9 ms·

“There will never be more children alive on the Earth than there is today.”

30 points by tigerlily 4y ago

mtgx 4y ago
pocketarc 4y ago
I suspect that over the next few decades we will see the countries with the lowest birth rates start to push massive incentives for having more children. The global economy runs on growth. If the population starts noticeably declining, it’ll take the economy down with it.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  A 60 year old woman can't give birth. It doesn't matter what incentives governments will give in 20 years: you can't beat biology. The women who can give birth in decades need to be born today. Yet birthrates are at their lowest levels ever. _Every_ developed country and most developing countries have committed suicide already, it's just that it will take 40 years for anyone to notice. The West is betting that immigrants will keep magically appearing whenever needed. The problem is that outside of a few countries torn apart by civil wars _nowhere_ are birth rates constant or let alone increasing. To put it in perspective: Bangladesh is below replacement fertility levels today. 40 years ago it had 8 children born per woman. Let me repeat that: Bangladesh today has fewer children born per woman than the US did in 2009.
  - rcarr 4y ago
    Not sure this is true. Nigeria has population growth of 2.5% and fertility rate of 4.6. I think other African countries are similar. Africa will be the main spawn point for new humans this century. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria
    - yreg 4y ago
      Ethiopia 2.6% Congo 3.2% Pakistan 2%
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    How accurate is that reporting? Honestly, it sounds more like the ability of statisticians to access accurate data than such a drastic shift in culture.
  - jjk166 4y ago
    The west doesn't need other nations to have high fertility rates, it just needs other nations to have people who want to immigrate to the west. Populations keep increasing for many years after the birthrate falls below replacement rate due to population momentum (people individually have fewer kids, but there are more people having kids than there used to be). And even after the population truly stops growing, people will still leave for wealthier areas in search of higher quality of life. If people keep emmigrating from a country with a sub replacement birth rate, eventually the population will get so low that there's no one left, but that would take many decades if not centuries. For example bangladesh has a net migration rate of -0.2%/yr and a birthrate 5% below replacement rate. Even if we ignore population momentum and assume bangladesh's population will immediately start falling, if they keep their current birth rate and migration rate it will take about 250 years for the population to halve, at which point it will still be about the same number of people that Germany has today.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  The era of growth through more people and more consumption is over. It is not sustainable. It will stop either because we have managed to come to our senses and stop it or because the instability caused by climate change will make it stop.
  - mrleinad 4y ago
    I agree with your conclusion, but not for those reasons. It'll be over because the cheap resources that enabled that growth will not be there anymore (unless there's a major technological change like cold fusion or something like that).
    - yreg 4y ago
      A lot of the economic growth is happening without a need for cheap natural resources. Software services are a big one.
      - mrleinad 4y ago
        Software services are at the top of the pyramid. You need a lot of other things to be in the right place for software services to happen. You need to be able to have electricity, infrastructure, food, and an educated population. That's a tall order in many places, and it's going to be taller moving forward. And I'm not even mentioning computers. They're not going to get more affordable without China, but the opposite. Software development will adapt? Sure, things will move to the cloud as they've been moving for years already, but that puts a heavier load on having the right infrastructure for it.
- dxuh 4y ago
  Maybe not. The German population is aging rapidly, our retirement model (young people pay for old people) is unsustainable and obviously unfeasible by the time I get to retire (in about 35 years), because there are too few young people to pay for the many old people. Right now about 30% of the German population is over 60 years old. I do not have the impression that the government is doing anything to improve the birth rates. If anything it's getting harder for many people to have children. So far the only time a low birth rate is being brought up politically it's to justify immigration, which might be a temporary solution, but whether it's good or not or how it should be done is a different discussion.
  - Akronymus 4y ago
    > by the time I get to retire (in about 35 years) Assuming they don't keep doing what they are doing and raise the retirement age. I doubt I'll live to whatever the retirement age is, by then.
  - iso1631 4y ago
    > our retirement model (young people pay for old people) is unsustainable All retirement models are like that. Doesn't matter how many millions of dollars the old people have, if you are on an island with 10 workers and 50 old people, the old people are screwed.
- Certhas 4y ago
  Or, you know, we change our economic model. As far as I know incentives for more children have historically not been very successful. It seems that in a modern society human nature reliably settles on a birthrate below two per couple. e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-vs-human-development-index?time=1980..2017 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-vs-hum...
- graphpapa 4y ago
  This makes me realise the growth model is a sort of pyramid scheme.
  - throw_m239339 4y ago
    Pensions certainly are, public or private. Old people use to rely on their kids to provide them when they retire. Now the kids can't even make a living for themselves or buy a house, because the "market" needs to yield enough for pension funds, no matter how. This system will collapse, sooner or later.
- piyush_soni 4y ago
  I'd heard Japan already has a mild version of this.
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  > I suspect that over the next few decades we will see the countries with the lowest birth rates start to push massive incentives for having more children. With what money? Babies are seen as a liability more than a investment among young people. No amount of money the government can afford will change that. It's a consequence of ultra-individualism driven by mass market societies and the disintegration of the nuclear family in western societies. The other extreme is of course gender imbalance where females are deemed worthless, you can't fix that with money either.
- _vbnz 4y ago
