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Are We Ready for a Looming Decline in World Population? (msn.com) 390

"All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history..." reports the New York Times.

There's already been some surprising results: Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can't find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks. Like an avalanche, the demographic forces — pushing toward more deaths than births — seem to be expanding and accelerating. Though some countries continue to see their populations grow, especially in Africa, fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else. Demographers now predict that by the latter half of the century or possibly earlier, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time.

A planet with fewer people could ease pressure on resources, slow the destructive impact of climate change and reduce household burdens for women. But the census announcements this month from China and the United States, which showed the slowest rates of population growth in decades for both countries, also point to hard-to-fathom adjustments. The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized — around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old. It may also require a reconceptualization of family and nation. Imagine entire regions where everyone is 70 or older. Imagine governments laying out huge bonuses for immigrants and mothers with lots of children. Imagine a gig economy filled with grandparents and Super Bowl ads promoting procreation.

"A paradigm shift is necessary," said Frank Swiaczny, a German demographer who was the chief of population trends and analysis for the United Nations until last year. "Countries need to learn to live with and adapt to decline...." The ramifications and responses have already begun to appear, especially in East Asia and Europe. From Hungary to China, from Sweden to Japan, governments are struggling to balance the demands of a swelling older cohort with the needs of young people whose most intimate decisions about childbearing are being shaped by factors both positive (more work opportunities for women) and negative (persistent gender inequality and high living costs)... As women have gained more access to education and contraception, and as the anxieties associated with having children continue to intensify, more parents are delaying pregnancy and fewer babies are being born. Even in countries long associated with rapid growth, such as India and Mexico, birthrates are falling toward, or are already below, the replacement rate of 2.1 children per family.

The change may take decades, but once it starts, decline (just like growth) spirals exponentially. With fewer births, fewer girls grow up to have children, and if they have smaller families than their parents did — which is happening in dozens of countries — the drop starts to look like a rock thrown off a cliff... Some countries, like the United States, Australia and Canada, where birthrates hover between 1.5 and 2, have blunted the impact with immigrants. But in Eastern Europe, migration out of the region has compounded depopulation, and in large parts of Asia, the "demographic time bomb" that first became a subject of debate a few decades ago has finally gone off...

According to projections by an international team of scientists published last year in The Lancet, 183 countries and territories — out of 195 — will have fertility rates below replacement level by 2100...

The article asks us to imagine a world where now-empty homes become "a common eyesore," noting that in regional towns in Korea, already "it's easy to find schools shut and abandoned, their playgrounds overgrown with weeds, because there are not enough children."
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Are We Ready for a Looming Decline in World Population?

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  • ...or not (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @12:43PM (#61413344) Homepage Journal

    As I read it, all the declining numbers assume that certain conditions are satisfied - contraceptives and education.

    Given an unfortunate resurgance of religion and other extremisms, that is far from certain. And the "slow adoption" curve sees the global population at 14 billion or so in 2100.

    Yeah, sorry. Not buying it. It's a prediction on a model with underlying assumptions that in themselves are wishful thinking.

    • Re:...or not (Score:5, Interesting)

      by crunchygranola ( 1954152 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @01:05PM (#61413432)

      Not a good way to deal with a subject - make a few assumptions without inspecting any evidence - then assume you know can pronounce on it with authority.

      Amazingly, the decline in fertility rate is world wide now (except for one region, I'll address that in a bit) with countries of every description - rich, poor, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, non-religious, traditional - have not only had declining fertility rates for many years now, but have almost crossed over into being below replacement rate. This is not dependent on any assumption about contraceptives, or education, or wealth - it is a fact that is in truth hard to adequately explain since it occurred where it was not expected, and where those assumed factors actually made it seem unlikely.

      The one area where this has not happened is Africa which still faces population explosion. It is hard to project when this will change since we do not really understand why it happened in South and Central America and throughout Eurasia. But the universality of this pattern, and the fact that Africa has consistently lagged in all measures of societal and economic development, gives reason to assume that it will spread to Africa too eventually.

      And the "slow adoption" curve sees the global population at 14 billion or so in 2100.

      You are either cherry picking an extreme upper end estimate from somewhere, or are just making stuff up. The central estimates I see are all in the range of 10.9-11.8 billion, about a 50% increase from the current 7.8 billion. And in 2100 the growth rate will be about zero, it is roughly the inflection point for population decline for the entire world. In other words another doubling of world population will never happen. Long before that large regions will have had declining populations for generations.

