19 ms·

The world has reached 8B people but soon we'll hit a decline we'll never reverse

151 points by adrian_mrd 4y ago

smitty1e 4y ago
Sweet, sweet Malthusianism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism
- XorNot 4y ago
  This has nothing to do with the article, which is about the natural decline in the number of children per woman, slated to fall below replacement levels in the next 100 years.
  - Animats 4y ago
    Birth rates are already below replacement levels worldwide, and well below it in all but Africa. "Peak baby" worldwide was in 2013. Japan's population peaked in 2017. Outside of Osaka and Tokyo, the country is emptying out. Look to Japan first to see how this plays out. China's population is peaking now. So is the US native-born population.[1] Almost all the population growth worldwide is in sub-Saharan Africa. That region may not survive global warming. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU00073413 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU00073413
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  Quite the opposite of Malthusianism, actually. Birth rates in the west have declined in spite of ever increasing capacity to feed the populace.
jefftk 4y ago
Predictions this far out are pretty silly given how much technological and change we've had in the past century and how much we can see on the horizon. Still, even if you held our technological state constant a permanent gradual decline is very unlikely given biological and cultural evolution: the children of people who have more kids than average will likely do the same, undoing the demographic transition.
- skissane 4y ago
  The article is only considering the social majority and ignoring the existing of minority groups – for example, ultra-Orthodox Jews – who appear to be consistently maintaining high birth rates and avoiding any demographic transition. While they are only a tiny minority in most countries (Israel being the exception), if they continue on their current trajectory for a few centuries, they (and similar groups) will come to make up the majority of the population.
- Enginerrrd 4y ago
  Demographics are actually pretty stable and accurate long term predictors of lots of other things. Now, birthrates might be something harder to predict, although they too are subject to demographic forces. (Less people have fewer babies even with higher fertility.) The problem will be slow to correct.
phpisthebest 4y ago
As I get older the number of these long term predictions that never come that I have personally live through increases. I never believe anyone of them now. I wonder if that is why there is such resistance to climate change among older people...
- jemmyw 4y ago
  The original climate change predictions were pretty much on the mark even though they weren't complex models. The problem is usually the media rather than the science. Journalists turn everything into sensationalist claims.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    Original? In the early 20th century global cooling and an end to the interglacial period of the ice age we’re still in was a prominent concern. By the way if we reset to the atmospheric conditions of a few hundred years ago this would be a certainty within a period of thousands of years at most. Much of the world’s population centers, agriculture, etc covered in hundreds of feet of ice.
    - veqz 4y ago
      That's not correct. We have had models showing global warming caused by fossil fuels since the late 18th Century at the very least. A few papers in the 1980s were predicting global cooling, but those have been shown to be erroneous – sometimes even by the very same authors.
  - lzooz 4y ago
    >The original climate change predictions were pretty much on the mark even though they weren't complex models. No? It's 2022 and our cities should be sunk in the ocean and we should be boiling or frozen and there should be no drinkable water left and blah blah blah.
    - hedora 4y ago
thriftwy 4y ago
In Babylon V the TV series, in the season 4 we casually find out that Centauri Prime, the home planet of one of strongest races who decide fate of universe, host less actual people than some irrelevant humanoid species' home planet (was it 4B vs. 8B?) There are also some ancient races who are very powerful individually but only have a few hundred individuals left (sometimes, one). It seems that individual power tends to rise but overall numbers tend to dwindle as a race develops, and quality * quantity would eventually peak. Maybe it's how it works in the real life as well.
- jemmyw 4y ago
  Not sure you can draw conclusions from a TV show. I thought the point of the Centauri was that they were declining due to decadence.
  - thriftwy 4y ago
    But who isn't decadent these day? The Minbari were quite obviously declining too, and the Vorlon were obviously thin in numbers. TV show is what may give food for thoughts.
    - jemmyw 4y ago
      Well the Minbari were losing souls to humans. I don't recall if that was fully explained in implication. The Vorlon are an example of what you said, individually powerful and long lived so no need to breed.
      - thriftwy 4y ago
        I'm not sure about the "not needing" part. Imagine there would be several billion Vorlon out there. They wouldn't even need their clever plots to win.
MisterSandman 4y ago
> Cities are growing, chewing up arable farmland. Um, what? City area growth is slow and mostly vertically, and effect of farmlands have been minimal, at least compared to other factors.
- idlehand 4y ago
  Many cities grow by adding more suburban areas. It's a very land-intensive way to grow, but popular among families as they don't have to live in apartments.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    They certainly did in the baby-boom years. Is that still the case? The cost of extending utilities and services to ever increasing areas is a growing concern. Traffic and the time and expense of commuting is a growing concern. Where I live, most growth is in the the form of increasing density closer to the city center. Smaller apartments are more workable for families if they have one or two (or zero) kids as opposed to three or more.
    - kwere 4y ago
