So a lot of problems will be solved by 2049 (overpopulation) and probably many others will arise (we never had worldwide decreasing demographics.)
Maybe in a couple countries. But not for the world, and not for the west and definitely not for America.
As the population has grown poverty has decreased.
So that's the end goal our species should aspire to?
Produce™ and Consume™?
Eternally without relent?
Will you be the first to go volunteer to back to the stone ages?
I didn't think so.
That is such a privileged first-world take.
You haven't lived in overpopulated places.
Just try it for 1 fucking year and then see if you still wish that hell upon anyone.
I swear I'm starting to wonder if that's a take pushed by ultracapitalists so they can have an endless supply of labor and consumers, like the bans on abortion etc.
Energy is very easy to produce cleanly (nuclear, and solar is looking better and better). The barriers to doing so are political and financial, not technical. They will be made worse by having an aged-heavy population, which is less innovative, less willing to invest in the future, and less willing to try new things. And it makes a poorer society, obviously.
Malthus has been proved wrong at every juncture. Lack of children is about to bite us very, very hard.
Could it have an effect like the Black Plague, where labor becomes more expensive?
But remember: the uber-rich are allowing millions to immigrate to the rich world, to prevent precisely this. (I'm not commenting here on whether immigration is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, simply noting that large-scale immigration brings wages down, and that the low birthrate is consistently stated as its main driver.) Also, remember that paying for all those unproductive old people will consume enormous amounts of wealth, something that didn't apply during the Black Death.
Why is everyone so sure of this? My own instinct is just that we'll adapt to it and it will be fine.
It's just seems like the equivalent of making one of those charts that shows we're going to run out of [some critical resource] by [some date]. They are always wrong, without exception. Because as the resource becomes more scarce, we adapt our societies to become less dependent on it. You can't just extrapolate that trend lines or relationships between statistics like GDP and population continue into the distant future; it almost never works.
I don't have my own competing, grand prediction of how the distant future will pan out. But my thinking is that societies are extremely complex systems and when one variable is tweaked, generally all the other variables also adjust to compensate.
I'm not against growing populations, just not overly concerned about depopulation either.
How? Old people need care. Younger people will need to take care of them. When they die, a lot of knowledge will be lost, because there will not be enough young people to learn all those skills. Less people will also mean overall less economic activity, less creativity, less inventions and so on. I'm not saying the world will stop, but the transition will certainly be painful.
First about behavior in old age. I'm pretty sure the majority of adults today don't want to live and think like their grandparents, so we can't say "less" anything. The circumstances are definitely changing enough that we already know it will be different.
The population decline is not happening in huge step changes. "About to bite us" is definitely hyperbole.
This is like comparing apples to oranges to find a correlation, and arriving at an incorrect causation.
Falling populations are largely due to better education, specifically of women, as well as integration of women into the workforce, which has been one of the bigger drivers in curbing poverty. The latter is so significant in the west and the far east (double income households mean rising costs of living, meaning SAHM households become unviable in the West for the middle class), resulting in a significant population decrease.
But in places such as the Middle East or Africa, ever increasing populations have only meant even more financial trouble for those economies. Case in point Pakistan and Egypt. In other economies such as India (which I assume is one of the "couple countries" you mentioned), overall birth rates are falling significantly to near replacement level, and in the few states/regions with high birth rates, poverty is rampant and the people reliant on subsidies from other more prosperous regions.
The problem with most of the world is that while we are able to sustain a huge population as a whole globally, most of the population growth is extremely localized, resulting in population sparsity in some comfortable regions (Canada, the US, Central Asia, southern Russia) and population unsustainability in other regions completely unsuited to population growth (sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, the Middle East).
True, but not obviously a causal relationship.
Some people have a massive ecological footprint. For instance, somebody who uses a private jet ~daily.
Other people have a negative ecological footprint: their actions either actively improve the ecology of the world or act to reduce the ecological footprint of others.
The difference between the two is many orders of magnitude. A world-wide population of 100 million daily private jet users likely has a larger ecological impact than 10 billion low-impact humans.
Population change takes decades or centuries for the ecological impact to happen.
Shifts in the ecological footprint of significant populations can cause shifts over a small number of years.
Yes, because the aging population increases healthcare spending to support them while the working age population shrinks, eroding the tax base. This is currently happening in Japan right now.
It's a titanic issue. Old people are expensive. They tax the young to pay for themselves. Now the system is running out of young to tax.
And that's the situation in rich and prosperous nations. I live in a developing country that has managed to be relatively poor and have a declining birth rate. It's so absurdly pathological it's not even funny. Symptoms include, for example, increased retirement ages. We will work well into our 70+ years of age, and we will be happy. Newer generations are already coping, they've already internalized the fact they will never actually retire. This is the stuff revolutions are made out of.
It will be (eventually) when the worldwide birth rate drop below replacement. And it's close to that now: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN.
Killing USAID probably put a drag on that slowdown by reducing access to family planning resources, but we’ll have to see exactly how much in the coming years.
- Niger: 6.7 births per woman
- Somalia: 6.0
- Chad: 5.5
So it seems only Africa.