      • Re:...or not (Score:5, Informative)

        by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @01:43PM (#61413558) Journal

        Worth mentioning that the Romans started to also see a population decline when their wealth increased to a certain point.

      • Re:...or not (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Immerman ( 2627577 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @02:08PM (#61413658)

        >This is not dependent on any assumption about contraceptives, or education, or wealth - it is a fact that is in truth hard to adequately explain since it occurred where it was not expected, and where those assumed factors actually made it seem unlikely.

        Oh? I believe Hans Rosling showed a consistent trend across cultures, and over a century, that fertility rates correlate very closely witha combination of health care adequate to ensure children reach adulthood, and education on family planning (just the idea that it's possible to choose how many children you have, using any of a wide range of methods, not just contraceptives). I think it's safe to say that the latter is now present anywhere that has internet access, and is thus influenced by Western norms.

        So, are we seeing declines in fertility rates in places where children are still likely to die before reaching adulthood?

        Contraceptive access certainly helps accelerate that process, often reducing population growth to near-zero in a single generation, but thanks to global environmental saturation with pseudo-estrogens from plastics and birth control, we're really delivering free low-grade contraceptives everywhere, which probably helps things along.

        • by crunchygranola ( 1954152 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @03:01PM (#61413788)

          It is not determined by specific education interventions, but does track declining childhood mortality rates. The problem with using this as the explanation by correlation is that they are both universal secular trends headed in the same direction so of course they will show a correlation whether they are related or not, and there isn't a specific survival rate that causes this to happen. But they are surely causally related.

          My point was that the OP's assuming some specific and (he presumed) non-universal factors being "required" for fertility decline, thus making it speculative, was an uninformed guess about the situation.

          As I said, the improving societal development in Africa will likely cause the trend to spread there. Child mortality dropped by half there over the last 20 years but fertility decline has not set in yet, and we don't know how to predict exactly when it will. So you aren't contradicting a single thing I said.

      • Re:...or not (Score:5, Informative)

        by SoftwareArtist ( 1472499 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @03:04PM (#61413798)

        The one area where this has not happened is Africa which still faces population explosion.

        It's happened in Africa too. For example, here is the World Bank's data on birth rates in Sub-Saharan Africa [worldbank.org]. It peaked at about 6.8 births per woman in the 1970s. Since then it has steadily declined. It is now down to 4.6 and shows no sign of slowing down. That's still well above replacement. But the global trend of decreasing birth rates applies to Africa just as much as anywhere else.

        • The thing to understand about population growth in Africa is that Africa's population is very young and will have a very low death rate as living standards improve and life expectancy increases. Even with a low birth rate like in countries with shrinking populations, Africa would still see continued population growth for decades. But as it is, the birth rate is also higher. If anyone stupidly worries about population decline, it is strictly going to be a regional development. Africa's young population and h

      • by e3m4n ( 947977 )
        Im just not seeing this as a problem. They did an overpopulation experiment with rats back in the 70s and ran into a lot of this. Infertility, higher than average rates of same sex interests, etc. Maybe its a genetic way of population control. As far a system where we need more young people to pay for the old, well, doesnt that sound like a pyramid scheme? If history has taught us anything, we should be looking at the aftermath of the black plague that wiped out nearly 2/3rds of Europe. That was a massive c
    • by fermion ( 181285 )
      The decline may be relative. Over the past 50 years in many areas the population doubled. The rate of that growth, and therefore the economics evolved, has been changed.

      There are places that are depopulating, in many countries. Vermont is paying people to move there, for instance. There are news reports of houses for sale for basically nothing. The question is how is government going to provide services with no tax base. In the US we tax the urban areas, like through telephone added taxes, but I donâ

    • by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @01:12PM (#61413462) Journal
      The avatar of Vishnu means business. He allowed the real First World War, at Kurukshetra, around 2400 BCE to happen because the world was getting too crowded.

      He has promised, To protect the Good, and to eradicate the Evil, and to reestablish the Righteous religion I will reappear age after age [holy-bhagavad-gita.org].

      So he is due any time now ... May be this time He, in His infinite Wisdom, chose the cornona virus. One of his favorite weapons is the Discus that sort of looks like the cross section of the corona virus.

