I very sincerely don’t get this:
In the year 1900, the world population was 1.6 billion. This was during the industrial era, long before robots and AI did away with an enormous number of jobs. There was culture, civilization, people lived and loved, and everything was fine.
Why can’t we accept that the population going to 8 billion was a fluke, and now things are peacefully evening out to the actual norm?
In the 1870s, the population of the United States was about 40 million people. If the TFR remains exactly the same as it is today and there is zero immigration in 300 years, the population numbers will revert to what they were in the 1870s. That’s assuming that nothing changes, which is unlikely, but simply for the sake of the experiment, let’s accept these numbers. What is catastrophic about them? This is not people dying out because of famine or genocide. It’s a simple population correction. Completely natural, no violence involved. Where is the catastrophe? I think it’s harder to argue that the population should always be growing. In what concerns long-term trends, why isn’t it rather that the population explosion of the last century and a half was due to the unprecedented need for manual labor brought about by the Industrial Revolution? Now that the industrial revolution is long over and we are experiencing the digital revolution, why not assume that the population trends are simply correcting themselves back to normalcy?
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What are the rates of change? What are the ratios and proportions?
What is the proportion of the very elderly to the young?
What percentage of those young are reproducing?
The absolute numbers of total world or even national populations may reflect a serious problem, but as ever, the devil is in the details.
Most of Miss Clarissa’s generation got short-changed on mathematical relationships as we learned during the Covidian panics. So big scary numbers are useful to the mass manipulators.
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“I very sincerely don’t get this”
My new take: It’s a scam. We are in the age of scams coming at us from all directions. The N word (to give people a break) is a giant ponzi scheme that has almost all governments playing along.
If there’s anything alarming going on in population dynamics it’s the modern insane idea that if you don’t have enough people in Peoria, you can import a bunch from Mogadishu and everything will work out.
There’s always going to be some migration (a natural human process) and there’s always going to be population fluctuations (again, a natural process). But the mantra that the numbers always have to keep increasing is doing far more harm than falling birth rates.
Let’s stop trying to outsmart mother nature and thousands of years of physical and cultural evolution.
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While I agree with you in the long term, in the short-to-medium term, the issue is entitlements, particularly old-age retirements such as Social Security and Medicare. As the population begins to decline it seems likely that there will be fewer resources to care for the elderly – both money to fund retirement and elderly care but also simply the number of caregivers and nurses and the like. It could get quite interesting to see how different societies handle this. As the West is currently politically constituted, I am not optimistic that we will handle it well.
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“in the short-to-medium term, the issue is entitlements, particularly old-age retirements”
For years, literally years, I have been saying the challenge of the new millenium is to figure out how to make an economy work with fewer people.
Of course retirement as a concept has to be re-thought (and medical innovations are liable to make old age less of a burden).
But politicians and economists are stuck in the “‘”if we don’t have bigger numbers ever year the world will end”.
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What Cliff said. Ultimately, it’s a return to baseline in an era of declining resources. If it is happening without mass famine and slaughter, great!
The “disaster” is that our entitlement programs are all built on the assumption of infinite growth, as is a lot of our investment economy. House prices go up forever because there are forever more people needing houses, right? The stock market goes up forever because there are more and more people buying stuff and companies keep expanding. The national debt depends on an ever-expanding economy to pay the interest.
None of which was ever more than a temporary historical glitch, but that doesn’t keep people from projecting that graph line out into infinity and declaring that this week’s growth is the norm now and we should plan all future enterprises around that immutable fact. Like idiots. What was that japanese economist back in the 90s who declared that we had reached a permanent new economic plateau that we could never fall from? It was the perfect “conservative” vision of the forever-progress cult.
Nothing can grow forever. When it tries, it’s called cancer.
Entitlement programs will go away. the stock market will decline. We will default on the national debt and endure a currency reset. Those things are all baked into the cake, there’s no escaping them, and we will survive it. Nothing based on infinite growth can be maintained forever.
But as you point out, Americans, and a lot of the rest of the world, still had OK lives with much lower populations than we have right now.
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