This is a question that many of the countries in the developed world will be facing. Fertility rates throughout these countries are well below replacement level. This is something that is really starting to raise some eyebrows.
It is amazing how quickly the narrative can change.
Only a decade ago, people were chirping the same rhetoric that started in the 1970s. That is when the over-population crowd began to claim there were going to be too many people for the planet.
Over the last decade, more evidence is pointing to the contrary.
Elon Musk Leading The Charge
Say what you want about Musk, he is always willing to discuss major problems he feels are confronting humanity. Whether you agree with him or not, there is little doubt that he looks at the big picture and is willing to take action in line with that.
Also, when it comes to the narrative, when a publication like Business Insider starts to cover it, the message is changing.
Getting back to Musk, he talked about the topic of under population in 2017.
Musk has expressed concerns about declining birth rates for years. "The world's population is accelerating towards collapse, but few seem to notice or care," he tweeted in 2017. Last year the Tesla CEO called population collapse "potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization." Experts are divided on the topic.
Experts might be divided but it is becoming more evident that, in the developed countries at least, there is a decline. Some countries have dealt with this so long that it is impossible for them to make it up. There simply are not enough women of reproductive age.
In the past 5 years, Musk has not changed his tune regarding this topic.
He is not alone in this belief.
Natural Progression?
There is other thing that Muck mentioned that we can focus upon if we step further back.
The entrepreneur has highlighted his efforts to curb population decline before. "Contrary to what many think, the richer someone is, the fewer kids they have. I am a rare exception," he tweeted in May. Musk is the world's richest person, with a fortune estimated to exceed $200 billion, according to Bloomberg.
We can move passed high net worth individuals. This statement is true for countries. As they get wealthier, the number of children decline.
Again, this is something we saw over the last decades as counties advanced. With poverty rates dropping globally, we saw fertility rates following the same trend.
This is a problem economically. We are still seeing the global population growing. Yet, even sub-sahara Africa is seeing the rates drop. They are elevated compared other parts of the world yet it is following the same path.
We are accustomed to economies expanding and overall wealth growing. The opposite happening due to reduced consumption is not something we are use to dealing with.
On top of that, an older population requires more services will offering reduced productivity. This obviously generates a big problem when it comes to paying for said services. If the tax base is being reduced, due to less workers, how are governments going to be able to maintain the promises made?
This is going to get very tricky unfortunately.
Demographics is not something that most pay attention to since it is like watching glaciers move. The is a field where the stop watch is done in decades. However, we could be within a couple decades of demographic collapse.
This really did a number on Japan. There are a lot of countries that will face a similar situation.
Will anyone figure this out?
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If we were back in the 80s... that mentality, and that time of growth of production
and plopped the declining birth rate of today, we could come to many conclusion like Musk discusses.
However, things are not
Nothing is the same.
There will not be a "normal" for at least 50 more years.
So, the 80s and 90s put off the great problem of high production manufacturing by introducing planned obsolescence. Both in the products and the marketing.
What a different world it would be if we had plowed that money into much better housing and infrastructure instead of filling land fills... but we didn't.
Soooo
What we are facing is a huge die off over the next decade.
On top of that, the hedonistic ways of women will/have resulted in decreased ability to get pregnant as a species.
Enter the ice-age and "modern"-farming-failure.
Just when we need more food from the places that can still grow it, we are going to see a crash as soils just will not grow our monoculture crops any more.
So, we are going to see a die off of more than 50% world wide.
Unless we stop these useless wars, kill off the Davos group now, and start working on preparing for the ice-age.
We are still coming out of the last ice-age. As the planet warms there will be a lot more arable land for farming.
You are right and climate is long term.
However, we are in a spell where things are going to reverse course for a few decades and get cooler. Sun spot activity is going way down with each cycle.
Likely going to get cooler overall into the 2050s and then reverse course again.
As you said the longer term pattern is coming out of the Ice Age.
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Sorry, we are entering a mini-ice-age.
Glaciers are starting to form.
The thing is, that an ice-age isn't all about cold.
There is also a heating condition before the plummet into cold.
And then we start getting colder, longer winters and crueller, and shorter summers.