      • Isn't there supposed to be a [/sarcasm] at the end of your morsel of wisdom?

        And, in true /. pedantry, "cornona" virus might be something, but it's not the "corona" virus...

        • Sarcasm should be self evident. But in the times we live in, SNL skits of yesteryears are coming as news at 6 O Clock .... it is getting difficult. Can't tell sarcasm anymore.
      • I can't decide whether to mod you +1 Funny for lampooning stupidity, or -1 Moron for believing in it.

    • Re:...or not (Score:5, Informative)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @01:14PM (#61413472) Homepage Journal

      It's already happened. Look at countries like Bangladesh. Rate went from around 9 (!) to near stable state now, and still falling.

      The chances of that being undone seem remote, because it also came with a huge improvement in quality of life that people won't give up, and won't forget. Religion isn't enough to overcome that, at least not in a scale that matters and not permanently.

    • all the declining numbers assume that certain conditions are satisfied

      It really depends on how much migration is permitted from Africa and some parts of Latin America and the Middle East.

      Outside of those places, it's not a prediction.

      So, immigration is set to be a massively contentious global issue in the coming decades - even more so than now.

    • by kbahey ( 102895 )

      Yeah, sorry. Not buying it. It's a prediction on a model with underlying assumptions that in themselves are wishful thinking.

      The data says otherwise [slashdot.org]: world population growth is slowing down, even in India.

    • by jiriki ( 119865 )
      https://ourworldindata.org/gra... [ourworldindata.org] The number of births per year is already slightly declining since 2017. Eventually this will lead to declining populations.
  • Why is it "looming"? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The definitions of "looming" are
    appear as a shadowy form, especially one that is large or threatening.
    -or-
    (of an event regarded as ominous or threatening) seem about to happen

    What is threatening about having fewer people on a finite planet? Having 8 billion people is an anomaly, a result of cheap energy and technology. Take away the cheap energy, the whole thing collapses.

    It will take as long to wind down as it took to wind up.

    And so what? Does anyone think our species is eternal?

    Let me guess, everyone is p

    • by jonored ( 862908 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @01:09PM (#61413454)

      Long term it's not a big deal to have fewer people. On the scale of a human lifespan or two, it's a pretty big deal, because it shifts the population pretty heavily to older, so you've got much fewer people to actually work relative to how many people need work done. That might cause quite a lot of suffering and potentially rapid collapse, although we might get lucky and outpace people leaving the workforce with automation.

      That's pretty much what's looming: starving in your 70s because there's nobody able-bodied enough left to farm. Depends on the exact population curves, of course.

      • by DanielRavenNest ( 107550 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @01:39PM (#61413546)

        > starving in your 70s because there's nobody able-bodied enough left to farm.

        This doesn't matter once the farming robots take over. Robotic farm tractors already exist.

        Even South Korea, with the lowest fertility rates, still has 1 child per woman. You need around 2% of people currently as farmers, so 50% children in the next generation is more than enough even without robots.

      • In the countries with declining birth rates, most people work in service industries. Food and other basic necessities are provided by a steadily shrinking part of the population due to mechanization and automation. If anybody is going to starve in these countries, it's a resource allocation problem, not a lack of resources or productivity.

      • by reanjr ( 588767 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @01:49PM (#61413584) Homepage

        There are plenty of 70-year-olds able to drive a tractor.

      • by Immerman ( 2627577 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @02:21PM (#61413686)

        Fortunately, aside from niche "boutique" products, farming is already almost entirely automated. At least in the "developed" world. We've gone from something like 80+% of the population being involved in farming a few centuries ago, to less than 1% today. If people starve, it's not going to be because of a lack of workforce to keep the farms running.

        And the COVID lockdowns have gone a long way toward proving that we don't actually need nearly as large a labor force as we have to keep necessary goods and services flowing.

        What we lack is a modern economic model that doesn't revolve around perpetual exponential growth. In the last few centuries we've become acclimated to a "grow or die" model of business, and our entire financial sector depends on the idea that, with sufficient diversification, any investment can reliably experience consistent exponential growth (e.g. a 3% increase year after year, indefinitely)

    • by crunchygranola ( 1954152 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @01:10PM (#61413456)

      Having 8 billion people is an anomaly, a result of cheap energy and technology.

