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 right now. 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 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 social and governmental 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, depleting the talent of their home communities. Meanwhile, poorly
equipped parents are producing the most offspring, while the better educated
and most materially successful are sitting on the sidelines. Over time, this
leads to a change in the quality of the population.
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 largely 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 and sanitation, which began
to seriously save lives only after World War I. The resulting 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, as career-minded women put off
childbearing.
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 have begun a slow collapse, 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, defined in most countries as 2.1 live births per female. 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. Earth’s population has soared from 1.5 billion in 1900 to
roughly 8 billion today. Homo sapiens are cutting down rainforests,
polluting oceans and spewing out carbon emissions. Who could object to bringing
down their numbers?
That’s where things get complicated. While we can rationally argue that the
planet would be better off with, say, 5 billion people instead of 8, 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, suddenly
we have a growing number of old people and shrinking pool of active workers to
support them. If the workforce shrinks, tax revenues will, too, and many nations
will be unable to pay the interest on their preexisting debt. The can only result
in default by the most indebted governments, including the United States. This,
in turn, assures an epic economic crash like the world has never seen.
Demographic Doom means the collapse of big governments and the economic
institutions we have built our lives on. Chaos will rule our society, much like
a state of war, until we build new institutions to replace the ones that
failed.
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.
