Bad times are coming to Planet Earth, and there is little we can do to stop them.
You may already be worried about climate change, drug-resistant disease,
nuclear proliferation, killer asteroids and the decline of global democracy, but
they are not the worst news. The really bad stuff is demographic,
meaning it involves human populations and how they evolve over time.
The 1960s gave us the population explosion, the idea that the growing
number of humans on Earth is far outstripping our natural resources. It was a
simple concept everyone could believe in, but it was obsolete from the time it
was conceived. Apart from a few isolated Third World countries, the overpopulation
threat has largely passed, thanks to two other products of the 60s: birth control
and women’s liberation. Today, most countries are closer to a population implosion,
where births are insufficient to replace deaths. While reducing births was relatively
easy, encouraging people to have more children seems nearly impossible, at
least within current government structures.
Our demographic problems today are not simply a matter of explosion or
implosion. Simultaneously, we are suffering from too many children, not enough
of them and not the right kind. When the children grow up, they are not staying
where they were born but are migrating to places where they can get the best
deal. Meanwhile, the babies that are born are not optimally distributed. Today,
poorly equipped parents are producing the most offspring, while the better
educated and most materially successful are sitting on the sidelines.
All of these processes, taken together, are propelling us into a set of
economic and political disasters I call Demographic Doom. Thanks to population
changes over the past half century, everything is falling apart simultaneously:
economics, politics, infrastructure and human capital. It is like Earth being
hit by an asteroid, except this crisis is entirely internal, caused solely by births,
deaths and migration.
Our impending storm is the product of two innovations in the 20th Century
that seemed good at the time but that have turned out to be highly disruptive. One
was the development of modern medicine, which began to seriously save lives only
after World War One. The dramatic reduction in child mortality had the unfortunate
effect of triggering a global population explosion. The other innovation was the
legalization of the birth control pill in the 1960s. This set us up for a
population implosion. It also changed the profile of who was having children. Young
women with big plans put off childbearing until later in their lives, while
those with fewer prospects had children right away.
Only a handful of Third World countries, mainly in Africa, are still
experiencing a population explosion, with 5 or more babies born to an average
woman. Most other countries are on the verge of a population implosion,
where not enough children are being produced to sustain the local workforce. This
happens when the number of babies produced by an average woman falls below replacement
fertility, usually defined in developed countries as 2.1 live births per female.
(She needs to produce two babies because men can’t do it, and the 0.1 is a
correction factor in case her kids don’t live to reproductive age.) If
fertility in your country lingers below 2.1 and you don’t make up the
difference through immigration, eventually your population will shrink.
So what’s the big deal? It is hard to deny that the planet as a whole is
overpopulated, so who could object to bringing down our numbers?
That’s where things get complicated. While we can rationally argue that the
planet would be better off with five billion people than eight, there is no
painless way to get there. Our current world economy is built on the assumption
of unlimited population growth. If growth slows and reverses, government debts
will become untenable, and many of the services and industries we have built
our lives on will fail. For example, if population is falling, there is little
need for a construction industry, because there are already enough homes and
offices for everyone. If governments can no longer borrow money and their tax
revenues drop, they could collapse. Chaos will rule our society, much like a
state of war, until we build new institutions to replace the ones that failed.
1. Population Change
For decades, we have been told that population growth is out of control, and
our senses often seem to confirm this. If you live in a big city, the traffic
seems to get worse every year, and if you look at global statistics, population
continues to climb, from 2 billion a century ago to 8 billion at the time of
this writing to an inevitable 9 and 10 billion a few years from now.
What may not be obvious is the simultaneous slow-motion collapse of national
populations in the developed world. You may not be aware of population loss in
your country because it isn’t happening homogeneously. Rural areas are fading
faster than cities as young people move to where the best opportunities are.
Popular tourist destinations continue to be popular while places you would never
think to visit are rapidly declining. Our senses are confounded by sampling
bias, where population seems high because we have already chosen to live in
a high population area. Conversely, if a rural town were to lose most of its citizens,
we might never know about it, because there would be few people left to lament
the change.
Population problems are analogous to climate change. It is easy to confuse
climate and weather. When you see the traffic get worse in your city, it
doesn’t necessarily mean the population of your whole country is growing. This
is like saying, “Global warming can’t be real because this week’s weather has
been so cold.” As peripheral regions become less viable, it encourages a mass
exodus to the central regions. This is how Tokyo’s population can continue to
grow even as Japan as a whole is shrinking.
The term “global warming” is now deprecated by scientists because it isn’t
as simple as that. While the planet as a whole is getting warmer, some regions
could actually become colder as established wind and ocean patterns are
disrupted. Deserts could become tropical rainforests and vice-versa. “Climate
change” is a better name for the whole package.
Likewise, it is inaccurate to say the planet is suffering from either a
population explosion or implosion. It is better to use the term population
change. This doesn’t mean that the situation is any less dire, but the
factors are complicated, and specific regions may be affected differently.
Japan is suffering from a population implosion, as its population falls by
hundreds of thousands each year. China will eventually follow, thanks to its overly
successful and essentially irreversible One-Child Policy. Singapore, on the
other hand, has an escape mechanism. It has endured even lower birth rates, but
its losses are mitigated by immigration, which neither Japan nor China are open
to. Meanwhile, some countries in Eastern Europe are suffering the double hit of
low birth rates and a loss of young talent to Western Europe. In certain countries
of Africa, the population is still exploding, but fertility in a few others has
fallen nearly to replacement levels. There is no label that fits every country.
The only thing certain is that nearly every nation is facing a demographic
crisis of some kind.
Like climate change, population change will be highly disruptive. It will be the economic equivalent of whole cities vanishing below the sea. In the long term, humanity will probably find ways to adapt. Later in this book I will talk about the long-term ways humanity can save itself. It is clear, however, that a near-term disaster is unavoidable. When the size of the workforce shrinks relative to the number of old people, there are bound to be serious economic repercussions.
Humanity will survive, but it will require a radical restructuring of society. Raising children must be seen as a community undertaking, not the sole responsibility of one couple. This is so far removed from our current model of child rearing that it won’t happen overnight and probably not within current government structures. Traditional governments exert control mainly by forcing people to not do things, punishing them if they do. Governments aren’t very good at encouraging people to do things that aren’t in their personal best interest, like having more babies. To make this happen, people need more motivation than any government can supply.
Before humanity can rejuvenate itself, there has to be a lot of pain. Due to rapidly ageing populations, economies will crash and big governments will be weakened and may collapse altogether. In this book, I will show you why catastrophe is unavoidable. In hard times, people tend to have even fewer children, until your country is left with none but the old, incapable of having children at all.
Pain is necessary because only when pushed to the wall will people make the radical chances necessary to preserve their species. They will gather together in small groups and ask themselves, “What do we need to do to make more and better children?”
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.
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.
