Why is population collapse such a threat when we have 7 billion people?
In: 6
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.
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