The Shrinking Global population.. (ideology, deduction, great, possible)

[Mike from back east]

Projections and predictions often fail to pan out as there will be improved science, changes, and surprises both good and bad; like economics, 9 of the past 2 recessions were accurately predicted by economists.

The wild card is Africa, as noted by blisterpeanuts, there could be dreadful starvation or a mass migration or both -- or the population there might surprise us and stabilize. Our current politics will only allow so many immigrants, especially people of color, sorry, but that's the trick bag we're in.

When presented with choices and freedom that good educations provide to women many are choosing to not be tied to motherhood. We are seeing more women getting advanced degrees and taking positions of leadership, etc, so we'll see more women doing just that and having fewer births as a result. The Chamber of Commerce, and their running dogs in the media, will whine like spoiled brats at the 'birth dearth' as it hurts their long-held mantra of 3% annual growth to grow the economy and keep the billionaires ever fat.

The 'experts' decrying lower TFRs seem to not notice that the ten richest countries have TFRs below replacement level and the ten poorest countries have the highest TFRs, but who among us wants to live in Niger, Angola, Congo, etc. We in the rich nations, with low TFRs, are just fine, thank you very much, and see no need to breed ourselves back into poverty.

[Listener2307]

Step back and take a look at it as an alien might:


We are mammals who live pretty close to 70 years. Only the females among us bear young, and in all their 70 years they are now producing 2.3 youngsters each. 60 years ago they were producing 5.3, so the reproductive rate is dropping fast.

The aliens may be perplexed as to how we ever got this far.
There would be no question as to whether we will become extinct.

[blisterpeanuts]

Originally Posted by Listener2307

Step back and take a look at it as an alien might:


We are mammals who live pretty close to 70 years. Only the females among us bear young, and in all their 70 years they are now producing 2.3 youngsters each. 60 years ago they were producing 5.3, so the reproductive rate is dropping fast.

The aliens may be perplexed as to how we ever got this far.
There would be no question as to whether we will become extinct.

At the current rate, we will likely not become totally extinct, but 100 years from now we will definitely have plateaued and perhaps decreased by a billion or so.

However, long before that point is reached, we will most likely have another pandemic or two, as Granite Stater suggests, and in addition we can't discount the great dangers that future technology and other trends will pose:

- robotics becoming so smart as to effectively put most humans out of work
- environmental issues becoming so severe that human and other life are unsustainable (acidic oceans, high CO2 levels, species die-off, nasty new bacteria and viruses released from melting tundra)
- people in developed lands succumbing to decadent lifestyles, like in the end times of the Roman Empire
- religious wars
- nonreligious wars
- nuclear terrorism
- space terrorism (some stateless entity getting hold of an asteroid and nudging it toward the Earth)

There are lots of life-ending scenarios. Our one real hope is to try and stabilize our societies, isolate and treat the crazies among us, help the 3rd World countries to develop their economies rationally and peacefully, and encourage democracy and intertwined economies around the world including China and Russia.

Beyond this, we should take Elon Musk's vision seriously, of space colonies to help ensure the survival of life, should some extinction-causing cataclysm, manmade or otherwise, hit the planet.

Within 100 years or so, we will have the means to build cities in space. It's a much harder feat than science fiction stories have led us to believe; you can't just hoist a glass-and-steel bubble into space and expect it to sustain life.

We'll need cheap launch capability, massive shielding, complex control systems, rotational simulated gravity, and then of course a reason to even go there - manufacturing, a better life, safe and secure environment, and, of course, an incentive to raise children, without which it's all pointless anyway.

None of us sitting here today will live to see this. My daughter, born in early 2000s, is very likely to live into the 22nd Century, and I just hope she and her future children inherit a world that's worth living in.

[Dave_n_Tenn]

Urbanization is the root cause of population decline.

It's also true that that 80% of agriculture around the world requires some imported substance to support 'their' agriculture. Think fertilizers and equipment. Why is this important to population shrinkage? Disease, war and famine are the big three when population declines. So not only has urbanization taking it's tolls on family size, but the disruption of supply chains will have a devastating affect on food supply.