  We have labour-saving technology though. Automation leads to higher productivity, so those fewer people can earn more and spend more. The economy will do just fine. I think it'll be a rocky time though, we're facing a new Industrial Revolution - where the existing capitalists would prefer to drive down wages and destroy trade unions via mass immigration, and ordinary workers want to reverse their worsening standard of living. Brexit was just the start of this, but I think we'll see more radical movements until this is resolved.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    > We have labour-saving technology though. > Automation leads to higher productivity, so those fewer people can earn more and spend more. I can't believe people use that outdated 1900s era argument despite it being proved completely wrong time and time over. It was true at some point but has been wrong since sometime after ww2
- lynx23 4y ago
  Infinite growth is an obvious myth. The fans of "global economy" better find something to replace growth with, or they will be pretty disappointed in a few decades.
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    Capitalism requires infinite growth. It will collapse without
    - lynx23 4y ago
      Then it will collapse.
      - yreg 4y ago
        Why do you believe an infinite growth is impossible? It can run on merely increasing the net productivity. Which can be done up until a post-scarcity society at which point capitalism is obsolete anyway.
        lynx23 4y ago
        Common sense tells me that infinite growth inside a finite system is wishful-thinking at least and more likely bullshit to distract from reality.
- b112 4y ago
  It was alreasy tried in Quebec, 20+ years ago, and failed. Massive tax rebates(not credits against tax owed, but rebates for each child). The true issue is, likely due to something environmental, humans are not driven to reproduce. You may say, "More people aee choosing not to...". Wrong. Reproduction is a greater drive than eating. It is more important than anything, biologically. And as an example, many cancer patients literally waste away. They know they should eat. They know that 1/2 their problem is lack of healthy food, it makes them weak, keeps them bedridden, but they cannot even force themselves to eat. Reproduction not sex, reproduction is a core, base drive beyond our control. And no, sex isn't reproduction. Biology is smarter than that. My point is, birthrates are not falling due to cost, or any other assumptions, because governments have tried to eliminate that, and it makes no difference. And it is not cultural, for whether Canada, the EU, Russia, or Japan, anywhere which adopts a modern lifestyle, birth rate plummet. Japan 20 years ago had a plummeting birthrate, yet their culture is quite different than the rest, and 20 years ago, a lot less forgiving to female rights. Whether climate, geography, war or peace, culture, language, religion, schooling, support by the state, cost of raising children, birth control or not, birth rates are plummeting world wide. And it is because something is blocking .. something, which causes reproductive drive. If you look at die offs of species on graphs, it typically slowly decreases, then takes a crazy plummet. If this is accurate for humans, by 2100 we will have 2b, by 2150 500M, by 2200 100M, and this presumes no massive war, plague, etc.
- rapsey 4y ago
  It would take some highly drastic changes to the entire social system to make a serious dent. Modern life is simply an anathema to having lots of children. The cost in time and money to the parents is too high.
- chinathrow 4y ago
  > The global economy runs on growth. Our collective failure summarized in one sentence.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >I suspect that over the next few decades we will see the countries with the lowest birth rates start to push massive incentives for having more children. After the lifestyle has changed, the economy has different impact, and its population is already older, it might not be recoverable anymore. There will be fewer people available in child-having age, despite the incentives, and those that are wont suddenly start having 3-4 children to compensate.
- jjk166 4y ago
  Far more likely they will just reform their immigration policies to make it easier for people to move into the country. Increasing birthrates has a long lead time, it takes at least a generation from when incentives begin to when you start seeing an increase in the number of economically active tax paying adults. And due to population momentum and cultural inertia, it is likely to take much longer than that still. Immigrants on the other hand can change the shape of a population pyramid on the timescale of a political administration and they start contributing to the economy immediately. Further immigrants tend to come from higher birthrate regions and will likely continue those practices for at least a generation after arrival, leading to long term improvements in population growth. Not every country is a desirable destination for immigrants, and some cultures have stronger barriers than others to assimilation of foreigners, but for many nations growth should easily be possible so long as there are people looking for a higher quality of life, which presumably will still be the case even decades after the world's population levels off.
cryptoz 4y ago
Clickbait - the article barely goes out 100 years, mostly focusing on the next few decades. Too bad because it’s an interesting piece on its own, but no discussion at all about the never. Obviously we have no idea how things will play out in the next few thousand years or more, but it is certainly possible that in the future there will be more alive than today.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > Clickbait Hmm. By adding the word "children" the title comes across as some kind of sinister, veiled threat.
Existenceblinks 4y ago
The earth seems to be doing fine with 7 billions, I bet 17 billions would be fine .. of course with many weird ways of doing things. If it's a market who dares to short .. the numbers within 200 years?
- leroman 4y ago
  The dog meme with the fire around saying “everything is fine”, is really needed here.
  - Existenceblinks 4y ago
    It's painful but it keeps going. At some point it will reach the bottom and go up .. probably a new high?
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  To the one who downvoted me, you are very silly. Please showing your argument.
  - dutchCourage 4y ago
    I don't have the ability to downvote, but you're making a bold claim with no arguments yourself. It's strangely worded as well. I'd assume this is why you're getting downvoted. Calling people silly because you're getting downvoted is against the rules and will result in more downvotes.
    - Existenceblinks 4y ago
