The Age of Depopulation

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/age-depopulation-surviving-world-gone-gray-nicholas-eberstadt

by toomuchtodo • 2 years ago

33 58 2 years ago

Eventually, in 1994, the economist Lant Pritchett discovered the most powerful national fertility predictor ever detected. That decisive factor turned out to be simple: what women want. Because survey data conventionally focus on female fertility preferences, not those of their husbands or partners, scholars know much more about women’s desire for children than men’s. Pritchett determined that there is an almost one-to-one correspondence around the world between national fertility levels and the number of babies women say they want to have. This finding underscored the central role of volition—of human agency—in fertility patterns.

I want to draw attention to this specific quote, because it gets to the root cause of the depopulation situation. Fertility rates are aligning to desired fertility of women, and while this perspective might seem dated based on the 1994 date in the quote, I believe there is substantial evidence that this thesis still holds true today (citations provided in my comments in the subthread below).

If this is indeed the case, and population decline is truly caused by aggregate intentional choice with regards to reduced/lower fertility, it is unlikely this (if one considers it a challenge) can be solved for by increasing fertility rates via policy. Therefore, humanity should attempt to forecast the future, and plan mitigations and contingencies around the fact there there will be less humans and labor in the future.

FirmwareBurner• 2 years ago

[flagged]

toomuchtodo5• 2 years ago

Pick up a copy of Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson; ISBN13: 9781984823229. Contains interviews with women indicating what I quoted from various cultures. Women want less children than men and society want them to have (TLDR).

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545397/empty-planet... (“Once a woman receives enough information and autonomy to make an informed and self-directed choice about when to have children, and how many to have, she immediately has fewer of them, and has them later.”)

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... | https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30677-2 ("Our findings suggest that continued trends in female educational attainment and access to contraception will hasten declines in fertility and slow population growth. A sustained TFR lower than the replacement level in many countries, including China and India, would have economic, social, environmental, and geopolitical consequences. Policy options to adapt to continued low fertility, while sustaining and enhancing female reproductive health, will be crucial in the years to come.")

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-... ("Our World in Data: What explains the declining fertility rate?")

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-exp... ("Pew Research: 57% of adults under 50 who say they’re unlikely to ever have kids say a major reason is they just don’t want to; 31% of those ages 50 and older without kids cite this as a reason they never had them")

https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-... ("64% of young women say they just don't want children, compared to 50% of men.")

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68402139 ("Why South Korean women aren't having babies: The reason women are not having children now is because they have the courage to talk about it.")

adamc5• 2 years ago

I think the author is right that comparatively few people have really bent their heads around this. But I am reminded of the Club of Rome studies in the 1970s, when a more Malthusian future seemed inevitable.

Trends don't necessarily continue; very often, they change the circumstance that gave rise to the trend in some way. When populations are half what they are now, housing will likely be cheaper, wages higher, the share of wealth controlled by the elderly lower. Maybe that will change the trend.

Interesting times coming. Not necessarily happy ones, but.

Qem• 2 years ago

When populations are half what they are now, housing will likely be cheaper

I thought like this, but pondering a bit, climate change and associated sea level rise will probably destroy many coastal properties where a lot of people live today, so I suspect this alone will delay housing affordability return for at least one generation. See https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/28/coastal-communities...

NoMoreNicksLeft8• 2 years ago

When populations are half what they are now, housing will be much lower than half the capacity of what it is now. Housing requires constant expensive maintenance (as anyone with a house will quickly point out), but when population is half what it is now it won't be a random sampling of our current population. It will overwhelmingly be geriatric and unable to perform the maintenance that keeps houses from crumbling into the ground.

Nothing about a shrinking population makes for a strong economy.

adamc5• 2 years ago

Well, that's a separate issue. Even if true, it will make the situation less bad than it otherwise would be.