      An interesting point about this is that the existence of 75% of the people on Earth is due to one single industrial process - the Haber Process for nitrogen fixation.

      Without synthetic nitrogen the world population would hit a hard ceiling around 1930 at 2 billion people because natural nitrogen fixation is too slow to support more than that. Nitrogen fertilizer made the green revolution possible, and the increase in food and population to current levels. Organic farming is, by the way, dependent on synthetic nitrogen fed to livestock to produce manure.

      • by Subm ( 79417 )

        I'm amazed at your understatement at leaving out the consequence of this point. We can't sustain this population without fossil fuels but fossil fuel pollution is already killing us. Solar, wind, and nuclear, even if their problems were solved, may not be able to replace this key role of fossil fuels, even if they solve other problems, which they might not, like transportation and sequestering carbon. Even if they can do all that, there's no sign they can in time before our population overshoot results in c

    • by mark-t ( 151149 )

      Having 8 billion people is an anomaly, a result of cheap energy and technology.

      I think more likely that having 8 billion people is the result of many hundreds of thousands of generations of people breeding faster than they were dying off.

      The so-called correlation you claim to have observed about the availability of inexpensive energy correlating to the growth rate of the population is tenuous, and doesn't really hold up against the evidence that the fastest growing countries tend to be *LESS* industrial

  • by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @12:47PM (#61413368)

    After the multitude of people who died during the years of the plague in Europe, wages rose, rent, and housing, became cheaper, and lives, to an extent, became better.

    With a declining birth rate across the world, the same will be seen except automation will take over larger portions of business where feasible. Since people will be making more money, the taxes brought in will help sustain government services for the elderly and others.

    And this doesn't take into consideration far less pollution which means cleaner air and water.

    A declining population is the best thing to happen on this planet since humans started settling into communities.

  • by Joce640k ( 829181 )

    The article asks us to imagine a world where now-empty homes become "a common eyesore,"

    HMOs aside, I think we'll manage.

    If the alternative is ever-more non-sustainable consumption then it can only be a good thing.

  • ... sounds so ominous and evil.

    I await a looming Lottery winning windfall.

  • Can't wait (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Revek ( 133289 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @01:07PM (#61413442)
    Less people equals more resources.
  • by TheNameOfNick ( 7286618 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @01:28PM (#61413516)

    We'll be fine. It is not a crisis. It is a return to a less overpopulated planet. Before a global decline, we'll see an increase for quite some time anyway, so if you like it crowded, you'll get your wish too.

  • If you follow age extension research, a breakthrough seems around the corner. Extended lives = larger population; the longer the extension the bigger the population increase. Extended lifetimes are very welcome with declining populations and very unwelcome for the opposite case.
    • Do tell. What is this breakthrough, that is just around the corner? One one may posit unknown breakthroughs in fields that get them regularly - like battery performance - but not in a field that has never ever had one, not even once. The maximum length of human life has not increased at all in human history thus far. The oldest known old people today are not significantly older than the oldest known old people from centuries ago, though there are more of them (but still very few).

      What has happened is a comp

    • by triffid_98 ( 899609 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @09:19PM (#61414710)
      I thought it was called Kale and most of us decided early death was preferable. You weird people enjoy your +3 years of dementia and bitter lettuce, I am headed to "flavor-town".
  • Yes, there will need to be some changes in economic policy: things like social security that relies on increasing numbers of future workers to pay fro retirees will need to change. We will need to spend more on elder care. But - the increased resources per person and decrease in total environmental damage is a huge win. There are a lot of over crowded, impoverished places in the world, so immigration from there to wealthy countries with declining populations will smooth out he changes for decades. We don
    • things like social security that relies on increasing numbers of future workers to pay fro retirees will need to change.

      People talk about like it is some design flaw with particular programs, but the fact is a lower percentage of workers in the population presents a challenge no matter how matter it is managed.

      • There is certainly a problem with a lower percentage of workers, and that may result in needing to increase the standard retirement age. It is a problem if the percentage of people's lives that they can work decreases. In the short term (few decades) this can be helped a lot with immigration.
  • Is it just me? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @02:04PM (#61413632)

    Or are we getting mixed messages here?

    "The world population is expanding! We're doomed!"
    "The worlld population is declining! We're doomed!"

