Occasional Paper: United Nations World Population Prospects, 2024

by Doug Muir on September 20, 2024

Every few years the UN publishes one of these big papers on “world population prospects”, which are… exactly what they sound like: a best guess at what’s going to happen with the world’s population over the next few decades.

Nut graph after the jump:




So the UN’s current best guess is that world population will peak around 10.4 billion people, give or take, some time around 2080.  Current world population is around 8.2 billion people, so that’s almost exactly a 25% increase.

A few quick thoughts:

1)  This paper’s estimate of peak population is both lower and sooner than the last one that the UN did.  That was in 2019, and at that point they were projecting that world population would peak at around 10.9 billion people just before 2100.  They now project that the peak will come almost 20 years sooner and be half a billion people lower.  I haven’t dug deeply into the methodology, but I strongly suspect that’s due to the continued fall of birth rates in China and India plus the visible onset of the demographic transition across almost the entire developing world.

2)  A 25% increase means that for every four people on Earth today, in fifty years there’ll be a fifth.   That seems… not catastrophic, honestly.  World population hit 4 billion people back in 1974, fifty years ago.  So in the last 50 years it more than doubled.  In the next 50 years it will grow by just a quarter.  Yes, we’ll have to find food and housing and whatnot for another 2.2 billion people.  We added that many people in the last 25 years already.  I suspect we’ll manage.

(A personal note here:  I work in development.  So, yes I do have some idea of the challenges involved in feeding and housing another couple of billion people.  I’m not pooh-poohing it. Rather, I’m saying that at the very-macro level of “the entire world, over the next 50 years” this really doesn’t look like a game breaker.)

3)  At this point someone will mention climate change.  Here’s my position on that: climate change is not really a population problem.  Climate change is a policy problem.  Atmospheric CO2 has been increasing ever since we started measuring it (1958), but the /rate/ of increase in atmospheric CO2 started increasing in the early 2000s — right around the time the rate of population increase was falling faster and faster.  Also, most of the world’s population increase is going to be happening in poorer countries, and Afghans and Ghanaians aren’t exactly topping the leagues in per capita CO2 output.

To make my position explicit:  climate change is a huge and terrible problem!   But it’s also a problem that could be fixed with current and near-future technology if the political will were present.  Right now, that political will mostly doesn’t exist.  Perhaps it will come into existence once the effects of climate change really begin to bite.  Or perhaps not!  But either way, whether gross global population is 8 billion or 10 billion is going to be very much a secondary issue.

4)  At this point someone else will start talking about dependency ratios and… yeah, that’s kind of a policy problem too.  (Well, unless you’re South Korea, okay.  Fewer kids is one thing, basically no kids is something else.*)  Also, according to the paper, the world of 2080 will still be a world dominated by working age adults 18 to 65.  There’ll be more old people than there are now, but they won’t be the biggest group, and most countries will still have plenty of working age adults around.  There will be exceptions — particular countries that are very grey — but at the global level, not that bad.

5)  On the optimistic side, there’s the argument that more people means more heads to solve problems, more hands to build solutions, more production and more innovation and just generally a more dynamic and interesting world. 

This argument is usually made by pro-natalists, who are usually conservatives.  But that doesn’t mean it’s inherently wrong or stupid. It is, however, more of a hopeful supposition than an argument from evidence.  If you double the population of Afghanistan, while still keeping it under the Taliban, I don’t think you’re going to generate a lot of exciting innovation.  As with the pessimistic concerns about climate change, the environment, food supplies, aging populations, and the like, this optimistic take is really more an issue of policy and choices rather than gross numbers.

6)  But as long as we’re talking optimism:  with the very big exceptions of climate change and environmental degradation, at the global level pretty much everything has gotten better over the last 25 years, even while population has grown and grown.  The average human in 2024 is significantly richer, healthier, better fed, better clothed, better housed, better educated, and likely to live longer than the average human of the 1990s.  Worldwide, infant mortality has been cut in half in the last thirty years.   Most of the world’s population has access to regular electricity, clean water, and birth control.  Most of the world’s children get vaccinated and go to school.   Right now those trends look good to continue.  Climate change notwithstanding, there’s every reason to expect that the world of 2080 will be healthier and more prosperous still.

7)  Obviously population growth and decline will not be evenly distributed.  The report addresses this but studiously doesn’t talk about implications.  That said, here’s a fun little factoid:  for the last five thousand years, the world’s geographic center of population has been hanging around  what’s now western China, between the massive population centers of East Asia and South Asia.  All the demographic changes of the last fifty centuries — the rise and fall of Rome, the Black Death, the depopulation of the Americas, the expansion of the United States, whatever — have barely budged it.  But just in the last few years, it has started to drift westward.  That’s because Africa is getting ready to join East Asia and South Asia as the world’s third major population center.

