The world might run out of people (2019)

https://www.wired.com/story/the-world-might-actually-run-out-of-people/

by WheelsAtLarge • 6 years ago

64 91 6 years ago

chiph• 6 years ago

Something they didn't mention is the rise of personal wealth. As people enter the middle class, they start having fewer children. As to why - I'm not a economist or sociologist, but I expect it's partly because they aren't family farming anymore and don't need the free labor, and partly because they have access to birth control.

chadcmulligan2• 6 years ago

Educated women is the reason usually put forward - once women are educated they find more interesting things to do than have a lot of kids [1]

[1] https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/228/pdfs/female-educati... [pdf]

it• 6 years ago

Kids used to be allies of their parents; now they are adversaries. If you are sitting at a computer all day, your kids will probably annoy you unless they are watching cartoons. On a farm or in a hunter-gatherer setting, your kids can learn by watching you and they can help in more useful ways over time.

luckylion• 6 years ago

I'd imagine it has more to do with independence than with hobbies. Educated women get jobs that pay well and can do whatever they please, they don't have to rely on a husband and stay at home. IIRC, it's strongly correlated to income (which of course is closely coupled to education), and I'm pretty sure that poor women do not have more children because they're bored or don't know what else to do.

AdrianB15• 6 years ago

In my country "middle class" means people that pay a lot of taxes and have little left for their own kids. When the government takes more than half of your income to give it to others and when the healthcare is free, but kind of missing, having your own kids is sometimes an economic challenge, especially when the fertility age is when people are also juniors and financially lacking; pushing childbirth to later in life is challenged by reduced female fertility rate over 30 years old.

boomlinde2• 6 years ago

In my country "middle class" means people that pay a lot of taxes and have little left for their own kids.

If that's anywhere like where I live, "lower class" means people that don't pay as much taxes but on the other hand end up having even less money left. Yet, lower class people tend to have more children and fertility has a negative correlation to income. Perhaps it's a matter of education and ambition rather than the economic challenge.

fierarul2• 6 years ago

healthcare is free, but kind of missing

Reading this part made me think "which other country is like Romania?"

Sure enough, the author is from Bucharest, Romania.

ChuckNorris894• 6 years ago

Funny, to hear a complaint from Romania about high taxes when Romanian devs enjoy some of the lowest taxes in Europe.

I'm guessing you haven't lived in Belgium, Germany or Scandinavia.

dghughes• 6 years ago

I would say education more than wealth but both seem to be factors in fewer children. Maybe both those reasons result in more planning of families and the decision to not have 12 children.

My dad's family had nine and he grew up in the city in a small house. I think religion may have some part in it for example Roman Catholic where contraception is frowned upon. It was quite common to have a dozen children. My mother's family who were farmers for awhile (then a restaurant) also has nine children.

Government financial support may also play a role. My country Canada has many social support systems that allow larger family sizes. I'm not criticizing it but the support is there for the children. It would be curious to see family size versus government support.

sukilot2• 6 years ago

Education is the most portable form of wealth for aspiring middle class people.

agensaequivocum• 6 years ago

Roman Catholic where contraception is frowned upon.

It's completely prohibited.

thefz• 6 years ago

And because it is very well documented that a predictor of the inverse number of babies a woman will have, is her level of education.

imtringued2• 6 years ago

There are lots of factors. One major factor is that women are working now. If you are a full time mom it's possible to take care of 4 children or even more. If you are working you have to pay for childcare and it gets more expensive the more children you have. Those pregnancies also impact your career negatively so there is an upper bound that limits how many children you can have. It wouldn't surprise me if that upper bound is around 2-3 children and other factors drag it down to reach the average birth rate.

hirundo• 6 years ago

"All he was doing was adding one new variable to the forecast: the level of improvement in female education."

This may be a bit of a trolley problem. If population were indeed controllable by this one variable, where too little female education resulted in overpopulation and too much resulted in population collapse, would it be ethical to impose an upper and lower limit on it? Would it be ethical not to?

As a libertarian my default position is, that should be left up to those women. I don't believe that authoritarian measures are useful for human flourishing. But if I were convinced that this is an existential issue for the species I'd have to struggle between 1) maybe an authoritarian species shouldn't survive, and 2) ethics are ultimately in service to our survival and must adapt to that end.

