World output has increased faster than population for thousands of years, though only by a thin margin prior to 1870 (and a thinner margin prior to about 1500). The answer is consumption per person increases. That can happen regardless of population growth or decline.
If a shortfall of aggregate demand arises, it can be remedied with fiscal and monetary policy. Yes, there are systematic pension problems in an aging population, but that’s not strictly a macroeconomic stabilization issue. Population can decline, firewood consumption can decline, coal consumption can decline, and moving forwards even oil consumption can decline during periods of economic growth.
Above we were talking about the population going from 8 billion to 1 billion. I don’t think I can eat 8 times more than I do now but, for all my arguing, you’ve given me reason to hope the problem isn’t unsolvable.
The problem with older people dominating the voting constituency isn’t that they believe crazy things. The problem is that they have less stake in the future than younger people who have to live with the consequences of policies put in place by people who won’t live long enough to be effected.
My proposal is that every 18 year old gets 100 votes. Every 19 year old 99, every 20 year old 98, etc. Those who live to be 118 get 1 vote for the rest of their life.
Correct, you can’t eat 8 times more than you do now. You can switch to restaurant and take-out (more expensive, more common than it was 30 years ago) but that won’t get you up to 8 times. You might own a small refrigerator in addition to a large one, but that won’t get you up to 8 times.
But honestly there are plenty of things that can be enjoyed. Human desires are boundless, as revealed by the US’s high GDP per person and low savings rate. The increase won’t exactly be 8-fold: labor input in hours worked terms will ratchet down along with population.
With a reduction in population, presumably the price of farmland will fall, as will the real price of metal inputs. The big problems with an aging population are pension and health care related - they are not trivial. But they are different.
This proposal doesn’t strike you as political crazy or at the very least a bit of a non sequitur as a solution to what you have ambiguously and arbitrary defined as “political craziness”?
I am disappointed though that I didn’t come across even weak evidence for disproportionate Boomer/Gen X cray-cray other than lead level blood tests, criminal inclination, teen pregnancy, etc. There’s ample evidence for associations with other demographic characteristics such as education, and political party, but that’s not the same. I was intrigued with the hypothesis between psychological profile and conspiracy beliefs, but the evidence for that was weak.
In short, the notion that the War of the Worlds program sent untold thousands of people into the streets in panic is a media-driven myth that offers a deceptive message about the power radio wielded over listeners in its early days and, more broadly, about the media’s potential to sow fright, panic, and alarm.
This gets brought up time and again in these conversations, but the demographic timebombs we’re facing are not about stopping unlimited growth. It’s about avoiding massive depopulation.
There would be no problem if we could just turn a knob and set every country to have a perfect 2.1 births/woman. That would mean a stable population without the harms of either unlimited growth or contraction.
But that seems to be impossible. Some developing countries still have high birth rates, but as they develop economically that number goes down, and seems to pass right through 2.1 to totally unsustainable numbers.
It would be one thing to stabilize at, say, 1.8. That is still a potential problem but only in the long run, and can be made up with immigration as long as some other country is at a higher rate. But what’s a disaster is, say, South Korea’s rate of 0.8. That means each new generation is only 40% the size of the last. If there are 20M people of reproductive age today, then in 30 years it’ll be 8M. And 30 years from then only 3.2M. And so on. And that’s assuming the birth rate doesn’t continue to go down.
The US is at 1.66 and so not quite in crisis mode in the way South Korea is. But the rates are still dropping and it seems we’ll get there unless something changes.
Well, the natural law is geometric growth. If the birth rate is 4.0, then the population will double each generation. If it’s 1.0, it’ll halve. There’s no way around that principle. What is unknown is how the birth rate relates to the other factors in the economy. There is no apparently natural tendency to stabilize around 2.0 even though that would be best for the world.
Roughly speaking, 1 km^2 supports 1 GW of solar, or 250 MW after capacity factor reduction. So 144000 km^2 corresponds to 36000 GW average.
