NOTE!!! I'm not suggesting that if we figure out we only need X people and X < population(2024) that we try to depopulate to X. I'm just curious at what X would we have enough people to have a nice world, with enough people to do the jobs needed to maintain the world and provide resources to continue improving the world.
Thinking back to around 1985, when the world population was around 60% of what it was today and the US population was around 70% of what it is today, and comparing what life was like then to now, the things that are better now don't seem to be things that inherently needed an increased population in order to happen.
My TV is a lot bigger now. My computer is orders of magnitude faster, with orders of magnitude more memory and storage, with much better peripherals. My phone is a cell phone instead of a land line, and is also a much more powerful computer than my 1985 desktop computer. And of course I've got internet now, whereas back then I had dial-up to CompuServe.
My car then was a Nissan Sentra. A Nissan Sentra today would be more efficient and have a lot more electronics, but it wouldn't really be much better than my car in 1985 when it comes to meeting my transportation needs.
My food and housing then was comparable to my food and housing today. My appliances today are more efficient, but like with the car the ones in 1985 got the job done well enough.
I think I'd be as happy in a 1985-like world with current level electronics, communications, and appliances. The question then is how much of the improvement in those since 1985 depended on the population increasing?
I think the killer is that right now we don't need absolute numbers, rather relative numbers of N young people per old person. We are net producers of stuff up to some age, then become consumers as we retire, and need some producers to offset us.
You could say, meh, you saved up money for retirement so you're good, but (a) that's just you, not most people, and (b) even then you need some young people to bake break, fight fires, look after you when ill and so on.
I guess we will have to break this model, whether we like it or not, but right now we rely on exponential growth... The longevity, ironically, is making it worse, as there are more old people, and I guess by extension more frail people, who in the olden days wouldn't make it, all of whom need more care from young people.
The problem was real. Without the efforts of Henry A Wallace and Norman Borlag to increase grain yields through hybridization, we would have been in serious trouble.
With improved high-density planting and fertilizer, combined with better drought-resistant and pest-resistant high-yield grains we enjoyed a 10X (ten times!) increase in yields per acre.
Don't tell me that didn't make all the difference! All the rest of it balanced on this monumental effort. Spearheaded by two people, one managing agricultural policy and reinventing ag processes and education and the other taking up hybridization to customize crops to regions of the world.
With 10X increases in yields per acre, I expected to see some really dramatic yield improvements over time. Some countries did have great improvements. However, from 1961 to 2022 United states only improved production by 151%. Basically what I see is that well established countries had modest improvements, but no where near 10x.
Our diet consists of a lot more than grains. I'm sure the improvements helped, yes they made a difference. I am not convinced we'd be in serious trouble without them.
Ideally, yes, but there's a reason they're called staples. It's very easy to have a diet where most of the _calories_ if not actual volume nor mass of food comes from grain. Grains and fats are very calorie dense, but grains are far cheaper than butter or steak. Many civilizations have been based on a huge portion of food being tortillas, rice, bread, pasta. Grains are important. Whether they should be as big a part of your diet for health reasons is another question, but their historical importance due to calorie density is not in question and is self evident.
It's similar to saying that Y2K was just a panic because nothing catastrophic happened at the turn of the millennium. You're ignoring all the work out into preventing it from happening.
Today, around 70% of birthing age women use contraception. In Western nations you can argue that this was primarily due to feminism, but in Asia, this was only possible because governments were afraid of overpopulation and made them widely available.
I think that confuses "we would not have been able to divert spending on food and usage of land into other benefits which we enjoy" with "we would have starved".
Being that there's also how human population growth does have nnegative feedback loops other than massive famine-death.
It isn't immoral nor wrong, it's dumb though. Culture isn't some static stuff 'we do and have always done'. Most of the stuff we call 'culture', including food, is often at most 150 year old, barring a few very rare exceptions. We assign random characters traits to culture too, but it's funny because everyone ends up with the same ones.