8)  And finally: if you eyeball that graph, you’ll notice that world population hits 10 billion around 2060, peaks at 10.4 billion around 2080, then begins to very slowly decline.  I think that trying to predict population trends 60 or 70 years in advance is a mug’s game, myself, but there’s still an interesting point here:  today’s kids will probably live to see a world where population is stable and/or slowly declining.  In fact, world population growth drops below 1% per year in the 2040s; some readers of this blog might live to see that.

Here’s the paper itself, if you’re interested.



*My take:  TFR below replacement level but still above 1.7 or so is not a big deal.  TFR below 1.5, yeah, that’s a real problem.  And TFR below 1.0, what the hell?  But so far, South Korea is the only large country in that particular club.

{ 60 comments… read them below or add one }

1

Brian 09.20.24 at 8:27 pm

A slowing or declining world population will be a world in which the demographics that have large families will take over politically and socially. Not everyone will decline at the same time, very much this will not be. Climate change is happening, and impact world population causing forced migration for survival, for political aims, and also famine.

Tverberg says we are in peak carbon, or it is already in the rear view mirror. This, plus our policy address to climate change that subsidizes solar and wind are pushing up energy costs. In the USA that cost increase (without accounting for subsidies) is 2-3 times the cost of energy without solar and wind. That cost will continue to rise, and it already imposes energy poverty. Energy poverty = monetary poverty, because energy is directly linked to money through GDP. This cost rise also imposes perverse incentives to energy suppliers allowing them to profit more as they control a critical resource.

The problem with declining imposed poverty is that humans respond to declining fortunes by getting violent. On a neighborhood scale it is everything from violent crime to riots. Nations go to war and people gravitate to bigotry, particularly if it profits their nation or they believe it will. War is a roll of the dice as far as most people are concerned.

2

Rob Link 09.20.24 at 8:38 pm

There’s indeed some room for optimism but in imho, unless we seriously curb consumerism, there is a very high chance, we’ll run into resource constraints of some sort. Judging by how many physical resources it took to get to the levels of consumption for just a small minority of humans and its accompanied degradation of the atmosphere+biosphere paired with shifting zones of habitation it might take more of a shift of mindset rather than mere changes of policy.

3

Brett 09.20.24 at 9:19 pm

The impact of the extra food production is what worries me the most, especially if (as expected) a larger, wealthier population consumes a lot more meat and just generally gets more picky about the sources of its food (more preference for organic agriculture, etc). That’s going to have a much larger impact on land use and the environment than just the sheer number of people, which we could easily fit into our existing urbanization area with still quite low population density – on par with a suburb in the US.

2080 is far enough out, though, that I tend to think we’ll get something “weird” that will drastically effect these changes. Maybe 99% of all meat production will be in vats and bioreactors, so everyone can have as much high-quality meat as they want at rock bottom prices. Maybe we’ll have artificial wombs and nanny robots, pushing up the number of children per family in richer countries. Or maybe we’ll just straight up have some significant longevity and vitality technological advances, increasing the length of lifespan and the healthy period therein. Or all three – it doesn’t seem unlikely to me.

4

Alex SL 09.21.24 at 3:27 am

An underlying but questionable assumption here is that ten billion people would sustainable. The population curve can only take the shape depicted in the figure if there isn’t a series of massive global crises caused by resource (water, soil, carbon, etc.) over-consumption over the next few decades that leads to significant population loss through starvation, war, and disease as societies collapse and every growing parts of the world begins to look like Syria, Libya, and Somalia, not to mention the disruptions that the evacuation of Bangladesh, Florida, Denmark, and many other areas will cause. That ties in with the observation that predicting trends 60-70 years ahead is very difficult.

Point 2: 25% more seems manageable at first sight – if even eight billion is manageable. The fact that we have Earth overshoot day sometime around August or so each year indicates to me that anything above ca. five billion people is not sustainable, maybe less, and that sooner or later something will have to give.

Point 3: This isn’t a binary. We can move along at least three axes: how many of us there are, how wealthy and profligate we want to be on average, and how sustainably we produce our stuff. We can move along the second and third axis in an attempt to avert a crisis, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also try to move along the first. Yes, population remaining constant, impoverishing ourselves will soften the crises ahead. But also, levels of wealth remaining constant, reducing our population will soften the crises ahead. Walk and chew gum at the same time.

Point 5: That has always struck me as a nonsense argument that only indicates that the person advancing it does not understand the concept of diminishing returns.

Point 6: See Earth overshoot day again. You can have (1) ten billion humans who are poor and miserable, or (2) humans being wealthy and comfortable but at most five billion of them if not fewer, or (3) ten billion humans being transiently wealthy and comfortable followed by global ecological and societal collapse. Pick one.

