If people or kids do not exist, then they cannot contribute to a nations economy. These will be huge effects by 2050 and even larger by 2100 and beyond. All of the forecasts that China and India will have economies many times larger than the USA will NOT happen. The other part of the forecasts of super-China and super-Indian economies also assumed a steady and strong rise in per capita income. The assumption was that the developing countries would have huge gdp growth from technological catchup. If both of these things do not happen or are far worse then China and India stagnate at about today’s economic levels and then start shrinking in line with the population collapse from 2050 onwards.
It is not just that the countries get old before they get rich, the countries economies shrivel up and shrink.
All of the developed countries except Israel have a total fertility rate below the replacement level of 2.1. Even almost all of the less developed countries like Mexico and Philippines have fertility rates that have dropped below replacement. 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%. India has already dropped below replacement fertility in 2021-2022 based on recent Indian survey data. The total fertility rate (births per woman) also fell from 3.96 in 1991 to 2.0 in 2023 for India, whereas in the USA, it fell from 2.05 to 1.66 and in China from 1.93 to 1.18 during the same period.
India’s National Family Health Survey indicated a fertility rate of 1.99 in 2017-19, in contrast to the WPP’s estimate of 2.16. If India’s population fertility estimate is off by 10% on the key metric of current fertility rate and is overestimating future fertility as 1.8 instead of 1.2 then the projected population will be double the correct projection in 2100. India with a fertility rate of about 1.5 instead of 2.2 from 2023-2050 will mean 20-30% fewer working age people.
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.
The numbers get far worse for India, China, Japan, Korea and other low fertility countries as the decades and centuries pass. There is constant halving or thirding every 50 years into the future so long as the fertility rate is 0.8 to 1.0. One third of the 2050 economy in 2100. One third of the 2100 economy in 2150. One tenth of the 2050 economy in 2100. 2% of the 2050 economy in 2300.
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. China will have to double its per capita income just to hold even on its overall economic size. China will need more than an extra 2% per year in annual GDP growth to make up for population loss.
Japan Peaked in 2008
Japan’s population peaked in 2008 at 128,083,960. Japan’s population was 123 million last year and is at 122 million this year. Japan has 15.2 million (15-39) women who could potentially have children. Japan in 2008 had 19.2 million women (15-39) who could potentially have children. In the 15 years before 2008, Japan had 17 million children but int he 15 years before 2023, Japan had 14 million children. The actual number of women who are having children is really between 20-32. There is significant dropoff in fertility from 32-40. Particularly if it is a first child. Culturally, the developed world is not using the 15-20 ages of fertility. Practically, Japan has 11 million women who could and are more active in having children.
I follow antiaging closely. The complete functional anti-aging regimen that could work and be deployed at scale and one that would rejuvenate fertility is at least 2040 or later and 2050-2060 is quite possible and could be delayed even more. Planning humanity based upon advanced tech deployment is not a good plan. Population decline is clearly in the population pyramid and total fertility data. Clearly, modern career, work and families and cities are not family and fertility friendly.
The only current fertility technologies to be deployed at scale are egg freezing and IVR. Those are in the hundreds of thousands to a few million per year now and could be scaled to hundreds of millions with a large adjustment to public health and medical systems. It would take a COVID pandemic vaccination scale response. Making sure that all of the people who plan to have children and families achieve this and we maximize those numbers with social and work life adjustment… I think all of that is a maximum +0.5 children to TFR. 0.8 goes to 1.3, 1.5 goes to 2.0. It can’t just be pulling forward some already planned kids, we have to fill in what would have been zero with one or two kids. A policy of mass scale surrogacy. Using freezing eggs with surrogacy (again by the millions), I think that could work. There would need to be as many surrogate mothers and state sponsored nannies as the standing armies of the world. Surrogacy would be most of their career and they would need to be compensated like a career. National propoganda to declare mother, surrogates and nannies as national heroes would also be needed.
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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France has the least problem with this in Europe (though it’s still a problem) and their approach is cover families with a social safety net. The take away in the US is that we need to start making having children a thing with zero cost burden on the people having them. All the selfish people are throwing a hissy fit at hearing this but it’s the only thing that will save our country, nothing else will.