      Thank you. I didn't know there's such rule. I thought facebook is the only one that has this kind of "community standards". I never got downvote from reddit/youtube or social platform generally.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  Apart from mass extinctions, habitat destruction and alteration, spiraling environmental chemical accumulation, and depletion of economical reserves of many minerals and petrochemicals, and greenhouse gas pollution? It's still pretty much a ball of stuff in space that orbits the sun though so I guess it's doing fine if you look at it that way.
lqet 4y ago
Tell me about it. After just a few years of high birth rates, it has now become virtually impossible for us to find a Kindergarten for our daughter, public or private, although the law clearly states that she is entitled to one. According to latest estimates, there will be a lack of 400.000 Kindergarten places in 2023 here [0]. Demographics predicted falling birth rates for decades, and politicians acted accordingly. Turns out even demographers cannot predict the future. The basic problem seems to be that it takes longer to educate a kindergarten teacher than for a child to reach kindergarten age. I fear a complete collapse of the school system here in 2026. [0] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/bildung/bertelsmann-studie-fuer-2023-fehlen-fast-400-000-kitaplaetze-in-deutschland-a-42665fec-f6a1-41a6-a4bd-66efcc3e5fda https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/bildung/bertelsmann-studie-f...
- akmarinov 4y ago
  In my country - if your child can't get into a kindergarten, the government pays you the equivalent of the monthly government fee that they'd pay to the kindergarten to you, so that you can use it towards a private kindergarten/nanny.
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    Here in Germany even the private options have ran out
  - the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
    In Austria the limiting factor you are running into will be the actual teachers. You can get a nanny just fine, but public and private Kindergartens alike are running into staffing issues. From what I have heard, that is a shared problem in many countries.
  - lqet 4y ago
    That sounds great. Even without this financial help, we would happily pay hundreds of euros out of our own pocket for a private nanny or kindergarten. We have lost half or our net income already because my wife stays at home now. But there are no free places. None. And we have been looking for 1,5 years.
misja111 4y ago
Eventually evolution will catch up. Surely there must be some gene that motivates us to have a lot of kids. If such a gene exists it will quickly wipe out any genetic competition. It could also work indirectly, for instance a genetic disposition that pushes humans into fundamentalist religions that are opposed to birth control.
- jojobas 4y ago
  It's not exactly opposition to birth control, it's more like indoctrination of women (some would even say brainwashing) into having kids like crazy.
  - thriftwy 4y ago
    Our societies can't even keep up producing child care, schools and jobs for the small amount of children we have. Can't imagine them succeeding in indoctrination. Having children is awesome but it is also a hard work and quite costly. It would be quite hard to compel modern people have 3+ children.
    - jojobas 4y ago
      People in Africa and India keep having many kids in atrocious conditions. "Inadequate childcare" and "costly" are not even on the cards when they marry and get on with making kids. The West used to be like that too, but then something changed and living on in your kids took the back seat to premium consumption.
      - thriftwy 4y ago
        India has declining birth rate as well and probably below reproduction rate already. People are not stupid. It just takes them some time to adjust. African societies may still be forced to use children as free field labor. The more centralized their agriculture becomes, the fewer children they would need. The most important resource to spend on children is time. Even if you decide to cut on spendings, it does not add any extra time. With both parents employed full time, there's very small wedge to stick children into.
mjburgess 4y ago
I think the most likely late 21st C. path is the emergence of empires again, and great-power politics. Rich nations will need to find someway of "finding" their retirement support from poor nations; and poor nations will, typically, experience more mass migrations from changing climate. I suspect this will lead to large armies, high walls, and a certain sort of "human mercantilism" in which young immigrants are a kind of resource.
- sigmoid10 4y ago
  And people wonder why billionaires want to settle Mars so urgently. Screw these puny walls, we've got one hundred million miles of vacuum to separate us from the poor peasants!
- graderjs 4y ago
  This is a good analysis. It would be great to see a more in-depth write up of this. I hope you complete that. My current theory of the moment that I just came up with on this thread so I should probably think it through more but I mean, if we just want to make our goal lots of children again being born, and all we need to do is have some largish, global disaster wipes out a significant portion of the population, but not too much to Dent the exponential dynamics of having billions of people already and then just like after every big die off, there’ll be a baby boom. (Also, let me just add that children of men is a fantastic film.) Plus, it would help if cultures become more celebratory and enthusiastic about relationships in general, rather than sort of pessimistic or, risk focused as it seems they are now. Also, if humans develop some spacefaring technology, we could make a campaign to create babies, encourage people to do so and incentivize them because we need people to go out and colonize our local area in space.
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    All great so-called "prescient" people are, in my view, just those attentive to features of their contemporary environment that they regard as long-term. Today, we can see the re-emergence of national boundaries, with: Brexit, the Russian invasion, and protectionist competition between the US and China. The syrian mass migration to Europe was indirectly a climate event: the precipitating conditions of the civil war was mass crop failure. This also, in many ways, caused brexit. So we have clear "climate -> migration -> national-borders" events today. We have clear great power politics today. What else? Well consider declining birth rates in the west require more immigrants, but at the same time, anti-immigrant sentiment rises. Why can no leader tell their people the truth? Why can't they say, "we're all too old to support our own populations"? I don't know. But the lack of that question posed to the public is conspicious and alarming. In the UK case, the leader of the centre-left opposition is even so deranged to suggest that our national health service shortages (100,000 positions!) should be filled by more training of our own population. This is economically and politically incoherent; and I'm quite sure he knows