      thats why most of US towns are bankrupt or near bankrupt and need federal funds to function, literally a ponzi scheme[0]. Strongtowns is an organization that study better urban policies[1] [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ... [1]https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/
    - hasbot 4y ago
      Yes, it's still the case. Look at Boise, Las Vegas, and Denver.
- breitling 4y ago
  Toronto just added 14 new suburbs. Until a month ago, these thousands of acres were considered the "green belt" necessary for the functioning of a large metropolis. Now they'll be paved over.
lionello 4y ago
“We’re getting older and older, which means there are fewer people able to work to support more people who can’t.” Well, if we’re getting older and older, isn’t that because we’re getting healthier and healthier? Wouldn’t the number of years we’re “able to work to support more people” increase as well?
- WalterSear 4y ago
  Not equally.
- mertd 4y ago
  Birthrates are falling too. Meaning less young people to pull down the average age.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  > isn’t that because we’re getting healthier and healthier? Not necessarily, just look at the obesity epidemic. 40% of Americans are now obese. Not overweight, obese. Our society has tackled large scale public health issues that used to kill lots of people (cholera, polio, etc.) But living longer is no way an indicator that we are healthier than we used to be. There's not as much out there to kill us when we're young. 0: https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2020-02-27/us-obesity-rate-passes-40-percent https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/...
  - frumper 4y ago
    I’d say being alive and obese is healthier than dying earlier from diseases we’ve been successful at tackling. Obese doesn’t mean anything close to being unable to work and be productive for society. A 6ft tall man is obese at 220. Hardly debilitating.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  "Older and older" means the average age. This is driven more by the number of old/young people rather than a small % increase in life expectancy. Look at a graph of the distribution of people in age groups
LaserDiscMan 4y ago
I wonder how countries will attempt to deal with declining populations. Immigration isn't really a solution, as the countries with positive fertility rates (falling fast) are not producing enough children to balance the decline. I find the geopolitical implications fascinating to think about. If a country is declining and cannot tempt migrants, does it perhaps become a tax haven? Is it absorbed by a larger country (either willingly or by force)? Does it join a union of other countries to form the start of a global government? Economically, could the deflationary pressures of a declining population lead to low/negative interest rates and hyper QE? It's going to be interesting to see.
- idlehand 4y ago
  More importantly, the countries with high birth rates do not have enough human capital to replace aging Westerners. Their kids aren't equipped to take the millions of vacant Western jobs, because they won't have the necessary education, especially when it comes to language.
  - bushbaba 4y ago
    Israel has a higher than replacement birth-rate and has western-ish ideals. If the US cared to increase births it could simply issue free daycare, or increase the child tax deduction.
    - lr4444lr 4y ago
      That needs to be disaggregated. Israel has a huge religious contingent, and a substantial segment of it is supported by wholesale welfare - not just child care and rebates. If subsidized early years child care were enough, you'd expect the Nordic countries with their amazing social safety net to have a population boom. They don't. There's something more subtle going on with the cultural attitudes about women as homemakers.
    - hnuser847 4y ago
      > free daycare France has free daycare and yet has had a below-replacement level birth rate since the late 70s.
jacknobody 4y ago
So who's amazed, anyway. We've seen population growth and decay curves and noted that our species has more characteristics in common with the short lived species that only go for a few million years than it has with the long surviving genus of cockroaches for example. We're a species which must die out. We must make our peace with that fact, just as we face our personal deaths.
ForHackernews 4y ago
"Never" is a very long time. Is there any reason to think the human population won't reach some kind of a steady-state eventually?
throwaway892238 4y ago
It's hard to take any kind of wholesale prediction of population calamity seriously after The Population Bomb bombed in the early 1970s. But this article claims to be able to predict the future of civilization 100 years into the future. Assuming we even make it another 100 years, there is no way to know what our population will look like then, or whether we could pull another technological/logistical food revolution out of our asses, or whether global cultures would start to embrace a further explosion of population. WW2 resulted in unprecedented population growth in the USA. There's no way to know if a similar event, here or in other countries, might shake what we expect growth to be, or why. The biggest mistake we could make is to expect consistency.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  > Assuming we even make it another 100 years, there is no way to know what our population will look like then, or whether we could not pull another technological/logistical revolution out of our asses, or whether global cultures would start to embrace a further explosion of population. It seems like women in pretty much all cultures where women achieve financial independence and have control over how many children they have, choose to have 0, 1, 2, or rarely 3. Which makes sense given the risks and costliness of childbirth for them. So I would guess that any culture that results in population explosion would have to either have medical advances that address the risks and costs of childbirth, or go backwards on women’s independence. Or really sweeten the deal in terms of financial and other incentives, but I don’t imagine that would fare very well.
  - forkLding 4y ago
