Why is population collapse such a threat when we have 7 billion people?
In: 6
elon musk answer: because the capitalist world economy requires constant, even exponential, growth and we can’t keep extracting and investing and growing with finite total resources and a steady world population. And he really wants to believe in infinite growth
real answer: because climate change is going to significantly change our ecosystem, impacting food growth both directly and indirectly, in the coming decades and we don’t know how well we’ll manage that yet. If we can stop crops from failing worldwide, and become comfortable with way less consumption in 1st world countries, we can absolutely live with falling birth rates.
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Population collapse is an economic problem
Capitalist economies depend on constant growth in order to thrive. If the population starts to shrink (like in Japan for example) there aren’t enough young people to pay into the system to account for all the elderly people that are draining from it.
Pensions and Government healthcare for example are 2 systems that depend on having more people paying in that take out.
From a survival perspective we would all be a lot better off if we reduced the overall world population.
The issue is that age groups aren’t collapsing equally – the <65 age bracket is rapidly shrinking while the >65 age bracket is dramatically growing and that’s the real problem.
The stuff that you use every day – things like food, electricity, websites on the internet – don’t just magic themselves into existence. What causes those things to come into existence is people. People go to work every day to produce the things that you consume. If no one goes to work, then there is nothing for you to consume.
The people working are predominantly in the <65 age bracket, while people in the >65 age bracket tend to be retired. IE, young people produce more than they consume, while old people *only* consume.
As the population ages, the ratio of people who produce to people who consume gets skewed in favor of people who consume. That means you have less stuff being made and more people who want to consume it. Less stuff available + more people = everyone has substantially less than they used to. Another way to phrase that is that as the population ages, everyone gets poorer.
How much poorer they get depends on just how much the <65 age bracket shrinks, but its not outside of the realm of possibility for the answer to be “a lot poorer.”
In the past, increased productivity through increased mechanization/computerization has offset the increase in the relative percentage of retirees from people living longer, but we’re getting to the point where people are retiring at a rate that’s faster than can be offset through productivity increases – especially in areas like agricultural production, where production is plateauing or decreasing in many countries.
“Population collapse” is a completely misleading term.
The UN estimates that world population will start to fall, very slowly, somewhere around 2080. The estimates end a little past 2100 with a population of 10 billion. So less a “collapse” and more “an increase of 25%”. Of course, this is just a projection – population might start to fall sooner, or not at all.
However the [15-64 population](https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/900) – ie. roughly working age – starts to fall about a decade earlier, while the 65+ population continues to increase until after 2100. And everything tends to start sooner in richer countries – Europe & North America have had decline in the 15-64 bracket since the 2010s.
In addition, just like population growth, population decline has momentum – it means a lower proportion of people in the age groups that tend to have children, meaning fewer children in the next generation.
So when people say “population collapse” they’re generally talking not about too few people, but about too high a ratio of working people to older people.
Of course, there are still things that could cause population to fall rapidly, most likely environmental collapse or nuclear war. Those could be genuine population collapses.
Imagine you know with certainty that the future is going to produce less wealth than the present. What do you do with your money?
Easy: you spend it. Investing your money is foolish since the payoff will be less than what you spent.
On an economy-wide scale, what this means is that when it becomes apparent that the future will be worse than the present, everyone stops investing and the economy collapses.
Now, the total productivity of an economy really just boils down to the number of productive workers multiplied by some productivity value. That productivity value is a bit abstract, but it factors in educational levels, technology, etc. For our purposes, the key characteristic is that you can’t just arbitrarily increase it – it increases slowly and somewhat predictably. China’s ‘productivity value’ is less than the United States, but the value for the United States gives a good idea of what the upward bound on China’s will be in the foreseeable future.
So in a situation where the number of productive workers is declining at a significant rate, it’s unlikely you’re going to make up the shortfall with higher productivity/worker. Once you turn the corner and the future is less productive than the present, everything collapses in a big hurry (as in apocalyptic hurry).
When it happens to a place like Venezuela or Zimbabwe, we have pundits on the evening news talking in abstract terms about the problem. When it happens to the entirety of the developed world, we’re talking about a new Dark Age where we end up settling the famine problem with clubs and spears.
The problem is somewhat localized at the country level.
For example, in [Japan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan) not enough kids are born to replace the people who are dying, so the population is steadily shrinking, but there are still a lot of older Japanese alive, meaning the shortage is more towards the younger ages. The problem in Japan, then, is finding enough young people to do all the work it takes to run the country *and* take care of all those retired people.
In [Nigeria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria), meanwhile, women are having 5 or 6 kids each. Nigeria has more kids than it needs. They could use some serious birth control.
Compare the population pyramids of [Japan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#/media/File:Japan_Population_Pyramid.svg) and [Nigeria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria#/media/File:Nigeria_single_age_population_pyramid_2020.png).
You might suggest that Japan just let in a bunch of young immigrants from places like Nigeria, but Japan doesn’t want lots of immigrants. If you aren’t genetically Japanese, you aren’t really Japanese as far as most Japanese are concerned.
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