this. This is economically and politically unsustainable: the driver towards anti-immigrant sentiment and national boundaries *HAS* to collide severely with the need for young immigrants and the "almost-here" health crisis of the west agining population. Either the future is one in which political leaders and western populations can reconsile themselves to their dependence on young immigrants, accept relatively mass migrations, and adapt their political cultures to cope. That is the "EU will work, eventually" view. OR, we take the Brexit-Russia lesson, and say the west will find a national-militaristic solution to the problem. At the moment, we're already a decade past needing to explain to western publics that immigration is not only economically beneficial, but necessary. We havent done so. At the same time, we've done the opposite. I'd suppose then that, knowing only what we know now, the "Russian trajectory" is the more likely one. The EU nations build armies, the US plays economic empire, China plays wargames in asia all the while our need for mass immigration plays out. Where does that lead? The best guess I can make is: empires. Along the "Russian-line" of future history, nations are still a deeply inefficient economic unit, but increasingly "politically efficient" at regulating national identities. With that tension, arises the need to bundle nations into empires. I think the Russian invasion of Ukraine has delayed this future a couple decades; but I only see a reversal towards the liberal alternative if new liberal institutions emerge. China-India-Russia need an "EU", and likewise, so does Europe. On that timeline, we get liberal supra-states able to negotiate migrations, transitions to aging nations, etc. But as the EU requried WW2, probably that liberal future (if ever realised) will require a comparable war. Perhaps an "asian civil war" in the manner that WW2 was a european civil war. Liberalism (in the sense of rights-based institutions) is just what happens when no amount of people dying will resolve conflict, so nations are forced to give up. It was a product of intra-Christian warfare; and possibly the likely state of the early 22nd century. Assuming Asia has the "civil war", which seems somewhat probable.
mrleinad 4y ago
This year, like so many others I'm sure, I found Peter Zeihan's books, which have been really eye opening in terms of what has happened and what's coming. It's not perfect, and at times it comes out a bit gloomier than expected, but it's certainly illuminating on a lot of topics. I highly recommend his books and videos as much as possible. Edited to add link. And also, I'd say that even though climate change impacts lots of regions of the world, fossil fuel is what has enabled our massive growth this past century. And renewable energies are not even remotely close in terms of providing the energy for that kind of growth. Not just because there's not enough of them, but because we'd need more mining than this planet can provide us with in order to meet those needs. So what I'm trying to say is that if you're concerned about falling demographics, better start embracing fossil fuel more. Either that, or come up with a different economic system in which there are fewer of us and we still manage to avoid famines and reduce poverty around the world. Demographics: https://youtu.be/xD-pj6i4b8A https://youtu.be/xD-pj6i4b8A Here's one on agriculture: https://youtu.be/myjLrulhMzk https://youtu.be/myjLrulhMzk
- causi 4y ago
  His ideas are very emotionally attractive but I think he falls down in two big areas. 1. The degree to which compliance with intellectual property laws constrains certain societies. Sure, China can't domestically produce bleeding-edge chips without using Western intellectual property, but Zeihan thinks withdrawing permission to use that property will make the Chinese industry flail and die. More likely they'll just steal it. 2. That nations will go back to high seas piracy and active trade disruption the way they did two hundred years ago. He mentions repeatedly the US no longer operates the type of navy required to patrol the ocean ("we don't need ten carriers, we need a thousand destroyers") but at the same time says the only thing stopping half the nations on earth from attacking the trade routes of the other half is the US navy. Personally I doubt anyone will decide it's worth the international scorn to actually do that even if the lack of the US navy makes it physically possible.
  - rapsey 4y ago
    > Zeihan thinks withdrawing permission to use that property will make the Chinese industry flail and die. More likely they'll just steal it. Bleeding edge chips are a giant international effort requiring tech from Europe, US, Taiwan and Japan. China has been cut out from that market and simply stealing and starting up all of it domestically is just not realistic. It is a decades long task needing hundreds of billions. > Personally I doubt anyone will decide it's worth the international scorn to actually do that even if the lack of the US navy makes it physically possible. Failed states don't have the ability to control their population and they can turn to piracy like Sudan.
gampleman 4y ago
If only we had some tools right in front of our noses… hm… like a large western religion preaching self-sacrifice with a complicated/adversarial relationship to birth control…
- thriftwy 4y ago
  Christianity is an eastern religion. In practice we don't see such a stellar number of children in predominantly catholic countries such as Poland or Italy.
  - throw_m239339 4y ago
    > Christianity is an eastern religion. The "west" here is purely metaphorical. East of what? West of what? Constantinople?
    - thriftwy 4y ago
      Well the industry has arisen in France and England, but which religions did? Freemasons? Anglicanism (still Christian though)?
  - bigDinosaur 4y ago
    It's questionable how truly catholic those countries are. Do the young generations go to church at all? True catholics legitimately wouldn't do things like use contraception, and I'm not doing a No True Scotsman, that's just a simple statement of what the church believes.
bullen 4y ago
Birth growth acceleration peaked in 1968, so yes they have had 50 years to write this article.
- vidarh 4y ago
  What is new is that as of the last couple of years India too reached replacement, and so only sub-Saharan Africa is now above replacement, and that is also dropping. And so now a lot of these changes are becoming imminent. E.g. we will see within 1-2 decades how China responds to either having to take massive steps to boost fertility rates or allowing more immigration if they want to prevent population decline which would put their economic growth in severe jeopardy. India will face the same a few decades later. The west is facing it now, and how anti-immigration settlement vs. need for labour will affect politics is going to be an even bigger question going forward than it has been.
xnx 4y ago
Actual title of the article: "World's population 8 billion and counting"