I do not think having fewer people is at all a bad thing. As long as such people are well educated and,of course, have some computer and technological savy. Come on+ fewer people could mean that there is prosperity,in measure, is more evenly distributed . Why not? Human life could become highly valued for once in our war – like like past
Russia has a declining population. How is your fewer people means less war theory working there? How is the fewer people are more prosperous theory working there?
I don’t care, y’all. I ain’t marrying and having kids. Cost/benefit analysis does not add up.
Sorry if my children/grandchildren won’t be contributing to the Humanity but I honestly do not care that much being a selfish guy. I am at peace and indifferent for the most part. I do however, wish y’all the best of luck!
I love living in peace, not resting in peace, LOL.
In regards to population stagnation or decline after peak within the next 40 – 100 years, even though I have few real concerns that our society, as a whole, will lose, in the long-term, high technology, health and human function, complex urban and rural order, or significant natural ecosystems (land or water) –except by sudden, unexpected cataclysm– (in the rich and near-rich world) over the next century, a degree of planning and resiliency-building is likely in order. With that in mind, resources/ interest should go to better: early childhood services, develop substitute parent birth/ raising, stopping early retirement/unlimited pension ‘support’ programs, develop late middle age health and productivity (extension) programs, develop substitute human services at retirement/ long-term care facilities, stop systems that gate/ segregate/ limit public access to non-security-related high technology/ information/ skills (after a reasonable profitability time), and –generally– just get better kids, longer productive working careers, longer lives being productive, easy access and distribution of cutting-edge knowledge, and less high-maintenance health/ poverty cases.
In advocating guidelines:
—-Ideas Likely Very Wrong Now in preparing for Reduced Population Growth
– each additional person always has net positive value-wealth, skills, productivity
– most people today have net positive value-wealth, skills, productivity
– long, idle retirements (even if healthy and non-pension) are a net benefit to society
– emphasizing groups and government support -over- individual empowerment and success-chasing
– emphasizing social, environmental, and political programs -over- skills, wealth, productivity, and competition policies
– unlimited and unvetted human movement and immigration
– policies that emphasize large family numbers when schools, communities, and job/apprentice opportunities are limited regionally
(and most woke and nanny-state policies)
—-Painful Ideas to Accept to Move forward
– not all Human cultures/ regions are equal and have the same potential, given a certain level of investment — though there is great overlap within the individuals within each culture — it’s the aggregate of each that matters. Some cultures may hold others back.
– nature cannot continue to provide services to human populations and we need to move into artificial means of support (assuming most systems are weakened/ reduced) – agriculture, forestry, climate, water quality, sympathetic ecosystems (mangroves, glaciers, corals/ reefs, natural fertilizers…)
– we will continue to use fossil fuels signfiicantly for at least a century — aim to work with them rather than eliminate them outright at great economic and development costs
– defense, war, and conflict will continue at individual, community, and regional levels in the next century — pretending that we are all one big happy family will mean resentment. It’s ok to alienate and segregate disruptive, violent, and self-harming cultures from a modern, rational civilization
– accepting and even encouraging ‘taboo’ technologies such as human cloning, artifiical wombs, pre-death vitrification, high risk human drug trials, human upgrades/ modifications/ uploads/ high-cyber-content, AGI of a certain complexity as an Intelligent Other with Rights, …
The bottom line is that the world needs to become more rational, ruthless, and success/productivity-oriented. Everything needs to justify its existence and contribute to a technological and pro-consumer civilization.
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2023/05/30/its-not-just-a-fiscal-fiasco-greying-economies-also-innovate-less
Older economies are disasters. Lower productivity, less creativity.
The next wave of creativity will have to come from Africa. No other countries will have enough young people to make innovation possible.
Less working-age people… means less houses need to be built. Or none. Or less than none, like in Japan. Houses / housing is the biggest expense for people trying to make a living.
For some strange reason, I’ve never heard about one obvious solution to this demographic trend: raise the age of retirement, to reflect the raising of average lifespans. Raise the age to 70.
Within reasonable population parameters, the important thing is per capita GDP, not total GDP.
The issue here is at least threefold, I think:
1) The decline is so rapid that it is distorting age demographics, a perhaps insupportable fraction of the population will be elderly.
