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Are There Too Many People Or Too Few? With financial collapse and global war inching closer every day, you’d have to be an anxiety junkie to worry about distant things like demographic trends. Still, the population debate is interesting, with economists, statisticians, and techies disagreeing over whether the world of 2100 will have too many people, too few, or just the right number. To summarize the three scenarios: Too many people. We already exceed the Earth’s carrying capacity and developing country populations will continue to increase for at least the next half-century, leading to mass extinctions, degradation of farmland and aquifers, and widespread famine. Meanwhile, automation will eliminate millions of jobs, causing mass unemployment, civil unrest, and bankrupt governments. This is “negative feedback loop” all the way down. Too few people. Birth rates are plunging and by mid-century there won’t be enough young workers to support a growing number of retirees, resulting in a global inflationary depression and/or massive cuts in social programs that leave millions of retirees destitute. Just the right number. Theworkforce shrinks while automation eliminates jobs, keeping labor markets more or less in balance. Productive capacity expands, retirees are supported, and the environment starts to heal. It really does matter which of these actually happens. How we got here The human population has exploded thanks to industrialization, fossil fuels, and better public health: But now birth rates are plunging. A population is stable when the typical woman has 2.1 kids. During the past few millennia, that number was obviously a lot higher (see above). But lately, birth rates have plunged, with the “replacement rate” threshold just a few years off. Here in the US, we’re tracking the global rate pretty closely: Why the sudden fertility collapse? The short answer is urbanization. In agricultural societies, children are free labor so people have lots of them. When people move from farms to cramped apartments in crowded cities, kids are more trouble than they’re worth, so families shrink. Today’s world is rapidly urbanizing, so fertility rates are plunging. Some populations, including big ones like Germany and China, are already declining. But Italy is leading the way in Europe. From Reuters:
Japan, meanwhile, offers a glimpse of Asia’s future:
Can a single worker support both themself and a retiree? That doesn’t seem mathematically possible, hence the financial doomsday predictions. Immigration to the rescue? Fertility stats for individual countries don’t include the several billion poor, desperate people who would happily move to Europe, the US, or Japan. From the previously quoted Reuters article on Italy:
So shrinking countries can, if necessary, just import new workers to maintain their population. But this risks the replacement of their culture with an alien one, thus defeating the purpose of the program. Better, perhaps, to stay Japanese or Italian to the bitter end than commit cultural suicide half a century early. For developed countries, this might be the central political debate of the next few decades. Automation: savior or existential threat? Goldman Sachs predicts that AI will automate 46% of administrative jobs, 44% of legal jobs, and 37% of architecture and engineering. In developed countries, this would mean 28% of workers being replaced by machines. In a sign of things to come, IBM recently announced plans to replace almost 8,000 jobs with AI, with human resources professionals being the first to go. But Goldman notes that emerging technologies also create new jobs, so the net impact isn’t clear. Then there’s Elon Musk
Totally manageable transition The deeper one digs into the population issue, the less scary it becomes. For every demographic threat, there’s a solution. But since the (always preferable) laissez-faire approach won’t work in cultures where free individuals are choosing not to reproduce, this might be an issue where even libertarians will have to hold their noses and accept major government interventions. Some examples:
Assuming we get through this decade’s immediate threats, it might be a relief to confront some problems that have actual solutions.
DollarCollapse.com is managed by John Rubino, co-author, with James Turk, of The Money Bubble(DollarCollapse Press, 2014) andÊThe Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit From It (Doubleday, 2007), and author of Clean Money: Picking Winners in the Green-Tech Boom (Wiley, 2008), How to Profit from the Coming Real Estate Bust (Rodale, 2003) and Main Street, Not Wall Street (Morrow, 1998). After earning a Finance MBA from New York University, he spent the 1980s on Wall Street, as a Eurodollar trader, equity analyst and junk bond analyst. During the 1990s he was a featured columnist with TheStreet.com and a frequent contributor to Individual Investor, Online Investor, and Consumers Digest, among many other publications. He currently writes for CFA Magazine.
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