So this thread has had a lot of discussion recently about Elon's warnings about population collapse. I'm in the middle of reading my favorite geo-political/economic analyst's just released book,
"The End of the World is Just The Beginning" , and I've just gotten to the point where he explains why we are staring at actual population collapse, not just a decline. Let me see if I can paraphrase it.
One of the things that people miss about our historical population increase is that in the past two hundred or so years, it has been fueled by longer lifespans, not just birth rates. If you double lifespans, but keep birthrates constant, then in one generation, you've
doubled your population. And that is what we've seen as modern medicine has slowly spread through the world. But lifespans have basically hit a wall (except in some ever smaller regions of the poorest parts of the world which have yet to industrialize). So lifespan population boost has pretty much reached its end.
Meanwhile, global industrialization has resulted in people having far fewer children. There are many reasons for this (children meant free labor on a pre-industrialized farm, now they are very expensive luxuries), but the facts are undeniable. We have below replacement birthrates for much of the world (like 1.8 children per woman), and some notable countries (Korea, and China!) the latest 2022 data suggest 1.2 children.
So we've been living through a period where expanding lifespans overwhelmed the declining birthrates to give us a still expanding population, but that period is ending. So now in the 2020s, in almost all of the industrialized world we are running low of young adults which is the group that produces the most children. Unless something changes, like mass cloning technology, or WWIII throwing us back into pre-industrialization, this is an accelerating trend.
Every generation going forward will be smaller than the one before it. That's why some people are worried about population
collapse.
Is it inevitable? No one knows because the world has never seen this before. The industrial revolution has only happened once in human history. What comes on the other side of the population hump? We don't know, but one outcome is catastrophically bad.
Since we really don't know what the future will hold, people like Elon aren't calling for a mass forced re-population program. But he is pointing out that it is very dangerous to be thinking the opposite, that we have too many people, that we should be cutting back on having kids. It isn't obvious now, but China will absolutely be paying the price for its one child policy.