The current world Birthrate is 2.27 births per woman.
This is not a problem. It is a Good Thing. Many people were freaking out about the increasing world population. You are worried about a decline that isnt happening world wide.
Nations predicts dozens of countries will have shrinking populations by 2050. This is good news. Considering no other large animal’s population has grown as much, as quickly or as devastatingly for other species as ours, we should all be celebrating population decline… Declining populations will ease the pressure eight billion people put on the planet. As the population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity, I’ve seen the devastating effects of our ever-expanding footprint on global ecosystems. But if you listen to economists (and Elon Musk), you might believe falling birthrates mean the sky is falling as fewer babies means fewer workers and consumers driving economic growth.
But there’s more to the story than dollars. Where our current model of endless growth and short-term profits sacrifices vulnerable people and the planet’s future, population decline could help create a future with more opportunity and a healthy, biologically rich world.
The other day I was asked to do an interview for a South Korean radio station about the declining-population “crisis”… Probably the most important aspect that I didn’t even get a chance to cover is that globally, our economic system is essentially broken because we are forced to exist inside a paradigm that erroneously assumes Earth’s resources are infinite. They are not, as the global ecological footprint clearly shows.
To slow and perhaps even reverse climate change, as well as mitigate the extinction crisis underway, we are obliged to reduce consumption globally. Shrinking human populations will contribute to that goal (provided we simultaneously reduce per-capita consumption).
But that argument, no matter how defensible, is still not even remotely appreciated by most people. It is the aim of only a minority, most of whom have very little political power to engender change.
The oft-touted ‘crisis‘ of ageing populations is founded on the erroneous notion that it will lead to economic crises for the affected countries. Indeed, countries like South Korea and Japan have declining populations, others like Italy are stable and will be declining soon, and others like Australia are only growing because of net immigration.
The reason for the hyped-up panic generally comes down to the overly simplistic ‘dependency ratio‘, which has several different forms but generally compares the number of people in the labour force against those who have retired from it. The idea here is that once the number of people no longer in the labour force exceeds the number of those in the labour force, the latter can no longer support the entirety of the former.
This simplistic 1:1 relationship essentially assumes that you need one person working to support one retired person. Errrh. Right. Let’s look at this in more detail.
First, in any country experiencing population decline (i.e., mainly high-income nations), there is almost always a form of national superannuation (retirement savings). This means that while you are working, you squirrel away money in a special investment fund (usually guaranteed or supported by government co-contributions) such that by the time you retire, you’ll have more or less enough to live on until you kark it. Certainly some superannuation schemes are better than others, but the idea that the working support the non-working is not only simplistic, it is mostly wrong. My own superannuation accumulated principally by me is designed to support me (and my family) later (yes, I realise government co-contributions depend to some extent on the number of current taxpayers).
Therein lies the rub — there is no crisis.
There= Science.