People need food, especially children. Children will have the reins of the future.

[Listener2307]

Originally Posted by blisterpeanuts

At the current rate, we will likely not become totally extinct,..........

At the current rate, you're correct. The problem is, the rate is dropping and has been for many, many years.
Once it goes below 2.1 and stays, the die is cast as it then becomes impossible for the population to survive.
As China demonstrated, the decrease in population doesn't happen right away. They first crossed the 2.1 threshold in 1990 and are just now experiencing a genuine decrease in population. They will now decrease in population and workforce every year for the foreseeable future.
TFR has continued downward in spite of attempts to reverse it - that's true for all countries who have tried. It seems to have budged a little, but never went above 2.1


The only thing that will revive population is if women begin once again to view children as a family asset. That may happen, but so far it has not.

[Phil P]

Originally Posted by Dave_n_Tenn

Urbanization is the root cause of population decline.

It's also true that that 80% of agriculture around the world requires some imported substance to support 'their' agriculture. Think fertilizers and equipment. Why is this important to population shrinkage? Disease, war and famine are the big three when population declines. So not only has urbanization taking it's tolls on family size, but the disruption of supply chains will have a devastating affect on food supply.

People need food, especially children. Children will have the reins of the future.

And urbanization - at least in megatropolises instead of small cities - could change. That's not set in stone, it's just a 100 year trend.

They're developing more and more things to fix agricultural inputs. Genetic engineering, enzymes / catalysts for ammonia production instead of the fossil fuel intensive method we have, using bacteria / fungi as nutrient builders. Agricultural collapses haven't been a driver of population collapse in a good long time.

Originally Posted by Listener2307

The only thing that will revive population is if women begin once again to view children as a family asset. That may happen, but so far it has not.

Because there's no existential threat of people getting wiped from existence like there was in the past. Whole societies routinely collapsed in the past - that's why we didn't get to 8 billion in 1000 CE.

Going back to a stronger push for kiddos is just reverting to the human cultural norm from 5000 BCE to 1900 CE. It'll be different in the future though, many more carrots, far fewer sticks.

Originally Posted by blisterpeanuts

- robotics becoming so smart as to effectively put most humans out of work
- environmental issues becoming so severe that human and other life are unsustainable (acidic oceans, high CO2 levels, species die-off, nasty new bacteria and viruses released from melting tundra)

To the first point, you can look at the economics forum on automation, but in general automation does is just increases the amount of of outputs desired. The fastest automating sector is data and software, and doing it better just means people want more. You'd think we'd have hit the job losses from automation by now if that's what was going to result, we've automated an absurd amount in the last 90 years.

A lot of the boost we got during industrialization was women entering the work force. Now we're seeing the opposite, women starting to drop out of the workforce. If we start having more kiddos, that's a shift from labor market work to household work. Things will balance out, don't worry too much.

To the second point, the falling population is an indirect solution to all these problems. All the remaining environmental issues are indirect or direct results of overexploitation of resource extraction. If the world had 2 billion people, we wouldn't have nearly the problem with habitat loss or fossil fuel usage. These problems exist because we're pushing the boundaries the supportable population.

[Listener2307]

Originally Posted by Phil P

And urbanization - at least in megatropolises instead of small cities - could change. That's not set in stone, it's just a 100 year trend.........

Let's talk about that point for a minute. It IS a 100 year trend, that's fact. But why did it wait until about 1900 to happen (we're rounding off years, here).?


In around 1900 cities began to provide electrical services, sanitation services and security. Before that cities were pretty dangerous. They were dark after sunset and criminals abounded. Not to mention the filth. Cities were the home of plagues and robbers.
The advances of civilization changed all that. Factories moved formed up, jobs started paying a little more, and people came in from the countryside. That process is still going on in some areas.
All of that migration made children more of a burden than an asset.
So it is, indeed, a 100 year trend. The skills that made our ancestors of 100 years ago successful farm dwellers are now gone. We have become city people with little knowledge of how to run a family farm.


