A major point the article is missing is that after population peak comes population decline. The pattern of "demographic transition" is that as lifespans extend, infant mortality declines, and lifestyles change the birthrate drops. But it doesn't drop just to replacement rate, it drops much below replacement rate.
Most developed countries are in this state now where their population would be declining but for immigration.
When today's fast-growing countries reach the same point in their demographic transitions, the whole world's population will enter decline.
This could happen even earlier than around 2100 when the UN estimates; other demographers are forecasting a date more like 2065. [1]
What will the economics be of a world in population decline? How will culture and policies change to eventually stabilise the decline? Lots of questions...
A major point the article is missing is that after population peak comes population decline. The pattern of "demographic transition" is that as lifespans extend, infant mortality declines, and lifestyles change the birthrate drops. But it doesn't drop just to replacement rate, it drops much below replacement rate.
Great. Better to have it happen through declining birth rates than through natural disaster, pandemic, starvation, etc.
Additionally the data points for the low-fertility countries are extremely reliable, while the data for the few countries with supposedely rapidly expanding population is only guesswork.
Most of the projected population increase in Africa is based upon a small number of countries like Nigeria, where most of the people live on the countryside, and there never have been reliable census to accurately predict the future population.
The only thing we know is that Africans moving to cities stop having many children, and that the fertlity rate in the richer African areas is rapidly decreasing. In Northern and Southern Africa the fertlity rate is already below 2.5, approaching sub-replacement levels. [1]
Which means it is definitely possible that the entire world will be entering sub-replacement level in the coming decades.
Unfortunately the African coutries with a high-fertility projection haven an interest in lying about their numbers, because it means more NGO money and political influence. [2]
The country with the lowest fertility rate in the world is South Korea, which has a fertility rate of <1. [3] South-Korea is facing extinction. [4]
Additionally there are hints that China is lying about their population numbers as well. [5]
India, which is the most populated country in the world, has already fallen to sub-replacement levels in almost all counties, and stands at a fertility rate of 2.2, as of 2017. [6]
Do you feel the assumption that all countries will follow the same pattern may be incorrect? Would it be possible to achieve high GDP and yet still maintain a high birth rate?
Things aren't quite this simple because developed nations don't act as homogeneous wholes. The trends we see on the international level are followed within nations themselves and even down to the state, county, and city level. For instance this [1] is a graph of US income vs fertility. People who are earning substantial amounts of money are, like you said, simply not not reproducing enough to maintain their population. Yet people people who cannot even afford to feed themselves, let alone any children, are reproducing rapidly. The birth rate of those earning less than $10k is nearly 50% higher than those earning more than $200k per year. And the gradient between these two is somewhat disconcertingly smooth.
Religion is another factor that plays into birth rates. Muslims, for instance, have extremely high fertility rates and that stays true even once they migrate to developed nations. For instance the Muslim fertility rate in North America is about 2.7. It's also why the Muslim population is expected to increase 70% by 2060 whereas the number of unaffiliated is expected to increase by 3%, Buddhists decrease by 7%, and so on. [2] Those number increases are not affected by conversion which plays a roughly net zero role in Islam with about 25% of people leaving the religion, and 25% joining it.
So what you're looking at is more of a demographic switch than an economic one. People who are highly educated, secular, and high income will gradually die off, failing to replace themselves. At the same time individuals of lower income and those who place less value on education and more on religion will continue to increase in numbers well beyond replacement. Basically, so long as there is at least one group within a nation that consistently produces in excess of replacement, they will eventually replace any and every group that does not. And, in the longrun, that group will also guarantee that, over time, the population (local, nation, and world) will also continue to increase. So we'll see a population peak, a demographic swap paired with a population decline, and then a return to a growing population - likely with vastly different norms and values as a society than we have today.
---
Of course my analysis is also flawed because it assumes no revolutionary change in the norms of today. These range from the unpleasant to consider such as changes to welfare systems, to the highly pleasant to consider such as the possibility of expanding our populations outward with the colonization of new planets and space in general. But ultimately, I do not see longterm population decline as probable in any scenario.
