It is the year 2200 and the world has 250 million people. What has happened? Was there a total nuclear war and followed by a famine? Was there a terrible super-pandemic? How can the world have fallen from over 8.1 billion people in 2023 to 250 million. How can there be only 3% of the world population? Perhaps, artificial super intelligence was created and it nearly wiped out humanity.
This is what happens if all countries have a total fertility rate of 1.0 or less. This is the situation in South Korea and Taiwan. Falling below replacement levels of 2.1 means that the average women no longer has an average of 1 daughter. If fertility rates go to 1.0 or less that means the total of all women have half of a daughter. This means the next generation (30 years later) has half as many fertile women. In 60 years there are 25% as many fertile women and in 90 years there are 12.5% as many fertile women.
Almost 80% of the population of the world is below replacement. This includes India and Bangladesh, which are very poor countries. Japan fell below replacement in 1976 and in 2008 its population began shrinking. This was in spite of having among the longest life expectancy in the world at over 80 years. Continued population growth is from the momentum of previous higher birth rates increasing the pool of women who have chosen not to fully replace themselves. Dropping staying below is replacement starts a ticking clock. 30-40 years until the population starts shrinking. 20-30 years after that and the population collapse gets very brutal. No country has fallen below replacement for over 5 years and come back to above replacement.
The world is trending to a low-fertility scenario, global fertility is approaching 1.3 after 2050. The world adult population averages 14.5 years of schooling, with male and female life expectancy both approaching 100. The median age is over 60. In this vision of the future, total population peaks at 8.7 billion in 2050 (up from about 7.7 billion in 2020) and then falls to 7.2 in 2100. On that fertility path, humanity would total around 250 million by 2200 and under 100 million by 2300.
There are some parts of the world that are below 1.3 TFR. China has been at 1.18 for the past three years. South Korea is at 0.78. Seoul is at 0.6. Taiwan is at 1.0. The current fertility rate for Europe in 2023 is 1.615 births per woman. Spain and Italy are at 1.2.
Find more statistics at Statista
China’s population is shrinking. China had the one child policy, so its population pyramid age distribution is already terrible. China had less than 10 million births in a year. If 10 million births per year was sustained then if people lived 80 years, you would head to a population of 800 million. However, the 5 million girls born last year in China could continue the trend of 1.18 TFR. They each have less than 0.6 daughters. In 2050s, the 5 million girls get replaced with 3 million girls. China could fall to 1.1 billion people in 2050 and 400 million people in 2100. Those 400 million people would mostly be old. China would have about 30-40 million fertile women in 2100.
China, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Italy all have shrinking populations. This means over 20% of the world population is already shrinking.
Demand for housing has been down in Japan for decades. The average value of real estate is less than half what it was in the 1980s and 1990s. People assumed that real estate prices always rise. This is the case with rising population and rising demand. Falling population means falling demand for everything. An Aging population makes this worse. People buy houses and major items be the time they are fifty, then they save and spend less. Japan’s per capita income is now less than half of the per capita income in the USA. Japan used to be at 70% of US per capital income. Japan has 10 million empty houses.
No country has a fully paid in national retirement system. This kind of retirement system means that you put in all of your retirement savings into your own account and then fully live off of those funds. The Japan and US pension systems involve having a guarantee based upon taking a portion of annual tax revenue and then distributing it to the people old enough to qualify. This works fine when we have 3 or more working age person for each retired person. We can tax 25% of income and get 75% of one persons salary. Give one third or half to one pensioner. They have enough to live (not well but enough at a modest level). Japan is heading to one working age person for each pensioner and China could head to one working age person for two pensioners. One child for two parents. If government taxes the one person 30%, they would have to give it all to the pensioner and have no money for any other government and the pensioners would not have enough.
The banks of the world and economies would collapse as the population ages and collapses.
People can make excuses about it. Well of course it is too expensive to have kids. Women need to have their careers. It does not matter. If the world not solving this issue means 250 million people in 2200 and ruined economies in 2035 and beyond. The world should not stop in 2200, if you run it forward from there then it could get to 50 million in 2400. NOTE: if there was super antiaging tech which did not extend fertility it would just mean more people alive who were 80+ years old.
