Welcome to my Demographic Doom project

I'm Glenn Campbell. I call myself a “demographic philosopher.” I'm looking at life and trying to predict the future through the lens of demography, or the study of human populations. I am less interested in the news of today than in what large groups of people are doing over long periods of time. I track humanity and where it is going with a 🐦Twitter Feed, a 🔊Podcast and occasional 📹Videos

Demography is intimately connected to macroeconomics, since you can't have economic activity without people to perform it. The success or failure of an economy depends to a large extent on the mix of people who occupy it, and right now that mix is in deep trouble.... hence the "Doom" in the title.

Simply put, in most countries, there are too many old people and not enough young workers to replace them. Our Doom is also assured by bad economic policies begun during the happy years when there were plenty of workers and not many elders. (One example: massive government debt that can never be repaid.) The only solution to the accumulated imbalances of the past is a massive economic collapse reminiscent of the Great Depression or maybe even the Fall of Rome™. I can't say when or how, but an economic collapse is already past due.

I have little optimism for society in the short- and medium-term, and I don't propose any simple solution to fix the world, but I do have a potential long-term solution for a small community of like-minded people. It is a new family structure I call the Post-Nuclear Family. How will your community generate enough well-raised children to sustain itself? My theoretical plan is not intended for everyone, but it's the only solution I can think of.

This project consists mainly of me speaking to the world through two active media streams and several supporting components....

• 🐦 @DemographicDoom Twitter — not just a Twitter feed but a sophisticated database of references and opinions linked together by a complex system of hashtags. Active daily, if not hourly. Includes both standalone tweets and structured Tweet Essays linked together in threads 🧵
  • If the volume of the main account is too much for you, try my selective feed: @DoomLite™ ——— Same Taste... Less Filling ———
  • To get started, see my Introductory Tweet Essay
  
  
• 🔊 Demographic Doom Podcast — available on all major podcast platforms (iTunes, Google, PodBean, etc.) and as audio YouTube videos. New episodes every 1-2 weeks.
  • I produce a 2nd podcast for other topics: Kilroy Café
  
  
• 🚀☢️👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Post-Nuclear Family — See here for several web pages describing my theoretical family system.
  
  
• 📹 Live-Action Videos — Before I started my podcast, I made semi-professional videos on demographic issues, most of which are still important and relevant today. I recorded them throughout 2019 in exotic global locations, like New Zealand, the English coast and the Canary Islands. Since the visual component was unimportant—and a lot of work—I eventually abandoned full videos in favor of an audio-only approach. — My first live-action video on the Demographic Doom Youtube Channel was recorded in Tenerife (off the coast of Africa) on 22 January 2019 and the last was recorded on 5 September 2019 in Amarillo, Texas. Here's a Full List. I may occasionally record new videos for specific purposes, but I don't expect to go back to the multi-camera extravaganzas of the past. (Podcasts are a lot easier.)
  
  
• 📜 Supporting Blog — Used for podcast transcripts, Tweet Essays and Twitter hashtag support. You are welcome to browse this blog, but you don't have to follow it directly, since it is referenced as needed on the Twitter feed.
  
  
• 🤳 Demographic Doom Instagram — reposting images already posted to Twitter. See the caption or first comment of each post for a link to the source tweet. Since 2019, no original material has been posted on this account, but it may help you detect interesting things on the main Twitter account.
  • If you can't handle the high volume of my @DemographicDoom Twitter, you can be alerted to key posts by following DoomLite™ on Twitter and Demographic Doom on Instagram.
  
  
• 💀 Since this project's birth in Nov. 2016, I have experimented with a dozen other components, like book manuscripts and video series that went nowhere. Although these failed experiments are now mothballed, many are retained for any residual value they may hold. See my inventory of them later in this page

Introductory Videos

🐦 Active Component #1: @DemographicDoom Twitter

Every tweet must be "interesting" according to criteria that I alone determine. True to the name, topics in this feed tend to be "Doom" related, but not exclusively. I am also attracted to topics in a wide range of fields that could be applied to a happier demographic future. Subjects can include...