Your article also affirms this hypothesis. For instance in their prediction graph they show that Sweden will now, even with 0 migration, see consistent population growth. Sweden is simply playing out this scenario in fast forward due to a very small population paired with high migration rates which did little than accelerate the rate of demographic replacement. E.g. in the 90s Sweden's population was less than 9 million and with negative fertility rates, they were starting to see population declines. Then enter the migrations and now their population is greater than 10 million and their population is now back to growing, even without any more migration.
Related to that, I highly recommend Factfulness[1]. You can try to answer 13 a/b/c questions here[2]. Most educated people score lower than if they would have just chosen answers randomly. It's really hard to discuss population and poverty if most people worldview is so skewed.
Btw, I've been wondering how population stabilization (it pretty much already stabilized in the US and EU) will influence real estate. Historically real estate have been a remarkably good investment. But historically population kept growing pretty fast. I'd love to hear some thoughts or recommended reading on that topic.
Wow, I just took the quiz and it was rather enlightening. I ended up scoring reasonably well (9/13), but only because getting the first few wrong taught me to stop taking such a dismal view of the world. If I hadn't been shown the correct answers until the end, I probably would have done even worse.
I might have to look into that book!
I scored 54% and all of the cases that I err'd were due to the reality being slightly better than I thought. That makes me think that to pass this test you do what I am not going to tell you now...
Investment: I personally think about that. The area I live in is popular due to a good nearby university so I think population will grow at least for the next decade.
But in a time frame of 30-60 years... I'm not counting on getting the money back for my house.
There are massive issues with the calculation of poverty designed to give the illusion of progress under globalized production chains. In reality, the metric is completely disconnected from what people identify as poverty. The entire premise is flawed. See: Steve Pinker for an example of this technique in use.
As Hans Rosling pointed out in Factfulness, the birth and literacy rates in Sweden in the 19th century were on par with the poorest of African countries today, resulting in fully 20% of the population becoming refugees in North America to escape famine. And today, 150 years later, it's... Sweden. The ideal of modern civilization. He said he was born in "Egypt", by which he meant the economy of Sweden in the late 1940s was similar to Egypt today.
With that in mind, is there any reason that the poor countries of Africa today can't be the Sweden of tomorrow? It's more irrational to say they'll stay poor and overpopulated than it is to say they'll become wealthy and modern with zero population growth.
That's okay, because the population density of Africa is very low (it's comparable to that of the Americas, much less than Europe/Asia)[1], it's currently only 15% of the world's population[2], and Africa is an enormous continent[3] the fact of which the Mercator projection distorts[4].
Such long term predictions have relatively little value due to the sensitivity to the initial inputs. Any small deviation from reality will result in a huge deviation in the longer term and 80 years is much too long to predict with any accuracy.
Typically the only useful info you can get out of such long term studies is the sign of the change and the order of magnitude.
This is absolutely incorrect, and you have no idea what you are talking about. There is no sensitive chaotic model behind this, it's completely straightforward dynamics.
The fertility rate is about 2 kids per woman now. But the generation of 20 year olds is much larger than the generation of 40 year olds. So even though the generation of 0 year olds is the same size as that of 20 year olds, in 20 years time we will have replaced a small 40 year old generation by a large 20 year old generation.
There are only two factors here: Fertility rate per woman, and death rate. This prediction is not terribly sensitive to either, and both are easy to measure accurately and on quite stable long term trajectories:
It could be that we are approaching a great filter: "when an
intelligent species has the freedom to decouple the great incentive for reproduction (sexual pleasure) from the actual reproduction, it turns out individuals choose not to reproduce, which leads to the collapse of the whole civilization"
From what I understand people are having less sex period.
I guess its some combination of women's lib (women more likely to say no to sex, relationships and children, wanting careers), people working more (side hustles are now a thing), and there now being more things to do (you can now socialise on the internet without actually meeting anyone).
But I wonder how the model would be affected by, say, the mass availability of a significant longevity increase, brought about by some sort of medical breakthrough?