Sweden and Denmark have some of the most aggressive pro-baby and pro-family policies in the world. Sweden brought the fertility rate up from 1.55 back up to 1.83. This is still below 2.1 so it slows down the decline. All of these policies need to be adopted and enhanced but they are not enough.
The world has armies of men in national armies to defend each country. They want to prevent another country from killing people in their country. There needs to be an army of surrogate women who are paid the wages of soldiers to defend the future of each country.
If the rich women in Shanghai will disregard an offer of $25000 to have a child, then a poor women from the rural areas of China could be willing to have the frozen eggs of that women in Shanghai. NOTE: the reality is that the leadership in China wants the high class and educated urban women to have children. 100 million rural women could be paid to have an extra 100 million babies each decade. This would make up the shortage of babies in China. This would be $2.5 trillion over a decade and another $2.5 trillion for extra childcare support. China’s military budget is $224 billion in 2023 and increasing by about 10% each year. It would be about $2.5 trillion over the 2020s. Population birth shortage mitigation needs to be at the level of current annual defense budgets or even beyond. NOTE: the costs get worse if the shortage of birth persists for decades. If you could not convince them to have 2 kids then how do you convince them to have 4?
Egg freezing and in vitro fertilization works. Surrogate birthing works. These things are done at about a million per year already. They work at something near the necessary scale. There is no functional artificial womb technology. This is too important and urgent to chance it on possible technology. There could also be aging reversal that extends life and extends the maximum age of fertility up to 60 or 80 or more. However, this does not exist yet and may not exist.
Japan and other countries would do the mass surrogate plan as well. Some advanced countries who can attract immigrants could use a clause requiring two children surrogacy or four natural children as a condition of immigration. There is only 10 million total immigrants per year globally and only 4 million net total immigrants.
We will see how this plays out for Japan, China and South Korea over the next two or three decades. What happens to Japans economy as they go from 122 million people to 100 million people in 2050 while at the same time the median age goes from 48 to 55? What happens to China’s economy as they go from 1.4 billion people to 1.1 billion and the age goes from 38 to 53. What happens to the globally important banks in those countries? What happens to the world banking system?
Japan’s economy was flat at 5 trillion from 1999 to 2023. Does Japan’s economy drop to 4 trillion or 3 trillion with the 20% drop in population and 40% drop in working age population? Japan has shown and is showing that a shrinking aging population means a terrible economy.
China’s economy has been heavily real estate dependent.
A PBoC survey of urban households conducted in 2019 revealed that the value of housing composed 59 percent of households’ total assets, while mortgage loans stood at 12 percent of total assets. Kenneth Rogoff estimated that the real estate sector and associated activities accounted for 29 percent of China’s GDP, comparable to both Ireland and Spain before the global financial crisis. A CaixiaBank report estimated that the real estate industry accounted for about 30 percent of China’s GDP after considering the whole supply chain and its inputs.
If China real estate market halves like Japan’s real estate, then that alone would be a 15% hit to GDP. If this was combined with 40% drop in the working age population, then what happens to the economy. What would $10-15 trillion annual hit to global GDP do to the world economy?
This can be financially offset if there is an AI, self driving and humanoid robotics economics miracle. China can continue urbanization from 65% to 85% over the next 15-20 years. We need to have children to give a good future world to the children. It is a huge problem if we do not even make the children to give the world.
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.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
The post exhibits first-order thinking: assuming that a trend of change will hold, with absolutely nothing happening in reaction. In reality, there are feedback loops that may counteract, and other changes in the making. A low birthrate persisting for a long time will trigger more reactions than just pro-birth government policies.
Some feedback loops:
* Natural selection feedback: women with genes that enhance reproductive drive (not just sex drive), will out-reproduce those who do lack it.
* Cultural selection feedback: religious and cultural groups that successfully indoctrinate reproduction will grow geometrically, so long as that’s less than the apostasy rate.
* Technological reactions: artificial wombs, for example. Tech is already half-way applied to animals. Governments will create their own population as needed, genetically optimized like in Gattaca.
