We do NOT know if the climate models are correct. There are predictions that worsening storms and drought will have economic losses that are 20-50 times worse than today by 2050. The older predictions of flooding or winters without snow have not happened. However, we know for certain that lowering birth rates will result in 20-30% lower working age populations by 2050 in Japan, China, Korea and Europe. Only massive immigration is temporarily avoiding this lower number of working age population outcome in the US, Canada and Australia. The total fertility rates have gotten worse from just under 2.1 replacement to 1.5 to 1.8 for many developed countries and is now dropping to the 0.78 to 1.1 range from many countries. The worst case economic loss from bad storms from climate change is 2-3% global GDP loss but the economic damage from lost population will be 20-30% GDP loss. $5.6 trillion would only be about 2% loss of a 2050 economy that is $250 trillion. If the climate models have massively overestimated the loss and climate damage is two to five times worse than today then it would be 0.1% loss of GDP. 20-30% loss of a 2050 economy that is $250 trillion would be $50-75 trillion.
In 2021, the World Economic forum called Climate change ‘most impactful risk facing the planet. The largest predicted economic losses of climate change are from models that predict a lot more storm damage. This is mainly worsening droughts, storms and torrential rain in some of the world’s largest economies could cause $5.6 trillion in losses to the global economy by 2050. This has not happened yet as the world has been experiencing $100-250 billion per year in such storm damage. The agricultural losses from climate change might be $330 billion in 2050 and this does not calculate the improved agricultural yields from warming conditions for Canada and other northern farmland.
Population loss does directly cause economic losses. Population loss from now to 2050 will cause about 20-30% in economic damage or about a $60 trillion in economic loss. The GDP of a country is the amount of working people times the average economic contribution from each person. If your economy has 30% fewer people and all the people had on average the same productivity then you would lose 30% of your economy.
China will be losing 10 million people per year from its working age population from 2027-2050. Japan will be losing 1 million people per year from its working age population from 2023-2050. The working age populations for China, Japan, Italy and Spain will be about 20-30% smaller in 2050 than today.
Japan is going from 122 million people today to about 100 million people in 2050-2056. By 2050, its population could fall below 100 million, of whom 38.8% will be 65 or older. IF there was magic policy to double Japan’s birthrates then instead of a working age population of about 58 million in 2050, Japan could have 72 million working age people and a population of about 120 million.
China currently has a total fertility rate of 1.18. However, a survey of Chinese women indicates similarities to South Korean women for family size. South Korea has a total fertility of 0.78. IF China will struggle to stabilize its fertility rate at 0.8, then its population will fall to less than 1.02 billion by 2050 and 310 million in 2100. If China succeeds in holding its fertility rate to 1.1 and prevents it from declining, its population will likely fall to 1.08 billion by 2050 and 440 million by 2100. This would be 232 million fewer people in China in 2050 than the UN projections. The UN was assuming that China would have a total fertility rate of 1.5. This would be about a 18% drop in total population but a 30-40% drop in the working age population by 2050.
All of the developed countries except Israel have a total fertility rate below the replacement level of 2.1. Dropping total fertility from 1.5 to 1.8 down to 1.1 drops the working age population by 20-30%. Dropping total fertility from 1.1 down to 0.8 drops the working age population by another 10%.
China currently has about 960 million working age people versus the US at about 208 working age people. The US has about 168 million people working vs China at about 800 million people.
If China drops to 1.02-1.08 billion people in 2050 then the working age population would be about 600-680 million people. If the US had 400 million people (via high immigration) then it would have about 250-270 million people of working age. China would go from 4.5 times the US level of working age people today to 2.5 times the working age people of the US in 2050. China would have to reach about Japan levels of per capita income in 2050 to have an economy the size of the US.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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It’s all about wealth. On average, the more wealth, the fewer kids. Why? Because if a family wants to maintain its wealth status it has to invest heavily in any children they have. In pre-industrial times that could be at least partially done by ‘stealing’ from the non-wealthy. That is the governing elites could us government to take resources (via tax or various charges) without interference from the governed non-elite. And even than wealthy families tended to have fewer children than non-wealthy families. Why, because preparing children to assume power is always very expensive.
Thus, for wealthy families, children are a total expense, a drag on them using resources currently for stuff they want, and therefore they tended to keep families small. For poor families though, children are a resource who become sources of labor as well as of care in old age (like in your 50s, or even 40s), so they had as many as they could.
After the Industrial more and more families became ‘wealthy’ in the sense that they gad an opportunity to prep their children to be wealthy AND to live long enough to provide services directly to the parents IF they succeeded, so they were a kind of hybrid trade-off between deadweight cost and resource benefit.
But as society as a whole becomes more wealthy, more and more ‘families’ have an impetus to have fewer children with more resources dedicated to their prepping to become/stay wealthy as a family.
So, pretty much any society/nation with a largish middle class seems destined to see a reduction in child birth. The meek and the poor may truly inherit the Earth.
Much of Israel’s fertility rate is from the ultra-orthodox families and arabs. Neither of these groups contribute significantly to the economy. The former rely heavily on government subsidies and only sparsely participate in the workforce, and the latter tend to work low-paying jobs and often live in poverty (though they have been important to the construction sector).
So listing Israel as the “only developed country with TFR above 2.1” is deceptive in this context.
We know how to improve fertility rates.
High TFR is associated with high levels of infant mortality and high levels of female education. If you can keep the babies from dying, fertility rates drop because parents don’t need to have as many children to assure at least one lives to adulthood.
Similarly, every year a woman spends in a classroom is a year she isn’t spending in the bedroom or the nursery. The more educated a woman is, the less likely she is to have children.
So, make sure infants die, and make sure women don’t receive an education.
Boom!
High TFR.
Smartphones in every hand means a population around the world that thinks before it procreates. If we accept that we will have decreasing populations and plan for it, we can make it a good thing.
We know that climate change was invented by scientists with dying careers.
Don’t forget the parallel projections of the elimination of jobs and decoupling of the economy from human labor due to AI/Robotics, AND the longevity/age reversal potential of biotech on population – which was traditionally discussed in terms of the threat of overpopulation.
Reduction in birth rates is not happening in isolation with everything else held constant in its tradition form.
Indeed. Depopulation and degrowth and those pandering it are bigger threats for humanity than bad weather.
We can face bad weather technologically, even rising seas, given it won’t be a sudden event, but spread across decades.
Hear, I know I will be dismissed as a solutionist, but it’s a fact: we have endured Earth’s changing climate since we exist, mostly with our brains and hands.
We can do it again. Unless there is no longer the critical mass of people to keep the current civilization going, and we start going into a collapse trajectory.
I’m afraid the next decades will see an existential fight like we have never seen before: the one against the actual effects of our dearly beloved, well meaning philosophies, amplified at the planetary scale.