The Depopulation Bomb Isn't Ticking, It's Overblown
americandreaming.substack.com
americandreaming.substack.com
NOTE!!! I'm not suggesting that if we figure out we only need X people and X < population(2024) that we try to depopulate to X. I'm just curious at what X would we have enough people to have a nice world, with enough people to do the jobs needed to maintain the world and provide resources to continue improving the world.
Thinking back to around 1985, when the world population was around 60% of what it was today and the US population was around 70% of what it is today, and comparing what life was like then to now, the things that are better now don't seem to be things that inherently needed an increased population in order to happen.
My TV is a lot bigger now. My computer is orders of magnitude faster, with orders of magnitude more memory and storage, with much better peripherals. My phone is a cell phone instead of a land line, and is also a much more powerful computer than my 1985 desktop computer. And of course I've got internet now, whereas back then I had dial-up to CompuServe.
My car then was a Nissan Sentra. A Nissan Sentra today would be more efficient and have a lot more electronics, but it wouldn't really be much better than my car in 1985 when it comes to meeting my transportation needs.
My food and housing then was comparable to my food and housing today. My appliances today are more efficient, but like with the car the ones in 1985 got the job done well enough.
I think I'd be as happy in a 1985-like world with current level electronics, communications, and appliances. The question then is how much of the improvement in those since 1985 depended on the population increasing?
You could say, meh, you saved up money for retirement so you're good, but (a) that's just you, not most people, and (b) even then you need some young people to bake break, fight fires, look after you when ill and so on.
I guess we will have to break this model, whether we like it or not, but right now we rely on exponential growth... The longevity, ironically, is making it worse, as there are more old people, and I guess by extension more frail people, who in the olden days wouldn't make it, all of whom need more care from young people.
With improved high-density planting and fertilizer, combined with better drought-resistant and pest-resistant high-yield grains we enjoyed a 10X (ten times!) increase in yields per acre.
Don't tell me that didn't make all the difference! All the rest of it balanced on this monumental effort. Spearheaded by two people, one managing agricultural policy and reinventing ag processes and education and the other taking up hybridization to customize crops to regions of the world.
We own them more than we can calculate.
Had crop productivity not increased then nor would have human population also increased to match.
Being that there's also how human population growth does have nnegative feedback loops other than massive famine-death.
With 10X increases in yields per acre, I expected to see some really dramatic yield improvements over time. Some countries did have great improvements. However, from 1961 to 2022 United states only improved production by 151%. Basically what I see is that well established countries had modest improvements, but no where near 10x.
To check my time line, I noted from the following that the Green Revolution started in the late 60's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
Our diet consists of a lot more than grains. I'm sure the improvements helped, yes they made a difference. I am not convinced we'd be in serious trouble without them.
Ideally, yes, but there's a reason they're called staples. It's very easy to have a diet where most of the _calories_ if not actual volume nor mass of food comes from grain. Grains and fats are very calorie dense, but grains are far cheaper than butter or steak. Many civilizations have been based on a huge portion of food being tortillas, rice, bread, pasta. Grains are important. Whether they should be as big a part of your diet for health reasons is another question, but their historical importance due to calorie density is not in question and is self evident.
Culture evolve with how we live anyway, and you cannot really 'preserve' a culture that didn't exist 70 years before and will be different in 50 years anyways. What people really mean by 'preserving our culture' really is 'preserving our heritage'. That will be done as long as no 3rd world war happens.
If you won’t, someone else will and you’ll be a part of theirs from that point on (or dead).
Is the bomb "overblown" or are we on track to have 2 billion less people on this planet in 150 years (assuming "replacement level" rates)? (And PS those 6 billion will almost entirely be senior citizens.)
But by all means make arguments about scenarios that your headline are declaring won't happen. That definitely increases credibility.
Both can be true .. the wild assertions that having 2 billion less people on the planet is harbringer of doom, some kind of 'bomb' is certainly overblown.
The 'short term' near certain bet is that human population will peak at some 10 billion ~ 2100, the less certain but highly probable future after that is that population will decrease and then stabilise at a lower level .. as witnessed in many constrained populations in the wild.
What is extremely unlikely is the notion that human population will plumment to zero and go extinct if humans cease to breed above replacement rates (and will then continue to do so forever until the last human dies).
I don't think it's a given that more people automatically means greater environmental problems or that fewer people means less economic growth.
I can absolutely imagine having big families coming back into fashion. In fact depopulation is likely to cause the conditions for this by making real estate cheap again among other things. Cultural, religious, and ideological shifts could also occur as well as technological advances.
I can say that all the young people I know would rather serve prison time than have children right now.