2) In a democracy, the lower the fraction of voters who have children, the less favorable to having children public policy will be, because too few voters see the benefit.
3) Below some level of population, you can’t maintain complexity and economies of scale. Modern industrial society requires a huge range of specialties, and you need to have enough people for them to all be well represented, or you start losing implicit knowledge of how to do things.
The US is unlikely to hit that last threshold soon, but many of the smaller advanced nations are going to run into it fairly early.
Every policy attempt ever designed to increase fertility levels is very efficient at making the problem worse. The apex of this will come when nations states try to coerce or outright force people to have more kids at which point people will flee to the states that don’t force them to be breeders against their will or fine them to pay off career breeders.
It will only be when nations states crash so profoundly that they are unable to enforce any policy that people will feel free enough and optimistic enough to have more kids.
Ah, but India has a plan! Which apparently involves removing evolution and the periodic table of the elements from middle school science texts, in exchange for more indigenous/early indian science and “ways of knowing”…
Not only India. Lots of countries brewing political platforms out of old colonial grudges, and putting science and rationalism in the same basket as the hated colonialist.
Since post-modernism and cultural Marxism took hold of academia, and infected philosophy with relativism and “all knowledge and opinions are equally valuable”, things started going downhill.
But many of these anti colonial sentiments are more linked to nationalism and this right wing than Marxism.
Alas, Flat Earthers, anti vaccination, Young Earth Creationism, are all right wing movements in western countries
Anti science is strong in the radical left and right
Seems to me that at least in Latin America, it’s rather the lefties the ones using the indigenous cultures revindications, either just ones of West-exclusionary as political flag.
Does Modi count as lefty or right winger? it seems to me the distinction may be meaningless, or be just according to whatever political trope is most preferred by the nation’s “average joe”.
In East Europe, though, the promoters of “original cultures” might indeed seem to be more right wing. E.g. Bulgaria and Russia.
China and India will encounter the middle-income trap. That coupled with the demographic difficulties will mean that their total GDP won’t exceed the US by a large factor. In fact, their economy might never surpass the US.
China became high income country this year. Threshold for high income country is per capita of around $13,2K (nominal). This year they are at $13,7K.
So yeah, 2023 is important year for humanity, number of people living in high income countries will more than double, thanks to China’s achievement. Now I am rooting for India.
In PPP(Purchasing power) per capita terms, China in 2023 is at $23,4K and growing by around 2K per year. So they already overcame middle income trap, because they no longer are middle income country, but high income country.
India is so far behind with a mere $2,5K per capita(nominal), that it may be serious problem for them, but I doubt it will be. Why? Because of technology. Whether it will be developed in advanced EU, US, Korea, China, Israel, whatever country, those technologies will be avaiable for everyone who will pay for them.
I am talking about advanced robots, supercomputers, ultra advanced AI services and so on.
We don’t need to have 10B cars in the world instead of 2B to be prosperous civ. We don’t need to consume stuff we don’t really need to become more advanced. Most important thing is to grow output to simply have more resources for developing new, more advanced tech ASAP and have ambitious scientific projects like for example advanced 10km wide space telescopes.
If we will develop nanoreplicators (and tech which Eric Drexler envisions), fusion power and other cheap energy generation tech + technology which will allow us to access resources in space(Starship 3.0) + mining machines, we will make it to uber abundance, even with low population.
Of course, most important work to do is to advance medical tech as fast as possible and cure aging, be able to reverse it.
Without it, we won’t be here soon and that makes all other things basically meaningless.
“This year they are at $13,7K.”
Always assuming their economic statistics aren’t total fabrications, of course.
$13,7K is IMF estimate, not data from Chinese gov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita
Well never get there, mindset will change or will be changed by govts.
I thought you believed in our capacity, specially with AI help, to increase human lifespan and youth towards a singularity.
In that case, we will have ANYTHING but population collapse
Making policy based on unproved yet-to happen things is unwise.
So far all trends show that:
– we can extend lifespan, but at an increasingly great cost. We get better healthcare, but it gets more and more expensive and we still can’t stop frailty and death.
– we can delegate work to robots, and have been doing so for decades, but no replacement of humans from the loop. Moravec’s paradox is well and doing fine.