Since people would presumably not use that extra time to have more children (they aren’t time-limited now), the result would just be a linear increase in population. The important part here is the change from the exponential models of Malthus etc.
There are several factors here: the age at which people realistically will still want children and the fact that they themselves will simply be alive for a longer time.
Medical breakthroughs tend to affect the latter rather than the former more, though the fact that people live longer has an effect on the age at which they start with having children. In my grandparents generation it wasn't rare for 19 year olds to be married and to have their first child on the way, my parents generation had their children when approaching 30 (on average), and the present day generation has their first child later still. There is some correlation here with education levels and of course from country to country there are still huge differences but overall those seem to be the trends.
So a significant longevity increase brought about by a medical breakthrough will likely cause people to have their children at an even later age (with all the associated risks, possibly resulting in much more screening), somewhat offsetting the effect of those people themselves being alive for longer.
Social security would be a real problem, especially if the time that people could work productively would not increase at the same rate as the longevity.
These predictions are laughable because they ignore the fact that fertility, like everything else, is heritable.
The people who aren't reproducing will die out. The people who are reproducing will do so, and their kids will keep reproducing too. These are separate sub-groups of the population.
As a very simple example, the Amish population doubles roughly every 20 years because of their high and early birth rates. It's not hard to calculate that there will be billions of them within a few centuries because of the power of exponential growth.
Any analysis which doesn't separate sub-groups by fertility, or handle the heritability of fertility, is meaningless.
All we're in now is a temporary state caused by rapid introduction of birth control and porn and other such technologies which suppress fertility. No different from hitting a bacterial colony with a drug that stops 90% of them from reproducing. It reverses growth for a few generations, but the logic of evolution and exponential growth always wins in the end and the population hits its carrying capacity once again. Which for humanity with modern tech, is going to be a very, very ugly situation.
It's far more likely that the Amish will have disappeared altogether in "a few centuries" than that they will number in the "billions". There is no Amish gene.
>> This new equilibrium is different from the one in the past when it was the very high mortality that kept population growth in check. In the new balance it will be low fertility keeps population changes small.
Culture. It's principally cultural not biological. It's perhaps clearer to say it is a decrease in fecundity rather than fertility.
Worldwide experience has been that increasingly developed nations have lower average fecundity. There are various likely reasons but the correlation seems to be quite robust. In most countries it seems that the causal link was from development to fertility. It is arguable that China reversed the causation, politically limiting fecundity.
This is a uniquely human dynamic. Pretty much every other species in the world drives its population to its Malthusian limit.
Excessive taxes and expensive housing. In much of Europe it is simply impossible to buy a house on a single income, if you obey 100% of tax laws. These taxes are used to pay for the elderly, their welfare (pensions) and healthcare.
If you are in the US you may not appreciate how heavy the tax burden is in Europe. It varies by country but its normally something like: 30% payroll tax paid by employer. 30% income tax paid by you. 20% sales tax paid by you. Then, very expensive housing due to the high population densities and limited room to expand.
Additionally in Europe, many parents want their children to be educated in English, however the language of instruction is usually the local language. This is partly why the migrant stream into the Anglosphere is so high. The alternative are private international schools, which are hideously expensive.
This is one of the major cause of the destruction of the environment we're seeing globally.
All forecasts predict another 60% (!!) increase in global population before it stabilises.
Forget about banning plastic straws or flying less (which are feel-good measures more than anything else) with such numbers... We need to take dramatic and effective steps.
There are 80 years left until the end of the century. This increase is far from being inevitable! But, again, we prefer to ignore these key issues and focus on marginal, feel-good measures instead.
This increase is essentially unavoidable at this point in time. It happens despite the fact that fertile couples now only reproduce at replacement rate. But older smaller generations get replaced by larger younger generations. There is a multi decadal lag in population dynamics.
Why forget about the easiest steps if we need dramatic ones?
Why should rich people continue to fly around the world while you try implementing big restrictions on everyone? This makes no sense.