Culture evolve with how we live anyway, and you cannot really 'preserve' a culture that didn't exist 70 years before and will be different in 50 years anyways. What people really mean by 'preserving our culture' really is 'preserving our heritage'. That will be done as long as no 3rd world war happens.
Go forth and multiply; no one is stopping you. The issue is when you take your own obsession with preserving your culture and try to turn it into a justification for running roughshod over others.
I hate articles that both attempt to reject a premise and then in the very next paragraph say .."and even if the premise is correct, it's a good thing."
Is the bomb "overblown" or are we on track to have 2 billion less people on this planet in 150 years (assuming "replacement level" rates)? (And PS those 6 billion will almost entirely be senior citizens.)
But by all means make arguments about scenarios that your headline are declaring won't happen. That definitely increases credibility.
> Is the bomb "overblown" or are we on track to have 2 billion less people on this planet in 150 years
Both can be true .. the wild assertions that having 2 billion less people on the planet is harbringer of doom, some kind of 'bomb' is certainly overblown.
The 'short term' near certain bet is that human population will peak at some 10 billion ~ 2100, the less certain but highly probable future after that is that population will decrease and then stabilise at a lower level .. as witnessed in many constrained populations in the wild.
What is extremely unlikely is the notion that human population will plumment to zero and go extinct if humans cease to breed above replacement rates (and will then continue to do so forever until the last human dies).
I’m glad someone is comparing this to overpopulation mania. It’s the same fallacy of assuming that present trends will continue indefinitely.
I can absolutely imagine having big families coming back into fashion. In fact depopulation is likely to cause the conditions for this by making real estate cheap again among other things. Cultural, religious, and ideological shifts could also occur as well as technological advances.
Yet another reason the trend might reverse. If there are any genetic factors that influence the desire to have kids we are selecting very hard for those right now. In two or three generations we might have a world full of people who love kids and have crazy biological clocks.
Eh, I mean, the more time passes the more you want to spend time with your children to educate them. This mechanically makes people have less kids, as each one of them require a tremendous amount of energy to raise.
I can see lots of reasons people would stop having children as they become industrialized. What’s the reasoning for them starting to have lots of kids again and do we see that happening anywhere on earth?
I can say that all the young people I know would rather serve prison time than have children right now.
The graph you linked shows that the total fertility rate was nearly 3.7 in 1960 but kept dropping to reach as low as 1.7 in 1976. Afterward it gradually, irregularly went up to reach 2.1 in 2006 and 2007. Since then it has gone down again.
Or to look at a time series covering more history,
the American TFR dropped continuously in the 140 years between 1800 and 1940. But it went up again after 1940 to reach that new local Baby Boom peak in 1960 where your graph starts.
I'm sure there are arguments to believe that "this time it's different" and that fertility won't go up again, but it has dropped and then risen again before.
I feel like 2006-7 was the last hurrah before the financial crisis happened and people lost that optimism that things were going to be ok environmentally and society-wise again where they wanted to have children. I don't know if that is coming back.
But again they were only treading water in 2006-7 and keeping population steady. For it to go above 2.1 and actually increase the population would take something happening that we haven't seen since 1971.
Things are better in many many ways than they were then. We just have a media and a political propaganda industry that runs on rage and fear bait.
The political parties have a vested interest in convincing you that civilization is about to collapse or driving you into a rage because turnout decides elections.
> by making real estate cheap again among other things
If this happens at scale, the system collapses. There's a reason The US Federal Reserve's target is positive 2% inflation. Why not 0? Why not negative 2%?
The reason is the financial system is dependent on "appreciation". Imagine a bank approving a loan and the collateral falls in value? And asset the loan acquired falls in value. Boom! The whole system is under water.
The USA has a housing supply problem for similar reasons. Property owners want the value of their assets to appreciate. Increase supply and that slows or stops.
Like it or not it's a Ponzi Scheme, and this is why the population crunch is a concern.