• Demography/Demographic Collapse
• Macroeconomics/Economic Collapse
• Societal collapse
• Families: Good, Bad and Future
• Education & Upbringing of Children
• Genetics and Evolution
• The Philosophy of Knowledge

Account History: The new @DemographicDoom Twitter account was recycled from an account I already owned (hence the 2013 start date). My first demographic tweet was posted on 1 November 2017, and the first tweet using hashtags was posted on 7 April 2019. (All of my tweets between those two dates are unindexed—but you can search them by content words.) My first hashtags started with "#ddoom_", but I later shortened the prefix to "#dd_" to save space.

A third Twitter stream, @BDLnotes is used for the maintenance and cross-referencing of hashtags, as well as other routine housekeeping functions. You should NOT follow this account directly (if you know what's good for you). Instead, posts from @BDLnotes may appear when you click on hashtags in my other two accounts. These posts can refer you to related hashtags or give you other pertinent information. In isolation, @BDLnotes tweets are dull and voluminous, which is why I don't post them to my main accounts. These posts may also be deleted and replaced at my whim, so you shouldn't retweet them. (In contrast, tweets in my main accounts are rarely deleted once they reach the mature age of 24 hours.)

Finally, I have fourth public account, @DoomLite™, started in January 2021, which attempts to address the huge volume of tweets on @DemographicDoom. On this account, I retweet only the most important material from @DemographicDoom (and occasionally @BadDalaiLama)—both present and past. For example, instead of seeing a whole Tweet Essay, as you would on @DemographicDoom, you see only the header tweet for that thread.

The main creative constraint of a Tweet Essay is that it can't delete or change it once it is integrated into a thread. (I am only allowed to delete and repost the last item in the thread.) This means I have to be careful about what I say, so it stands the test of time. A Tweet Essay usually starts with the most important information first and drills down to the details. No Tweet Essay is ever "finished" since I could add more to it at a later date. (If you comment on any tweet in a thread, it may prompt me to add more posts to the thread to address your interests or concerns.)

My opinions are not restricted to Tweet Essays. In general, I have an angle on nearly every reference I post. I try to distinguish my opinion from statement of fact, but the line sometimes get muddled.

🔊 Active Component #2: Demographic Doom Podcast

1. On YouTube, as audio-based videos. The YouTube version may occasionally include video of me talking, but the visual element isn't essential. I consider the YouTube version to be the primary "home" for each podcast, because the long description gives me space to provide notes, links and corrections.
   
   
2. On PodBean in standard audio-only format, automatically distributed from there to other platforms like iTunes and Google Podcasts.
   
   
3. As script or transcript on my blog. The podcast started out unscripted. (I thought about each episode in advance, but I didn't write it down first.) Starting with Episode #29, I began scripting each podcast in advance, publishing the script on my blog. A script may differ from the final product because I am free to improvise. Starting with Episode #50, I started replacing some scripts with literal transcripts a few days after the episode was released. (This is a lot of work, so I don't do it for every episode.) A transcript is what I actually said vs. what I had planned to say. A transcript is based on the automatic YouTube transcription of each episode, reformatted and lightly edited for clarity. I may go back and generate transcripts for old episodes when it seems important (as I did for Episode #8).

• All episodes, latest first. Includes all of my previous demographic videos at the end.
• All episodes, oldest first. Starts with Episode #1, which is pretty primitive.
• All Post-Nuclear Family episodes, oldest first, starting with Episode #46 when I first introduced the term.
• All episodes and Videos on Family Issues, including the Post-Nuclear Family, newest first, including "prehistoric" podcasts and videos when I fleshed on the concept under a different name, the "Modular Family".
• All Episodes on Economic Collapse
• All episodes on conflicts between the generations
• All episodes on Covid-19, mostly before it shut down America
• All episodes on my philosophy of "Triagism"
• All episodes on Government Intervention in demographic and economic issues.