    Or there are technological advances in artificial wombs and children are grown in incubators so that women are no longer as involved in pregnancy/child-bearing. We have research papers with animal fetuses being grown in artificial wombs. Never know, could be some technology developed for humans during the next 100 years.
    - tough 4y ago
      Damn the matrix is so close We all batteries in 100 years
dotnet00 4y ago
Feels like they're really overlooking technological progress's role in shaping long term population changes. Fertility rates tend to be lower in more developed nations due to higher cost of raising children and people being occupied by careers, but with 50 years worth of improvements in automation that can change significantly. Similarly, while many countries are offsetting their aging populations with immigration, if that ceases to be sufficient they currently can still afford to create incentives for people to have children.
- lossolo 4y ago
  Just to complement your comment, robots will not only help with costs of raising children but will also replace a lot of working people so should offset declining population, which we need to do if we want to keep social contract in our current economical model based on growth.
actuallyalys 4y ago
The article switches between grounded projections and sweeping “never” statements in a way that seems misleading. It’s certainly possible that the early 20th century ends up being a historical outlier in terms of the level of technology and wealth distribution and we never see a baby boom like that again. But we don’t know. Certainly saying we’ll never reverse the population decline is total speculation. I wouldn’t expect the same conditions to persist forever and at some point, people might be motivated by the decline itself.
- eulgro 4y ago
  The truth is that our current population level can only be supported by fossil fuels, which are becoming increasingly harder to exploit. As society collapses, technology required for extraction may be lost. Fossil fuels will take millions of year to regenerate.
  - asvitkine 4y ago
    Why can't other energy sources support it? There's plenty of geothermal energy or let's say nuclear.
    - eulgro 4y ago
      Surely other energy sources can be a replacement, but for a lot of things, fossil fuel is still the only solution today (agriculture, mining, air travel). Can we manage the energy transition? Perhaps. I was always a pessimist, so my guess is no. The technology for it has yet to be invented. In overshoot territory, we're already living on borrowed time. The world's ecological footprint widely exceeds the Earth biocapacity has long been exceeded, now imagine 8 billion people who want to live the lifestyle of Americans. Demand in energy just keeps growing. Renewables don't even displace fossil fuels, they only increase the total energy output.
  - actuallyalys 4y ago
    That might turn out to be the case, but we just don't know. Notably, there are some industrial processes that use fossil fuels directly and can't be trivially swapped out for grid power. Those processes might not be possible after a certain point. However, we've had fossil fuels for the entire history of industrial production, so there hasn't been pressure to invent other techniques.
option 4y ago
why all predictions are confident that the decline will never reverse?
kragen 4y ago
within a century more than 8 billion people will live in space habitats if 99% or 99.9% of the population voluntarily practices a below-replacement fertility rate, either every generation or on average over multiple generations, it might instead take 500 years whatever eccentric 1% or 0.1% chooses otherwise will double every 50 years, as world population just did then it's just a question of the technical feasibility of building appealing offworld habitats, and the political freedom to do so
conformist 4y ago
> Around the Balkans, the nations of Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia and Serbia are all at least 1 per cent smaller this year than they were last year, according to the UN’s figures. So, did they mix up and then also group the Baltics and the Balkans? Otherwise this is a rather bizarre description.
- probablypower 4y ago
  They're Australian, they probably just think Balkan is term for countries between Germany and Russia.
  - reustle 4y ago
    Maybe the article was written by the kangaroos in Austria
vouaobrasil 4y ago
Good. Although there will be short-term suffering, humanity will recover and hopefully learn from our mistakes.
mikewarot 4y ago
It's possible we'll be back down to 7B people by the end of 2025 thanks to the food and fertilizer disruption that has already happened due to the war Ukraine. We're approaching the downside slope of the carbon pulse that has been fueling mankind for the past 200 years. Things don't look good for the next decade for anyone. I've watched too much Peter Zeihan and Nate Hagens to see anything other than that coming.
- lost_tourist 4y ago
  you are grossly exaggerating the situation, barring nuclear war we'll be just fine for a while, jeesh.
  - Petersipoi 4y ago
    Yep. I don't think people realize how much damage hyperbole like this does. Each time one of these predictions don't pan out (which, come one, we'll all be able to laugh about this one in 2025) people take them less and less seriously.
  - arise 4y ago
    If by "we" you mean Americans with in-demand technical skills and 6-figure salaries, then yes, we'll be okay. North America has a great setup for internal good security. However, the rest of the world has to deal with losing 25% of cereals (from Russia and Ukraine) as well as the curtailment of rice imports from China, India, and Parisian. Similarly, the loss of Russia's and China's nitrogen, potassium, and potash exports cuts out ~20-30% of those resources, each of which is necessary to sustain post-industrial agricultural yields. This can easily cascade, for example, with Brazil and Latin American food exports drying up due to insufficient fertilizer input, or Saudi fertilizer output drying up due to regional insecurity or state collapse driven in part by high food prices. So yes, "we" will be fine. North Africa and the Middle East... not so much.
    - lost_tourist 4y ago
      You're moving the goalpost from what I said, but okay? I guess.
lost_tourist 4y ago
