The Age of Depopulation
foreignaffairs.com
foreignaffairs.com
Trends don't necessarily continue; very often, they change the circumstance that gave rise to the trend in some way. When populations are half what they are now, housing will likely be cheaper, wages higher, the share of wealth controlled by the elderly lower. Maybe that will change the trend.
Interesting times coming. Not necessarily happy ones, but.
I thought like this, but pondering a bit, climate change and associated sea level rise will probably destroy many coastal properties where a lot of people live today, so I suspect this alone will delay housing affordability return for at least one generation. See https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/28/coastal-communities...
Nothing about a shrinking population makes for a strong economy.
But disasters don't usually make things that bad in the longer term -- the big effect is that it forces us to spend money, which tends to improve the economy, at a cost to stored wealth.
Interesting times coming, to be sure. But I'm a bit more optimistic. We figure things out, eventually.
The people in charge in the west are not going to let this happen. Look at Canada.
I want to draw attention to this specific quote, because it gets to the root cause of the depopulation situation. Fertility rates are aligning to desired fertility of women, and while this perspective might seem dated based on the 1994 date in the quote, I believe there is substantial evidence that this thesis still holds true today (citations provided in my comments in the subthread below).
If this is indeed the case, and population decline is truly caused by aggregate intentional choice with regards to reduced/lower fertility, it is unlikely this (if one considers it a challenge) can be solved for by increasing fertility rates via policy. Therefore, humanity should attempt to forecast the future, and plan mitigations and contingencies around the fact there there will be less humans and labor in the future.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545397/empty-planet... (“Once a woman receives enough information and autonomy to make an informed and self-directed choice about when to have children, and how many to have, she immediately has fewer of them, and has them later.”)
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... | https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30677-2 ("Our findings suggest that continued trends in female educational attainment and access to contraception will hasten declines in fertility and slow population growth. A sustained TFR lower than the replacement level in many countries, including China and India, would have economic, social, environmental, and geopolitical consequences. Policy options to adapt to continued low fertility, while sustaining and enhancing female reproductive health, will be crucial in the years to come.")
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-... ("Our World in Data: What explains the declining fertility rate?")
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-exp... ("Pew Research: 57% of adults under 50 who say they’re unlikely to ever have kids say a major reason is they just don’t want to; 31% of those ages 50 and older without kids cite this as a reason they never had them")
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-... ("64% of young women say they just don't want children, compared to 50% of men.")
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68402139 ("Why South Korean women aren't having babies: The reason women are not having children now is because they have the courage to talk about it.")
Haven't read this, thanks for the recommendation.
> Once a woman receives enough information and autonomy to make an informed and self-directed choice about when to have children, and how many to have, she immediately has fewer of them, and has them later.
I do not agree with this premise.
> adults under 50 who say they’re unlikely to ever have kids say a major reason is they just don’t want to
This is like asking the anorexic why they don't eat and believing them when they tell you that they're "just not hungry".
I ask, out of curiosity, what you do believe the culprit is and what your data to back the assertion is (if the cause is not empowered women making fertility choices).
https://reason.com/2023/05/02/storks-dont-take-orders-from-t... ("South Korea spent more than $200 billion subsidizing child care and parental leave over the past 16 years, President Yoon Suk Yeol said last fall. Yet the fertility rate fell from 1.1 in 2006 to 0.81 in 2021. The amount of money required to trigger even these small effects is enormous. In "The Economic Consequences of Family Policies," published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2017, researchers found "one extra percentage point of GDP spending" on early childhood education and child care programs was "associated with 0.2 extra children per woman." In the U.S., where the 2022 GDP was $25.46 trillion, that would mean spending more than $250 billion.")
https://www.nber.org/papers/w23051 ("The Economic Consequences of Family Policies: Lessons from a Century of Legislation in High-Income Countries")
What data?
> Even in countries with robust (ie expensive) pro natalist fiscal policy, it does not materially improve the fertility rate.