30 points by tigerlily 4y ago

mtgx 4y ago

I suspect that over the next few decades we will see the countries with the lowest birth rates start to push massive incentives for having more children. The global economy runs on growth. If the population starts noticeably declining, it’ll take the economy down with it.

thrown_22 4y ago
A 60 year old woman can't give birth. It doesn't matter what incentives governments will give in 20 years: you can't beat biology. The women who can give birth in decades need to be born today. Yet birthrates are at their lowest levels ever. _Every_ developed country and most developing countries have committed suicide already, it's just that it will take 40 years for anyone to notice. The West is betting that immigrants will keep magically appearing whenever needed. The problem is that outside of a few countries torn apart by civil wars _nowhere_ are birth rates constant or let alone increasing. To put it in perspective: Bangladesh is below replacement fertility levels today. 40 years ago it had 8 children born per woman. Let me repeat that: Bangladesh today has fewer children born per woman than the US did in 2009.
- rcarr 4y ago
  Not sure this is true. Nigeria has population growth of 2.5% and fertility rate of 4.6. I think other African countries are similar. Africa will be the main spawn point for new humans this century. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria
  - yreg 4y ago
    Ethiopia 2.6% Congo 3.2% Pakistan 2%
- dotancohen 4y ago
  How accurate is that reporting? Honestly, it sounds more like the ability of statisticians to access accurate data than such a drastic shift in culture.
- jjk166 4y ago
  The west doesn't need other nations to have high fertility rates, it just needs other nations to have people who want to immigrate to the west. Populations keep increasing for many years after the birthrate falls below replacement rate due to population momentum (people individually have fewer kids, but there are more people having kids than there used to be). And even after the population truly stops growing, people will still leave for wealthier areas in search of higher quality of life. If people keep emmigrating from a country with a sub replacement birth rate, eventually the population will get so low that there's no one left, but that would take many decades if not centuries. For example bangladesh has a net migration rate of -0.2%/yr and a birthrate 5% below replacement rate. Even if we ignore population momentum and assume bangladesh's population will immediately start falling, if they keep their current birth rate and migration rate it will take about 250 years for the population to halve, at which point it will still be about the same number of people that Germany has today.
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
The era of growth through more people and more consumption is over. It is not sustainable. It will stop either because we have managed to come to our senses and stop it or because the instability caused by climate change will make it stop.
- mrleinad 4y ago
  I agree with your conclusion, but not for those reasons. It'll be over because the cheap resources that enabled that growth will not be there anymore (unless there's a major technological change like cold fusion or something like that).
  - yreg 4y ago
    A lot of the economic growth is happening without a need for cheap natural resources. Software services are a big one.
    - mrleinad 4y ago
      Software services are at the top of the pyramid. You need a lot of other things to be in the right place for software services to happen. You need to be able to have electricity, infrastructure, food, and an educated population. That's a tall order in many places, and it's going to be taller moving forward. And I'm not even mentioning computers. They're not going to get more affordable without China, but the opposite. Software development will adapt? Sure, things will move to the cloud as they've been moving for years already, but that puts a heavier load on having the right infrastructure for it.
dxuh 4y ago
Maybe not. The German population is aging rapidly, our retirement model (young people pay for old people) is unsustainable and obviously unfeasible by the time I get to retire (in about 35 years), because there are too few young people to pay for the many old people. Right now about 30% of the German population is over 60 years old. I do not have the impression that the government is doing anything to improve the birth rates. If anything it's getting harder for many people to have children. So far the only time a low birth rate is being brought up politically it's to justify immigration, which might be a temporary solution, but whether it's good or not or how it should be done is a different discussion.
- Akronymus 4y ago
  > by the time I get to retire (in about 35 years) Assuming they don't keep doing what they are doing and raise the retirement age. I doubt I'll live to whatever the retirement age is, by then.
- iso1631 4y ago
  > our retirement model (young people pay for old people) is unsustainable All retirement models are like that. Doesn't matter how many millions of dollars the old people have, if you are on an island with 10 workers and 50 old people, the old people are screwed.
Certhas 4y ago
Or, you know, we change our economic model. As far as I know incentives for more children have historically not been very successful. It seems that in a modern society human nature reliably settles on a birthrate below two per couple. e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-vs-human-development-index?time=1980..2017 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-vs-hum...
graphpapa 4y ago
This makes me realise the growth model is a sort of pyramid scheme.
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  Pensions certainly are, public or private. Old people use to rely on their kids to provide them when they retire. Now the kids can't even make a living for themselves or buy a house, because the "market" needs to yield enough for pension funds, no matter how. This system will collapse, sooner or later.
piyush_soni 4y ago
I'd heard Japan already has a mild version of this.
throw_m239339 4y ago
> I suspect that over the next few decades we will see the countries with the lowest birth rates start to push massive incentives for having more children. With what money? Babies are seen as a liability more than a investment among young people. No amount of money the government can afford will change that. It's a consequence of ultra-individualism driven by mass market societies and the disintegration of the nuclear family in western societies. The other extreme is of course gender imbalance where females are deemed worthless, you can't fix that with money either.
_vbnz 4y ago
We have labour-saving technology though. Automation leads to higher productivity, so those fewer people can earn more and spend more. The economy will do just fine. I think it'll be a rocky time though, we're facing a new Industrial Revolution - where the existing capitalists would prefer to drive down wages and destroy trade unions via mass immigration, and ordinary workers want to reverse their worsening standard of living. Brexit was just the start of this, but I think we'll see more radical movements until this is resolved.
- lm28469 4y ago
  > We have labour-saving technology though. > Automation leads to higher productivity, so those fewer people can earn more and spend more. I can't believe people use that outdated 1900s era argument despite it being proved completely wrong time and time over. It was true at some point but has been wrong since sometime after ww2
lynx23 4y ago
Infinite growth is an obvious myth. The fans of "global economy" better find something to replace growth with, or they will be pretty disappointed in a few decades.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  Capitalism requires infinite growth. It will collapse without
  - lynx23 4y ago
    Then it will collapse.
    - yreg 4y ago
      Why do you believe an infinite growth is impossible? It can run on merely increasing the net productivity. Which can be done up until a post-scarcity society at which point capitalism is obsolete anyway.
      - lynx23 4y ago
        Common sense tells me that infinite growth inside a finite system is wishful-thinking at least and more likely bullshit to distract from reality.
b112 4y ago
It was alreasy tried in Quebec, 20+ years ago, and failed. Massive tax rebates(not credits against tax owed, but rebates for each child). The true issue is, likely due to something environmental, humans are not driven to reproduce. You may say, "More people aee choosing not to...". Wrong. Reproduction is a greater drive than eating. It is more important than anything, biologically. And as an example, many cancer patients literally waste away. They know they should eat. They know that 1/2 their problem is lack of healthy food, it makes them weak, keeps them bedridden, but they cannot even force themselves to eat. Reproduction not sex, reproduction is a core, base drive beyond our control. And no, sex isn't reproduction. Biology is smarter than that. My point is, birthrates are not falling due to cost, or any other assumptions, because governments have tried to eliminate that, and it makes no difference. And it is not cultural, for whether Canada, the EU, Russia, or Japan, anywhere which adopts a modern lifestyle, birth rate plummet. Japan 20 years ago had a plummeting birthrate, yet their culture is quite different than the rest, and 20 years ago, a lot less forgiving to female rights. Whether climate, geography, war or peace, culture, language, religion, schooling, support by the state, cost of raising children, birth control or not, birth rates are plummeting world wide. And it is because something is blocking .. something, which causes reproductive drive. If you look at die offs of species on graphs, it typically slowly decreases, then takes a crazy plummet. If this is accurate for humans, by 2100 we will have 2b, by 2150 500M, by 2200 100M, and this presumes no massive war, plague, etc.
rapsey 4y ago
It would take some highly drastic changes to the entire social system to make a serious dent. Modern life is simply an anathema to having lots of children. The cost in time and money to the parents is too high.
chinathrow 4y ago
> The global economy runs on growth. Our collective failure summarized in one sentence.
coldtea 4y ago
>I suspect that over the next few decades we will see the countries with the lowest birth rates start to push massive incentives for having more children. After the lifestyle has changed, the economy has different impact, and its population is already older, it might not be recoverable anymore. There will be fewer people available in child-having age, despite the incentives, and those that are wont suddenly start having 3-4 children to compensate.
jjk166 4y ago
Far more likely they will just reform their immigration policies to make it easier for people to move into the country. Increasing birthrates has a long lead time, it takes at least a generation from when incentives begin to when you start seeing an increase in the number of economically active tax paying adults. And due to population momentum and cultural inertia, it is likely to take much longer than that still. Immigrants on the other hand can change the shape of a population pyramid on the timescale of a political administration and they start contributing to the economy immediately. Further immigrants tend to come from higher birthrate regions and will likely continue those practices for at least a generation after arrival, leading to long term improvements in population growth. Not every country is a desirable destination for immigrants, and some cultures have stronger barriers than others to assimilation of foreigners, but for many nations growth should easily be possible so long as there are people looking for a higher quality of life, which presumably will still be the case even decades after the world's population levels off.