As for economic impacts, bear in mind that negative economic impacts of population decline assumes an economically productive population. If AI automates production and information and basic services that’s most of the GDP right there (whether the profit goes to shareholders or is nationalize remains to be seen). The GDP would be decoupled from population, and remaining jobs will be ones for which the primary qualification of interest is being a biological human.
I do discuss countering effects. Countries like Japan, Denmark and Sweden paying tens of billions to boost fertility and recommending the mass use of Invitro fertilization and surrogates.
BTW: where are the feedback loops in Japan, Spain, Italy, Korea and China? The countries furthest along in this process?
Correct, you did point out fast-acting feedback loops in the form of government policies that support childcare and fertility.
Japan, Spain, Italy, Korea and China do have low fertility, and that government policy responses to date may be insufficient to achieve replacement-level fertility, if that is even an explicit or prioritised goal, or policies to do so may simply date years or decades to reverse the trend.
Selective sweep effects have multiple generation longer timelines and to be fair you may find a population crash by 2200, followed by expansion since everyone remaining will have strong biological urges to reproduce and be part of cultural/religious/political movements that socially condition people to reproduce.
Note that several regions still have high birth rates, and if that trend continues will make up for the shortfall. That said, such regions already struggle to provide food, housing, education, healthcare, employment for the majority of their population, in which case a larger populations just increase those deficits.
Best comment here, agree completely.
The labor-intensive part or reproduction is raising children, not gestating them. The comments about artificial wombs must be from people with no kids. I have 4 so I have done my part and I know what I am talking about. Wake me up when a robot can open or close a ziplock bag and they still won’t be able to raise children to self sufficient adulthood.
Let’s game out one possibility.
Gott’s application of Copernican theory suggests if trillions of people will be born in the future, the probability becomes extremely low that we would not exist then, rather than now.
Other than as statistical outliers, how to explain that we are alive now, and not in some future time, without invoking impending racial extinction?
One possible alternative would seem to be that we will become something else, but then the question just changes to: Why am I not a transhuman? This does not help.
Without declaring ourselves as outliers (the chance of which is, by definition, 5% or less) the answer seems to be that there will not be many more of us created in the future. This sounds uncomfortably like extinction.
But there is another possibility.
It may be that many of us are going to become intelligent machines, or genetically altered beings, or something else that, regardless of what it is, will be essentially immortal. Further, as more copies are needed, we might simply create copies of ourselves. Assuming no immortal souls, we would certainly have the means by which to do it.
And it even makes a certain sort of sense. If society needs another gifted plasma physicist, why not duplicate one? Or a dozen? It would surely be far more expedient than having several hundred new people created and, over the next few decades, hope that one will gravitate towards this specialty and be extremely gifted at it. And after a few decades, despite all of them necessarily recalling having been one person alive now, or a short time from now, they would likely become much different from each other.
The point being, in this scenario, if we do not begin our existences shortly before this transformation into how we replace people, we would likely never exist at all, as we are approaching a future where there will be very few entirely new beings being created.
Rather than our extinction, we may be facing our own immortality, of a sort.
Also playing into this is that it is possible that higher ethics will require we only augment our numbers with algorithm-based intelligences, where the emulation of intelligent beings is near flawless, but there is no one home, no actual sense of self or awareness.
Such creations would make the perfect servants as, being no more alive than a clock-radio or a wind-up toy, they could be assigned mundane and undesirable functions for all eternity, and never need pay, promotion, entertainment, time off, and so on. Even destroying them at will for the mildest of reasons, or none at all, would involve no sin, no crime, and no violation of rights. At worse it would simply be a waste of resources.
Seems ectogenesis and robotic child-care might be the only option… Oddly enough I only wrote about that for interstellar travel (Crowl et al, 2012), not preserving our terrestrial future.
When young people have lots of job opportunities, a stable environment, and foresee a better future ahead they will have many children.
The problem is self-repairing.
The old population grown was for a civilization switching from an agricultural to an industrial one.
foresee a better future ahead they will have many children.
FALSE, when stated without the crucial condition: when they foresee a better future by taking personal steps to ensure their own prosperity … then they decouple from idealizing of a better future WITH children, and a better future economized and maximally entertained by having NO children.
