Global Population Crash...

Seattle

Seattle

Valued Senior Member
This is an interesting article. I'll link to it but I saw something similar from an Australia news source on YouTube.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/a...-collapse-isn-t-sci-fi-anymore-niall-ferguson

The point of the piece is that the Earth peak population is likely to occur late in this century. It's already happening in most developed countries and that is anytime the average birth rate per female is less than 2.1 children.

Currently India, Egypt, and several sub-Saharan countries in Africa are above the 2.1 rate so the greatest growth is in the area least able to support them. There are both positive and negative aspects to declining growth but we have generally focused on overpopulation issues when underpopulation issues are more likely for developed countries.
 
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Seattle said:
Currently India, Egypt, and several sub-Saharan countries in Africa are above the 2.1 rate so the greatest growth is in the area least able to support them. There are both positive and negative aspects to declining growth but we have generally focused on overpopulation issues when underpopulation issues are more likely for developed countries.
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The reason we don't have an underpopulation problem here is immigration, primarily from those countries you just mentioned. Thus the importance of continuing it at a similar scale. We could even back off by 50% and achieve zero growth by 2050, but would have to open it up after that to prevent population decline.
 
Quote from Bloomberg article: "Second, because the fertility drop came later in the Middle East and North Africa and has barely begun in sub-Saharan Africa, we are seeing a dramatic shift in the global demographic balance in favor of people with darker pigmentation — as a Scotsman married to a Somali, I am doing my part for this trend — many of them Muslims. This worries many of the mostly white and mostly Christian peoples who were globally dominant from around 1750 to 2000."​

At worst, Europe's gradual transition to heavy Muslim influence will produce something like the governments of Bosnia, Indonesia, or Turkey. (Compared to monarchy of Saudi Arabia and the sham republic of Iran.)

Many civil liberties will thereby still endure, and any applications of Sharia law would be of some mitigated or mixed type, not the classical variety.

Islam and the Rule of Law: The meaning of secularisation is different in an Islamic state and in the Muslim World from that of a constitutional state of the western kind.

When one talks about secularity in Islam, the first country that normally comes to mind – at least from the german perspective – is Turkey, with its population of well above 70 million, of which more than 90% are Muslims.

But this overlooks that Indonesia is another important country of the Islamic world in which, despite the high proportion of Muslims in the total population, Islam is not the religion of the state and in which the official separation between the state and religion is seen as particularly strict. ​
 
The most likely scenario has the United States not experiencing a population decline until after over a half-century to come.

www.census.gov

U.S. Population Projected to Begin Declining in Second Half of Century

The U.S. population is projected to reach a high of nearly 370 million in 2080 before edging downward to 366 million in 2100.
www.census.gov www.census.gov

EXCERPTS: Projections illustrate possible courses of population change based on assumptions about future births, deaths and net international migration. The 2023 projections include a main series (also known as the middle series) considered the most likely outcome of four assumptions, and three alternative immigration scenarios that show how the population might change under high, low and zero immigration assumptions.​
  • By 2100, the total population in the middle series is projected to reach 366 million compared to the projection for the high-immigration scenario, which puts the population at 435 million. The population for the middle series increases to a peak at 370 million in 2080 and then begins to decline, dropping to 366 million in 2100. The high-immigration scenario increases every year and is projected to reach 435 million by 2100.
  • The low-immigration scenario is projected to peak at around 346 million in 2043 and decline thereafter, dropping to 319 million in 2100.
  • Though largely illustrative, the zero-immigration scenario projects that population declines would start in 2024 in the complete absence of foreign-born immigration. The population in this scenario is projected to be 226 million in 2100, roughly 107 million lower than the 2022 estimate.

EDIT: Meh. The original Peter Zeihan video has been moved and replaced by a different one. But I'll leave the transcript excerpt from it.

How the U.S. escaped the globalization trap (for now)

VIDEO EXCERPTS: [...] And here's the Koreans -- now in a radically different model, suddenly awash with that capital rich demographic of people in their late 50s and early 60s. But you've run out of young people.

[...] There's no longer enough people at the bottom to consume, and countering that is an [older] workforce that has literally decades of expertise that is very productive. The whole world has gone through some version of this.

Transition at different speeds from different starting points, but we're all on the same highway. The Koreans in the next few years will lead us into something new, a world where that bulge in the population isn't young or isn't mature. It's retired.

We will have to figure out a fundamentally new economic model that is not based on consumption, on production, or on investment. What will that be? Not a clue, never happened in human history before. We're making this up as we go.

The Koreans aren't alone, Bottom-left, there is the Germans. Same basic model for the same basic reasons. This is their last decade as an industrialized power. They won't have a work force.

If we keep aging at today's rate, we will be in a Korean German style situation around 2070. That's a lot of time to figure out another path...
 
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C C said:
If we keep aging at today's rate, we will be in a Korean German style situation around 2070. That's a lot of time to figure out another path...
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Like opening up immigration. The Third World is supplying a lot of babies.
 
Seattle said:
Maybe we don't need a lot of babies?
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We don't need them from the perspective of most things - resources, environmental damage, living space etc.