I'm aware of this. I even understand why... it's not that difficult. While it probably remains true that you can bribe someone to raise a child, the monetary amount required isn't a few thousand bucks. But if a government needs 100,000 babies to be born, they also can't afford to pay $1 billion each. So they cheapskate out, and we get bribes far too small to make any difference. (One might also wonder what "product quality" one would get in such circumstances.)
> I ask, out of curiosity, what you do believe the culprit is
A contagious mental illness. We know some mental illnesses to be contagious (teenage suicide, for instance). This is why the surveys are so useless. Psychology has already hinted that people often do not know why they make the decisions that they make and instead invent post hoc rationalizations after the fact. Asking them "why did you have no children" isn't going to elicit any useful information at all, any more than asking the 15 yr old why they attempted suicide after 3 other teens did so in nearby towns.
> researchers found "one extra percentage point of GDP spending" on early childhood education and child care programs was "associated with 0.2 extra children per woman."
The education itself isn't what causes this. But the public schools are the place where the contagion is endemic, and so that's where they're exposed to it. You'd find all sorts of strange differences if you knew where to look, I think. Girls who "graduated" illiterate without an education to speak of would have fertility rates just as low as high achievers, because they're still exposed to the contagion. I doubt that elite private schools are safe either, because though it would appear that those schools are disconnected from the system at large, they're still staffed by the same sorts of teachers and administrators moving back and forth between public and private schools as their career progresses.
I should also point out that dissolving the public education system (even if that were feasible from a political standpoint) is unlikely to change things substantially. New vectors are arising, ready to take over. I don't think we can policy our way out of this.
Nit: This patently does not exist. Zero countries pay or provide anywhere close to the actual cost of raising a child, let alone the lost opportunity of choosing to raise children vs living a life dedicated to yourself.
That actual cost is horrifically high, but I promise you if it was offered, people would have more children. We WILL have to have that discussion eventually, unless we somehow return to a society where women are property and don't have rights, or unless we just outsource the whole baby making process to the places of the world that DO work like that, but people hate immigrants, especially when they are poor (for some fucking reason).
That's the story, in my humble opinion. Not that depopulation is underway, but that nothing can be done about it, and any policy put forth to try to do something about it would be so expensive as to be deemed impossible.
Spending time in the wild may be more unlikely as the time required to maintain a lifestyle grows beyond the number of hours in a day.
Also, increased efficiency is a form of economic growth. We are after all doing more with less.
Another important thing to consider is that population size allows and enable certain economic activities to exist. For example, I go to theater and do theater activities, but theater can only exist if enough people go to theater. That threshold can be more easily reached if your theater is in a city.
If you want computer to exists, you need a certain amount of specialists dedicated to that. You need a large population because not everyone cares about computing and there are essential tasks that first need to be taken of such as agriculture and grocery stores and trains.
Finally, economic growth is desirable the same reason improving technology is desirable. It enables more capabilities. The bad side is when we abuse these capabilities, not that these capabilities are bad in itself.
I don't think you understand the math of this. It's not that anyone wants a higher population, it's that the spectrum is a little screwed up. There's this line in the middle (fertility rate 2.1), and anything to the right of that is "population spirals out of control". Then everything to the left of it is "human extinction in just a few centuries".
We're currently on the "human extinction in a few centuries". And all the arguments that we're not are positively stupid. People seem to think that we're like moose on some island, that "population bounces back" (it does for animals, because their fertility rate never goes below replacement, so when population pressures subside, their populations recover). Every time you ask "what's the case for higher population", you're actually helping to murder our entire species.
If you were rational, you'd be pushing the idea that we need that 2.1 fertility rate, the one that doesn't result in higher population, and doesn't result in human extinction.
That being said, the lack of population growth we're seeing likely represent a crisis of some kind across the world. Otherwise if it's benign, it just means that people just don't wanna start families.
