The Earth can not indefinitely sustain its current population with our current technology at a lifestyle people in general would consider desirable. Therefore, at some point one of two things need to happen:
Massive technological breakthrough enabling advanced/comfortable lifestyle for 10 billion people that does NOT trash the sole planet we have to live on
or
Population reduction.
Of the two, I think the latter is most likely. There are some dreadful problems with population reduction, starting with “disasters that would be absolutely horrific to experience”. As an example from history, long term some good things came out of the Black Death in Europe, but it was a horrific nightmare to experience. Disease, famine, war, plague - the good ol’ Horsemen of the Apocalypse can get the job done in regards to reducing human populations to a more sustainable level but holy crap, thinking about that “solution” leads me to hide under the bed gibbering.
Or we can choose to limit births. Which is already happening. Which also entails some very uncomfortable, or even very painful, consequences. It will almost certainly take longer and require considerable adjustments to society, but may be the more humane method towards that end.
Regardless, at some point in the future there will be fewer people on this planet than there currently is. The only question is how that happens.
An interesting concept to contemplate is whether a “geriatric peace” will be upon us mid-century, when the world’s primary military powers find their economies bogged down with huge percentages of elderly citizens and a dearth of people in the work force.
I’ve read a few opinion pieces where the theory is that demographic changes are one factor in increasing China aggressiveness – that the Chinese government believes that a window is closing.
Right. The NYT article in the OP talks about South Korea having the lowest birthrate among developed countries and what the government is doing to encourage people to have children.
That would seem to discourage people from having babies? What the article says, “To goose the birthrate, the government has handed out baby bonuses. It increased child allowances and medical subsidies for fertility treatments and pregnancy. Health officials have showered newborns with gifts of beef, baby clothes and toys. The government is also building kindergartens and day care centers by the hundreds. In Seoul, every bus and subway car has pink seats reserved for pregnant women.”
I maintain that the largest challenge for the 21st century is how to maintain a vibrant economy with a shrinking population. All of our economic models (and most economic decisions) are based on a growing economy (growing economic base). With a shrinking population in the larger consuming regions, the world economy is going to have issues.
I don’t believe the needed solutions are going to be found in the hard sciences (which have provided solutions for most of the problems we have faced in the past 200 years). While there is still plenty to learn and exploit from the hard sciences (an expanding front), I believe the softer sciences is where better understanding will have the greatest improvement to the human condition.
Economics (already mentioned) as well as Sociology, and Psychology are areas where we really need a better understanding on how things work. I suspect that while a shrinking human population is a good thing for humans generally, it could very well be a bad for humans specifically. That is, the growing pains from our learning how make a slowly shrinking, or stagnant, economy work are going to be severe, but necessary to avoid a violently shrinking one.
As I am in my 60s, I suspect I will not see anything but the disruptions in what we consider “normal” (Trumpism being one of them). These disruptions, hopefully, will help guide us to where we need to go. It’s obvious, to me anyway, that our “divide and conquer” strategy doesn’t work without never-ending expansion. Going forward, it isn’t going to be a “Us vs. Them” situation, merely an “Us” situation. We have to realize that “They” are simply part of “Us.”
Re-thinking our economy will indeed be critical. We’ll need a new model where we can maximize productivity while still allowing our young people to escape the grinding hamster wheel of capitalism and take the time to make families.
It will require a delicate balance of policies and a buy-in from the citizenry at large, both of which seem to be unachievable right now. Conservatives who cannot even acknowledge the perils of climate change and who will have to overturn their aversion to immigration will be a particular political roadblock.
In general - the higher the education level of a woman the fewer children she has. Which is not to say highly educated women have NO kids, they do have kids, but increasing education is, apparently, a non-coercive way to decrease the number of children born to women on average.
An increased social safety net, especially into old age, will also help reduce the birth rate in a non-coercive manner as the old motivation to have many children to support the parents in old age will then go away.
These are not hard science/hard tech answers. They are “squishy” areas that can also run full tilt into tradition, religious structures, historical social structures, and other problems.