However we have a debt-based economy, and that requires more or less constant growth. Hence the requirement for a growing population. It would be great if we could change how our economy works, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
 
We could encourage savings and investment. We could spend less (government). That would be a more sustainable approach. A currency independent from the state would help.

Prior to WWII we did have an economy with less debt. There were no credit cards, many people saved and bought houses and cars without debt.

Or we could turn the US into a 3rd world country by staying on the current path.
 
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Seattle said:
We could encourage savings and investment.
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That makes it worse. In a debt based economy, any new wealth is created by growth directly, or by debt that supports that growth. So if you invest in a bank, and they do well? They did well because they made a lot of loans, and increased debt overall. If you invest in a company that makes widgets? You are relying on them to become larger and larger so your investment gains value. In both cases, growth is a prerequisite.

And for that company to grow, what do they need more of? Investment (a form of debt) more resources and new employees. That means for any market to do well overall, the population has to grow.

Which is why, from an economic perspective at least, we need a lot of babies.
 
billvon said:
We don't need them from the perspective of most things - resources, environmental damage, living space etc.

However we have a debt-based economy, and that requires more or less constant growth. Hence the requirement for a growing population. It would be great if we could change how our economy works, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
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Careful, he might sick the House Committee on Un-American Activities on you.
 
billvon said:
That makes it worse. In a debt based economy, any new wealth is created by growth directly, or by debt that supports that growth. So if you invest in a bank, and they do well? They did well because they made a lot of loans, and increased debt overall. If you invest in a company that makes widgets? You are relying on them to become larger and larger so your investment gains value. In both cases, growth is a prerequisite.

And for that company to grow, what do they need more of? Investment (a form of debt) more resources and new employees. That means for any market to do well overall, the population has to grow.

Which is why, from an economic perspective at least, we need a lot of babies.
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No, that makes it less of a debt based system.
 
Seattle said:
No, that makes it less of a debt based system.
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Using debt to make more money makes it MORE of a debt based system.

Want to get away from a debt based system? Require all loans to be made with actual money. Not physical money of course but a representation of real money from a fixed supply. This would solve both inflation and the need for future repayment of ever-larger debts.

Of course it would mean that, in some instances, the money just plain won't be available for loans, and that would have a negative effect on the economy. The economy simply would not be able to grow as fast, and there would be hard limits on how much it could grow. But if your goal is a sustainable system that "doesn't require a lot of babies" to use your language, it gets us there.
 
billvon said:
Using debt to make more money makes it MORE of a debt based system.

Want to get away from a debt based system? Require all loans to be made with actual money. Not physical money of course but a representation of real money from a fixed supply. This would solve both inflation and the need for future repayment of ever-larger debts.

Of course it would mean that, in some instances, the money just plain won't be available for loans, and that would have a negative effect on the economy. The economy simply would not be able to grow as fast, and there would be hard limits on how much it could grow. But if your goal is a sustainable system that "doesn't require a lot of babies" to use your language, it gets us there.
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I agree.
 
Seattle said:
Maybe we don't need a lot of babies?
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We need less. In terms of the worlds resources. Babies use the NHS grow up use schools the use roads fuel food and more NHS.

If all of those things were inexhaustible there would not problem but they are not and using them to breaking point causes harm.
 
billvon said:
Agreed. And the #1 way to make that happen is by educating women in third world countries. Both Tostan and Camfed do a great job in this area.
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Yes absolutely the wrong way to go in those areas is "make lots of babies."
Unfortunately, women's rights in countries where they have lots are limited at best and absent at worst.
 
Pinball1970 said:
Depends if you think having lots of babies is a good idea in those areas.
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Someone from the outside coming in and telling you having more babies isn't a good idea probably isn't going to result in "Oh, thanks, I didn't realize that. I'll stop."

There are plenty of logical reasons to have babies. They are subsistence farmers and need the extra hands, they need family to take care of them in their old age, it's a cultural thing, they have nothing else.

We didn't start having fewer kids because of knowledge. In a modern society it's not helpful, it's expensive, we have better options educationally and economically. That's when we stopped. Not when someone "educated" us. Sure, you could say that as we became college educated we stopped but that wasn't because we learned that in college. We got better jobs because of college and suddenly it didn't make sense (and big city life also made kids more expensive).
 
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Seattle said:
Someone from the outside coming in and telling you having more babies isn't a good idea probably isn't going to result in "Oh, thanks, I didn't realize that. I'll stop."

There are plenty of logical reasons to have babies. They are subsistence farmers and need the extra hands, they need family to take care of them in their old age, it's a cultural thing, they have nothing else.

We didn't start having fewer kids because of knowledge. In a modern society it's not helpful, it's expensive, we have better options educationally and economically. That's when we stopped. Not when someone "educated" us. Sure, you could say that as we became college educated we stopped but that wasn't because we learned that in college. We got better jobs because of college and suddenly it didn't make sense (and big city life also made kids more expensive).
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I am not belittling anyone or trying not to. I am not sure how many of these area you have been to or worked in but the last thing I thought those community needed was more babies in my experience.
Treatment of women, opportunities for women, women's health and role in the community, what is your experience?
 
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