    • Are you surprised? If the value of the dollar goes up, we hear how it's bad for exporters, and of the dollar goes down, we hear it's bad for importers. The media only reports on the negative or scary aspects of everything. It gets more eyeballs.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Climate change denialists love to harp on and increasing population because it's an excuse for them to do nothing. Why bother reduce your carbon footprint, the REAL problem is OTHER people having too many kids? They have been responsible by not reproducing!

    • Only if you cannot distinguish concerns from half a century ago with the present. The decline in fertility rates has been in progress for decades, and in the last 20 years it became clear that the world would reach a ceiling by the end of the current century.

      • I can see the difference in the concerns. My question is why fifty years ago a trend was seen as a sure path to destruction, and now the exact opposite trend is also being touted as our doom.

    • Disasters sell news, its really as simple as that. There are some real issues out there, but the news media has a motivation to make a wide range of issues sound dire because more people will read about them. That makes it very difficult to distinguish the real looming disasters from the looming inconveniences.
  • by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @02:05PM (#61413638) Journal
    It is not just that the population is poised to decline. It is the changing of demographics too.

    The nations that have higher quality of life, stabler governments, more equitable law enforcement and fairly impartial judiciary, good health care etc are the ones that face plummeting birth rates.

    The people under authoritarian theocracies, unstable governments, uncontrollable crime, are the ones with population growth, that triggers population explosion.

    Building walls will not stop illegal immigration. The people coming over have nothing to lose. They either die a miserable death in some South American hellhole, or die trying to get into USA. What would you choose, were you in their shoes?

    Nation building will stop illegal immigration. USA had/has countrywide quotas for legal immigration, and visas allocated to developed countries go unused. My own personal story is an anecdote, but it is exactly what would happen if USA did nation building instead of wall building. Back when I came over in the early 1990s, top graduates from India saw USA as the top place to go to. H1B visa is so coveted, it garnered so much of respect, admiration, even jealousy back home. As the economy of India improved, top grads prefer to stay home. Now a days India exports second or third class engineers to IT companies, Top ones have better jobs and higher quality of living in India. A couple with two IT salaries in India will typically have two cars, a driver, a cook, one sometimes two maids. They take vacations abroad, and have tons and tons of leisure time. USA is not attractive to them anymore.

    If USA helped the unstable banana Republics of South America to handle their crime, to enforce some basic security for life and some basic prospects for life home, they wont risk their lives trying to come to America.

    It is not the duty of America to build other nations. But it is in its best interests to improve quality of life everywhere, to improve worker safety everywhere, to improve pollution laws and enforcement everywhere. Viruses and pollution do not respect national borders.

    • The people coming over have nothing to lose. They either die a miserable death in some South American hellhole, or die trying to get into USA.

      Wow, it's not that bad in Central America. People go north for economic opportunity.

  • by dave-man ( 119245 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @02:05PM (#61413646)

    The only life form on this planet of which there is no shortage is human beings. Getting population growth under control is a good thing.

  • Book: Empty Planet (Score:5, Informative)

    by kbahey ( 102895 ) on Sunday May 23, 2021 @02:13PM (#61413672) Homepage

    There is a book on this very topic called Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Planet Decline [penguinrandomhouse.com], by Darrel Bricker and John Ibbitson. One is a journalist, the other is a political scientist.

    What they found is very interesting. Even India's birth rate is slowing down.

    See the reviews and interviews at: TVO [youtube.com], Wired [wired.com], and CBC [www.cbc.ca].

    Oh, and the topic of declining birth rates worldwide has been covered on Slashdot back in Feb [slashdot.org] and June [slashdot.org] 2019.

  • The summary keeps claiming we need to brace for a declining population and talking about empty ghost communities. But the population of the world is increasing. It's increasing more slowly than it was previously, but it's still growing. Ghost towns aren't the result of fewer people, it's just fewer people in one specific region. It's like saying global warming is reversing because it snowed today. I live in an area where hospitals are closing and businesses are dying. It's not from the population shrinking
  • This reveals one of the larger contributors to people not having kids: https://imgur.com/JBEIzCY [imgur.com]

  • ... now-empty homes become "a common eyesore." Uh, huh. Not like today, where millions are on the streets while perfectly usable homes sit empty and unaffordable.

  • by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Monday May 24, 2021 @02:13AM (#61415144) Journal
    Many of our current problems would be solved by there being fewer humans.

It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. - W. K. Clifford, British philosopher, circa 1876

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