AdrianB15• 6 years ago

It is more like a one and zero, not a spectrum of shades of gray: women can be educated enough to know about fertility, contraception and birth control or not.

The part that is a large spectrum is the desire of people (not only women) to have kids. I know educated people with 4 kids and people with the same level education with 0 kids, with all the intermediary numbers being present. I talked to women that are childless and they have various reasons for that, I talked to women that have 3-4 kids and they have various reasons for that, but the common theme is they all have made some informed decisions. For women without education having kids is mostly out of their control.

narag• 6 years ago

Why authoritarian measures instead of incentives?

strken• 6 years ago

The ethics of it are irrelevant in a world where genes and memes[0] are under intense selective pressure. Wait long enough and the infertile will weed themselves out.

[0] In the original sense of the word.

rwmj• 6 years ago

The prediction in this article is that the population will reach a stasis of around 8-9 billion, so no real danger of humans dying out (humans might, but not for this reason). Also this happens in 2100 and beyond when surely we will have started to become a spacefaring species.

okintheory• 6 years ago

There are much easier ways to fix this:

Option 1) You could make it easier to afford and raise children.

I realize this seems a little extreme in a US context, so here is a more affordable option:

Option 2) You could encourage women to get an abortion if they're pregnant with a boy.

All we need to maintain the population is that each woman on average produces one new woman. Plus a few men, perhaps acting as sperm donors.

I jest, of course, but my point is that there's more than one way to be authoritarian.

clairity• 6 years ago

it's not education so much as subjugation, for which education (reverse) proxies. less subjugation and more freedom correlate with better education (for all, not just women), and that correlates with a greater diversity of life choices over primarily bearing and raising children.

so yes, that one variable is not a master switch. propagation has many, many avenues, assuming we don't wipe ourselves out in a myriad of other ways.

quicklime• 6 years ago

The United Nations predicts that the global population will soon explode.

No, they don't. They predict it'll plateau at 11 billion by 2100, and believe that the fastest growth is behind us.

https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/Lin...

timerol• 6 years ago

The text has the same number, but interprets it, ah, interestingly: "By 2100, that number will balloon to 11 billion, pushing society into a Soylent Green scenario."

This is a pretty ridiculous statement from the article, considering the history of population growth. Growing from 7.8B humans to 11B in 80 years is a significantly reduced growth rate compared to historical data. It's even reduced growth on an absolute scale. Starting from 1930, we went from 2B to 6B humans in 69 years[1]. We added tripled the world population in a few generations. I think we'll be able to handle to slow, steady population growth of the 21st century.

We have a lot of hard problems to solve in the 21st century, and population growth isn't even on the list.

Edit: I finished reading the article. I would not recommend that course of action. The so-called "running out of people" scenario is that the world has between 8 and 9 billion people in 2100. While that is a significant change to the model, calling it "running out of people" is clickbait garbage.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

curo3• 6 years ago

We have a lot of hard problems to solve in the 21st century

I've been on the hunt for an apolitical assessment of what humanity's greatest challenges are. Anyone know where this body of work might be?

Copenhagen Consensus is an interesting one as a list of economists ranking cost-to-impact ratios. Something similar or adjacent?

[1] https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/

hn_throwaway_992• 6 years ago

I think more importantly that you'll see different regions of the world experience very different growth rates, and that realignment will have a big impact on the world order. Europe and advanced Asian economies like China, Japan and Korea will (or in many cases already) see a declining population, while places like Africa and the Philippines will see huge population growth because their population pyramids already are "wide and flat" with a huge proportion of young people.

coldtea2• 6 years ago

Starting from 1930, we went from 2B to 6B humans in 69 years[1]. We added tripled the world population in a few generations.

Along with huge technological changes. Nowadays the technological advances are more or less plateaued themselves compared to getting from no factories to factories, no electricity to electricity, no computers to computers, no telecommunications to telecommunications, etc, no cars to cars.

Today we already have problems all around the world with the economy...

makerofspoons• 6 years ago

Has anyone plugged Lutz's education variable into scenarios for climate change? It could be one of the silver linings is we have more runway than anticipated.