The ice-age people have a model, but unlike the "climate change" people's models, it has been accurate every year.
I'm not aware of any relevant glacier formation that would indicate we won't finish off this tail end of the last ice-age.
It does seem we are heading back for a mini-yet-long-ice-age, as is customary. But that is 100s of years away.
I just want the antarctic to melt to see what is underneath. I think we could see rainforests stretching up to greenland again. Tundra will become hot property.
The Antarctic may continue to melt... it is like the sun goes further south, pulling away from the north.
(we do not know what shape the earth is. We don't know what the sun really is. And we have fucked with history so much we don't even know what year this is. It is about 1200 AD. And this affects our ability to notice the cycles)
We will really know that we are in an ice-age when Canada starts seeing month long ice storms and rivers freezing solid.
ice-age-farmer used to post on here... i think he is on ThemTube still.
He has much better info.
A lot of that is already in the works. Many countries are passed the point that their populations can rebound. They simply do not have the numbers. Then add in other factors and it is going to be a few decades of decline. This stuff takes a generation or two to recound.
The Millennials are already not reproducing at a rate that will replace them so it is another leg down.
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People have been fed the over-population line for so long that they can't see what's right in front of them.
Since the 1970s at least.
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For me, I do not know whether it will pose a very serious problem because every era or period has its own features and irritability. But really, the rate of births is getting reduced, all thanks to our individual mindset, contraceptives and all. I think the reason these ideas were sold out to us is like you said, we didn't pay attention to demographics. We only looked at the overall population and not the key points precisely.
It is interesting that something most don't give attention to is affecting the economy and now that the concern is growing and becoming so obvious worldwide, we can easily "see" how the impact would be in the next decades.
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I don't really think we can solve this time anytime soon. From what I see, people aren't as interested in having that many children, and I don't even know if all the medical drugs we use will have any effects on the birth rates. I think automation and machines will be the solution to make up for the lowering population.
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Similar to developed western countries, even in developing countries such as Turkey, the population has started to age. Unfortunately, we missed the demographic window of opportunity because of poor management. Countries such as Japan and Korea experienced rapid growth rates during the period when the number of children decreased and the adult population did not age yet.
Immigrants are influential in population dynamics. Countries that can attract qualified workforce born in underdeveloped regions of the world will be economically advantageous.
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Except the immigrants are going to be heavily sought after since most of the developed world is facing population crisis.
And even the birth rates in second world countries are declining.
So even that solution is going to be a non-starter.
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This is going to be serious problem. Immigration, which was hailed as the solution for developed countries' demographic woes, will soon dry up when developing and underdeveloped countries start having some low birth issues like the rest of the world. And it would occur much sooner than anyone thinks.
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Even if their birth rates hold up, not enough to go around.
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For me, it would not be so much the problem of the population, but the population that is aging, who can replace it if they surely will not have the same education. That for me is the big problem
Without immigrants with many children, we would have long since become over-aged here in Germany. Of course, I don't know if that's enough. The question would be "what will it be enough for? I assume, for tax revenues due to gainful employment. Since old people are no longer working, other ways will be found to keep markets stable. More taxes on consumer goods and wealth and pensions will follow. Homeowners are already taxed more. The government takes from everywhere it can. The vaccination campaigns have brought in profits galore and I think the human body itself will be (and has been) released for exploitation to compensate for the lack of tax revenue. Where natural markets can no longer be developed (due to material resource shortages or artificially created ones), they are invented or mentally staged. Cynically, one could ask how much an over-aged population can financially serve the whole in order to replace the missing labour force. Other sources say that labour is the last bulwark against exploitative intentions. But if human labour is predominantly done by machines, the human being no longer has any leverage in this respect (resignation, strike, etc.). I doubt whether automation has really progressed that far (and I don't know when it will).
According to my subjective observation, there is clearly childlessness. You only have to recall the street scene of your own childhood and compare it with today. I also agree with the prediction that the child-rich civilisations hitherto described as developing countries are tending towards child poverty. This trend seems unstoppable to me.
Is Japan an example of an over aged population par excellence? How would one know?
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