Perhaps you meant "In addition to bans on (...), we need dramatic measures"? Also, suggesting some steps would help understand how stronger your proposals are.
Perhaps you didn't read the article, because its main point is that the official UN forecast is for world population to essentially flatten out at 10.9B around 2100, which is 40% more than today, not 60%.
There is always the doomsday argument: we should expect a significant population decline in the near future in order to justify the statistical typicality of our present day existence.
News items like these are then used as fodder for higher immigration limits so that the liberal parties keep getting elected further, even as they enjoy less and less support from their already existing citizens.
This data should mandatory in all school curricula throughout the world. One of the greatest impediments to understanding the social reality of the world around us is the general population's ignorance of this data.
We need people to (a) understand that the world's population is increasing but that the rate of increase will inexorably slow and that (b) this means that the population will plateau. We then need people to ask themselves can the Earth support that level of population of 11 billion. The answer is an incontrovertible "yes". Anybody who claims the Earth cannot support 11 billion people is factually incorrect. Is it going to cause environmental stress? Yes. Will it cause environmental collapse? No.
People also fail to understand this other simple fact. Even though there will be more mouths to feed, there will be more hands to make the food. And given economies of scale, it'll arguably be easier to feed 11 billion than 7 billion.
[+] [-] dzdt|6 years ago|reply
Most developed countries are in this state now where their population would be declining but for immigration.
When today's fast-growing countries reach the same point in their demographic transitions, the whole world's population will enter decline.
This could happen even earlier than around 2100 when the UN estimates; other demographers are forecasting a date more like 2065. [1]
What will the economics be of a world in population decline? How will culture and policies change to eventually stabilise the decline? Lots of questions...
[1] Lutz et al 2018 : https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/sites/jrcsh/files/lutz_et_al_2018_d...
[+] [-] Balgair|6 years ago|reply
https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_kelly_on_how_technology_evol...
[+] [-] nerdponx|6 years ago|reply
Great. Better to have it happen through declining birth rates than through natural disaster, pandemic, starvation, etc.
[+] [-] user17843|6 years ago|reply
Most of the projected population increase in Africa is based upon a small number of countries like Nigeria, where most of the people live on the countryside, and there never have been reliable census to accurately predict the future population.
The only thing we know is that Africans moving to cities stop having many children, and that the fertlity rate in the richer African areas is rapidly decreasing. In Northern and Southern Africa the fertlity rate is already below 2.5, approaching sub-replacement levels. [1]
Which means it is definitely possible that the entire world will be entering sub-replacement level in the coming decades.
Unfortunately the African coutries with a high-fertility projection haven an interest in lying about their numbers, because it means more NGO money and political influence. [2]
The country with the lowest fertility rate in the world is South Korea, which has a fertility rate of <1. [3] South-Korea is facing extinction. [4]
Additionally there are hints that China is lying about their population numbers as well. [5]
India, which is the most populated country in the world, has already fallen to sub-replacement levels in almost all counties, and stands at a fertility rate of 2.2, as of 2017. [6]
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
[2] https://qz.com/africa/1221472/the-story-of-how-nigerias-cens...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/03/south-koreas-f...
[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/south-koreans-could-be-extin...
[5] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/china-has-be...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_union_terri...
[+] [-] adrianN|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iandanforth|6 years ago|reply
https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/29461/what-is-...
[+] [-] Ntrails|6 years ago|reply
I'm not informed, as the quiz result suggests, I just spotted the pattern.
[+] [-] hkai|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjf72|6 years ago|reply
Religion is another factor that plays into birth rates. Muslims, for instance, have extremely high fertility rates and that stays true even once they migrate to developed nations. For instance the Muslim fertility rate in North America is about 2.7. It's also why the Muslim population is expected to increase 70% by 2060 whereas the number of unaffiliated is expected to increase by 3%, Buddhists decrease by 7%, and so on. [2] Those number increases are not affected by conversion which plays a roughly net zero role in Islam with about 25% of people leaving the religion, and 25% joining it.