But disasters don't usually make things that bad in the longer term -- the big effect is that it forces us to spend money, which tends to improve the economy, at a cost to stored wealth.

mensetmanusman2• 2 years ago

Abandoned houses with no youthful labor to repair will have little value as a place to live. It’s not like available housing in Montana will change prices near NYC.

toomuchtodo5• 2 years ago

It would be wise to build today for service life of whatever is being built (housing, infrastructure, etc) that anticipates many less humans available in the future to maintain.

Retric3• 2 years ago

Skyscrapers are inherently more expensive to build and maintain than smaller buildings, so a significantly smaller global population gets more efficient housing automatically.

adamc5• 2 years ago

Labor prices will go up but scarcity will go down. People will end up doing more of their own labor, in all likelihood, but I still think it is likely to help.

atomicnumber3• 2 years ago

A lot of the 19th and 20th century thinking on population growth was completely up-ended by several major advances: first the Haber-Bosch process of fixing atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia/fertilizer (and now "Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber–Bosch process"), then the discovery of antibiotics (which basically enables modern surgery), modern sanitization, and so on. And since then we've been changing things so fast that I don't think it's easy to predict what things will look like 3 generations from now. What happens if we figure out fusion in 100 years, and fusion power does to several other industries what Haber-Bosch did for agriculture? What if we figure out some major part of human cell senescence and people live to 200-300?

Interesting times coming, to be sure. But I'm a bit more optimistic. We figure things out, eventually.

adamc5• 2 years ago

I don't know that I'm pessimistic. I think it is hard to forecast. Fusion has been coming in 50 years for at least 60 years. Antibiotics increasingly face problems with resistant strains. Etc.

gilmore606• 2 years ago

When populations are half what they are now

The people in charge in the west are not going to let this happen. Look at Canada.

aklemm3• 2 years ago

What's the case for higher population? As someone who spends time actually in the wild, my perspective is we've used up enough of that and can't afford to take any more. Population growth seems required by modern economies, but is there some other requirement I'm not aware of making that growth desirable? Let's fix the growth-based economies and move on with fewer but better-off people.

mensetmanusman2• 2 years ago

Higher population spreads out the cost of technology making it affordable. Right now 5 workers support every retiring boomer, this will drop to less than 2 in our old age.

Spending time in the wild may be more unlikely as the time required to maintain a lifestyle grows beyond the number of hours in a day.

kiba3• 2 years ago

Pollution has more to do with high intensity resource usage and unpriced negative externality than the # of people who are alive. For example, meat is much more energy intense because you require farmland to not only feed people, but also the cows. It also pollutes more, in addition to being more expensive to buy, but not expensive enough to cover all the damage being done to the environment.

Also, increased efficiency is a form of economic growth. We are after all doing more with less.

Another important thing to consider is that population size allows and enable certain economic activities to exist. For example, I go to theater and do theater activities, but theater can only exist if enough people go to theater. That threshold can be more easily reached if your theater is in a city.

If you want computer to exists, you need a certain amount of specialists dedicated to that. You need a large population because not everyone cares about computing and there are essential tasks that first need to be taken of such as agriculture and grocery stores and trains.

Finally, economic growth is desirable the same reason improving technology is desirable. It enables more capabilities. The bad side is when we abuse these capabilities, not that these capabilities are bad in itself.

NoMoreNicksLeft8• 2 years ago

What's the case for higher population?

I don't think you understand the math of this. It's not that anyone wants a higher population, it's that the spectrum is a little screwed up. There's this line in the middle (fertility rate 2.1), and anything to the right of that is "population spirals out of control". Then everything to the left of it is "human extinction in just a few centuries".

We're currently on the "human extinction in a few centuries". And all the arguments that we're not are positively stupid. People seem to think that we're like moose on some island, that "population bounces back" (it does for animals, because their fertility rate never goes below replacement, so when population pressures subside, their populations recover). Every time you ask "what's the case for higher population", you're actually helping to murder our entire species.

