“Population collapse is the biggest threat to civilization” – Elon Musk
Population Collapse is a term I started hearing of in 2017, mostly from Elon Musk. More recently, however, it has garnered more attention, and people started taking it more seriously and making documentaries and studies about it.
What Is Really Going On?
From 10,000 BC until 1700 AD, the world’s population grew around 0.04% a year. After 1700 AD, the population growth rate jumped to around 0.6% per year, causing concern about overpopulation worldwide because the rate had accelerated to more than ten times what it was before the 1700s.
In the 1800s, the population growth rate peaked at 2.1% per year, and it has since started to go down little by little. In 2023, it reached a concerningly low growth rate of 0.9% per year. This caused a new concern about population decline or collapse.
The concern lies in that the current growth rate will not be sufficient for the population to replace itself from one generation to the next, causing a decline in the world’s population and one that is rapidly accelerating if the fertility rate doesn’t reach 2.1 children per woman.
Consequences
Population Decline can have positive and negative effects on society.
The positive Impacts of Population Decline on society are largely dependent on workforce productivity. It is evident that countries can increase their per capita GDP, which is a rough proxy for average living standards, and increase their total GDP, even though their populations are declining, as is the case with Japan and Germany.
If the productivity of the workforce increases as the population declines, it could lead to a higher per capita GDP and total GDP. It could also lead to benefits for the workforce through higher wages, customers through lower prices, and governments through higher tax proceeds.
Population Decline, however, has many negative effects on society. It leads to difficulties in paying retirees their pensions because there would be fewer workers relative to retirees, difficulties in providing care for the elderly because there wouldn’t be enough caregivers around, and a decline in military strength.
It could also cause governments to take in large numbers of refugees to make up for the lack of workers, which could lead to ethnic and cultural clashes and civil unrest.
Causes
The countries most at risk of underpopulation are developed European and Asian countries. In these countries, where people live generally prosperously, fertility tends to go down because of the focus people have on careers and education, in addition to a predominantly individualistic culture.
This causes people to perceive reproduction as non-essential and somewhat of a luxury that they are too busy to partake in. This perception could be especially convincing given the high costs of child care and housing, which could be avoided if one decides not to have children.
What About The East?
According to the World Bank, the population of the Middle East and North Africa is currently increasing at an annual rate of 1.5%. This region’s growth rate peaked around 1990 at a rate of 3.6% and started to decline from there.
Although it is declining, the growth rate of the Middle East and North Africa is still much higher than the European (0%) and Asian (0.2%) growth rates.
The higher population growth rate in the Middle East and North Africa could be attributed to many factors, including the economic and healthcare improvements in many of the region’s countries, the majority of the region’s population being in the childbearing age group, and cultural and religious influences that encourage larger families.
Should We Be Worried?
From my understanding, whether or not we need to worry about population decline is still a matter of debate. The UN, for example, estimates that the world’s population will plateau at about 11 billion people by the year 2100.
Another estimation done by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation shows that the population would peak at 9.7 billion people around the year 2064 and decline to 6 billion people around the year 2100. Which is the world’s population in the year 2000.
The worry concerning Population Decline is mainly an economic issue. A declining population in developed countries means that these countries’ economies won’t be able to grow perpetually. That stunt in growth is caused by fewer working people, generation after generation.
However, developing countries in Africa and the Middle East seem unlikely to face such problems in the foreseeable future because their fertility rates are still above the replacement level. This means that their populations will be much larger than those in European or developed Asian countries in the future.
Therefore, Population Decline or Collapse doesn’t seem to be an issue that could irreparably damage the world. It could, however, cause challenging economic problems in many of the world’s regions. These problems could be alleviated in various ways, though.
Mitigation strategies concerning Population Decline include taking in workers from other countries to compensate for the lack of young workers, encouraging the citizens of countries with low fertility rates to have more children, and having systems to incentivize young people to build families.
It is worth mentioning, however, that taking in a large number of workers from other countries requires governments to put systems in place to integrate these workers into their societies in order to avoid tensions rising between them and the citizens of the countries they expatriated to.
Thoughts
In my opinion, humans tend to overestimate their ability to influence the world. We think we can create AI that is much smarter than us and destroy the world, we think we can eventually populate other planets and extract their resources, and we think we can predict and influence how people will behave over hundreds of years.
Are these things impossible to achieve? I don’t think they are. But I think the chance we assume we have to achieve them is much higher than it really is. I also believe that we understand the world much less than we think we do.
When it comes to population growth and decline rates, we forget that the world had been functioning just fine with an annual population growth rate of 0.04% for thousands of years, and only in the 1700s did we start exponentially increasing in numbers.
When we started rapidly increasing in numbers, economists and scientists started talking about overpopulation and the risks it brings to the environment and the economic state of the world. Evidently, we never reached the point they were worried about. And now that we started slightly increasing slower than before, the worry surrounding depopulation started to arise.
I believe everything in life comes in cycles. We have times of happiness and sadness, sickness and health, and fluctuating financial situations throughout our lives. Can’t the same be said about population growth rates?
Maybe what we are seeing is a pattern. People could simply tend to have children at times of prosperity, but when this prosperity reaches a certain level, they tend to get caught up in their personal aspirations, neglecting the idea of reproduction, leading to a result we are yet to see.
At the end of the day, it isn’t a bad idea to keep things like this in mind when making decisions about whether or not to have children. Because we, as individuals, like to impact the world in a positive manner so that future generations can have an easier time getting by.
However, whether we choose to try to impact such things or not, the world will continue to exist, and future generations will know how to deal with their problems, just like we have.
So, is this concern brought about by the assumption that we can keep growing economically forever?
Is this issue, in reality, a matter of hubris?