So what you're looking at is more of a demographic switch than an economic one. People who are highly educated, secular, and high income will gradually die off, failing to replace themselves. At the same time individuals of lower income and those who place less value on education and more on religion will continue to increase in numbers well beyond replacement. Basically, so long as there is at least one group within a nation that consistently produces in excess of replacement, they will eventually replace any and every group that does not. And, in the longrun, that group will also guarantee that, over time, the population (local, nation, and world) will also continue to increase. So we'll see a population peak, a demographic swap paired with a population decline, and then a return to a growing population - likely with vastly different norms and values as a society than we have today.
---
Of course my analysis is also flawed because it assumes no revolutionary change in the norms of today. These range from the unpleasant to consider such as changes to welfare systems, to the highly pleasant to consider such as the possibility of expanding our populations outward with the colonization of new planets and space in general. But ultimately, I do not see longterm population decline as probable in any scenario.
Your article also affirms this hypothesis. For instance in their prediction graph they show that Sweden will now, even with 0 migration, see consistent population growth. Sweden is simply playing out this scenario in fast forward due to a very small population paired with high migration rates which did little than accelerate the rate of demographic replacement. E.g. in the 90s Sweden's population was less than 9 million and with negative fertility rates, they were starting to see population declines. Then enter the migrations and now their population is greater than 10 million and their population is now back to growing, even without any more migration.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
[2] - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/06/why-muslims...
[+] [-] comboy|6 years ago|reply
Btw, I've been wondering how population stabilization (it pretty much already stabilized in the US and EU) will influence real estate. Historically real estate have been a remarkably good investment. But historically population kept growing pretty fast. I'd love to hear some thoughts or recommended reading on that topic.
1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness
2. http://forms.gapminder.org/s3/test-2018
[+] [-] whalabi|6 years ago|reply
What happens to wages? Inflation? Energy? Companies? The share market? ...aged care?
Absolutely fascinating stuff.
[+] [-] gibspaulding|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikorym|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olau|6 years ago|reply
But in a time frame of 30-60 years... I'm not counting on getting the money back for my house.
[+] [-] KSS42|6 years ago|reply
(Interesting result : in many regions women have high rates of post secondary education than men.)
[+] [-] SomeOldThrow|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ElonsMosque|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-global-gates/africa...
[+] [-] beat|6 years ago|reply
With that in mind, is there any reason that the poor countries of Africa today can't be the Sweden of tomorrow? It's more irrational to say they'll stay poor and overpopulated than it is to say they'll become wealthy and modern with zero population growth.
[+] [-] igravious|6 years ago|reply
[1][2] https://www.geolounge.com/continents-population-density/
[3] https://io9.gizmodo.com/africas-true-size-will-blow-you-away...
[4] http://www.petersmap.com/
[+] [-] jacquesm|6 years ago|reply
Typically the only useful info you can get out of such long term studies is the sign of the change and the order of magnitude.
[+] [-] Certhas|6 years ago|reply
The fertility rate is about 2 kids per woman now. But the generation of 20 year olds is much larger than the generation of 40 year olds. So even though the generation of 0 year olds is the same size as that of 20 year olds, in 20 years time we will have replaced a small 40 year old generation by a large 20 year old generation.
There are only two factors here: Fertility rate per woman, and death rate. This prediction is not terribly sensitive to either, and both are easy to measure accurately and on quite stable long term trajectories:
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
[+] [-] raducu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ptah|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benj111|6 years ago|reply
I guess its some combination of women's lib (women more likely to say no to sex, relationships and children, wanting careers), people working more (side hustles are now a thing), and there now being more things to do (you can now socialise on the internet without actually meeting anyone).
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kharak|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Symmetry|6 years ago|reply
[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381...
[+] [-] Nursie|6 years ago|reply
But I wonder how the model would be affected by, say, the mass availability of a significant longevity increase, brought about by some sort of medical breakthrough?