My Origin Story

My first theory was "bad breeding". If the stupid people of America were having more kids than the smart people (however you define "stupid" and "smart"), the population as a whole would get stupider with time. This problem would have started with the birth control revolution of the 1960s, when the birthrate for educated adults dropped more precipitously than it did for the uneducated. Prior to this, I assumed, the birthrate of the smart and not-so-smart was about the same.

This theory may indeed be true—The world population could be getting "less fit".—but it did not explain the election of Trump. Trump's primary supporters were older Americans, born before the birth control era, while young people—the supposed product of "bad breeding"—were generally against him. My nice, neat theory collapsed.

All was not lost, however. In the course of researching my hypothesis, I stumbled upon the field of demography, which I had previously regarded as one of the dullest topics in the world. This time, I found it completely relevant. Sure, the math part sucks, and I avoid it whenever I can, but the general conclusions of demography are devastating.

Shortly after the start of my research, I came upon an ominous 2008 documentary called Demographic Winter. This and other references shattered one of my foundational beliefs: that the world is "exploding" in population.

Demographic Winter shattered my illusions. The Population Explosion as I knew it in the 1970s no longer existed. In fact, the problem was already solved by birth control by the time I learned of it. In the developed world, the overpopulation crisis essentially ended when the post-war Baby Boom did. It is now confined mainly to the poorest countries of Africa. Most of the rest of the world—North America, Europe, South America, East Asia—is on the verge of a population implosion, and it is not a good thing. While one might applaud an eventual reduction in human population for the sake of Mother Earth, there was no painless way to get there. Even Mother Earth could suffer if a fall in population causes a collapse in the governmental structures that protect the Earth. (For example, if the US Government collapses, we will lose the EPA.)

As I learned more about the plateauing population, I also learned about its devastating economic consequences. You can't stop having babies without a relative "explosion" at the other end of age spectrum. Proportionally, there are a rapidly growing number of old people and fewer young workers to support them. The economic crisis begins with an excess of retirees absorbing government resources, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. It turns out the world economy is Ponzi scheme that depends on unsustainable growth to remain solvent. Once the growth slows down, everything starts collapsing, and we're just beginning that phase right now.

Ten Kinds of Demographic Doom

1. Baby Bust/Silver Tsunami 👶📉 / 👴👵🌊 ⸻ This is a long-term crisis unfolding over at least the next 50 years. The developed world is suffering from a devastating lack of babies, which will have a crushing effect on most economies and societies as young adults fail to join the workforce. Babies have gotten scarce because they're so damn expensive to raise, with little reward to the people making the investment. Governments are virtually helpless to do anything about the lack of babies because the only theoretical solutions involve tons of money that governments don't have.
   The "Baby Bust" and "Silver Tsunami" are two sides of the same coin. A lack of babies doesn't just mean an eventual reduction of population but a dramatic aging of the population, where communities are overwhelmed by old people. Since old people tend to get sick long before they die, the costs of their maintenance is huge, and it is borne by fewer and fewer taxable workers. The deeper you look at the problem, the more dire it appears. Our economy was built on the assumption of perpetual population growth, and as growth reverses or merely slows down, all kinds of systems will start to fail.

2. Retirement of the Baby Boomers 👴👵🎸☮ ⸻ This is a one-time exacerbation of the "Silver Tsunami" mainly restricted to the next 20 years. The Boomers were the large cohort of babies born just after World War II. In their prime working years from the 1980s through the 2010s, they supercharged the economy (known as the "demographic dividend"). They started retiring in 2011 and are now draining the government and economy. The Boomers are a "bulge" in the population that once benefited the economy but that's now sinking it. In 2046, the Boomers will start topping out at 100 years old—the practical limit of longevity. Until then, we can expect them to cost society a whole lot of money.
   
   
3. The Financial Collapse 💰💣💥 ⸻ This is a crisis of the next five years—although I can't say exactly when or how. Even before demographics takes its full toll, the world economy is destined to collapse of its own accord. The problem has evolved over the past 50 years and involves the explosion of worldwide debt and the mismanagement of the economy by governments and central banks. To put it simply, the world economy is a Ponzi scheme—or an interconnected network of them—and all such scams have to collapse eventually. The demographic component is that most of the dynamite for coming collapse was laid during the halcyon period of 1980-2010 when (1) everything was growing, and (2) the developed world had plenty of active workers with few old people or children to care for. Now that neither of these assumptions are true, the economy of the last generation is unsustainable.
   