I went to a book tour stop of for this author + book and Princeton Univ a few months ago. Definitively recommended.
> Imagine a bank approving a loan and the collateral falls in value? And asset the loan acquired falls in value. Boom! The whole system is under water.
Not really, you just have to use different collateral. After all personal loans are already based on taking a loan against a different collateral.
Yes, really. Those assets are falling in value as well. Banks can't write down everything. Banks don't like such ugliness on their balance sheets.
The Feds target is 2% because it's a CYA for the entire system.
Note: 2% inflation - if they are lucky enough to stay on target - will cut your spending power in *half* in ~35 yrs. Let that sink in. The Fed's stated goal is to cut you in half every 35 yrs. Why? Because in the context of the current system 0 or less would be a disaster.
As someone who lived through both 1979 (14% inflation) and 2008 (fear of a deflationary collapse), I'll take 2% inflation any day. If you can't see that that's the least-bad option, I don't know what to tell you.
Yeah, if I don't invest my money that grows in value, it will lose half its value in 35 years. Yes, that's not ideal. No, it's not the catastrophe that you're making it sound.
You'll take it? You / we have no choice. But that's not what's being discussed. The discussion is about the financial / economic system and a shrinking / deflationary run.
It would be a disaster. How could it be otherwise? If the system's fuel is up, not down.
Another way to look at it is this: we've gotten all kinds of technology. We've seen efficiency and productivity improve. And yet, prices keep increasing. Efficiency and productivity should mean dropping prices, at best break even. And yet no? There's a reason for that.
That is, assets losing value will lead to the house of cards collapsing. Groupthink to the contrary is just head in the sand naivete.
Japan has had deflating real estate for decades and has not collapsed. In fact it’s been great for their culture. They have a lot of other problems but this is not one of them.
I was intrigued until I realized this book is just shilling for Bitcoin from an analyst who sits on the board of Swanbitcoin.com. I realize this is HN and all, but no thanks.
She’s on the board of swanbitcoin? Where can I confirm that information? I didn’t see her mentioned on the page where 6 people affiliated with the company are listed, but I don’t think that is a list of people on the board, so I don’t think it would. How do you know she’s on the board?
I met someone from Newfoundland. When she was small, she and the other kids ate lobster day in and day out. Well, except for the rich kids; the rich kids ate peanut butter.
Here’s what’ll really cook your noodle: in the US fertility is non-uniform by party affiliation. Conservatives tend to have more kids (duh). Think about that next time someone says “demographics is destiny”.
They usually start as democrats to rebel against their parents. Later in life a lot of people turn conservative. But it doesn’t really matter if they do, since if they stay (or become) liberal they will have fertility well below replacement anyway.
(to be fair to swine, in the wild their litters are much smaller [4-6]; we've bred the domestic ones to produce so many young [9-13] that she can't feed them all. This is because on a farm the pigs do not breed for their own benefit, but for the farmers')
1 billion people is more than enough. The years 1865-1905 were some of the most amazing years in human history, and there were only ~ 1 billion people on the earth.
and all these worries about having too many old people are way overblown. Any problem whatsoever which involves 70+ year old people is a short-term problem.
Pick any metric. Human rights? We got rid of slavery. Technology? we mechanized farming, first with steam engines and then with the first practical internal combustion engines, we discovered how to fly. Science? Maxwell wrote his equations, Einstein explained the photoelectric effect, proved atoms existed, and overthrew Newtonian physics, Max plank made physics quantum...
....by what metric wasn't it some of the most amazing years in human history?