See… your point — as honest and well meaning as it is, is a trope that has long been hauled forth and trumpeted as ‘the way to correct the problem’, whereas, ‘the problem’ is already quite different thap n you paint it. The younger generation(s) have already enveloped and adopted the synthetic world empowered and projected by their soon-to-be-AI-fueled ‘smart phones’. They adopt and present and ‘identify with’ avatars of their collectively idealized future, a Barbie World (of sorts) future, that doesn’t tax them with reproduction, with global ethics and morals, with honor to one’s ancestors, one’s country’s history, or one’s remarkable economics ascendence, IN ANY WAY.
The parents — the ‘boomers and newer’ who have such eff-ed up values centered around the purposefulness of children, of honor of grandparents, and a life of work with a scant wind-down of pleasant retirement … that picture is COMPLETELY antithetical to the iPhone addicted up-and-coming nameless generation. THEY DO NOT WANT the burden of all that conservatıve thinking, those mundane limits on their entertainment, their friendships and their ever-more-modest-and-proud-of-it living conditions.
OUR very thinking, we Post-Boomers, is antiquated, obsolete and basically going extinct.
So the problem, the problem of reproduction to maintain some semblence of a productive middle-and-lower class to manufacture everything, to fix the switches, to mend the ever-breading society? We’re not going to get buy-in from the up-and-coming generations for it. TOO MUCH HASSLE. Almost no apparent reward-for-investment. Hardship, without a golden parachute. Building a civilization’s infrastructure without the rainfall to fill the dams, wind to spin the windmills, sunlight to sparkle electrons against solar panels.
IT WILL NOT “GET BETTER” until something about the digital world significantly changes.
And that I can NOT predict.
⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅
I applaud this answer, GoatGuy: the uncomfortable truth. It’s no one’s fault per se, and there are various factors at play here, but maybe we are about to witness a new phase in natural selection. Our environment has changed drastically and those who can adapt while retaining an earnest desire to reproduce will pass on the genes associated with that…
My grandfather, born in 1916, was one of 11 children and his parents lost 2 of them before they reached the age of ten. Unimaginable. There was limited plumbing, no indoor toilets, probably no electricity, periods of mass unemployment; his mother would have been a house wife and his father was a full-time soldier staring the war to end all wars in the face… (he survived it, partly by choosing to join the “suicide squad” and become a machine gunner in no man’s land versus being forced to walk over the top into a hail of bullets; very literally kill or be killed). As a devout Catholic, I’m told it played heavily on his mind for the rest of his life – it sure as hell wasn’t a video game.
Was life easy back then, I wonder? And it wasn’t just the early 20th Century that was hard…
I had a related conversation with a young female friend in her mid-twenties not too long ago. She said she wanted kids but wasn’t sure about it because of the state of the world. I pointed out that the world wasn’t perfect, sure, but it never was…at least you can go about your day without a band of Vikings appearing on the horizon. And it’s true. We need to stop idealising and catastrophising both the present and the future. Life is a mixed bag and will continue to be so and, all being well, when we’re gone, the world will keep on turning and people will be here enjoying what we enjoyed and worrying about new things but the main thing is that they keep on going, just like our ancestors did, and just like we have to… Pay it forward.
Well, I do recall, going to high school in the seventies, that a great many of my peers were convinced they would never see old age, because the world would go boom before then, for one reason or another.
I myself wanted to start a private space program but the plan called for making around 50 billion dollars first and I felt that wasn’t going to happen with a wife and kids at the same time and starting from zip. I compromised and told myself I’d reconsider marriage at age 30. I quickly sold out and was engaged less than a year out of undergrad. Then proceeded to have kids. I still got wealthy, although not quite a one percenter, and nowhere near Musk levels . . . yet (although radical life extension could still make it happen, Buffet didn’t have his first billion until he was 57). My kids are all on track to do better than myself (save one, sigh) and I have I have quite a few grand children. It just seems that I couldn’t conceive of a life without family, and that got instilled into my kids.
I’m not really concerned about the race going extinct because of an unwillingness to have kids. Other potential reasons worry me, but not that one.