So despite Musk and similar claims about depopulation, maybe we shouldn't devalue having children so much as a society. It becomes progressively hard to afford time and money for more children based on current economics and corporations controlling society via governments so that all the money flows up and we dont have extra money for kids/child care/etc.
addingadimensio 4y ago
Your kids probably won’t reproduce, it’s the end of most of our lines, sorry not sorry, we don’t deserve much better.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  The future belongs to those who believe their will be one. You don't? Your choice, and your loss.
epolanski 4y ago
Wouldn't that be great? For how much we consume and greed it's best if there's less of us.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pmontra 4y ago
These predictions don't even take into account factors like sea level rising by meters. Think about the demographic impact of coastal infrastructure going underwater and having to be rebuilt and reconnected to different roads and railways, farmland going underwater and permanently lost, many million of people becoming homeless also in first world countries, lack of food and clean water. Help yourselves to add more to the list. If enough of this happens fertility rates are the least of the problems.
big_red 4y ago
mdip 4y ago
I'm guessing there's a fancy name for this phenomenon that I'm not aware of, but a lot of these kinds of advocacy-news pieces fall victim to it: The assumption that a problem that will occur in X number of years, where X is anything greater than, say, 20 will be met only with the exact technology available to us, today. If tomorrow, most of the non-elderly population died off leaving only the less-capable-of-working-and-therefore-feeding-the-world-elderly to fend for themselves, we'd have a crisis on our hands. This will happen gradually, over time. Over time, nearly every thing we produce -- food included -- is done more efficiently when the market requires it. I should temper this a little -- I'm not saying "let's just start pouring sewage into the rivers because robots will come by and clean it up some day"[0], ignore climate change (or deny it or anything else). I am suggesting those who believe this is a problem that requires awareness (and not dismissal) might be better served by being less sensational. And it would be intelligent of us to remember that when we try to make predictions about the future that the future happens all around the thing you're predicting, too ... and might even make it irrelevant. [0] If anything it's over-reacting pieces like this that cause people to think that way ... especially when they end up being the opposite of previous hauntingly similar sounding over-reactions (see The Population Bomb)
Proven 4y ago
fellellor 4y ago
The growth in population will never reverse. The decline in population will never reverse.
xg15 4y ago
> Homo sapiens have roamed the Earth for roughly 300,000 years, give or take (no one left a diary back then). [...] There were perhaps 230 million of us on Earth at around the time of Cleopatra’s death, as the ancient Egyptian civilisation came to an end. I think those numbers on their own are already interesting. They give us a picture just how unusual the present time really is - or even most of recorded history. Cleopatra was living in the first century BC, so very roughly 2000 years ago. So for the ~298.000 years before (or ~99.3% of human history), there were less humans on earth than are living in the US today. Only in the last 0.7% have we ever gotten close to a billion, then surpassed it and reached 8 billion today. So explosive population growth has absolutely been real, it just used to happen at timescales that are not easy for us to access.
perilunar 4y ago
I hope the Earth's population does keep declining. Be good for the Earth to have fewer humans. But I also hope the total human population increases to hundreds of billions, trillions even.
- brent_noorda 4y ago
  pick a side
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    I.e. life on other planets
rrgok 4y ago
Dumb question: climate change is inevitable, right? If it is not inevitable, please correct me. My intuition comes from the Ice Age. The planet warms up and then cool down cyclically, right? If it is inevitabile, sooner or later the planet will warm up where life as we know will be unsustainable, right? We might have accelerated the warming phase, but it would have happened anyway? So, my question is why are we panicking about it? I'm not even sure that we as human are completely responsible for the warming up (what big ego we have?). There are other species which are in trillions and don't even bat an eye about being overpopulated? Why this burden only on us? Why the burden of protecting a species is on us? Why we have such a big ego to think that we are running the solar system and the earth?
- ericmay 4y ago
  > So, my question is why are we panicking about it? Speed of change basically. If it typically takes tens of thousands of years to make these changes, species can adapt and survive. If you do 10,000 years worth of heating in like 300 years it’s not enough time for that to occur.
- magic-chicken 4y ago
  I don't know what ego has to do with this to be honest. If you regognize that human behavior has an impact on climate change (and the science is clear that it does), don't you have a moral obligation to do something about it, regardless of your ego and intuition?
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Cities expanding is generally a good thing for arable land availability. Not that there's no problems with cities and agriculture, just the big picture seems the opposite of what is suggested here. Also "peak child" means peak baby. We need to support people in old age and in infancy (even supporting mothers pre-birth) so the correct comparison of workers to non-workers is those who have left school upwards to retirement. Again, not suggesting there are no demographic issues, but even on that scale it's not "all downhill from here" even before you get into robots and longer, healthier lives and other details.
dividedcomet 4y ago
This has been a theory about an impending population decline because the earth just _can’t_ support that many people, for over 200 years but it’s never come to pass. This article is a convincing as a Robert Malthus piece from 1800.
herrrk 4y ago
Cities are chewing up arable land? Cmon