This was all done by a population of ~1 billion people. Who actually were way less productive that people are today. If the human population dropped much below 1 billion, I might be worried. But IMHO ~1 billion seems to be a sweet spot.
the irony is supporting depopulation in one area will just reward population increase in another, and supporting population increase somewhere will decrease it somewhere else. not sure the specific rule at play, but it seems to have to do with all things expanding to consume their available capacity.
north america and the West effectively ended teen motherhood and reduced the birthrate to below replacement rate, but populations have still skyrocketed from immigration because that gap made the economic capacity available.
the presumption in not worrying about depopulation is that people globally are interchangeable. Seeing humanity as an undifferentiated, homogeneous mass conflates sophisticated cultures with undeveloped ones and presumes you are somehow both above them all and can manage it, instead of being respectable peers in different and separate cultures. it's a fatal conceit as we are seeing play out in european cities today.
That's the begged question in all this post-national global homogenization stuff. No nations, one humanity, and yet under whose governance and dominion? The thing about global governance is that if there is no alternative, there can be no consent, or even conscience, either. So from the perspective of a member of a tiny global minority with a sub-replacement birthrate, depopulation isn't fine at all, really.
How many people do we actually need?
NOTE!!! I'm not suggesting that if we figure out we only need X people and X < population(2024) that we try to depopulate to X. I'm just curious at what X would we have enough people to have a nice world, with enough people to do the jobs needed to maintain the world and provide resources to continue improving the world.
Thinking back to around 1985, when the world population was around 60% of what it was today and the US population was around 70% of what it is today, and comparing what life was like then to now, the things that are better now don't seem to be things that inherently needed an increased population in order to happen.
My TV is a lot bigger now. My computer is orders of magnitude faster, with orders of magnitude more memory and storage, with much better peripherals. My phone is a cell phone instead of a land line, and is also a much more powerful computer than my 1985 desktop computer. And of course I've got internet now, whereas back then I had dial-up to CompuServe.
My car then was a Nissan Sentra. A Nissan Sentra today would be more efficient and have a lot more electronics, but it wouldn't really be much better than my car in 1985 when it comes to meeting my transportation needs.
My food and housing then was comparable to my food and housing today. My appliances today are more efficient, but like with the car the ones in 1985 got the job done well enough.
I think I'd be as happy in a 1985-like world with current level electronics, communications, and appliances. The question then is how much of the improvement in those since 1985 depended on the population increasing?
I think the killer is that right now we don't need absolute numbers, rather relative numbers of N young people per old person. We are net producers of stuff up to some age, then become consumers as we retire, and need some producers to offset us.
You could say, meh, you saved up money for retirement so you're good, but (a) that's just you, not most people, and (b) even then you need some young people to bake break, fight fires, look after you when ill and so on.
I guess we will have to break this model, whether we like it or not, but right now we rely on exponential growth... The longevity, ironically, is making it worse, as there are more old people, and I guess by extension more frail people, who in the olden days wouldn't make it, all of whom need more care from young people.
The problem was real. Without the efforts of Henry A Wallace and Norman Borlag to increase grain yields through hybridization, we would have been in serious trouble.
With improved high-density planting and fertilizer, combined with better drought-resistant and pest-resistant high-yield grains we enjoyed a 10X (ten times!) increase in yields per acre.
Don't tell me that didn't make all the difference! All the rest of it balanced on this monumental effort. Spearheaded by two people, one managing agricultural policy and reinventing ag processes and education and the other taking up hybridization to customize crops to regions of the world.
We own them more than we can calculate.
Well, I looked up Cereal production over time. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-production?tab=tab...
With 10X increases in yields per acre, I expected to see some really dramatic yield improvements over time. Some countries did have great improvements. However, from 1961 to 2022 United states only improved production by 151%. Basically what I see is that well established countries had modest improvements, but no where near 10x.
To check my time line, I noted from the following that the Green Revolution started in the late 60's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
Our diet consists of a lot more than grains. I'm sure the improvements helped, yes they made a difference. I am not convinced we'd be in serious trouble without them.
> Our diet consists of a lot more than grains.