Edit: It doesn't appear that it would make a difference, the low-end emission scenarios already have population growth similar to what is described in the article: https://skepticalscience.com/rcp.php?t=3

novalis78• 6 years ago

It will be interesting what the fertility rate of new frontier worlds might look like. Technologically advanced but in constant need of humans to build and push further.

usrusr• 6 years ago

Not all educated women who are in control of their lives decide against children, far from it.

If all women are educated and in control, every child of the next generation will have an educated mother who decided to have children and those mothers will likely pass on the cultural traits that lead to this decision. The result will be a generation whose reproduction rate is much less impacted by education and being in control than previous generations who to a large part had mothers lacking education and control. Reproduction rates will stabilize as motherly role models adapt.

carapace4• 6 years ago

The Amish win.

Among the best farmers in the world, with huge families, a healthy lifestyle, and they're non-violent.

Their biggest problem is that they are so good at farming that land prices around their communities go up and their children have to move farther and farther to afford their own farms.

aphextron• 6 years ago

"Among the best farmers in the world, with huge families, a healthy lifestyle, and they're non-violent."

They're also completely reliant on the larger economy to sell their goods, and are in no way self sufficient. Not to mention sky high rates of child and spousal abuse. Humanity moved away from sustenance farming for very good reasons.

carapace4• 6 years ago

I'm kind of joking. I think that something would give before "100% Amish!" became the actual Earth equilibrium state.

The point is, not every one will stop having large families. I don't think we're in danger of an empty planet.

dahdum• 6 years ago

Eh, I'm not strongly against the Amish but I wouldn't hold them up as an ideal. They are theocratic communities with strictly gendered roles, harsh discipline, and practice shunning and excommunication of their undesirables.

carapace4• 6 years ago

I wouldn't hold them up as an ideal.

I'm not.

annoyingnoob• 6 years ago

Is there enough fertile land for everyone on Earth to live like the Amish? We will run out of land before we can all live that way, doesn't really work on a larger scale. And there is no way I'm going to live in a strict religious society.

carapace4• 6 years ago

Is there enough fertile land for everyone on Earth to live like the Amish?

All available fertile land will eventually be farmed by the Amish (if the rest of us stop having kids.)

And there is no way I'm going to live in a strict religious society.

What makes you think they would accept you? ;-P

Anyway, the scenario isn't armies of Amish forcing you to join them. It's you and me getting out-populated by them over time.

I'm pointing out that the premise of the article is flawed: not everybody is going to stop having kids.

I'm also pointing out that, as far as I can tell, and only slightly joking, the Amish are the "meek" who "shall inherit the Earth", which possibility I find amusing and though provoking.

owenversteeg• 6 years ago

Yep, exactly.

The Amish population doubles every 20 years. Simple growth, over time, while everyone else's populations are near flat or shrinking? I give them a great chance.

That's faster than any other group that I could find. The Census Bureau publishes growth rates by race too - the Hispanic population is growing around 2%, the Black population is growing around 1.5%.

(I'm just hoping their attitudes on women and race improve.)

bkirkby• 6 years ago

wired was instrumental in educating me about the "vertical knowledge" on this subject over 20 years ago with this article: https://www.wired.com/1997/02/the-doomslayer-2/

until then i had never been exposed to any of the evidence countering the "population bomb" hypothesis. not in education, not in media, not in personal discussion.

cesaref• 6 years ago

The website subscribe banner that keeps appearing makes it unreadable for me. I wonder if anyone at these companies actually tries to use their websites?

hn_throwaway_992• 6 years ago

Once that decline begins, it will never end.

I always roll my eyes at researchers who take a trend and then expand it to its infinite conclusion. The forces that are causing a change in the rate of growth may look very different once the dynamics inherent in a large population with lots of resource competition go away.

Also, if you look at the UN numbers, as another commenter said, they are NOT expecting a "population explosion". Indeed, they are seeing the rate of decline accelerating pretty much everywhere. The big difference is that the proportion of young people in places like Africa is enormous, so there is already a lot of "population momentum". It will take time for those huge cohorts to pass their way through the population pyramid.

imtringued2• 6 years ago

I think it is pretty lazy to think that this is irreversible. It only took a century for the growth to happen in the first place. Having lots of children is much easier than not having children.

econcon2• 6 years ago

Educated women have more options and they do not marry guys just because they happen to have some comfy jobs and can pay for living expense for her.