cryptoz 4y ago

Clickbait - the article barely goes out 100 years, mostly focusing on the next few decades. Too bad because it’s an interesting piece on its own, but no discussion at all about the never. Obviously we have no idea how things will play out in the next few thousand years or more, but it is certainly possible that in the future there will be more alive than today.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
> Clickbait Hmm. By adding the word "children" the title comes across as some kind of sinister, veiled threat.

Existenceblinks 4y ago

The earth seems to be doing fine with 7 billions, I bet 17 billions would be fine .. of course with many weird ways of doing things. If it's a market who dares to short .. the numbers within 200 years?

leroman 4y ago
The dog meme with the fire around saying “everything is fine”, is really needed here.
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  It's painful but it keeps going. At some point it will reach the bottom and go up .. probably a new high?
Existenceblinks 4y ago
To the one who downvoted me, you are very silly. Please showing your argument.
- dutchCourage 4y ago
  I don't have the ability to downvote, but you're making a bold claim with no arguments yourself. It's strangely worded as well. I'd assume this is why you're getting downvoted. Calling people silly because you're getting downvoted is against the rules and will result in more downvotes.
  - Existenceblinks 4y ago
    Thank you. I didn't know there's such rule. I thought facebook is the only one that has this kind of "community standards". I never got downvote from reddit/youtube or social platform generally.
throwawaylinux 4y ago
Apart from mass extinctions, habitat destruction and alteration, spiraling environmental chemical accumulation, and depletion of economical reserves of many minerals and petrochemicals, and greenhouse gas pollution? It's still pretty much a ball of stuff in space that orbits the sun though so I guess it's doing fine if you look at it that way.