Ideally, yes, but there's a reason they're called staples. It's very easy to have a diet where most of the _calories_ if not actual volume nor mass of food comes from grain. Grains and fats are very calorie dense, but grains are far cheaper than butter or steak. Many civilizations have been based on a huge portion of food being tortillas, rice, bread, pasta. Grains are important. Whether they should be as big a part of your diet for health reasons is another question, but their historical importance due to calorie density is not in question and is self evident.
These improvements happened before the late 60’s.
Alternatively; if you build more roads you get more traffic, if you grow more food you get more people.
Had crop productivity not increased then nor would have human population also increased to match.
It's similar to saying that Y2K was just a panic because nothing catastrophic happened at the turn of the millennium. You're ignoring all the work out into preventing it from happening. Today, around 70% of birthing age women use contraception. In Western nations you can argue that this was primarily due to feminism, but in Asia, this was only possible because governments were afraid of overpopulation and made them widely available.
I think that confuses "we would not have been able to divert spending on food and usage of land into other benefits which we enjoy" with "we would have starved".
Being that there's also how human population growth does have nnegative feedback loops other than massive famine-death.
It always felt to me that the people sounding the horn on population collapse just think that not enough of the "desirable" people are being born.
Wanting to preserve an existing culture rather than replacing it with others isn’t immoral or wrong.
It isn't immoral nor wrong, it's dumb though. Culture isn't some static stuff 'we do and have always done'. Most of the stuff we call 'culture', including food, is often at most 150 year old, barring a few very rare exceptions. We assign random characters traits to culture too, but it's funny because everyone ends up with the same ones.
Culture evolve with how we live anyway, and you cannot really 'preserve' a culture that didn't exist 70 years before and will be different in 50 years anyways. What people really mean by 'preserving our culture' really is 'preserving our heritage'. That will be done as long as no 3rd world war happens.
Calling it a global population collapse ends up sounding like a dog whistle.
Go forth and multiply; no one is stopping you. The issue is when you take your own obsession with preserving your culture and try to turn it into a justification for running roughshod over others.
Civilization is the story of running roughshod over others.
If you won’t, someone else will and you’ll be a part of theirs from that point on (or dead).
Based hezbollah supporter
We can survive an economic collapse more then an environmental.
I hate articles that both attempt to reject a premise and then in the very next paragraph say .."and even if the premise is correct, it's a good thing."
Is the bomb "overblown" or are we on track to have 2 billion less people on this planet in 150 years (assuming "replacement level" rates)? (And PS those 6 billion will almost entirely be senior citizens.)
But by all means make arguments about scenarios that your headline are declaring won't happen. That definitely increases credibility.
> Is the bomb "overblown" or are we on track to have 2 billion less people on this planet in 150 years
Both can be true .. the wild assertions that having 2 billion less people on the planet is harbringer of doom, some kind of 'bomb' is certainly overblown.
The 'short term' near certain bet is that human population will peak at some 10 billion ~ 2100, the less certain but highly probable future after that is that population will decrease and then stabilise at a lower level .. as witnessed in many constrained populations in the wild.
What is extremely unlikely is the notion that human population will plumment to zero and go extinct if humans cease to breed above replacement rates (and will then continue to do so forever until the last human dies).
It’d be a lot easier to manage resources if we managed the population down to 500 million. Thanos snap not needed.
I’m glad someone is comparing this to overpopulation mania. It’s the same fallacy of assuming that present trends will continue indefinitely.
I can absolutely imagine having big families coming back into fashion. In fact depopulation is likely to cause the conditions for this by making real estate cheap again among other things. Cultural, religious, and ideological shifts could also occur as well as technological advances.
People, in general, are most likely the descendants of people who have lots of kids.
Yet another reason the trend might reverse. If there are any genetic factors that influence the desire to have kids we are selecting very hard for those right now. In two or three generations we might have a world full of people who love kids and have crazy biological clocks.
Eh, I mean, the more time passes the more you want to spend time with your children to educate them. This mechanically makes people have less kids, as each one of them require a tremendous amount of energy to raise.