   As of Jan. 2021, evidence for a looming collapse takes the form of...
   
   
   1. All-time highs in stock markets despite an economically devastating pandemic.
   2. Exploding government debt that can't possibly be repaid.
   3. Rampant money printing by central banks with no apparent consumer inflation.
   
   This gravity-defying activity is taking place at a time when population is plateauing and economic growth is petering out, weakening the underlying fundamentals. Something has to break.

As if the major crises above weren't enough, I've identified six others, each a world of Doom in itself.

4. The Population Explosion 👶📈💣 ⸻ The "population explosion" described in the 1960s is alive and well in the poorest countries of Africa. Impoverished nations like Nigeria continue to expand at an alarming rate. (See this Africalist of the highest-birth countries.) Unfortunately, this excess of humans provides little relief for the countries of the developed world that lack them. You can't just ship babies or random adults from poor countries to rich ones (as discussed in my Episode #2). Developed countries can skim the best-educated adult talent from Africa—to the detriment of the countries that educated them—but they can't absorb "average" African adults raised with little education. Until these poor countries get their birth rates under control (which is not impossible), they will threaten the stability of the rest of the world as they export refugees and unrest.
   
   
5. The Medical Science Paradox 💉🤪 ⸻ As I explain in a video and a podcast, medical technology may be have reached its limit for extending the human lifespan. Even as health care gets more expensive (in every country), the longevity of the general population is plateauing. Modern medicine continues to save more lives than ever before, at ever-growing expense, but the overall health of the population seems to be getting worse. In part because of the higher societal cost of health care itself, which is consuming an ever-growing proportion of income and tax revenue. For example, if modern medicine saves someone's life when they previously might have died, it assures they will consume still more medical resources as they age. Health care is a quagmire filled with feedback loops and perverse incentives, but the bottom line is that the per-capita cost of providing it to the elderly will continue to rise even as government resources fall. The inevitable global outcome is that fewer people will have access to health care, negating any improvement in the technology.
   
   
6. International Brain Drain 🌍🎓📉 ⸻ Whenever borders are opened, talented workers tend to move from disadvantaged countries to more advantaged ones. This a good for the receiving country but terrible for the donor. It is sucking the life out of weaker countries, like Bulgaria and Greece, while bolstering the wealth of the stronger ones, like Germany or Sweden. This "brain drain" goes in only one direction and is self-reinforcing. The more talent leaves the country, the worse life gets and more young people want to leave. I don't see any end to it.
   
   
7. Rural Flight ⇨🏙 ⸻ Since the Industrial Revolution, mankind has been migrating from the countryside to the city (within the same country). This process has intensified in recent years, decimating rural towns and villages everywhere in the developed world. As a national population falls, rural villages tend to be the hardest hit. Young people flee to the city at the earliest opportunity, leaving only the elderly. When they die, the village dies, too. This is a problem not just for the village but for the nation as a whole, since the infrastructure of rural areas, like roads and power lines, still has to be maintained, especially if a few old people remain there.
   
   
8. Urban Flight ⇦🏙 ⸻ A new development of the internet era is people moving out of the most expensive cities and states to more affordable ones—and doing it in sufficient numbers that the expensive places are losing population. This is a special crisis for the "headline" cities of North America—like New York, San Francisco and Chicago—and the most expensive states, like California, New York and Illinois. This phenomenon has been greatly accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has freed many workers from fixed offices. For those who can now work from home, "home" can be anywhere, and many are choosing to flee the most expensive areas of the country. This is devastating for the legacy cities and states that already have huge debt and complex obligations and who can't easily downsize their infrastructure. Their timebomb is falling tax revenues, especially because the wealthy seem to be leading the exodus. Those jurisdictions are now careening toward bankruptcy, which can only lead to a deterioration of services that prompts still more departures.
   