Total US energy use per year (not just electricity): 100 quadrillion BTU (1.06e+20 joules)
Average equivalent electrical power: 3360 GW (that’s 1.06e+20 divided by the seconds in a year)
36000 GW is more than 10x 3360 GW. These are obviously very rough numbers. But the difference is extreme. And this is just not doing the stupid thing. Rooftop solar, etc. means we don’t have to carve off as much land, and instead let it go back to nature.
Actually manufacturing that many panels is its own question. But solar is the cheapest energy source around today. It needs some storage, but batteries are getting cheaper too. And with that much energy available, you can do a lot of interesting things like fuel synthesis.
Solar farms are also a lot less horrible for the environment than corn farms.
Father Time is doing its usual efficient job at the rate of about 9300 per day (deaths of Americans who were born before 1980).
If you’re a generally optimistic person like me, you can squint a little and see a fairly near future where we might, just might, experience one of those eras of progressiveness that pops up every so often.
We need to study closely how Japan and South Korea handles their depopulation issues.
The US population is still growing, even though its fertility rate has been below 2.1 for about 50 years. It was close to 2.1 for a few years in the early 2000s, though. If it weren’t for immigration, it’d probably be decreasing.
Unfortunately for South Korea, they have no robust immigration to depend on.
But it’s zero-sum anyway. What one country gains, another loses. The global average had better not be too much below 2.1 if humanity isn’t to shrink away to nothing.
Well, then, there’s no point worrying about it. Humanity will either vanish or squash into a ball of human flesh expanding at the speed of light in a short time on the cosmic scale; such is the nature of exponential curves in the absence of a tendency to regress to a sustainable medium.
Fortunately, there is a fairly obvious tendency to regress to a sustainable medium in the long term: a smaller next generation exerts upward pressure on wages that tips people on the fence toward deciding that they can afford another kid and a larger one does the opposite.
Ideally. So why isn’t that working in Italy or South Korea?
Maybe higher wages motivate people to work more, as compared to spending their free time raising kids. And also motivates proportionally more women, who are ultimately responsible for deciding to have kids.
…if current trends continue. It also shouldn’t be much above 2.1 if humanity isn’t to experience Malthusian population explosions and crashes if current trends continue. A few decades ago the California realtor population was growing explosively, mathematically leading to the entire state being composed of California realtors if current trends continued (they didn’t).
I opine that concerns about human extinction from fertility rates above zero are silly, but honestly this belongs in its own thread.
Details, details
The Economist magazine has pointed out that declines in fertility have largely been driven by declines in teen pregnancy. That sounds like a good thing, not a bad thing. Efforts to increase fertility have been expensive in France and other countries. But after controlling for other factors higher income families within a country tend to have more children than lower income families. In an environment of housing abundance, I suspect that tastes for children would increase.
Two is fine, stop at nine
Wake me up if population drops below 6 billion. Way before that point, there will be high profile books out on how to raise educated and terrific families with 3-6 kids. That hasn’t happened to my knowledge and before it does I see no reason to panic.
I’m not particularly thrilled by the options, nor particularly sold on the hypothesis. I’m currently browsing for any actual data pro or con.
But I would say that it’s become a little too common to simply denounce all measures as “that will never happen”, without consideration of the benefits. Given sufficiently great benefits and enough evidence, it should become politically possible to do almost anything. But you’ll never get there if the mandate to society and everyone invested in the quality of our national governance is to denounce everything out-of-hand and to consider no changes, never and no-how.
Alaska set up their 4-candidate system; gerrymandering has been blocked in various states; Maine instituted a ranked voting system; etc. The idea that nothing can ever change again is false. Selling an image that it can’t, however, does likely lead to it being less likely.
A fertility rate below replacement is guaranteed to result in extinction. And in fairly short order if the number is well below replacement. This is a mathematical certainty.
The only question is if there is some factor that will raise the rate back above replacement at some point. So far, we see no evidence of this, but it’s early.
This is not a safe position. Humans live a long time past their fertile years, so the population can remain fairly high even with an absolutely disastrous birth rate. If the birth rate dropped to zero, it would take decades for the population to drop to 6B. It might even take long enough that extinction was certain at that point due to the lack of anyone who could reproduce (because the youngest people are in their 40s, say).