I can see lots of reasons people would stop having children as they become industrialized. What’s the reasoning for them starting to have lots of kids again and do we see that happening anywhere on earth?
I can say that all the young people I know would rather serve prison time than have children right now.
This doesn’t look good for fertility.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINUSA
USA is 1.66 now and Japan is 1.3. You need 2.1 to even tread water.
The graph you linked shows that the total fertility rate was nearly 3.7 in 1960 but kept dropping to reach as low as 1.7 in 1976. Afterward it gradually, irregularly went up to reach 2.1 in 2006 and 2007. Since then it has gone down again.
Or to look at a time series covering more history,
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033027/fertility-rate-u...
the American TFR dropped continuously in the 140 years between 1800 and 1940. But it went up again after 1940 to reach that new local Baby Boom peak in 1960 where your graph starts.
I'm sure there are arguments to believe that "this time it's different" and that fertility won't go up again, but it has dropped and then risen again before.
I feel like 2006-7 was the last hurrah before the financial crisis happened and people lost that optimism that things were going to be ok environmentally and society-wise again where they wanted to have children. I don't know if that is coming back.
But again they were only treading water in 2006-7 and keeping population steady. For it to go above 2.1 and actually increase the population would take something happening that we haven't seen since 1971.
We seem to always go back to 1971.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Things are better in many many ways than they were then. We just have a media and a political propaganda industry that runs on rage and fear bait.
The political parties have a vested interest in convincing you that civilization is about to collapse or driving you into a rage because turnout decides elections.
> by making real estate cheap again among other things
If this happens at scale, the system collapses. There's a reason The US Federal Reserve's target is positive 2% inflation. Why not 0? Why not negative 2%?
The reason is the financial system is dependent on "appreciation". Imagine a bank approving a loan and the collateral falls in value? And asset the loan acquired falls in value. Boom! The whole system is under water.
The USA has a housing supply problem for similar reasons. Property owners want the value of their assets to appreciate. Increase supply and that slows or stops.
Like it or not it's a Ponzi Scheme, and this is why the population crunch is a concern.
I went to a book tour stop of for this author + book and Princeton Univ a few months ago. Definitively recommended.
https://www.lynalden.com/broken-money/
> Imagine a bank approving a loan and the collateral falls in value? And asset the loan acquired falls in value. Boom! The whole system is under water.
Not really, you just have to use different collateral. After all personal loans are already based on taking a loan against a different collateral.
Yes, really. Those assets are falling in value as well. Banks can't write down everything. Banks don't like such ugliness on their balance sheets.
The Feds target is 2% because it's a CYA for the entire system.
Note: 2% inflation - if they are lucky enough to stay on target - will cut your spending power in *half* in ~35 yrs. Let that sink in. The Fed's stated goal is to cut you in half every 35 yrs. Why? Because in the context of the current system 0 or less would be a disaster.
As someone who lived through both 1979 (14% inflation) and 2008 (fear of a deflationary collapse), I'll take 2% inflation any day. If you can't see that that's the least-bad option, I don't know what to tell you.
Yeah, if I don't invest my money that grows in value, it will lose half its value in 35 years. Yes, that's not ideal. No, it's not the catastrophe that you're making it sound.
You'll take it? You / we have no choice. But that's not what's being discussed. The discussion is about the financial / economic system and a shrinking / deflationary run.
It would be a disaster. How could it be otherwise? If the system's fuel is up, not down.
Another way to look at it is this: we've gotten all kinds of technology. We've seen efficiency and productivity improve. And yet, prices keep increasing. Efficiency and productivity should mean dropping prices, at best break even. And yet no? There's a reason for that.
That is, assets losing value will lead to the house of cards collapsing. Groupthink to the contrary is just head in the sand naivete.
Japan has had deflating real estate for decades and has not collapsed. In fact it’s been great for their culture. They have a lot of other problems but this is not one of them.
I was intrigued until I realized this book is just shilling for Bitcoin from an analyst who sits on the board of Swanbitcoin.com. I realize this is HN and all, but no thanks.