As with so many other issues, the problem is not one of absolute numbers but of distribution. The lumps of A are not in the places where the hollows of B are. That applies to population, and to farm production, and mineral wealth, and education, and medical care, and a long list of other.
People here have mentioned immigration, but mostly as applied to the U.S. The need to smooth out population is an issue everywhere in the world. For all the overt bigotry in this country, we’re still more accepting of immigrants than most countries. Many don’t offer them a pathway to citizenship or make their children automatically citizens at birth.
Europe is already shifting to anti-immigrant parties because of influx from Africa and the Middle East. The Japanese have never allowed more than a handful of immigrants in, and treats them as second-class, despite the huge need for workers. Yet climate change forecasts show up to a billion people needing to leave areas that will become uninhabitable.
To make a bad situation worse, the future is one of machines removing ever more jobs, especially low-paying jobs that don’t require extensive education or training, the kind of jobs that immigrants have historically taken when entering a new country.
The issue of the future is not demographic collapse. That’s a self-imposed handicap that will only be an issue where immigrants are unwelcome. Demographic leveling is the true problem that requires an answer.
The Japanese (along with South Koreans, Bulgarians and Hungarians) appear to have decided that they would rather there be no Japanese than a Japan with large numbers of non-ethnic Japanese. Meanwhile, the African continent, currently home to about 1.2 billion, is on pace to have almost half of the global population by the end of the century (three billion out of about seven) without significant changes in immigration trends.
I have a tough time imagining all the ramifications of those trends but they won’t be anything that recent history has prepared us for.
There will still be a demand for home health aides and nursing home staff, which are low-skill jobs, though sadly low-paying given how critical such work is.
This was a plot point in the science-fiction television series The Expanse*, which was set several hundred years in the future. Due to technology replacing humans in many jobs, most people on Earth didn’t have a job or a career – welfare payments from the government were (barely) enough for subsistence, making for wide swaths of humanity who were not only poor, but also had nothing to do, and had no prospects for that changing during their lives.
*- it may well have also been in the novels on which the show was based, but I haven’t read them.
I remember that. Wasn’t the earth’s population around 30 billion in that plot? That’s harder to believe than ever but things change.
The most prescient novel ever written might have been Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano which, remarkably, was published in 1952, before computers really powered the nation’s economic growth. Vonnegut envisioned a dystopian society where nearly everything was automated and only a few highly educated and trained had meaningful jobs. The huge remainder was employed by the government in “Reconstruction and Reclamation,” (iirc) and were known as the “Reeks” and the “Recs.”
This was the plot of Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, published in 1952. That was similar to the plot of William Wallace Cook’s satiric A Round Trip to the Year 2000, published in 1903. They were both predictions of what they thought the fairly near term future would bring.
It seems that it will come true this time, but the future often throws us a curve.
Ideally, what we need are slowly decreasing populations around the world. The population shouldn’t increase, since we will have obvious problems if the population of the world is much greater. But it shouldn’t decrease too fast either, since the proportion of retired people can’t be too large either. It will also be useful for the retirement age to increase somewhat. I don’t think it’s likely that the average lifespan will increase very much and the average age at which people are unable to work will not increase. If that happens, then we would truly have problems with too large a proportion of people who needed to be cared for. It would also be nice for all these things to happen around the world at the same time.
The more sensible approach is to reframe the work ethic to cover everyone, in a much less brutal structure. The work week for 20 year-olds should strictly max out at no more than 25 hours (OT over 20h) and decline gradually such that 80-y/os would be expected to contribute a proper 5 hours a week. Simply dispense with retirement entirely, allowing older people to maintain their mental health longer by facing challenges and having a sense of purpose.
Of course, such a social structure would be absolutely anti-libertarian and would probably not support traditional capitalism or billionaires, but traditional capitalism is what has driven us to this pass.
Funnily, Luddites have been saying this since the invention of the wheel. Happily we only increased the number of jobs since then.
You’d think that people would stop saying stuff like that after the first million times it was proven to be bullshit.