Hey! It’s GoatGuy! Welcome back. Had begun to worry something had happened to you, or that this odd comment application had driven you off.
Population growth depends on fertility and death rates.
When you consider these catastrophic scenarios, Brian, it seems you completely ignore ALL of your own posts about longevity or immortality science advances.
Well there will be about 150 million Amish by the year 2200 if their fertility rate doesn’t drop, which it hasn’t for the past 150 years. That would mean the Amish would be more than half the world’s population at that point. There are other subgroups with similar extremely high fertility, such as the Salafist Muslims, ultra orthodox jews, Quiverfull Christians, etc. These groups are all intentionally isolating themselves from the mainstream, secular, anti-natal culture, and have extremely high retention rates of over 90%, over 95% in the case of the Amish. Barring some sort of apocalypse or serious military intervention from secular governments, I don’t see these groups disappearing or dying out. It’s quite plausible that by 2200, liberal democracy and secular culture will have died out and been replaced by some sort of agrarian culture led by these highly religious subgroups.
I say virtual environments became more accessible and just as real, if not more real, than our reality. That could certainly be what happened.
Can’t help but feel that a population of 0.25 billion would be a better world, and still ample enough.
I was thinking much the same thing, but there would be lots of turmoil and suffering until it happened. Also, it likely be difficult to maintain technologies like we have today, with smaller population (pure speculation on my part).
Personally, I think there is more to it than straight math though. I am still a bit more worried about future overpopulation more than I am underpopulation. Things have a way of working themselves out usually. When the population goes down enough, people will have more incentives to re-populate, and it will likely happen without government intervention.
Until then, I hope that we don’t have a cycle of violence against us older folks.
We should be seriously thinking about creating artificial wombs and eggs to reverse the trend in the next 2 decades. More and more women do not want to be bothered with having children, especially in countries in East Asia. Much of these women believe this inconvenience and disadvantage them. There are some truths in this. To make it more fair for women and to break the reliance of men on women for procreation artificial wombs will be the way to go to prevent population calamity.
Japan is and will be losing almost 1 million people per year and China will start losing 10-15 million people per year there is a shortage of 20 million babies and increasing to 70 million babies per year.
When the topic of biotech to stop or reverse aging comes up, among the first objections is that it would lead to an unsustainable growth in population.
That’s why it’s so often assumed to be something that’s not made universally available and cheap. It’s assumed that governments wouldn’t support it by policy.
However, in a world with declining birth rates and an aging population – that imposes increasing medical costs on governments and economies, that won’t be true. Governments will support mass availability of aging reversal treatments – simply because they are cheaper than treating the sequelae of aging.
Similarly the AI robotics revolution eliminating the need for more human workers to support economic growth is seen as a threat but it’s also the answer to declining birth rates and populations of young workers.
It seems premature to project any of these trends out many decades but the fact that declining birth rates match very well with AI/Robotics and Aging Reversal as counter trends is worth noting.
Good points.
Demographic trends more than 30 out are impossible to predict. The birth rate between now and 2200 will ebb and flow just like its always done through out human history.
This time it is different. More and more women now feel that it is unfair for them to bear the burden of procreation, especially when this would disadvantage them- which can be true since most women choose to have a career. It is time we put our scientific mind together to invent artificial wombs.
Anyone who feels strongly about this should be talking to their spouse about having 12 kids or hiring a fleet of surrogate mothers while putting an addition on the house instead of lobbying people who don’t want kids to do the work for them.
Every time I hear that no nation has had fertility levels below X and returned to replacement levels I wonder what other periods of time where such drops have occurred they are taking their data from. Are there big empty parts of the map where people in the 1600s had low fertility and couldn’t get back from it? It’s interesting that people assume that the technological society that makes human children expensive instead of free labour as they were in the past will survive long enough to keep fertility low right up until the end. As if when the people who make tractors and other productive agricultural tech start dying off the profitability of big farm families won’t make a sudden comeback.
Well anyway, when humanity goes extinct and gets to Hell it can say hello to the Pandas. 🔥 🐼 👋 🔥 I bet we will regret having lobotomized AI to keep it from advancing after we are gone. LOL.