If you were rational, you'd be pushing the idea that we need that 2.1 fertility rate, the one that doesn't result in higher population, and doesn't result in human extinction.

kiba3• 2 years ago

Population growth/degrowth is contextual. You cannot extrapolate trend and expect the condition to never change. There is no reason to expect that the population will die out in a few century, only that we are in a currently bad situation.

That being said, the lack of population growth we're seeing likely represent a crisis of some kind across the world. Otherwise if it's benign, it just means that people just don't wanna start families.

Ekaros• 2 years ago

I wonder should we just see in century again. Remembering that 100 years ago world population was circa 2 billion. So maybe we need to take some time and see how things develop and only really panic in maybe 3 or 4 generations.

aklemm3• 2 years ago

You projected a lot on to my comment that's not there. Your comment is interesting, but would be more useful if you brought a rhetorical style that was less needlessly confrontational. Also drop the subtext that you're a rational authority simply by your presence here.

Retric3• 2 years ago

Larger populations both enable and incentivize more R&D, art, etc resulting in net positives in the short and long term. That’s somewhat counterbalanced by smaller global population having more resources per person to work with, but you have fewer geniuses with 0.8B people vs 8B people.

The speed of population collapse also impacts our ability to care for infrastructure and the elderly. While I personally think the global population would be better off at a steady 2-5 Billion people vs 10-20 Billion, dropping down to say 100M would make modern electrons manufacturing difficult to maintain let alone improve upon.

Log_out_• 2 years ago

Having your dna lottery tickets in the urn that is global conflict?

keybored• 2 years ago

It’s not about higher population. It’s about not having a lopsided demographics. Spend some time in front of a whiteboard, imaginary or actual:

- Less working age people

- More old people

- More geriatric people

This is the transition which you skip over before you get to the fewer but better-off people. (Better-off? Well I have retiring at 72 years of age or later to look forward to, compared to something like 65 for my father.)

ericmcer3• 2 years ago

Nature vs Nurture I guess. If more people = more progress we would see way more innovation coming from China/India/Africa.

Each of those places has double the population of Europe and 5X that of the USA, but aren't really driving human progress in any meaningful way. It seems like pouring more resources into fewer people has better outcomes. 2-3 generations of depopulation might be what we need to make space for some huge innovations.

poisonborz2• 2 years ago

China and India, but even Africa not driving human progress in any meaningful way? They are not perfect countries with a western eye, but you should read a bit more on what goes on outside the western hemisphere. Or just look at the label of all your electronics.

marcusverus2• 2 years ago

The case for higher population is that population growth brings economic growth, which brings prosperity.

Let's fix the growth-based economies and move on with fewer but better-off people.

Fewer people is easy, but fewer-but-better-off people seems very difficult. The wealth- and tax-revenue-creating capacity of the stock market (which has been going up at an inflation-adjusted average of ~6% annually since the late 1800s, driven by growth) simply cannot be replaced. With compounding 5% returns, saving 10K/year will net you a ~$700K nest egg over 30 years. With a flat market, you'd only have $300K.

niam• 2 years ago

Cheaper goods, larger market, more things to market, age demographic balance, broader cultural influence (inasmuch as one believes this to be a good thing), increased chances for innovation.

All or some of this probably ties into what people mean by "economy", but I think it doesn't lend to any appreciation of the material difference that having more people thrown at a problem presents.

Taken to the extreme: a world void of other humans might be entertaining but would be a woefully inefficient place to learn about medicine or the cosmos. Which again presumes an audience who cares about any of that, but I wager that many do. Automation certainly replaces some people for some tasks, but we haven't escaped the need for humans yet.

bitcoin_anon2• 2 years ago

The case for higher population is that it indicates that a species is thriving.

GeoAtreides• 2 years ago

What's the case for higher population

maybe you missed it when you first read the article, but it is explained, at length, in the article

fasa99• 2 years ago

What's the case for higher population?

A lot of society is a ponzi scheme e.g. social security, insurance. Young supporting the old. In some senses, young inexperienced people "paying their dues" are handling most of the frontline gruntwork. No young people means scutwork for the rest of us by definition. The final revenge of the young naive. That's the "real world" case for it.