   
   • You would think this would benefit those vanishing rural villages, but it doesn't, since people are moving to mid-size cities instead. Indianapolis and Austin are doing fine. Chicago and Shamrock, Texas are not.
   
   
9. Infrastructure Hell 🛣🚧🔥 ⸻ Building a road, sewer system or powerline is not the end of its costs, only the beginning. Most infrastructure needs to be maintained at regular intervals or it will deteriorate and eventually collapse. For example, roads need to be resurfaced every 3 to 30 years (depending on traffic) or they turn into rubble. It turns out that infrastructure has a life cycle similar to human beings, and the demographics for it are similarly bad in the developed world: Too much old stuff and not enough new stuff. Countries and regions that experienced a growth spurt in the late 20th Century are now facing maintenance deadlines. Routine maintenance can always be delayed, but eventually the neglect leads to disaster when bridges fall, tunnels flood or roads become impassible. Governments will need to devote more money to infrastructure to keep it going—money they don't have.
   
   
10. Intergenerational Theft 👶🔫👴 ⸻ Current generations have found countless ways to steal from future one. One obvious example is overwhelming government debt, which either has to be repaid by future generations or will cause the collapse of their government. No one steals from the future with malice, but modern technology has given us plenty of ways to do it. Skimping on education and infrastructure are thefts from the future. If you don't adequately maintain a bridge, it will eventually fall down, but not while you're alive, which is all the matters to most people.

Looking at demography alone, the Doom is deep. Many things are going to break in the coming decade or two. I see hope for humanity only in the long term, decades from now. After current structures collapse, humans will reorganize themselves. They always do. My theoretical contribution to this process is the Post-Nuclear Family, which is described on a separate page.

Abandoned Components

1. A Manuscript Since this project began in Nov. 2016, I have made multiple attempts at writing a book or long manuscript on our Demographic Doom or the Post-Nuclear Family. Here is my Latest Failed Attempt. I have set aside any book project for now for these reasons...
   1. Since I'm not a credentialed expert, my chance of getting a book professionally published are nil. I can always self-publish, but my past experiences with that have been dismal.
   2. Writing a book would be duplicating effort that I already put into my podcast. It's a different kind of project that would require a different kind of effort. A book needs to be "perfect" is details while a podcast does not.
   3. If you want a "book", you can just print out the transcripts of my podcasts and read them in sequence.
   4. The main goal is to get my ideas out there. The form they take is immaterial. To avoid becoming overwhelmed by the project, I have to use the most efficient methods available.
   
   
   
2. A Facebook page - It still exists, but I don't think it's good for anything. I try to post new podcast episodes here if I remember to, but that's all I use it for.
   
   
3. Historical Videos — Since my project began in November 2016, it has gone through an evolutionary process, which can be traced through my past videos. My positions reached a stable state in January 2019, when I created the Demographic Doom video channel. Before that, I produced about 9 videos on my personal channel. I may not agree with these videos today, but they show the evolution of my thinking.
   
   
4. My first known demographic video was Why Democracy is Collapsing (6 min) released on July 29, 2016, during the period when Donald Trump began to get serious attention as a presidential candidat. Trump is the subject, although he isn't explicitly mentioned. Even though his election seemed unlikely at the time, I was disturbed enough by his nomination to believe that democracy's days were numbered. I sought an explanation for his rise to power, and I thought I found it in the "dumbing down" of society due to the Darwinian effects of birth control (which I have since discounted).
   
   
5. My demographic project was "born" with the election of Trump on Nov. 8, 2016, when I began to seek answers as to why and how it happened. In November 2016, I quickly released a series of four videos as the Demographic Timebomb series. The initial focus was on the alleged Darwinian de-evolution of society, due to the assumption that "stupid" people have more kids than "smart" ones, especially since the advent of birth control in the 1960s. Unfortunately, this theory didn't hold water for the election of Trump himself, since his voters tended to be older, born in the pre-birth control era.
   
   
6. In Nov. 2016, I was influenced by Demographic Winter (2 hour-long videos from 2008) and other videos and books on demographic decline.
   