A lot of women are adopting "all or nothing" approach, aka "I'd rather live alone than with someone I am not attracted to".

There are various articles where women are interviewed and they report shortage of "attractive males" for relationships. Also others where women claim, "men no longer chase" (my personal opinion is that it's because of metoo men are afraid of pursuing and asking out unless if some woman displays explicit interest)

Meanwhile there are lots of women who have children with the guys they deemed attractive but that guy never commited as a husband or father, some of those are now struggling to pay their bills and raise kids as a single parent. Society has to come forward and help them raise their kids.

Maybe we should get done with traditional marriage and assume every country man or woman is father or mother to every kid existing within the borders of the country and pay for their maintenance and good upbringing as a community as a whole.

Maybe the cost of having kids is too high? And we need to lower it through incentives?

If we choose to not do this - where will the future tax payers come from when the present ones will be on retirement? We borrow from future. Today the taxes you are paying have been used already in past for the welfare of the previous generation. Tomorrow when you'll need welfare, you'll want to have fresh population supporting it.

You can bring in the immigrants but will they have the values which your community needs? Will it require a period of time before they are able to contribute to your society in a positive way?

qeternity• 6 years ago

Also others where women claim, "men no longer chase" (my personal opinion is that it's because of metoo men are afraid of pursing and asking out unless if some woman displays explicit interest)

I really don't think it has anything to do with #metoo. I'm a very outgoing millennial male, and I think this all boils down to a decrease in sociability, largely centered around mobile phones. When I go out, I never think about pulling my phone out, but I see countless people in social settings on their phones...not socializing. Men used to have to get over the fear of rejection but now there are countless apps that put that fear to rest and let people pursue behind the comfort and safety of a screen, even if it means lower success rate.

rantwasp2• 6 years ago

yeah no. one needs to take responsibility for actions. if you did something without thinking it through, you should experience the consequences. I am all for having a social net and helping people that are going through a rough time, but I believe the normalization of this will lead to more poverty.

instead, I could take the view that there are too many people in the world, that having an aggressive population growth is actually a good thing, and that technology could fill in a lot of gaps we fill in by throwing unqualified people at it.

econcon2• 6 years ago

yeah no. one needs to take responsibility for actions.

How can you predict if your partner will leave you in future when you decide to have kid?

polycaster• 6 years ago

While I didn’t read the article, telling from the title this talk by Hans Rosling could be a resourceful addition to the topic: https://youtu.be/fTznEIZRkLg

info781• 6 years ago

These guys are wrong. The population needs to find a stabilisation point. Right now it's still heading much higher. Nigeria is expected to go to four hundred million people from 200 million now. Once we find that stabilization point we could start having more kids, as women will get more support to do so. projections more than 30 or 40 years into the future are extremely difficult.

dannykwells• 6 years ago

Population decline is very well documented. The global trends hide countries like Germany, South Korea, and Japan where the numbers have sunk as low as 1.3 births / female, far below replacement.

The world might have more people by 2100 but many countries, including US, Europe and others will be shrinking, unless they take aggressive action on immigration reform.

My personal belief is this is ultimately how humans will go extinct. Not with a bang (apocalyptic global warming, war, famine, etc) but a whimper (gradual fade out into black over the next 1000 years).

nine_zeros• 6 years ago

My personal belief is this is ultimately how humans will go extinct. Not with a bang (apocalyptic global warming, war, famine, etc) but a whimper (gradual fade out into black over the next 1000 years).

Yup. Our economic system will ensure nobody produces kids, or at least, not more than one kid.

toast0• 6 years ago

Barring any of the fun post-apocolyptic fertility problems, if people are simply chosing not to reproduce in response to their environment, I would expect many would change their choice as the population shrinks. Especially if there are strong government incentives.

CodesInChaos• 6 years ago

Educated people voluntarily choosing to have fewer children is an important effect in the short term.