Little girls raised by mothers who only have 1 child don't grow up thinking that they want five children. Little girls who grow up being taught by childless teachers, excited and inspired by childless role models in the entertainment industry don't think they want four children. When they're bombarded with propaganda about how "adoption is just as good", they tend to believe that. And so on.
These things don't change just because population is shrinking. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I don't believe these things to be deliberate. But I do recognize them for what they are.
> There is no reason to expect that the population will die out in a few century, only that we are in a currently bad situation.
There actually is. People like yourself tend to look at the "population". "Gee, there's 7.2 billion sixty year olds! We'll never go extinct." But it's really the one small demographic slice that is shrinking all the time, even while population grows... the demographic still young enough to make more people.
Your claim is that this trend doesn't just stay the same, that it might reverse. But it's so much worse than it merely not reversing... the trend becomes more extreme. As fertility falls, there are far fewer examples of high fertility for children to grow up around and be normalized to. They lower their own fertility in adulthood in response. Fertility decline is set to accelerate, not slow.
Your claim is that this trend doesn't just stay the same, that it might reverse. But it's so much worse than it merely not reversing... the trend becomes more extreme. As fertility falls, there are far fewer examples of high fertility for children to grow up around and be normalized to. They lower their own fertility in adulthood in response. Fertility decline is set to accelerate, not slow.
Big claim you're making. Populations are not homogeneous.
The relatively few families that have five children, and assuming that the values of having a large family can be passed to offspring, they will continue to have large families.
In a couple generations these people will become the majority of the population and the birth rate goes back up again.
If somehow I were wrong on this, it still wouldn't fix the problem. Technological civilization can't be put on pause for 150 years while they manage to get population back up to a level where it can carry that burden. How many of those children six generations in are likely to make it out of childhood without modern medicine?
It would be one thing to hold out hope for change if attitudes towards this issue with different... but in a world that shrugs and says "oh, things might be different in 50 years" when no one even wants things to be different in 50 years and aren't acting in ways that would cause things to be different in 50 years, then I feel pretty confident telling you that you're just plain wrong.
The speed of population collapse also impacts our ability to care for infrastructure and the elderly. While I personally think the global population would be better off at a steady 2-5 Billion people vs 10-20 Billion, dropping down to say 100M would make modern electrons manufacturing difficult to maintain let alone improve upon.
- Less working age people
- More old people
- More geriatric people
This is the transition which you skip over before you get to the fewer but better-off people. (Better-off? Well I have retiring at 72 years of age or later to look forward to, compared to something like 65 for my father.)
Each of those places has double the population of Europe and 5X that of the USA, but aren't really driving human progress in any meaningful way. It seems like pouring more resources into fewer people has better outcomes. 2-3 generations of depopulation might be what we need to make space for some huge innovations.
I am not trying to be elitist, just making an argument that more people != more innovation and smaller groups with more resources will produce better results than just making tons of people and hoping more random geniuses appear.
In current times China and India has a manufacturing industry the US can't compete with (tries to, with expensive hogwash like the Chip act).
Strictly speaking yes, more people != more innovation, but your examples are just not making sense. You are talking about the second and fifth largest economies worldwide.
US has 333m so:
China 1.4b = 4.5X more innovations
Africa 1.3b = 4X more innovations
India 1.4b = 4.5X more innovations
I don't think this holds true at all. Also the innovations you mentioned are from a time before China had a massive population compared to Europe. I am talking about the last few generations when the human population exploded. Why would an innovation from 1000 years ago have any relevance.
Said small group result of brain drain from very large group of Chinese, Indian / others. Billions of people are being filtered through foreign academic gauntlets - trying to find random geniuses from large pop base - before being drained / coordinated by US who does not have sufficient indigenous talent.
> Let's fix the growth-based economies and move on with fewer but better-off people.