She’s on the board of swanbitcoin? Where can I confirm that information? I didn’t see her mentioned on the page where 6 people affiliated with the company are listed, but I don’t think that is a list of people on the board, so I don’t think it would. How do you know she’s on the board?
Edit: she says so on her website.
She claims it about herself on her web site:
https://www.lynalden.com/about-lyn-alden/
Additionally, I serve as an independent director on the board of Swan.com, and am a general partner at the venture capital firm Ego Death Capital.
(swanbitcoin.com and swan.com are the same)
Read the first half, then judge.
And fwiw some of my best lessons have come from forcing myself to read outside my sweetspot.
The bitcoin stuff didn't do much for me. The history of how we got here and the shit we're sitting in did.
I certainly would welcome reduced traffic, more housing options, and not having to eat bugs (eventually).
People pay top dollar for bugs, as long as they're from the ocean (shrimp, lobster, crab). It's all just a matter of marketing.
I met someone from Newfoundland. When she was small, she and the other kids ate lobster day in and day out. Well, except for the rich kids; the rich kids ate peanut butter.
Depends where you live, cities are still growing, like in Japan Tokyo still grows while the rest of the country shrinks.
Substack is going the way of medium.
Here’s what’ll really cook your noodle: in the US fertility is non-uniform by party affiliation. Conservatives tend to have more kids (duh). Think about that next time someone says “demographics is destiny”.
Q. these kids they have, are they still conservative after they grow up and get a job?
Lagniappe: https://dakotavadams.substack.com/p/gunshow
They usually start as democrats to rebel against their parents. Later in life a lot of people turn conservative. But it doesn’t really matter if they do, since if they stay (or become) liberal they will have fertility well below replacement anyway.
compare Aesop, The Sow and the Lioness
(to be fair to swine, in the wild their litters are much smaller [4-6]; we've bred the domestic ones to produce so many young [9-13] that she can't feed them all. This is because on a farm the pigs do not breed for their own benefit, but for the farmers')
1 billion people is more than enough. The years 1865-1905 were some of the most amazing years in human history, and there were only ~ 1 billion people on the earth.
and all these worries about having too many old people are way overblown. Any problem whatsoever which involves 70+ year old people is a short-term problem.
> The years 1865-1905 were some of the most amazing years in human history
Interesting claim, what metric are you using?
Pick any metric. Human rights? We got rid of slavery. Technology? we mechanized farming, first with steam engines and then with the first practical internal combustion engines, we discovered how to fly. Science? Maxwell wrote his equations, Einstein explained the photoelectric effect, proved atoms existed, and overthrew Newtonian physics, Max plank made physics quantum...
....by what metric wasn't it some of the most amazing years in human history?
This was all done by a population of ~1 billion people. Who actually were way less productive that people are today. If the human population dropped much below 1 billion, I might be worried. But IMHO ~1 billion seems to be a sweet spot.
the irony is supporting depopulation in one area will just reward population increase in another, and supporting population increase somewhere will decrease it somewhere else. not sure the specific rule at play, but it seems to have to do with all things expanding to consume their available capacity.
north america and the West effectively ended teen motherhood and reduced the birthrate to below replacement rate, but populations have still skyrocketed from immigration because that gap made the economic capacity available.
the presumption in not worrying about depopulation is that people globally are interchangeable. Seeing humanity as an undifferentiated, homogeneous mass conflates sophisticated cultures with undeveloped ones and presumes you are somehow both above them all and can manage it, instead of being respectable peers in different and separate cultures. it's a fatal conceit as we are seeing play out in european cities today.
That's the begged question in all this post-national global homogenization stuff. No nations, one humanity, and yet under whose governance and dominion? The thing about global governance is that if there is no alternative, there can be no consent, or even conscience, either. So from the perspective of a member of a tiny global minority with a sub-replacement birthrate, depopulation isn't fine at all, really.