50 years of growth without thinking of the consequences.
>The system [capitalism] will introduce scarcity even at lower population levels to maximize profit, and that will cause the same problems.
We had communism as well in my Eastern European country, where all the resources were owned by the state, and there was even more poverty, scarcity and rationing than today because it lacked the competition and efficiencies driven by the free market, so everything just collapsed. We didn't lack housing though so that was at least a big plus.
Not at all. The current systemic environmental destruction happens because it is more profitable to do so. There is no money in protecting the environment. Worse - it costs money to do so. So the system wont do it because avoiding doing it is needed due to the profit maximization mechanic of the system.
> We tried communism as well in my Eastern European country, where all the resources were owned by the state, and there was even more poverty, scarcity and rationing
No Eastern European country suffered from any of those until the US and its Gulf Allies started the economic war against your bloc in late 1970s to starve it of GDP. In fact, Kennedy administration feared in 1960s that everyone in the world would imitate your development model because you were developing way too fast and raised your people from mud houses and barefeet level to apartment blocks and physics education level within the same generation. They thought 'something needed to be done about it'. And they did - it was the Vietnam war. That is called 'the Domino Theory' read about it.
Note that if anyone did even a fraction of what the US did to your bloc to the US itself, the US would immediately trigger a nuclear war as the examples with previous, much lesser offenses show. In a way, your bloc sacrificed itself to avoid a delirious, unstable nuclear-armed actor from destroying the human civilization if it couldn't get its way. And Im not using the 'delirious' and 'unstable' words as metaphors - the US strategic documents actually, literally advocate projecting an 'unstable persona'.
> it lacked the competition and efficiencies driven by the free market
You have no idea about how efficient the free market is yet.
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/13/americas-dirty-little-secret...
Entire Eastern Europe is still protected from much of the free market because it still keeps a lot of social democrat measures that were leftover from your communist era and Europe's 1960s era socialism. Wait until those measures are disappeared to make way for 'the market' through the trojan-horse policies of centrist and right wing neoliberal parties backed by the US.
Citation needed. How many multiples? 10 times the current population? That's perilously close to disaster, given the exponential possibilities of growth.
Maybe if we return to -10,000 lifestyles. No drugs, no technology, no fuel. The resources needed to support a given lifestyle multiplied by the population cannot exceed what the planet can provide and accept without being wrecked. The higher the population the more basic the lifestyle each of them can have. You simply cannot have 20 billion people living like 21st century Americans. There's not enough resources to go around.