lqet 4y ago

Tell me about it. After just a few years of high birth rates, it has now become virtually impossible for us to find a Kindergarten for our daughter, public or private, although the law clearly states that she is entitled to one. According to latest estimates, there will be a lack of 400.000 Kindergarten places in 2023 here [0]. Demographics predicted falling birth rates for decades, and politicians acted accordingly. Turns out even demographers cannot predict the future. The basic problem seems to be that it takes longer to educate a kindergarten teacher than for a child to reach kindergarten age. I fear a complete collapse of the school system here in 2026. [0] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/bildung/bertelsmann-studie-fuer-2023-fehlen-fast-400-000-kitaplaetze-in-deutschland-a-42665fec-f6a1-41a6-a4bd-66efcc3e5fda https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/bildung/bertelsmann-studie-f...

akmarinov 4y ago
In my country - if your child can't get into a kindergarten, the government pays you the equivalent of the monthly government fee that they'd pay to the kindergarten to you, so that you can use it towards a private kindergarten/nanny.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  Here in Germany even the private options have ran out
- the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
  In Austria the limiting factor you are running into will be the actual teachers. You can get a nanny just fine, but public and private Kindergartens alike are running into staffing issues. From what I have heard, that is a shared problem in many countries.
- lqet 4y ago
  That sounds great. Even without this financial help, we would happily pay hundreds of euros out of our own pocket for a private nanny or kindergarten. We have lost half or our net income already because my wife stays at home now. But there are no free places. None. And we have been looking for 1,5 years.

misja111 4y ago

Eventually evolution will catch up. Surely there must be some gene that motivates us to have a lot of kids. If such a gene exists it will quickly wipe out any genetic competition. It could also work indirectly, for instance a genetic disposition that pushes humans into fundamentalist religions that are opposed to birth control.

jojobas 4y ago
It's not exactly opposition to birth control, it's more like indoctrination of women (some would even say brainwashing) into having kids like crazy.
- thriftwy 4y ago
  Our societies can't even keep up producing child care, schools and jobs for the small amount of children we have. Can't imagine them succeeding in indoctrination. Having children is awesome but it is also a hard work and quite costly. It would be quite hard to compel modern people have 3+ children.
  - jojobas 4y ago
    People in Africa and India keep having many kids in atrocious conditions. "Inadequate childcare" and "costly" are not even on the cards when they marry and get on with making kids. The West used to be like that too, but then something changed and living on in your kids took the back seat to premium consumption.
    - thriftwy 4y ago
      India has declining birth rate as well and probably below reproduction rate already. People are not stupid. It just takes them some time to adjust. African societies may still be forced to use children as free field labor. The more centralized their agriculture becomes, the fewer children they would need. The most important resource to spend on children is time. Even if you decide to cut on spendings, it does not add any extra time. With both parents employed full time, there's very small wedge to stick children into.

mjburgess 4y ago

I think the most likely late 21st C. path is the emergence of empires again, and great-power politics. Rich nations will need to find someway of "finding" their retirement support from poor nations; and poor nations will, typically, experience more mass migrations from changing climate. I suspect this will lead to large armies, high walls, and a certain sort of "human mercantilism" in which young immigrants are a kind of resource.

sigmoid10 4y ago
And people wonder why billionaires want to settle Mars so urgently. Screw these puny walls, we've got one hundred million miles of vacuum to separate us from the poor peasants!
graderjs 4y ago
This is a good analysis. It would be great to see a more in-depth write up of this. I hope you complete that. My current theory of the moment that I just came up with on this thread so I should probably think it through more but I mean, if we just want to make our goal lots of children again being born, and all we need to do is have some largish, global disaster wipes out a significant portion of the population, but not too much to Dent the exponential dynamics of having billions of people already and then just like after every big die off, there’ll be a baby boom. (Also, let me just add that children of men is a fantastic film.) Plus, it would help if cultures become more celebratory and enthusiastic about relationships in general, rather than sort of pessimistic or, risk focused as it seems they are now. Also, if humans develop some spacefaring technology, we could make a campaign to create babies, encourage people to do so and incentivize them because we need people to go out and colonize our local area in space.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  All great so-called "prescient" people are, in my view, just those attentive to features of their contemporary environment that they regard as long-term. Today, we can see the re-emergence of national boundaries, with: Brexit, the Russian invasion, and protectionist competition between the US and China. The syrian mass migration to Europe was indirectly a climate event: the precipitating conditions of the civil war was mass crop failure. This also, in many ways, caused brexit. So we have clear "climate -> migration -> national-borders" events today. We have clear great power politics today. What else? Well consider declining birth rates in the west require more immigrants, but at the same time, anti-immigrant sentiment rises. Why can no leader tell their people the truth? Why can't they say, "we're all too old to support our own populations"? I don't know. But the lack of that question posed to the public is conspicious and alarming. In the UK case, the leader of the centre-left opposition is even so deranged to suggest that our national health service shortages (100,000 positions!) should be filled by more training of our own population. This is economically and politically incoherent; and I'm quite sure he knows this. This is economically and politically unsustainable: the driver towards anti-immigrant sentiment and national boundaries *HAS* to collide severely with the need for young immigrants and the "almost-here" health crisis of the west agining population. Either the future is one in which political leaders and western populations can reconsile themselves to their dependence on young immigrants, accept relatively mass migrations, and adapt their political cultures to cope. That is the "EU will work, eventually" view. OR, we take the Brexit-Russia lesson, and say the west will find a national-militaristic solution to the problem. At the moment, we're already a decade past needing to explain to western publics that immigration is not only economically beneficial, but necessary. We havent done so. At the same time, we've done the opposite. I'd suppose then that, knowing only what we know now, the "Russian trajectory" is the more likely one. The EU nations build armies, the US plays economic empire, China plays wargames in asia all the while our need for mass immigration plays out. Where does that lead? The best guess I can make is: empires. Along the "Russian-line" of future history, nations are still a deeply inefficient economic unit, but increasingly "politically efficient" at regulating national identities. With that tension, arises the need to bundle nations into empires. I think the Russian invasion of Ukraine has delayed this future a couple decades; but I only see a reversal towards the liberal alternative if new liberal institutions emerge. China-India-Russia need an "EU", and likewise, so does Europe. On that timeline, we get liberal supra-states able to negotiate migrations, transitions to aging nations, etc. But as the EU requried WW2, probably that liberal future (if ever realised) will require a comparable war. Perhaps an "asian civil war" in the manner that WW2 was a european civil war. Liberalism (in the sense of rights-based institutions) is just what happens when no amount of people dying will resolve conflict, so nations are forced to give up. It was a product of intra-Christian warfare; and possibly the likely state of the early 22nd century. Assuming Asia has the "civil war", which seems somewhat probable.