PS, the autocomplete email address sharing is still an issue.
Why are my long comments being censored or not posted for other reasons? I tried to leave a long response here, as I have to other NBF articles, but they don’t show up even a day later.
I’m aware of this problem so i saved the comment and posted it on Twitter to you here:
https://twitter.com/NewThinking2/status/1682664275762880515
Japan is and will be losing almost 1 million people per year and China will start losing 10-15 million people per year there is a shortage of 20 million babies and increasing to 70 million babies per year. BTW: I do not see any long comment in the pending queue. All pending comments have been approved. If you saved your comment, you can cut an past and try to post it in chunks.
Israel has an above replacement TFR and is considered a developed country. While it is true that no other country can boast an international propaganda campaign portraying its people as the replacement for Christ as the Innocent Victim Bringing Light Unto The Nations via the 200+ Holocaustianity films out of their cousins in Hollywood, Israel at least demonstrates indoctrination of its females can make them act more like 1950s wives of returning war vets than metrosexualized sterile worker bees.
The problem is getting control of mass media from them.
Israel is an anomaly.
https://taubcenter.org.il/wp-content/uploads/Total-fertility-rates-ENG.png
Undoubtedly it is due to the demographic competition with the Palestinians whose TFR is 3.6.
I believe what we need is anti aging. People have kids later in life because they just cant afford them earlier. If we live lets say until we are 200, then people can have their first kid in their fourties, and then more in their fifties or sixties
No you don’t understand the real problem. Sure there are economic expenses but there are deeper seated cultural issues that lead to this state. The youngest generation in much of the developed world self identifies with a subculture that diminishes and eliminates even the possibility of children.
Hopefully this subculture will burn itself out so that subcultures that were viable can grow and thrive, much like how a bush fire clears the ground for new growth. In my subculture children are common.
ADvanced cities are getting so expensive, the government need to subsidize spending from baby to uni, travel, dinner, lunch and breakfast, and school materials. Cheaper to attack at the roots.
I can assure you that people who want to have kids flee US cites for many reasons.
It does look like in 2200 or so the population of the world will be under 500 million, barring radical life extension.
America needs immigrants. Any society that sees their population drop will see the value of everything go down. I think we need at least a .5% population growth rate.
Any society that imports large numbers of culturally different immigrants is going to self destruct. See the recent riots in France. America (and Europe, Canada, Australia) needs deportations, and lots of them.
Unless you are a Native American, Doubting Thomas, then you and I are descendants of immigrants, are we not?
I’m a descendant of settlers. The difference matters to national character.
You may argue that settlers are “immigrants” too in some sense — say if you are an “emigrant” from one land you are an “immigrant” to another land even if unsettled. But then what do we call “immigrants” that “immigrate” to a settled land? Why not just call the union of the two sets “migrants” and reserve “immigrants” for those destined for a settled land just as we reserve “emigrants” for those leaving a settled land?
The immigration isn’t the problem, it’s the culturally different immigrants. Importing a million English is going to have a totally different effect than importing a million Somalis. Behavior is downstream from genetics and culture is downstream from behavior. To think that we can or should import culturally different people is a recipe for disaster.
As in experiments made by J.B. Calhoun we are looking at a form of social breakdown, usually the interpretation is based on physical overpopulation, but some are more promising, defining the triggering event as the moment when there are more individual than social “roles”: we are a lot down this route because we give more importance (money) to entertainers and middleman compared to productive individuals, we had to create new “social roles” and swell them to keep social stability.
About J.B. Calhoun – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun
Reverting the trend is almost impossible if we bound ourselves to this planet or to our present social structures because technology is eroding the “social roles” but is also the foundation of our standard of living, the simplest answer is developing and sponsoring extraplanetary colonization: creating new environments where there is a huge demand to fill real social roles as colonist! Are there some possibilities about social stabilization but are more theoretical, the perfect society of Gospels is one, but almost every tried form was short-lived and ended with a bit of gore.
Mothers need to be paid a salary to have more than 3 child’s, my mother get 4 kids, she educate them , one phd in chemistry and 3 engineers.