Even assuming these are solvable, if these situations hold or long enough, we will have a population crash and less capability to innovate our way out of it.
Population collapse and everything else here is ALSO unproven.
And you are talking about traditional methods to increase life span, which are basically around trying to maintain a degrading car working… The pieces and components fail each time in greater quantity. The cost increases a lot.
We are talking here about molecular or genetic level rejuvenation
Not old frail 90 year old people
But 90 year old people that look to be in their 30s, active and healthy.
Japan’s population peaked in 2008 at 128,083,960. Japan’s population was 123 million last year and is at 122 million this year. Japan has 15.2 million (15-39) women who could potentially have children. Japan in 2008 had 19.2 million women (15-39) who could potentially have children. In the 15 years before 2008, Japan had 17 million children but int he 15 years before 2023, Japan had 14 million children. The actual number of women who are having children is really between 20-32. There is significant dropoff in fertility from 32-40. Particularly if it is a first child. Culturally, the developed world is not using the 15-20 ages of fertility. Practically, Japan has 11 million women who could and are more active in having children. I follow antiaging closely. The complete functional antiaging regimen that could work and be deployed at scale and one that would rejuvenate fertility is at least 2040 or later and 2050-2060 is quite possible and could be delayed even more. Planning humanity based upon advanced tech deployment is not a good plan. Population decline is clearly in the population pyramid and total fertility data. Clearly, career, work and families and cities are not family and fertility friendly. The only fertility technologies to be deployed at scale are egg freezing and IVR. Those are in the hundreds of thousands to a few million per year now and could be scaled to hundreds of millions with a large adjustment to public health and medical systems. It would take a COVID pandemic vaccination scale response. Making sure that all of the people who plan to have children and families achieve this and we maximize those numbers with social and work life adjustment… I think all of that is +0.5 children to TFR. 0.8 goes to 1.3, 1.5 goes to 2.0. It can’t just be pulling forward some already planned kids, we have to fill in what would have been zero with one or two kids. A policy of mass scale surrogacy. Using freezing eggs with surrogacy (again by the millions), I think that could work. There would need to be as many surrogate mothers and state sponsored nannies as the standing armies of the world.
According to the Conference Board, “The latest estimates extend the downward trend in global labor productivity growth from an average annual rate of 2.6 percent between 2000-2007 to 1.7 percent between 2011-2019. The latter is roughly the same as the average growth rate of output per worker in 2019-2021.” – https://www.conference-board.org/press/global-productivity-2021
Productivity growth varies quite a bit, influenced by things like pandemics negatively, but positively by things like computers and AI (TBD).
NBF regularly posts updates on longevity science, boosting agricultural output, energy breakthroughs etc. so I won’t repeat those, but they will boost productivity too. Even just bringing air conditioning to sweltering climates boosts productivity. Millions of people don’t even have electricity or indoor plumbing so they have exponential productivity growth potential, or at least their children will if they have these things.
The fact is much if not most of humanity lives way below its productive potential. We need to make more of the people we have instead of focusing on just having more bodies to feed, clothe and house.
Curbing rent-seeking and monopolies would also free up innovation and production too. Thomas Picketty’s Capital book showed how societies with high levels of wealth inequality due to rent-seeking have low levels of innovation because innovation disrupts channels of rent collection. Advanced economies fall into promotion of rent-seeking over innovation and then their productivity growth slows dramatically.
If lifespan is greatly increased and age reversal is practical, much lower birth rates will lead to a stable healthy population.
The revolution in AI and robotics may well decouple the growth and performance of the economy from human labor and hence demographics.
In this case the critical question for the the economy is inequality of property ownership /wealth not how many human workers are available. People will mostly serve as consumers not producers. Wealth inequality will trend much greater if AI and robots can be private property. That recreates something like a slave economy where wealthy slaveowners have no need of free workers for anything and the economy and wealth generally shrinks because of demand shortages. The poor would have the desire to participate in the economy by consuming various goods and services but no wealth or income to pay for it.
The critical need is for a different way of thinking about property that optimizes wealth distribution for economic growth. Even the rich would suffer from limits on the economy if inequality chokes demand.
90% population collapse is a normal cycle. 10% survivors is plenty.
Not for our current civilization, or for the prospect of a pleasant future for us now alive.