The other day my boss said something along the lines of "there's too many people in the world", and seemed genuinely surprised when I pointed out articles like

The other day my boss said something along the lines of "there's too many people in the world", and seemed genuinely surprised when I pointed out articles like this one showing overall humanity is on the road to start shrinking over the next few decades. I think a lot of people still believe we're in the population bomb scenario Ehrlich painted in 1968, when actually we're looking more like a sad "Children of Men" scenario, particularly in developed countries. I wonder what the end game of this decline is. The population of countries couldn't go to zero (right?). So at some point fertility rate must rebound. But at what point? 50% of the current population? 20%? 5%? Could we (or our great grand children, if we have any) see a world with just 2 million people living in Japan, finally beginning to grow again? It seems to me if there is ANY sub group in the country reproducing above the 2.1 replacement rate, eventually they will come to dominate the population, if they pass this inclination on to their children. The "bottoming out" of the population might be determined by the relative size of that sub group today, and how much over replacement rate they are reproducing at. So maybe in America, the population bottoms out at 100 million people, with Mormons making up 50% of those, and as time goes on the population slowly grows and becomes more and more Mormon. The other thing I think may happen, at least in more authoritarian countries like China, is that the state steps in directly. If offering tax breaks and free day care just aren't moving the needle (which they haven't so far), governments set up, for lack of a better term, "baby farms". Giving birth is turned into a full time job, completely separate from raising the children, which is done by some other state institution, and the population is stabilized that way.