[+] [-] IAmEveryone|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|6 years ago|reply
Medical breakthroughs tend to affect the latter rather than the former more, though the fact that people live longer has an effect on the age at which they start with having children. In my grandparents generation it wasn't rare for 19 year olds to be married and to have their first child on the way, my parents generation had their children when approaching 30 (on average), and the present day generation has their first child later still. There is some correlation here with education levels and of course from country to country there are still huge differences but overall those seem to be the trends.
So a significant longevity increase brought about by a medical breakthrough will likely cause people to have their children at an even later age (with all the associated risks, possibly resulting in much more screening), somewhat offsetting the effect of those people themselves being alive for longer.
Social security would be a real problem, especially if the time that people could work productively would not increase at the same rate as the longevity.
[+] [-] jlawson|6 years ago|reply
The people who aren't reproducing will die out. The people who are reproducing will do so, and their kids will keep reproducing too. These are separate sub-groups of the population.
As a very simple example, the Amish population doubles roughly every 20 years because of their high and early birth rates. It's not hard to calculate that there will be billions of them within a few centuries because of the power of exponential growth.
Any analysis which doesn't separate sub-groups by fertility, or handle the heritability of fertility, is meaningless.
All we're in now is a temporary state caused by rapid introduction of birth control and porn and other such technologies which suppress fertility. No different from hitting a bacterial colony with a drug that stops 90% of them from reproducing. It reverses growth for a few generations, but the logic of evolution and exponential growth always wins in the end and the population hits its carrying capacity once again. Which for humanity with modern tech, is going to be a very, very ugly situation.
[+] [-] jessaustin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peteradio|6 years ago|reply
What is the reason for low fertility prediction?
[+] [-] comboy|6 years ago|reply
Well it's a simplification. Better education also correlates with lower fertility.
And yes, I'm not showing causation. But anti-conception does require some basic money and education.
[+] [-] sago|6 years ago|reply
Worldwide experience has been that increasingly developed nations have lower average fecundity. There are various likely reasons but the correlation seems to be quite robust. In most countries it seems that the causal link was from development to fertility. It is arguable that China reversed the causation, politically limiting fecundity.
This is a uniquely human dynamic. Pretty much every other species in the world drives its population to its Malthusian limit.
[+] [-] ausbah|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Creationer|6 years ago|reply
If you are in the US you may not appreciate how heavy the tax burden is in Europe. It varies by country but its normally something like: 30% payroll tax paid by employer. 30% income tax paid by you. 20% sales tax paid by you. Then, very expensive housing due to the high population densities and limited room to expand.
Additionally in Europe, many parents want their children to be educated in English, however the language of instruction is usually the local language. This is partly why the migrant stream into the Anglosphere is so high. The alternative are private international schools, which are hideously expensive.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|6 years ago|reply
Fascinating.
[+] [-] python_gt_r3|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] NotPaidToPost|6 years ago|reply
All forecasts predict another 60% (!!) increase in global population before it stabilises.
Forget about banning plastic straws or flying less (which are feel-good measures more than anything else) with such numbers... We need to take dramatic and effective steps.
There are 80 years left until the end of the century. This increase is far from being inevitable! But, again, we prefer to ignore these key issues and focus on marginal, feel-good measures instead.
[+] [-] Certhas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcMgD2BwE72F|6 years ago|reply
Why should rich people continue to fly around the world while you try implementing big restrictions on everyone? This makes no sense.
Perhaps you meant "In addition to bans on (...), we need dramatic measures"? Also, suggesting some steps would help understand how stronger your proposals are.
[+] [-] roca|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yters|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Creationer|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] car12|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] igravious|6 years ago|reply
We need people to (a) understand that the world's population is increasing but that the rate of increase will inexorably slow and that (b) this means that the population will plateau. We then need people to ask themselves can the Earth support that level of population of 11 billion. The answer is an incontrovertible "yes". Anybody who claims the Earth cannot support 11 billion people is factually incorrect. Is it going to cause environmental stress? Yes. Will it cause environmental collapse? No.
People also fail to understand this other simple fact. Even though there will be more mouths to feed, there will be more hands to make the food. And given economies of scale, it'll arguably be easier to feed 11 billion than 7 billion.