The thing that is guiding humanity toward extinction was success. Technological success. It could be the thing that drives humanity toward expansion would be the failure of the same technologies that is causing us to decline now.
I do not know why those technologies could fail other than just too few people left to maintain them. Or maybe a monstrous Carrington Event that kills grids across the world.

[Mike from back east]

Migration to cities began with the two-part industrial revolution.

The first industrial revolution started around 1793 with arrival of water powered textile machinery and lasted until the Civil War. It picked up speed with the use of steam-powered machineries, riverboats, etc.

The second industrial revolution started after the Civil War when steam-powered farm machinery came on the scene which obsoleted the need to have large families. Railroads in general, and particularly the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, provided needed connectivity and mobility to support growth of cities. Young people left the farms to go work in the cities to make all manner of farm and other machinery, steam powered ships and railroad rolling stock, and tons of items made with steel whose quality was constantly improving including entire new fleets of steel ships and steel railroad equipment. The migration from farm to city has been going on now for about 150 years and has largely played out, leaving many rural areas quite hollow. The Interstate Highway System and modern jet travel made migration to/between cities even easier. We see the trend even today as for-profit medical firms abandon hospitals in rural areas due to lack of patients and/or lack of doctors willing to live in such sparse areas.

[blisterpeanuts]

Originally Posted by Mike from back east

Migration to cities began with the two-part industrial revolution.

The first industrial revolution started around 1793 with arrival of water powered textile machinery and lasted until the Civil War. It picked up speed with the use of steam-powered machineries, riverboats, etc.

The second industrial revolution started after the Civil War when steam-powered farm machinery came on the scene which obsoleted the need to have large families. Railroads in general, and particularly the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, provided needed connectivity and mobility to support growth of cities. Young people left the farms to go work in the cities to make all manner of farm and other machinery, steam powered ships and railroad rolling stock, and tons of items made with steel whose quality was constantly improving including entire new fleets of steel ships and steel railroad equipment. The migration from farm to city has been going on now for about 150 years and has largely played out, leaving many rural areas quite hollow. The Interstate Highway System and modern jet travel made migration to/between cities even easier. We see the trend even today as for-profit medical firms abandon hospitals in rural areas due to lack of patients and/or lack of doctors willing to live in such sparse areas.

People are out-migrating, and have been since the 1950s, when the cities started evolving into strictly business and entertainment districts to serve the suburbs.

The pandemic, and remote work technology, and out-of-control crime and filth in the urban centers, have all spurred this trend. Today, the centers of power are in the 'burbs and smaller towns ringing the cities and beyond.

There's also a "back to the land" movement afoot, comparable to the hippy farm thing of the 1960s, only with a more grounded and realistic population of families seeking a sane, healthy place to raise their children, and in many cases grow food for sale.

Many of them document their lives on Youtube, which has become a revenue stream for farmers, plus a way to share methods and innovations. Permaculture is all the rage, organically treating the land as a living thing, rotating herds and plants to restore natural mineral balance, etc.

This trend is actually revitalizing some rural areas, interestingly. Local carpenters, electricians, handymen etc. are finding new work, helping people set up their homes, solar panels, running water lines from streams, etc. Local stores, too. Though, people tend rely on the Lowes 50 miles away, rather than the hardware store 10 miles away, just for economical reasons.

Eventually, I think the U.S. population will be pretty much dispersed to the small towns, exurbs, and rural districts, and the cities will be museums, warehouses for the poor (pretty much are now), former symbols of 19th-20th Century industrialization.

[Dave_n_Tenn]

Regarding western societies... Another component that drives lower birth rates, is the work opportunities advanced education offers. For instance, women with advanced degrees especially those in the STEM field, are not having children. Speaking from my own anecdotal experience/observations, with my daughter and her friends, this seems true.

Family structure, life style, work, research, traveling etc. doesn't allow for child bearing. Of course I'm not speaking in absolute terms, but this is true to a large degree.