151 points by adrian_mrd 4y ago

smitty1e 4y ago

Sweet, sweet Malthusianism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism

XorNot 4y ago
This has nothing to do with the article, which is about the natural decline in the number of children per woman, slated to fall below replacement levels in the next 100 years.
- Animats 4y ago
  Birth rates are already below replacement levels worldwide, and well below it in all but Africa. "Peak baby" worldwide was in 2013. Japan's population peaked in 2017. Outside of Osaka and Tokyo, the country is emptying out. Look to Japan first to see how this plays out. China's population is peaking now. So is the US native-born population.[1] Almost all the population growth worldwide is in sub-Saharan Africa. That region may not survive global warming. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU00073413 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU00073413
HideousKojima 4y ago
Quite the opposite of Malthusianism, actually. Birth rates in the west have declined in spite of ever increasing capacity to feed the populace.

jefftk 4y ago

Predictions this far out are pretty silly given how much technological and change we've had in the past century and how much we can see on the horizon. Still, even if you held our technological state constant a permanent gradual decline is very unlikely given biological and cultural evolution: the children of people who have more kids than average will likely do the same, undoing the demographic transition.

skissane 4y ago
The article is only considering the social majority and ignoring the existing of minority groups – for example, ultra-Orthodox Jews – who appear to be consistently maintaining high birth rates and avoiding any demographic transition. While they are only a tiny minority in most countries (Israel being the exception), if they continue on their current trajectory for a few centuries, they (and similar groups) will come to make up the majority of the population.
Enginerrrd 4y ago
Demographics are actually pretty stable and accurate long term predictors of lots of other things. Now, birthrates might be something harder to predict, although they too are subject to demographic forces. (Less people have fewer babies even with higher fertility.) The problem will be slow to correct.

phpisthebest 4y ago

As I get older the number of these long term predictions that never come that I have personally live through increases. I never believe anyone of them now. I wonder if that is why there is such resistance to climate change among older people...

jemmyw 4y ago
The original climate change predictions were pretty much on the mark even though they weren't complex models. The problem is usually the media rather than the science. Journalists turn everything into sensationalist claims.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Original? In the early 20th century global cooling and an end to the interglacial period of the ice age we’re still in was a prominent concern. By the way if we reset to the atmospheric conditions of a few hundred years ago this would be a certainty within a period of thousands of years at most. Much of the world’s population centers, agriculture, etc covered in hundreds of feet of ice.
  - veqz 4y ago
    That's not correct. We have had models showing global warming caused by fossil fuels since the late 18th Century at the very least. A few papers in the 1980s were predicting global cooling, but those have been shown to be erroneous – sometimes even by the very same authors.
- lzooz 4y ago
  >The original climate change predictions were pretty much on the mark even though they weren't complex models. No? It's 2022 and our cities should be sunk in the ocean and we should be boiling or frozen and there should be no drinkable water left and blah blah blah.
  - hedora 4y ago

thriftwy 4y ago

In Babylon V the TV series, in the season 4 we casually find out that Centauri Prime, the home planet of one of strongest races who decide fate of universe, host less actual people than some irrelevant humanoid species' home planet (was it 4B vs. 8B?) There are also some ancient races who are very powerful individually but only have a few hundred individuals left (sometimes, one). It seems that individual power tends to rise but overall numbers tend to dwindle as a race develops, and quality * quantity would eventually peak. Maybe it's how it works in the real life as well.

jemmyw 4y ago
Not sure you can draw conclusions from a TV show. I thought the point of the Centauri was that they were declining due to decadence.
- thriftwy 4y ago
  But who isn't decadent these day? The Minbari were quite obviously declining too, and the Vorlon were obviously thin in numbers. TV show is what may give food for thoughts.
  - jemmyw 4y ago
    Well the Minbari were losing souls to humans. I don't recall if that was fully explained in implication. The Vorlon are an example of what you said, individually powerful and long lived so no need to breed.
    - thriftwy 4y ago
      I'm not sure about the "not needing" part. Imagine there would be several billion Vorlon out there. They wouldn't even need their clever plots to win.

MisterSandman 4y ago

> Cities are growing, chewing up arable farmland. Um, what? City area growth is slow and mostly vertically, and effect of farmlands have been minimal, at least compared to other factors.

idlehand 4y ago
Many cities grow by adding more suburban areas. It's a very land-intensive way to grow, but popular among families as they don't have to live in apartments.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  They certainly did in the baby-boom years. Is that still the case? The cost of extending utilities and services to ever increasing areas is a growing concern. Traffic and the time and expense of commuting is a growing concern. Where I live, most growth is in the the form of increasing density closer to the city center. Smaller apartments are more workable for families if they have one or two (or zero) kids as opposed to three or more.
  - kwere 4y ago
    thats why most of US towns are bankrupt or near bankrupt and need federal funds to function, literally a ponzi scheme[0]. Strongtowns is an organization that study better urban policies[1] [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ... [1]https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/
  - hasbot 4y ago
    Yes, it's still the case. Look at Boise, Las Vegas, and Denver.
breitling 4y ago
Toronto just added 14 new suburbs. Until a month ago, these thousands of acres were considered the "green belt" necessary for the functioning of a large metropolis. Now they'll be paved over.

lionello 4y ago

“We’re getting older and older, which means there are fewer people able to work to support more people who can’t.” Well, if we’re getting older and older, isn’t that because we’re getting healthier and healthier? Wouldn’t the number of years we’re “able to work to support more people” increase as well?

