Reactions to the now frequently predicted decline in worldwide human population range from mild celebration to panic. The mild celebration comes from those concerned about the huge environmental impacts a growing human population continues to have on the planet. The panic comes from government officials and economists who wonder how societies will support the huge number of old people (who generally work less and therefore contribute less to the economy) without a substantial influx of new, young workers. Economic growth is expected to take a large hit as population growth slows and then actual population decline sets in.
One writer ticks off the environmental benefits of a gradual population decline and actually embraces a degrowth path for the economy. The editorial board of The Deseret News in Salt Lake City tells us that "big troubles await" for a world with declining population. A staff writer for The Atlantic magazine notes the precipitously declining population growth in the United States and trots out several sources who tell readers how bad this is for economic growth and innovation.
All of these writers assume that population decline, however troubling or salutary, will be gradual. They attribute it to a series of factors such as rising education (especially of women), increasing urbanization, changing cultural attitudes and the costs of bringing up children. These scenarios of gradual, seemingly manageable decline are called into question by the work of fertility researchers who discovered that fertility rates are dropping like a stone and on present trends expect the worldwide fertility rate to reach zero by 2045. That's not a typo.
Herman Daly, the dean of the steady-state economists, was a steady-stater with good reason. Daly noted the no economy can grow forever and that therefore perpetual growth would lead to collapse as resources give out and pollution and climate change take their toll. But Daly also understood that a perpetually shrinking economy would simply lead to the end of human civilization. Only a steady-state economy could be sustained in the long run. (Daly did suggest that current rates of consumption were too high to achieve a steady-state economy and that a gradual lowering of consumption to a sustainable level would have to be effected.)
Now if the fertility researchers cited above are right—and they are simply working from empirical observations—then the plummeting fertility rate will lead not just to a destabilizing shrinking in the world economy in the coming decades, but a wipe-out for the human race.
The fertility researchers don't deny the factors cited above, but believe that the list is woefully incomplete. Let me quote from my previous coverage of the topic:
But some scientists have been pointing to other factors associated with industrialization, namely, the widespread dispersion of toxic chemicals in the environment that can adversely affect fertility; the increasing use of pharmaceuticals; the ubiquitous presence of plastics in the environment and human bodies; smoking; poor diet; and obesity (which itself may be a product of endocrine disruption caused by environmental toxins).
I am particularly focused on endocrine disruption. More than 25 years after the publication of Our Stolen Future which detailed the deleterious role of endocrine-disrupting chemicals on human reproduction, childhood development, obesity and chronic disease, the situation is now worse as we continue to introduce more and more novel chemicals into the environment.
It will be a supreme irony if the industry that brought us "better living through chemistry" ends up being a major driver toward the extinction of humankind. The debate over economic growth versus environmental protection may indeed end in the coming century if the civilization in which that debate is taking place collapses because of the exceptional "ingenuity" of its scientists.
Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.
Dear Kurt,
ReplyDeleteFertility and birth rates are already plummeting in many countries. Fertility is just one cause. The economy, the cynical society we are living today, in which risk takers and those who exploit and pray upon and trample the others are rewarded are either forcing or enticing many couples to choose and live an entire CHILDLESS life. The rising cost of living in every aspects also pushes young people to live the day and not care for the future, let alone start families - one life, so let us live it and not give a care about the future generations.
I think the long descent of our society has already begun around the turn of the century and it is accelerating. Like someone said, there is no solutions, only mitigation. The faster we abandon the HGTV-esque style of no care in the world living, the better our odds to survive as a species will be.
Respectfully, Radu, economist
A reader from France, Walter Haugen, wrote the following in an email to me and has granted permission to post his words:
ReplyDeleteI am glad you contest the assumption that population decline will be gradual. I have been doing so since 1970, so I am glad that more and more analysts are seeing this possibility/probability. Mentioning Herman Daly was good, although he fell into a trap early on, assuming that a perpetually shrinking economy means the collapse of civilization. The historical record is full of collapsed civilizations, which simply spread out and reduced their complexity. The Anasazi spread out and became pueblo people, the Romans shifted their focus to Constantinople and a feudal system of regional polities (to use Tainter's term) arose in Europe. The Mayans simply moved out into the surrounding area. All of these examples started with a decline in population and they just adapted. After the Black Death in Europe, a florescence (in Florence!) resulted from a severe population decline after a short hiatus. Cosimo Medici took power in 1434, less than 100 years after the Black Death. So a collapse could be short-lived, with people like myself gaining localized power based on our farming methods and ability to integrate short-term, mid-term and long-term thinking. I might also point out that around 160,000 years ago, a bottleneck in modern human populations reduced the global population to <10,000 individuals. We weren't wiped out and the likelihood is that we will not be wiped out this time either.
As another idea, if civilization collapses, the state might still survive. It would be in the form of ancient states or proto-states. To use the anthropological definition, a civilization is just a state with public architecture and writing. And again, even if all the state-level societies (monopoly on violence, resources distributed by class, no size restrictions, central capital, etc.) were to fall, human society would just reduce in complexity to chiefdoms, tribes, bands, or a combination of all three. This is the less complex regional polity idea again. (Tainter popularized it in 1988 but it was around well before that time.)