The nationalistic case for it is harnessing a natural resource: population. Big country in terms of population can dominate others economically and militarily. People is power and leaders want power.

The humanistic case for it is that of Eli Musk : humans keep growing exponentially, as does knowledge, as does economy, until blossoming out into space and the universe. The futurist view. Idea being, the more people there are the faster that happens, the lower the risk.

Let's fix the growth-based economies and move on with fewer but better-off people.

Yes, they will naturally fix themselves. it will be painful for some as goods become more expensive, but life gets easier - less traffic, cheap housing, fruitful resources, and so on. Japan has it figured out. All the beautiful rural places to live. Places like that fully exist in the US now too (see: appalachia)

But here's what happens on the long term that is obvious to me : population will begin growing again. They'll be some gene variant that makes people deeply want to reproduce on a biological level. In a few generations everyone will have this gene (people without it... they didn't reproduce). Call it a genetic bottleneck on the genetic will to procreate.

It's worth noting that in 5-10 years we could easily have cloning vats. We now have "cloning as a service" for all pets and livestock, many such commercial companies - on a biological level it's trivial to imagine the same service and structure for human, the only barrier is ethics and regulations. We have cloned primates and cracked the underlying tricks that might equally clone a human. We have cracked genetic modification vis a vis an infinite number of genetic mouse models and CRISPR. We have early stages of artificial wombs (CHOP; some years ago) but equally one could make a human chimeric pig to incubate the clones. I don't envision this will be seen in the near future but at somepoint, somewhere along the lines, some nation state will begin doing this in secret not unlike a manhattan project, and as we saw with nuclear proliferation, once the cat's out of the bag everyone will do it, everyone will complete the civilizaton "world wonder" called "The Cloning Vats" https://alphacentauri.fandom.com/wiki/The_Cloning_Vats

marcusverus2• 2 years ago

So far, government attempts to incentivize childbearing have failed to bring fertility rates back to replacement levels. Future government policy, regardless of its ambition, will not stave off depopulation.

I find this to be amusing, because as far as I can tell government policies are a major cause of depopulation in the first place.

Women don't want to have children because having children is no longer a net positive. Having children is no longer a net positive because they are not relied upon in old age--the government will support you with medicare, medicaid, etc. If women felt that having children was a requirement to be taken care of in old age, they'd go right back to having four kids each.

On the bright side, this problem seems likely (in the absence of extreme levels of immigration) to solve itself naturally. As the population curve inverts further, we'll have fewer resources to take care of our elders, and young women will realize that having a few kids (who can support them later) is vastly preferable to the alternative of spending their old age in squalor--just as it used to be.

RGamma2• 2 years ago

You may be overestimating the subjective importance of elderly care/life span maximization. I think many would be just as fine with assisted suicide in that setting. I, for one, would rather not end up as a demented mummy which I've seen plenty enough of.

Sure there's pre-terminal scenarios where adult children may be of help, but different living arrangements could mitigate that.

IIRC I've read that even pre-modern cities have often suffered from below replacement fertility, propped up by countryside migration. Children are decent laborers for subsistence farmers.

But yeah, as others have pointed out, it may well be a socially contagious mood that's causing the current trend. Personally, I'd like to think it's having to do with our imposing technosphere causing wildlife extinction, global warming, etc and a desire for better balance, but that may be too optimistic.

spacemadness• 2 years ago

I find it disturbing how obsessed HN is with population decline. There is a new article about it every few days.

seacos• 2 years ago

Probably because there's a lot of smart people here. Demographics is the one trend that overpowers any other. Technologies, Productivity, GDP, Debt, Religion, Culture, all pale in comparison. Paying attention to that is important. Although I understand your sentiment, in the end we're all dead.

aklemm3• 2 years ago

The lords of tech are obsessed with it because they exploit the macro economy so it makes sense the accolytes here would follow suit

The Age of Depopulation

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