mrleinad 4y ago

This year, like so many others I'm sure, I found Peter Zeihan's books, which have been really eye opening in terms of what has happened and what's coming. It's not perfect, and at times it comes out a bit gloomier than expected, but it's certainly illuminating on a lot of topics. I highly recommend his books and videos as much as possible. Edited to add link. And also, I'd say that even though climate change impacts lots of regions of the world, fossil fuel is what has enabled our massive growth this past century. And renewable energies are not even remotely close in terms of providing the energy for that kind of growth. Not just because there's not enough of them, but because we'd need more mining than this planet can provide us with in order to meet those needs. So what I'm trying to say is that if you're concerned about falling demographics, better start embracing fossil fuel more. Either that, or come up with a different economic system in which there are fewer of us and we still manage to avoid famines and reduce poverty around the world. Demographics: https://youtu.be/xD-pj6i4b8A https://youtu.be/xD-pj6i4b8A Here's one on agriculture: https://youtu.be/myjLrulhMzk https://youtu.be/myjLrulhMzk

causi 4y ago
His ideas are very emotionally attractive but I think he falls down in two big areas. 1. The degree to which compliance with intellectual property laws constrains certain societies. Sure, China can't domestically produce bleeding-edge chips without using Western intellectual property, but Zeihan thinks withdrawing permission to use that property will make the Chinese industry flail and die. More likely they'll just steal it. 2. That nations will go back to high seas piracy and active trade disruption the way they did two hundred years ago. He mentions repeatedly the US no longer operates the type of navy required to patrol the ocean ("we don't need ten carriers, we need a thousand destroyers") but at the same time says the only thing stopping half the nations on earth from attacking the trade routes of the other half is the US navy. Personally I doubt anyone will decide it's worth the international scorn to actually do that even if the lack of the US navy makes it physically possible.
- rapsey 4y ago
  > Zeihan thinks withdrawing permission to use that property will make the Chinese industry flail and die. More likely they'll just steal it. Bleeding edge chips are a giant international effort requiring tech from Europe, US, Taiwan and Japan. China has been cut out from that market and simply stealing and starting up all of it domestically is just not realistic. It is a decades long task needing hundreds of billions. > Personally I doubt anyone will decide it's worth the international scorn to actually do that even if the lack of the US navy makes it physically possible. Failed states don't have the ability to control their population and they can turn to piracy like Sudan.

gampleman 4y ago

If only we had some tools right in front of our noses… hm… like a large western religion preaching self-sacrifice with a complicated/adversarial relationship to birth control…

thriftwy 4y ago
Christianity is an eastern religion. In practice we don't see such a stellar number of children in predominantly catholic countries such as Poland or Italy.
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  > Christianity is an eastern religion. The "west" here is purely metaphorical. East of what? West of what? Constantinople?
  - thriftwy 4y ago
    Well the industry has arisen in France and England, but which religions did? Freemasons? Anglicanism (still Christian though)?
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  It's questionable how truly catholic those countries are. Do the young generations go to church at all? True catholics legitimately wouldn't do things like use contraception, and I'm not doing a No True Scotsman, that's just a simple statement of what the church believes.

bullen 4y ago

Birth growth acceleration peaked in 1968, so yes they have had 50 years to write this article.

vidarh 4y ago
What is new is that as of the last couple of years India too reached replacement, and so only sub-Saharan Africa is now above replacement, and that is also dropping. And so now a lot of these changes are becoming imminent. E.g. we will see within 1-2 decades how China responds to either having to take massive steps to boost fertility rates or allowing more immigration if they want to prevent population decline which would put their economic growth in severe jeopardy. India will face the same a few decades later. The west is facing it now, and how anti-immigration settlement vs. need for labour will affect politics is going to be an even bigger question going forward than it has been.

xnx 4y ago

Actual title of the article: "World's population 8 billion and counting"