Fewer people is easy, but fewer-but-better-off people seems very difficult. The wealth- and tax-revenue-creating capacity of the stock market (which has been going up at an inflation-adjusted average of ~6% annually since the late 1800s, driven by growth) simply cannot be replaced. With compounding 5% returns, saving 10K/year will net you a ~$700K nest egg over 30 years. With a flat market, you'd only have $300K.
All or some of this probably ties into what people mean by "economy", but I think it doesn't lend to any appreciation of the material difference that having more people thrown at a problem presents.
Taken to the extreme: a world void of other humans might be entertaining but would be a woefully inefficient place to learn about medicine or the cosmos. Which again presumes an audience who cares about any of that, but I wager that many do. Automation certainly replaces some people for some tasks, but we haven't escaped the need for humans yet.
maybe you missed it when you first read the article, but it is explained, at length, in the article
A lot of society is a ponzi scheme e.g. social security, insurance. Young supporting the old. In some senses, young inexperienced people "paying their dues" are handling most of the frontline gruntwork. No young people means scutwork for the rest of us by definition. The final revenge of the young naive. That's the "real world" case for it.
The nationalistic case for it is harnessing a natural resource: population. Big country in terms of population can dominate others economically and militarily. People is power and leaders want power.
The humanistic case for it is that of Eli Musk : humans keep growing exponentially, as does knowledge, as does economy, until blossoming out into space and the universe. The futurist view. Idea being, the more people there are the faster that happens, the lower the risk.
> Let's fix the growth-based economies and move on with fewer but better-off people.
Yes, they will naturally fix themselves. it will be painful for some as goods become more expensive, but life gets easier - less traffic, cheap housing, fruitful resources, and so on. Japan has it figured out. All the beautiful rural places to live. Places like that fully exist in the US now too (see: appalachia)
But here's what happens on the long term that is obvious to me : population will begin growing again. They'll be some gene variant that makes people deeply want to reproduce on a biological level. In a few generations everyone will have this gene (people without it... they didn't reproduce). Call it a genetic bottleneck on the genetic will to procreate.
It's worth noting that in 5-10 years we could easily have cloning vats. We now have "cloning as a service" for all pets and livestock, many such commercial companies - on a biological level it's trivial to imagine the same service and structure for human, the only barrier is ethics and regulations. We have cloned primates and cracked the underlying tricks that might equally clone a human. We have cracked genetic modification vis a vis an infinite number of genetic mouse models and CRISPR. We have early stages of artificial wombs (CHOP; some years ago) but equally one could make a human chimeric pig to incubate the clones. I don't envision this will be seen in the near future but at somepoint, somewhere along the lines, some nation state will begin doing this in secret not unlike a manhattan project, and as we saw with nuclear proliferation, once the cat's out of the bag everyone will do it, everyone will complete the civilizaton "world wonder" called "The Cloning Vats" https://alphacentauri.fandom.com/wiki/The_Cloning_Vats
I find this to be amusing, because as far as I can tell government policies are a major cause of depopulation in the first place.
Women don't want to have children because having children is no longer a net positive. Having children is no longer a net positive because they are not relied upon in old age--the government will support you with medicare, medicaid, etc. If women felt that having children was a requirement to be taken care of in old age, they'd go right back to having four kids each.
On the bright side, this problem seems likely (in the absence of extreme levels of immigration) to solve itself naturally. As the population curve inverts further, we'll have fewer resources to take care of our elders, and young women will realize that having a few kids (who can support them later) is vastly preferable to the alternative of spending their old age in squalor--just as it used to be.
Sure there's pre-terminal scenarios where adult children may be of help, but different living arrangements could mitigate that.
IIRC I've read that even pre-modern cities have often suffered from below replacement fertility, propped up by countryside migration. Children are decent laborers for subsistence farmers.
But yeah, as others have pointed out, it may well be a socially contagious mood that's causing the current trend. Personally, I'd like to think it's having to do with our imposing technosphere causing wildlife extinction, global warming, etc and a desire for better balance, but that may be too optimistic.