In the long term, sub-populations which choose to have more children will outgrow sub-populations which have fewer children. Until the growth is eventually stopped by external factors, like limited resources, famine, war, or strictly enforced government policies.

rishav_sharan• 6 years ago

How come we never consider the climate catastrophe as a variable for any of these studies?

If some of the forecasts are correct, we will hit a 5'C increase in overall global temperatures. the mass famines, dieoffs due to logistics breakdown, water scarcity, insane human migrations, wars over scarce resources etc. will be far bigger factor making most of these variables look like non factors.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01125-x

I think it will be lucky if even half/4B of humans survive 2100

pluto9• 6 years ago

Because those forecasts are outliers, if you can even call them forecasts. Is this quote from your linked article what you're referring to?

"Despite a temporary drop in carbon emissions from the 2020 outbreak, countries turned to cheap fossil fuels to revive their economies after the crisis. Carbon emissions soared and temperatures followed, setting the stage for 5 °C of warming by the end of the century."

That's not a forecast, that's speculation. Might as well factor in WWIII while we're at it.

dctoedt2• 6 years ago

Totally anecdotal: When my wife and I were having kids 30 years ago, we stopped at two, as did many or even most of our friends. Now, however, on our block in our upscale neighborhood, with educated professional women, just about every one of the young families has three kids, and I can't think of a single young family that has just one kid.

(Nowadays during the recent COVID-19 lockdown, pretty much every afternoon we see hordes of kids, roughly ages three to ten, riding bikes and scooters and skateboards back and forth on the street, although that's slowing down as the Houston summer weather sets in.)

paulcole2• 6 years ago

Kids today are a status symbol. Everybody can finance the same iPhone and luxury sedan. So how do you show you’ve made it?

It’s a real flex to have a gaggle of kids filling up a giant house.

dctoedt2• 6 years ago

Kids today are a status symbol.

Out of curiosity, do you have kids? They're a pretty labor-intensive "status symbol." <g>

benja123• 6 years ago

I didn't read the entire article. I take issue with any article that uses female education as a reason for the decrease in family size.

I understand where it is coming from, but I think it is oversimplified... Increased female education happens when a society is more educated. That is you could probably switch female with male and get the same results (which is also over simplified).

The reality is so many things are changing that is causing the birthrate to decrease and it's way to hard to blame it on one factor over another. You could probably argue that technology, wealth and what is the social norm in the society we live have a massive effect on the decrease in birthrate in western countries.

Now I live in Israel. The religious have an extremely large number of children and it has nothing to do with the female education level and everything to do with religion! In fact the females are often more educated than the men and are the ones with Jobs!. What is interesting though is the secular Jews, like my wife and I, usually have 3+ kids (we are at number 2). It's just the norm here and society caters to families with children

archived22• 6 years ago

Writer didn't accounted for covid or something more dangerous coming up in future.

hamilyon2• 6 years ago

Clearly author did not read enough sci-fi. If by 2100 we had any shortage of humans, we will clone just enough of them.

1e-9• 6 years ago

Based on his analysis, the single biggest effect on fertility is the education of women.

Although it's not surprising that controlling for education of women would provide a better model fit, it seems unlikely to me that this is the main causal relationship. I think logic and evidence suggest that the main driver of fertility is child mortality.

Humans appear to adjust fertility to maximize the probability that their offspring will successfully reproduce. Higher child mortality in a population tends to result in higher fertility as insurance against loss of a child [1]. Lower child mortality tends to result in lower fertility.

The human species would not be around today if we lacked a natural tendency to place utmost priority on offspring reproduction success. Parents must trade off the number of children they have versus the quality of care per child. Our current rate of child mortality reduction is shifting the optimal strategy to fewer children and higher quality of care per child. I see improved education of women (and men) as largely a consequence of this trend. I expect this will continue until disrupted by high-mortality events such as natural disasters, disease, or major wars.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4411230/

rexgallorum2• 6 years ago

In agrarian societies, children are economically productive. In urbanised industrial/post-industrial societies, children are expensive and thus an economic liability.

Many of the conditions that accompanied falling fertility rates in Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are now evident in the developing world.

The world might run out of people (2019)

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