Depopulation — unremitting, long-term population decline — promises to be the 21st century’s most important demographic trend.
After centuries of seemingly unstoppable increase, world population is on track to peak soon.
The United Nations’ latest projections envision depopulation starting as soon as 2052 — just a generation hence.
Depopulation is no future fantasy. A growing number of countries are in prolonged population decline.
China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan — all already depopulators, as are Russia and eight of the European Union 27.
By UN estimates, in fact, more than 50 countries and territories around the world had fewer births than deaths in 2023.
For such “net mortality” societies, only immigration can prevent national-population shrinkage.
Once upon a time, depopulation would have been unthinkable for the United States.
No longer. And it could happen much faster than almost anyone realizes.
The demographic engines that have powered America’s amazing economic and geopolitical ascent since 1776 — fertility and immigration — are faltering today.
Let’s look at both, starting with fertility — the foundation of every country’s demographic outlook.
Throughout our history, American birth rates have been exceptionally high for a rich nation. In colonial times, total fertility was about 7 births per woman; Benjamin Franklin likened our frontiersmen to “locusts swarming across the countryside.”
More recently — over the postwar era’s past three generations — US fertility levels averaged 20% above Europe’s and 30% above Japan’s.
But falling birth rates pushed developed countries’ fertility below the replacement level 50 years ago — including America’s.
In the years since 1972, US annual fertility rates only hit replacement twice.
For most of this period (1972 to 2007) American childbearing was only just barely below replacement.
But in 2008 it started to slide, and by the early 2020s it was more than 20% below the roughly 2.1 births per woman required for long-term population stability. --->READ MORE HERE
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As global fertility rates drop, two economists make the case for humans
If humanity’s existence were threatened by plague, nuclear war or environmental catastrophe, people would surely demand action.
But what if the threat came from our own, passive acceptance of decline? This is not some theoretical curiosity: It is a reasonable extrapolation of globally declining fertility rates.
People aren’t demanding action. In fact, some think a smaller population is actually a good thing.
Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, economists at the University of Texas at Austin specializing in demographics, want to change that. Their book “After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People” is a deep dive into the facts and consequences of depopulation, and an impassioned argument against letting it happen.
They rest their argument not on the familiar need for workers to propel economic growth or shore up Social Security but on a more fundamental proposition: More people is a good thing in and of itself.
The numbers
Global fertility—the number of babies a woman is expected to have over her lifetime—averaged 2.25 last year, the United Nations estimates, the lowest in recorded history, barely above the replacement rate of 2.1 that keeps population stable.
Where fertility levels out is unknown. But the authors note that depopulation will happen so long as it goes below two, and two-thirds of the world’s population now lives in countries with fertility below two. In most others, including throughout sub-Saharan Africa, fertility is generally falling.
If global fertility fell to the current U.S. fertility rate of 1.6, world population will rise from 8 billion now to a peak of 10.2 billion in 2080 and then start to decline. “It will not fall to 6 billion or 4 billion or 2 billion and hold there,” they write. “Humanity could hasten its own extinction if birth rates stay too low for a long time.”
The authors aren’t predicting literal extinction. But, compared to a stable world population, depopulation has serious downsides.
Who’s listening? --->READ MORE HERE (or HERE)
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