WalterSear 4y ago
Not equally.
mertd 4y ago
Birthrates are falling too. Meaning less young people to pull down the average age.
thr0wawayf00 4y ago
> isn’t that because we’re getting healthier and healthier? Not necessarily, just look at the obesity epidemic. 40% of Americans are now obese. Not overweight, obese. Our society has tackled large scale public health issues that used to kill lots of people (cholera, polio, etc.) But living longer is no way an indicator that we are healthier than we used to be. There's not as much out there to kill us when we're young. 0: https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2020-02-27/us-obesity-rate-passes-40-percent https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/...
- frumper 4y ago
  I’d say being alive and obese is healthier than dying earlier from diseases we’ve been successful at tackling. Obese doesn’t mean anything close to being unable to work and be productive for society. A 6ft tall man is obese at 220. Hardly debilitating.
nonethewiser 4y ago
"Older and older" means the average age. This is driven more by the number of old/young people rather than a small % increase in life expectancy. Look at a graph of the distribution of people in age groups

LaserDiscMan 4y ago

I wonder how countries will attempt to deal with declining populations. Immigration isn't really a solution, as the countries with positive fertility rates (falling fast) are not producing enough children to balance the decline. I find the geopolitical implications fascinating to think about. If a country is declining and cannot tempt migrants, does it perhaps become a tax haven? Is it absorbed by a larger country (either willingly or by force)? Does it join a union of other countries to form the start of a global government? Economically, could the deflationary pressures of a declining population lead to low/negative interest rates and hyper QE? It's going to be interesting to see.

idlehand 4y ago
More importantly, the countries with high birth rates do not have enough human capital to replace aging Westerners. Their kids aren't equipped to take the millions of vacant Western jobs, because they won't have the necessary education, especially when it comes to language.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  Israel has a higher than replacement birth-rate and has western-ish ideals. If the US cared to increase births it could simply issue free daycare, or increase the child tax deduction.
  - lr4444lr 4y ago
    That needs to be disaggregated. Israel has a huge religious contingent, and a substantial segment of it is supported by wholesale welfare - not just child care and rebates. If subsidized early years child care were enough, you'd expect the Nordic countries with their amazing social safety net to have a population boom. They don't. There's something more subtle going on with the cultural attitudes about women as homemakers.
  - hnuser847 4y ago
    > free daycare France has free daycare and yet has had a below-replacement level birth rate since the late 70s.

jacknobody 4y ago

So who's amazed, anyway. We've seen population growth and decay curves and noted that our species has more characteristics in common with the short lived species that only go for a few million years than it has with the long surviving genus of cockroaches for example. We're a species which must die out. We must make our peace with that fact, just as we face our personal deaths.

ForHackernews 4y ago

"Never" is a very long time. Is there any reason to think the human population won't reach some kind of a steady-state eventually?

throwaway892238 4y ago

It's hard to take any kind of wholesale prediction of population calamity seriously after The Population Bomb bombed in the early 1970s. But this article claims to be able to predict the future of civilization 100 years into the future. Assuming we even make it another 100 years, there is no way to know what our population will look like then, or whether we could pull another technological/logistical food revolution out of our asses, or whether global cultures would start to embrace a further explosion of population. WW2 resulted in unprecedented population growth in the USA. There's no way to know if a similar event, here or in other countries, might shake what we expect growth to be, or why. The biggest mistake we could make is to expect consistency.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
> Assuming we even make it another 100 years, there is no way to know what our population will look like then, or whether we could not pull another technological/logistical revolution out of our asses, or whether global cultures would start to embrace a further explosion of population. It seems like women in pretty much all cultures where women achieve financial independence and have control over how many children they have, choose to have 0, 1, 2, or rarely 3. Which makes sense given the risks and costliness of childbirth for them. So I would guess that any culture that results in population explosion would have to either have medical advances that address the risks and costs of childbirth, or go backwards on women’s independence. Or really sweeten the deal in terms of financial and other incentives, but I don’t imagine that would fare very well.
- forkLding 4y ago
  Or there are technological advances in artificial wombs and children are grown in incubators so that women are no longer as involved in pregnancy/child-bearing. We have research papers with animal fetuses being grown in artificial wombs. Never know, could be some technology developed for humans during the next 100 years.
  - tough 4y ago
    Damn the matrix is so close We all batteries in 100 years

dotnet00 4y ago

Feels like they're really overlooking technological progress's role in shaping long term population changes. Fertility rates tend to be lower in more developed nations due to higher cost of raising children and people being occupied by careers, but with 50 years worth of improvements in automation that can change significantly. Similarly, while many countries are offsetting their aging populations with immigration, if that ceases to be sufficient they currently can still afford to create incentives for people to have children.