This doesn’t look good for fertility.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINUSA
USA is 1.66 now and Japan is 1.3. You need 2.1 to even tread water.
Or to look at a time series covering more history,
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033027/fertility-rate-u...
the American TFR dropped continuously in the 140 years between 1800 and 1940. But it went up again after 1940 to reach that new local Baby Boom peak in 1960 where your graph starts.
I'm sure there are arguments to believe that "this time it's different" and that fertility won't go up again, but it has dropped and then risen again before.
But again they were only treading water in 2006-7 and keeping population steady. For it to go above 2.1 and actually increase the population would take something happening that we haven't seen since 1971.
We seem to always go back to 1971.
The political parties have a vested interest in convincing you that civilization is about to collapse or driving you into a rage because turnout decides elections.
If this happens at scale, the system collapses. There's a reason The US Federal Reserve's target is positive 2% inflation. Why not 0? Why not negative 2%?
The reason is the financial system is dependent on "appreciation". Imagine a bank approving a loan and the collateral falls in value? And asset the loan acquired falls in value. Boom! The whole system is under water.
The USA has a housing supply problem for similar reasons. Property owners want the value of their assets to appreciate. Increase supply and that slows or stops.
Like it or not it's a Ponzi Scheme, and this is why the population crunch is a concern.
I went to a book tour stop of for this author + book and Princeton Univ a few months ago. Definitively recommended.
Not really, you just have to use different collateral. After all personal loans are already based on taking a loan against a different collateral.
The Feds target is 2% because it's a CYA for the entire system.
Note: 2% inflation - if they are lucky enough to stay on target - will cut your spending power in *half* in ~35 yrs. Let that sink in. The Fed's stated goal is to cut you in half every 35 yrs. Why? Because in the context of the current system 0 or less would be a disaster.
Yeah, if I don't invest my money that grows in value, it will lose half its value in 35 years. Yes, that's not ideal. No, it's not the catastrophe that you're making it sound.
It would be a disaster. How could it be otherwise? If the system's fuel is up, not down.
Another way to look at it is this: we've gotten all kinds of technology. We've seen efficiency and productivity improve. And yet, prices keep increasing. Efficiency and productivity should mean dropping prices, at best break even. And yet no? There's a reason for that.
That is, assets losing value will lead to the house of cards collapsing. Groupthink to the contrary is just head in the sand naivete.
Edit: she says so on her website.
https://www.lynalden.com/about-lyn-alden/
Additionally, I serve as an independent director on the board of Swan.com, and am a general partner at the venture capital firm Ego Death Capital.
(swanbitcoin.com and swan.com are the same)
And fwiw some of my best lessons have come from forcing myself to read outside my sweetspot.
The bitcoin stuff didn't do much for me. The history of how we got here and the shit we're sitting in did.
The important detail is, that Japan is not burdened with the cost of maintaining a aging infrastructure. Japan got a semi fresh start after WW II. The same can not be said for other parts of the world (e.g., USA).
Finally, Japan has also benefited from the rest of the world not *yet* contracting. It is a single outlier. It's not wise to extrapolate The Japan Story as on that will work on a global scale.
1/10 of the current population would be a nice compromise.
The only demographic against such a scenario are ponzi scheme scammers...
Lagniappe: https://dakotavadams.substack.com/p/gunshow
(to be fair to swine, in the wild their litters are much smaller [4-6]; we've bred the domestic ones to produce so many young [9-13] that she can't feed them all. This is because on a farm the pigs do not breed for their own benefit, but for the farmers')
and all these worries about having too many old people are way overblown. Any problem whatsoever which involves 70+ year old people is a short-term problem.
Interesting claim, what metric are you using?
....by what metric wasn't it some of the most amazing years in human history?
This was all done by a population of ~1 billion people. Who actually were way less productive that people are today. If the human population dropped much below 1 billion, I might be worried. But IMHO ~1 billion seems to be a sweet spot.
north america and the West effectively ended teen motherhood and reduced the birthrate to below replacement rate, but populations have still skyrocketed from immigration because that gap made the economic capacity available.
the presumption in not worrying about depopulation is that people globally are interchangeable. Seeing humanity as an undifferentiated, homogeneous mass conflates sophisticated cultures with undeveloped ones and presumes you are somehow both above them all and can manage it, instead of being respectable peers in different and separate cultures. it's a fatal conceit as we are seeing play out in european cities today.
That's the begged question in all this post-national global homogenization stuff. No nations, one humanity, and yet under whose governance and dominion? The thing about global governance is that if there is no alternative, there can be no consent, or even conscience, either. So from the perspective of a member of a tiny global minority with a sub-replacement birthrate, depopulation isn't fine at all, really.