Das Zeitalter der Entvölkerung – Überleben in einer grau gewordenen Welt

From the article

>The consensus among demographic authorities today is that the global population will peak later this century and then start to decline. Some estimates suggest that this might happen as soon as 2053, others as late as the 2070s or 2080s.

>Regardless of when this turn commences, a depopulated future will differ sharply from the present. Low fertility rates mean that annual deaths will exceed annual births in more countries and by widening margins over the coming generation. According to some projections, by 2050, over 130 countries across the planet will be part of the growing net-mortality zone—an area encompassing about five-eighths of the world’s projected population. Net-mortality countries will emerge in sub-Saharan Africa by 2050, starting with South Africa. Once a society has entered net mortality, only continued and ever-increasing immigration can stave off long-term population decline.

>Future labor forces will shrink around the world because of the spread of sub-replacement birthrates today. By 2040, national cohorts of people between the ages of 15 and 49 will decrease more or less everywhere outside sub-Saharan Africa. That group is already shrinking in the West and in East Asia. It is set to start dropping in Latin America by 2033 and will do so just a few years later in Southeast Asia (2034), India (2036), and Bangladesh (2043). By 2050, two-thirds of people around the world could see working-age populations (people between the ages of 20 and 64) diminish in their countries—a trend that stands to constrain economic potential in those countries in the absence of innovative adjustments and countermeasures.

When it comes to population growth, we can divide the world in 2, one part of the population is aging rapidly with low rate of replacement (thus leading to population in a certain area decreasing because there are more old people dying than babies being born to replace them, like Japan) and the still growing part of the world like Africa and parts of Asia. Africa is expected to go from around 1 billion people to maybe 3 or 4 billion by the end of this century, Asia might add another 1 billion. These numbers are rough estimates and can change due to things like wars, epidemics, social unrest or simply economic growth affecting fertility rates in various countries.

Now should Europe, North America and some other regions promote child birth to fight against the trend in their region for population decline? Economists would say yes, people who have studied history and/or care about the environment would likely shout “NO”. You see, even a century ago the world population was smaller than China and India combined and historically the global population was lower the farther you go back in history. We should absolutely allow it to decline back to more normal levels, people who advocate to maintain the current population are imo short sighted and perhaps selfish, the economy will absolutely suffer due to population decline but once it goes down enough and stabilizes the world will only benefit.

As for the reason the population grew so much between 1900 and 2000, it’s mostly due to simple advancements in medicine and agriculture. First, child mortality was drastically reduced, one ought to understand that in the past most new born babies didn’t survive till adulthood and form families of their own, they simply died in their youth so it was common for women to give birth to 5 or more children on average. Once antibiotics and other medicine became widely available and most children survived till adulthood and beyond, the population grew exponentially. Imagine 1 million couples giving birth to 5 million children and in 20 years those 2.5 million couple give birth to over 10 million and so on, in the span of a century this is what you get until families on average reduce the number of children they have to 1 or 2 on average.

The sharp or gradual decline in population due to fertility is irrelevant to me, as long as it happens it’s a good thing so long as it’s not due to war, pandemic or an asteroid impact, I’m happy with this development. The only dystopian part about it is how short handed parts of the economy will be and immigration can solve that as well as automation.

If only there were some technology that could replace the need for human workers in the next decades

IMO you really can’t make predictions about a world post AGI and post ASI. Who knows what’ll happen.