lossolo 4y ago
Just to complement your comment, robots will not only help with costs of raising children but will also replace a lot of working people so should offset declining population, which we need to do if we want to keep social contract in our current economical model based on growth.

actuallyalys 4y ago

The article switches between grounded projections and sweeping “never” statements in a way that seems misleading. It’s certainly possible that the early 20th century ends up being a historical outlier in terms of the level of technology and wealth distribution and we never see a baby boom like that again. But we don’t know. Certainly saying we’ll never reverse the population decline is total speculation. I wouldn’t expect the same conditions to persist forever and at some point, people might be motivated by the decline itself.

eulgro 4y ago
The truth is that our current population level can only be supported by fossil fuels, which are becoming increasingly harder to exploit. As society collapses, technology required for extraction may be lost. Fossil fuels will take millions of year to regenerate.
- asvitkine 4y ago
  Why can't other energy sources support it? There's plenty of geothermal energy or let's say nuclear.
  - eulgro 4y ago
    Surely other energy sources can be a replacement, but for a lot of things, fossil fuel is still the only solution today (agriculture, mining, air travel). Can we manage the energy transition? Perhaps. I was always a pessimist, so my guess is no. The technology for it has yet to be invented. In overshoot territory, we're already living on borrowed time. The world's ecological footprint widely exceeds the Earth biocapacity has long been exceeded, now imagine 8 billion people who want to live the lifestyle of Americans. Demand in energy just keeps growing. Renewables don't even displace fossil fuels, they only increase the total energy output.
- actuallyalys 4y ago
  That might turn out to be the case, but we just don't know. Notably, there are some industrial processes that use fossil fuels directly and can't be trivially swapped out for grid power. Those processes might not be possible after a certain point. However, we've had fossil fuels for the entire history of industrial production, so there hasn't been pressure to invent other techniques.

option 4y ago

why all predictions are confident that the decline will never reverse?

kragen 4y ago

within a century more than 8 billion people will live in space habitats if 99% or 99.9% of the population voluntarily practices a below-replacement fertility rate, either every generation or on average over multiple generations, it might instead take 500 years whatever eccentric 1% or 0.1% chooses otherwise will double every 50 years, as world population just did then it's just a question of the technical feasibility of building appealing offworld habitats, and the political freedom to do so

conformist 4y ago

> Around the Balkans, the nations of Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia and Serbia are all at least 1 per cent smaller this year than they were last year, according to the UN’s figures. So, did they mix up and then also group the Baltics and the Balkans? Otherwise this is a rather bizarre description.

probablypower 4y ago
They're Australian, they probably just think Balkan is term for countries between Germany and Russia.
- reustle 4y ago
  Maybe the article was written by the kangaroos in Austria

vouaobrasil 4y ago

Good. Although there will be short-term suffering, humanity will recover and hopefully learn from our mistakes.

mikewarot 4y ago

It's possible we'll be back down to 7B people by the end of 2025 thanks to the food and fertilizer disruption that has already happened due to the war Ukraine. We're approaching the downside slope of the carbon pulse that has been fueling mankind for the past 200 years. Things don't look good for the next decade for anyone. I've watched too much Peter Zeihan and Nate Hagens to see anything other than that coming.

lost_tourist 4y ago
you are grossly exaggerating the situation, barring nuclear war we'll be just fine for a while, jeesh.
- Petersipoi 4y ago
  Yep. I don't think people realize how much damage hyperbole like this does. Each time one of these predictions don't pan out (which, come one, we'll all be able to laugh about this one in 2025) people take them less and less seriously.
- arise 4y ago
  If by "we" you mean Americans with in-demand technical skills and 6-figure salaries, then yes, we'll be okay. North America has a great setup for internal good security. However, the rest of the world has to deal with losing 25% of cereals (from Russia and Ukraine) as well as the curtailment of rice imports from China, India, and Parisian. Similarly, the loss of Russia's and China's nitrogen, potassium, and potash exports cuts out ~20-30% of those resources, each of which is necessary to sustain post-industrial agricultural yields. This can easily cascade, for example, with Brazil and Latin American food exports drying up due to insufficient fertilizer input, or Saudi fertilizer output drying up due to regional insecurity or state collapse driven in part by high food prices. So yes, "we" will be fine. North Africa and the Middle East... not so much.
  - lost_tourist 4y ago
    You're moving the goalpost from what I said, but okay? I guess.

