(With liberal quotations from the New York Times opinion piece, The World’s Population May Peak in Your Lifetime. What Happens Next? 09/18/2023)
I don’t know why this news item slipped under the media’s radar. Perhaps because it’s not bad news, and it’s far away. Are you ready? Here it is.
The world population will peak sometime between 2065 and 2085. Then it will plummet.
That’s good news indeed because feeding and maintaining the planet’s exploding population brings so much planet-wide destruction. The end of population growth is bigger news than climate change, our madcap political scene, Ai, Taylor Swift, and college football.
Some background. Over the past 100 years, the global population quadrupled, from two billion to eight billion. But people worldwide are now choosing smaller family sizes. If this trend continues — and there’s no evidence that it won’t — in the 22nd century, our population decline could be just as steep as its rise.
Today the planet’s population is around 8 billion people. It’s expected to peak in 2085 at around 10 billion because families worldwide are having fewer children. Children born today will probably see the end of global population growth. All industrialized nations now average less than two children per family, which is the “replacement fertility” rate. India is at that rate, 2.0, with a stable population. China’s fertility rate is 1.2, a local economic and political issue. Many African nations are still growing, though their birth rates are mostly declining.
A friend lives in Kyoto. Japan’s birth rate is 1.3. He says vacant houses there go begging. We may never experience that. Our birthrate is 1.6 but in-migration maintains the US population and housing occupancy.
The shrink in global population will not be distributed evenly. Just like today, there will be gainers and losers as people migrate into more desired countries. But one thing is for sure, our global economy, which now depends on growth, will adapt in some predictable but mostly unknowable ways. Just as the effects of climate change were often surprises — think forest fires and the scope and speed of ecological destruction — population shrinkage will bring large, unanticipated events.
Our current century’s last decades will see an aging global population, fewer people entering the labor force, a declining number of consumers, and (in my dreams) perhaps a remade economy as corporations treat, not dump, their waste.
This will happen against a backdrop of increasingly unimaginable effects of climate change, alongside vast demographic, geographic, and agricultural shifts. Assuming that technology continues its current headlong acceleration, our grandchildren’s world will be unrecognizable, physically and culturally. Though our descendants will likely love their inherited world — just as we loved ours — I suspect I’d find it all too unfamiliar, perhaps scarily alien.
For sure, I won’t be here to see our shrinking global population, but it’s heading our way. That’s COLOSSAL good news.
Thank you for reading.
Barry
Add Your Name below to my list to know when I have posted a new blog.
