If we are running out of resources and increasing pollution does a smaller population not help with this? As a species we have shrunk in numbers before and clearly increased again. Really keen to understand more about this.
In: 2155
big generalisations obviously but population decline is normally because there’s fewer younger people (they’ve either emigrated or not being born in the first place). fewer young people means less things get done since older people are more likely to be retired and/or grumpy and old. new people bring in new ideas and stuff so everything kind of stagnates.
Basically our economic systems (capitalism, socialism, etc) are based on always having an expanding population. Its pretty much a ponzi scheme, where new people are there to feed up the pyramid. Without new people, the system collapses.
Think Detroit – what happens to a city when half the population leaves? you cannot support the infrastructure (roads, schools, emergency services) with half the people, so things start falling apart.
Peter Zeihan does a lot of work on this. One video to watch: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozDKrJdr_j4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs1zYns8pQI)
He’s got a lot of insights in how the world will change as population drops.
The world financial and economic system is set up on continuous growth and borrowing from the next generation. It’s dysfunctional and fucked up so when population declines so does the functioning of our society
It’s bad for the *economy,* I don’t think it’s really bad for much else. The world economy is based on growth.
It isn’t. Rich people just want an abundant, exploitable pool of cheap labor. Same reason there are so many prisons.
For the well-being of the environment and planet, population decline is good. For politicians and governments in power, population decline means less profits.
It’s an issue because our entire economic stance of the developed world is based on constant growth instead of sustainability. Without more young to continually buy, work and fuel our economies will see issues. Basically the rich and powerful need new slaves
It’s not really a problem for us as a species, ecologically we would probably be better off with a smaller population. The issue is that in a very short period of time, basically from the early 1900s, the world population exploded. A couple of things influenced that kind of growth, from the discovery of antibiotics in 1928 to the development of a number of vaccines that prevented large numbers of deaths that previously were very common in families. Before that, the average life expectancy at birth was 47 years due to the common infectious diseases. Things like smallpox, cholera, diphtheria, pneumonia, typhoid fever, plague, tuberculosis, typhus, syphilis, etc. were rampant, and as a result, people just died earlier. Just as recently as 1950 the global mortality rates were five times higher than they are today. We have seen a very steep decline during our lifetimes.
The other major events that occurred during the early 1900s were of course WW1 and WW2. The amount of social mobility that occurred after these wars isn’t something that could be imagined today. The massive amounts of destruction in Europe fueled economies like nothing ever before and as a result, people were glad to be at peace, hopeful for the future, and flush with cash from a newly stimulated economy. Of course, new couples were having children. By the end of the 1940s, about 32 million babies had been born in the US alone, compared with 24 million in the 1930s.
That kind of birth rate coupled with the increased likelihood of those babies surviving infancy and childhood meant that by 1965 four out of ten Americans were under the age of 20. That kind of population disparity is what a large portion of the modern capitalistic idea is built upon.
The idea is that the elderly that we currently care for are greatly outnumbered by the young people working to offset the cost of taking care of those workers. Entire industries target demographics specifically because this population boom happened – it’s why bands like the Beatles existed, why companies began to advertise to teenagers who were suddenly a massive demographic with disposable cash. The word teenager was coined to describe the demographic before this but it became popular and widely used in the 1940s.
When the population increased that much our economies expanded rapidly to accommodate that change – it’s what capitalism is great at. Filling a void. But here we are about eighty-odd years down the road and we are seeing the results of the end of that population boom.
As a personal anecdote, both of my grandparents are in this demographic. They were born in the 1950s ish and lived a very stereotypical life for that time – working husband, stay-at-home mom, and 2 children. They saved adequately and live in a very nice home. However, both of them come from much larger families. My grandmother had five siblings and my grandfather had six and they all lived to adulthood. This wonderful invention came along in the 1960s that allowed my grandparents to reduce the likelihood of having more children than they wanted – birth control.
See while that initial period after WW2 concluded people were still stuck using condoms and not much else. Frequently people used condoms incorrectly – so the advent of a daily pill for women was an incredible invention. It allowed for family planning to become a commonplace idea. Why scrimp and save and struggle as they did during the depression trying to feed five or six kids when all you needed was a pill to prevent that from happening. You could make the decision to have that baby when you were ready for it and instead divert a significant portion of your income to the new television model.
So indirectly, capitalism has become an issue in and of itself. The way we currently structure the economy is dependent upon young workers supporting the bulwark of society – money doesn’t mean anything if there is no one to work at a Wendy’s to get you your sandwich, and a massive portion of our population is old and dying. It caused cascading issues in my parent’s generation as well because a lot of these experienced geriatrics never really left the workforce. Why would someone hire an inexperienced 20-something when they had 100 experienced forty-year-olds already trained? It’s why you can look at upper management in a lot of places and be surprised to see people in their seventies still kicking around.
The issue an extreme population decrease runs into is that capitalism is terrible at contracting. We end up with a lack of workers performing services that people have come to expect having done. Symptoms of this more recently have been exacerbated by COVID since large numbers of elderly people have decided to retire.
Sources for some of this data:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5354621/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5354621/)
[https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past](https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-20th_century_baby_boom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-20th_century_baby_boom)
[https://www.ushistory.org/us/46c.asp](https://www.ushistory.org/us/46c.asp)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_control](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_control)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States)
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