lost_tourist 4y ago

So despite Musk and similar claims about depopulation, maybe we shouldn't devalue having children so much as a society. It becomes progressively hard to afford time and money for more children based on current economics and corporations controlling society via governments so that all the money flows up and we dont have extra money for kids/child care/etc.

addingadimensio 4y ago

Your kids probably won’t reproduce, it’s the end of most of our lines, sorry not sorry, we don’t deserve much better.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
The future belongs to those who believe their will be one. You don't? Your choice, and your loss.

epolanski 4y ago

Wouldn't that be great? For how much we consume and greed it's best if there's less of us.

deleted 4y ago

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pmontra 4y ago

These predictions don't even take into account factors like sea level rising by meters. Think about the demographic impact of coastal infrastructure going underwater and having to be rebuilt and reconnected to different roads and railways, farmland going underwater and permanently lost, many million of people becoming homeless also in first world countries, lack of food and clean water. Help yourselves to add more to the list. If enough of this happens fertility rates are the least of the problems.

big_red 4y ago

mdip 4y ago

I'm guessing there's a fancy name for this phenomenon that I'm not aware of, but a lot of these kinds of advocacy-news pieces fall victim to it: The assumption that a problem that will occur in X number of years, where X is anything greater than, say, 20 will be met only with the exact technology available to us, today. If tomorrow, most of the non-elderly population died off leaving only the less-capable-of-working-and-therefore-feeding-the-world-elderly to fend for themselves, we'd have a crisis on our hands. This will happen gradually, over time. Over time, nearly every thing we produce -- food included -- is done more efficiently when the market requires it. I should temper this a little -- I'm not saying "let's just start pouring sewage into the rivers because robots will come by and clean it up some day"[0], ignore climate change (or deny it or anything else). I am suggesting those who believe this is a problem that requires awareness (and not dismissal) might be better served by being less sensational. And it would be intelligent of us to remember that when we try to make predictions about the future that the future happens all around the thing you're predicting, too ... and might even make it irrelevant. [0] If anything it's over-reacting pieces like this that cause people to think that way ... especially when they end up being the opposite of previous hauntingly similar sounding over-reactions (see The Population Bomb)

Proven 4y ago

fellellor 4y ago

The growth in population will never reverse. The decline in population will never reverse.

xg15 4y ago

> Homo sapiens have roamed the Earth for roughly 300,000 years, give or take (no one left a diary back then). [...] There were perhaps 230 million of us on Earth at around the time of Cleopatra’s death, as the ancient Egyptian civilisation came to an end. I think those numbers on their own are already interesting. They give us a picture just how unusual the present time really is - or even most of recorded history. Cleopatra was living in the first century BC, so very roughly 2000 years ago. So for the ~298.000 years before (or ~99.3% of human history), there were less humans on earth than are living in the US today. Only in the last 0.7% have we ever gotten close to a billion, then surpassed it and reached 8 billion today. So explosive population growth has absolutely been real, it just used to happen at timescales that are not easy for us to access.

perilunar 4y ago

I hope the Earth's population does keep declining. Be good for the Earth to have fewer humans. But I also hope the total human population increases to hundreds of billions, trillions even.

brent_noorda 4y ago
pick a side
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  I.e. life on other planets

rrgok 4y ago

Dumb question: climate change is inevitable, right? If it is not inevitable, please correct me. My intuition comes from the Ice Age. The planet warms up and then cool down cyclically, right? If it is inevitabile, sooner or later the planet will warm up where life as we know will be unsustainable, right? We might have accelerated the warming phase, but it would have happened anyway? So, my question is why are we panicking about it? I'm not even sure that we as human are completely responsible for the warming up (what big ego we have?). There are other species which are in trillions and don't even bat an eye about being overpopulated? Why this burden only on us? Why the burden of protecting a species is on us? Why we have such a big ego to think that we are running the solar system and the earth?

ericmay 4y ago
> So, my question is why are we panicking about it? Speed of change basically. If it typically takes tens of thousands of years to make these changes, species can adapt and survive. If you do 10,000 years worth of heating in like 300 years it’s not enough time for that to occur.
magic-chicken 4y ago
I don't know what ego has to do with this to be honest. If you regognize that human behavior has an impact on climate change (and the science is clear that it does), don't you have a moral obligation to do something about it, regardless of your ego and intuition?

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

Cities expanding is generally a good thing for arable land availability. Not that there's no problems with cities and agriculture, just the big picture seems the opposite of what is suggested here. Also "peak child" means peak baby. We need to support people in old age and in infancy (even supporting mothers pre-birth) so the correct comparison of workers to non-workers is those who have left school upwards to retirement. Again, not suggesting there are no demographic issues, but even on that scale it's not "all downhill from here" even before you get into robots and longer, healthier lives and other details.

dividedcomet 4y ago

This has been a theory about an impending population decline because the earth just _can’t_ support that many people, for over 200 years but it’s never come to pass. This article is a convincing as a Robert Malthus piece from 1800.

herrrk 4y ago

Cities are chewing up arable land? Cmon