   
7. I changed my direction in November 2016 in the last video in the Timebomb series, The Global Fertility Crisis (9 min), when I realized the real crisis was not so much the quality of the population but its sheer quantity, or lack thereof. I had grown up thinking the world was facing a "population explosion," but I quickly learned that the opposite was now the case.
   
   
8. between Dec. 2016 and March 2017, I filmed a new series of five videos as The Baby Bomb series, filmed in Norway, France and various locations in the USA. Although it covers some of the same topics as my later podcast and videos, it was not as well thought out, and I abandoned it.
   
   
9. On 11 July 2018, a few days after learning I had massive cancer, I recorded a 1½ hour video summarizing my Demographic Doom project, thinking it might be my last.
   
   
10. After a five-month hiatus for cancer treatment (and complete remission), I came up with a new name for my project, Demographic Doom, and started the new Demographic Doom YouTube channel in January 2019. Initially, I produced live-action videos but switched to a podcast format in September 2019 because podcasts are easier to produce.
    
    
11. Glossary of Demographic Terms - Dozen's of terms defined and annotated on a single big page.
    
    
12. List of References before April 2019 — Before my Twitter account, I tried to add all new references to a single massive page, organized by subject. (You can see that Twitter is a lot easier.)
    
    
13. YouTube playlists (partial index) - Before 2020, As I discovered new videos on demographic topics, I would add them to YouTube playlists of third-party videos. There are playlists on countries and topics, but they are no longer maintained. I may still add videos to old playlists, but I now use my Twitter to record and organize videos, just like I do for print references. Most new videos on my Twitter use the hashtag #dd_video.
    
    
14. I have two one-page essays on economic collapse, written in December 2018. These essays are in the format used for my early philosophy series, Kilroy Cafe.
    
    
15. In early 2019, I tried to maintain a page of Key Findings in my demographic research, no longer maintained.
    
    
16. The Demographic Doom Blog was active only in July and August 2019, with four entries. It has since been replaced by my personal Bad Words, starting in Feb. 2019.
    
    
17. My Demographic Doom Instagram account used to be indexed by hashtags, just like my Twitter account. Here is a partial list of some of the hashtags. While I still add posts to this account, I no longer try to index them because it is too much work.
    
    • On the Instagram account, I used to post one-minute excerpts of each of my videos and podcasts. I gave up on this after Episode 40 because it was too much work.
    
    
18. I had a Demographic Comedy Page of cartoons and videos. You can now find demographic comedy at #dd_comedy and #ddoom_comedy on Twitter at #ddoom_comedy on Instagram.
    
    
19. Revision Timeline — Before July 2019, I tried to keep track of all major website changes and new videos on a single timeline page. It became too burdensome, and the same function is now provided by Twitter.

If you were an alien approaching Earth, the first questions you might ask are:

• What is the dominant life form?
• How many of them are there?
• How do they reproduce?
• Where is their population headed?

If you scanned Earth now, you would see that humans control the planet; they reproduce sexually, and there are about 8 billion of them. If you looked closer, however, you would see these creatures are in deep trouble. While humans continue to reproduce, they are doing it haphazardly, and they are failing their children in significant ways.

Among other things, they are not producing enough offspring to maintain their civilization. The humans that remain are getting statistically older, and there are fewer young people to support them. With fewer people working and paying taxes, heavily indebted governments will go even deeper into hock until widespread default is inevitable.

And those are only the short term effects. In the long term, there are serious problems with the distribution of talent on Planet Earth and the quality of human reproduction. These are complicated issues, which is why I need to write a book and assemble a multi-page website. My conclusion: Thanks to demographic imbalances, civilization is due for collapse.

Our demographic crisis will become acute within the next decade with a massive economic crisis I call the Great Reversal. The world must readjust itself from population-fueled growth to permanent contraction. Unable to support any additional debt, big governments like the United States will collapse. It may not mean the end of our species, but we will be forced to dramatically restructure ourselves. Power will shift to local fiefdoms, like Europe after the Fall of Rome.