I understand china to have educated people to have kids, this really hard to have no educated child
a partial solution may be to have the government subsidize female births but not male births. opposite of many traditional views. increase the proportion of women as a percentage of the population. this wont solve the problem but it would help. free ivf for women having girls but not boys. increased social payments for raising girls not boys. You need women to replace themselves. You only need a small number of men to do that. Not 1 for 1. Those future generations of women would lack male partners but that is already happening for other reasons.
Does this model take into account that different population strata have different number of children?
In Sweden, about 15% of the couples have 3 children. Let is assume that this trait is heritable. With every generation -say every 30 years- this subpopulation grows by 50%.
This would mean that the 3 child population would be:
2020: 1.5 million
2060: 2.25 million
2090: 3.4 million
2120: 5.1 million
2150: 7.6 million
2180: 11.4 million
So even if the part of the population that is having 2 children or less – about 85%, ie 8.5 million today – go completely extinct, the fertile ones more than compensated for this shortfall over the long run.
Most likely, there are similar submunitions in all countries, which means that we will be done in the long run. In fact, when the norm is 3 children or more, we will have an accelerating population explosion on our hands.
I guess the critical question is what genetic and cultural traits do this strata have besides having more children? Less career driven? Lower IQ? What about the culture?
The future belongs to those who turn up.
Thought-provoking article, Brian. As I explain to the young men I mentor, this is a self-correcting problem. The question is, will we head it off and have a soft landing? Or will we kick the can down the road and have a crash landing?
It is the same thought I have on Social Security and Medicare.
It is the same thought I have on US gov’t debt and unbridled spending.
The BRICS countries are forming their own currency and backing it with Gold.
The BRICS countries already have a PPP greater than the G7.
If investors ever move away from the dollar as a default currency (China & many Middle-Eastern countries have started) then we have a crash landing.
As Earnest Hemmingway said when asked:
“I went bankrupt in two ways: Gradually, then suddenly…”
There have been many efforts to replace the US dollar as the basis for international trade. There is no reason to think that any plan by BRICS is anything but fantasy. None of the BRICS have anything in common or any history or basis for cooperation. If it involves a Gold Standard it’s DOA. There are good reasons there are no gold backed currencies in the modern world.
You make good points. I don’t know what’s going to happen 15 years from now. I just know that spending way above income by our federal government is not wise. And it leaves us vulnerable to bad outcomes.
Couple that with the fact that many large countries are openly rooting against us, and it makes me nervous for my children and grandchildren.
I love my country, but I’m not blind to the sense of entitlement that has gripped our nation. People who are selfish and unwilling to make sacrifices and work hard do not have Bright Futures.
Why the weird obsession with this lately? I guess the question is… so what? Also what makes you think this is a permanent thing?
People ‘feel’ like they don’t want children because so much else is more important or they don’t have financial or time availability. What can we do to change this? Why do we need to?
Will technology make this point moot in next 200 years?
Is this indicative of a ‘steady state’ population based on social density? How do we build society around a steady state?
Is a planetary or internal system always aimed at a final steady state and expansion must happen with exactly that (moon, Mars, onwards)
Is the constant growth philosophy incorrect or naive, do we need a more mature outlook on society?
Governments and people will have nearly 200 years to see this coming and they won’t sit around doing nothing. Robot care givers will greatly reduce the burden of child rearing which is one of the main causes of the reduction of the number of children desired. The saving of gametes at a young age will probably be more common and will be paid for by countries as the situation becomes more clear. So infertility will will be less of a problem. As robots and AI do more of our work and hence there is less of a need to work, couples will be able to have the time to take care of children. Also, ecotgenesis (artificial wombs) will be a mature technology well before 2200. So depopulation is a real problem but it isn’t fully explored until all possible interventions and relevant factors are considered.
You know, while he’s projected it out to 180 years from now, the real disaster actually happens in a few decades, when long lived elders collide with a distinct lack of youngsters. It’s the distortion of the age distribution that gets you, not the absolute numbers.
Well, the absolute numbers will get you, too, when they drop below what’s neccessary to sustain the complexity of a modern society. But at the sub-replacement rates we’re seeing now, the age distribution gets you, first.