Brian,

Very puzzled by your first paragraph. Isn’t a world where population grows, or a world where population stagnates, also a world where “demographics that have large families will take over politically and socially”? That is mathematically always the case, and the necessity not to grow beyond carrying capacity is orthogonal to that observation.

But yes, I share your pessimism. I strongly doubt that people collectively will accept that they cannot consume a multiple of the resources that the Earth can provide us with sustainably. That is why any political party that suggests measures adequate to the severity of the crises we are facing is stuck at a maximum of 10% vote share, if that. My expectation is global ecological, societal, and population collapse within the next two centuries are politically unavoidable.

5

Doug Muir 09.21.24 at 8:00 am

No offense, Brian, but this is kind of a mess.

A slowing or declining world population will be a world in which the
demographics that have large families will take over politically and socially.

— citation needed. (This is a complicated topic, to be sure.)

Tverberg says we are in peak carbon, or it is already in the rear view mirror.

— citation needed. The pace of atmospheric CO2 increase has not slowed at all.

This, plus our policy address to climate change that subsidizes solar and
wind are pushing up energy costs.

— citation needed. Onshore wind and PV solar are both significantly cheaper than coal. PV solar is currently /extremely/ cheap — well under half the cost of coal.

In the USA that cost increase (without accounting for subsidies) is 2-3 times
the cost of energy without solar and wind.

— I’m sorry, but that’s a non-fact statement. Wind and solar are currently providing about 15% of US electricity, and doing it more cheaply than most other sources.
(As noted, PV solar is cheaper than /all/ other large-scale sources.) So, “energy without solar and wind” would be significantly more expensive.

As to subsidies: worldwide, fossil fuels are more heavily subsidized than renewables.

It’s true that, as you get more and more power from wind and solar, costs rise, because you need to upgrade the grid and start investing in storage. But most of the world is nowhere near that point. Right now, almost everywhere in the world, adding a kilowatt of capacity from PV solar is much cheaper than adding a kilowatt of capacity from coal or natural gas.

This — not “subsidies” — is the reason the world is building solar like crazy. The world installed an eye-watering 447 gigawatts of solar capacity in 2023 — more than double the new construction of coal. Renewables generally accounted for about 80% of new electricity generation last year.

Doug M.

6

Chris Bertram 09.21.24 at 8:46 am

“With the very big exceptions of climate change and environmental degradation, at the global level pretty much everything has gotten better over the last 25 years, even while population has grown and grown.”

Well the first part is very much “apart from that Mrs Lincoln” isn’t it? As for the second, well it is true that on those kinds of measures life has got better, but over the same period the same forces that have brought us this progress have also made various forms of life more and more unviable from peasant smallholdings to high-street business to various artworlds, to (possibly!) liberal democracy. The working of many professionals have become more proletarianized over the same persiod. So farewell to the petty bourgeoisie, maybe we’ll miss them when they’re gone?

7

Reason 09.21.24 at 9:28 am

Doug Muir,
Thanks for that. I was at a loss trying to understand Brian’s argument. Subsidizing something makes it cheaper not more expensive. That is what subsidies are for.

8

Peter T 09.21.24 at 9:51 am

Carbon-equivalent gases continue to rise, while the other major environmental problems (deforestation, species loss, nitrogen overload …) are largely unaddressed and new ones (forever chemicals, micro-plastics … crowd in. So something more than a technical fix is needed – something along the lines of a change in human attitudes to consumption. Whatever the population curve, and whatever the projections 70-80 years out, most of these problems are persistent on very long time scales (by human standards). CO2 degrades over centuries or millennia, and the inertia of the climate system means that temperatures will keep rising for decades even after we reach zero emissions.
How do we get to a politics that takes centuries seriously? Because that’s where we need to go over the next few generations.

9

engels 09.21.24 at 10:02 am

With the very big exceptions of climate change and environmental degradation, at the global level pretty much everything has gotten better over the last 25 years

One nuclear war (/pandemic/unaligned AI) can really spoil your species’ day.
https://www.existentialriskobservatory.org/

10

qwerty 09.21.24 at 10:25 am

“Subsidizing something makes it cheaper not more expensive.”

If I was subsidizing energy generated by burning Rembrandt paintings, people would buy it, cheaply. But it still wouldn’t make Rembrandt-burning a cheap way to produce energy.

11

Doug Muir 09.21.24 at 10:34 am

Alex @4:

a series of massive global crises caused by resource (water, soil, carbon, etc.)
over-consumption over the next few decades that leads to significant population
loss through starvation, war, and disease as societies collapse

— none of this looks very likely right now. There are local crises, absolutely. But at the global level, we are not headed for any massive world-wide crises in the near or medium term, never mind “a series” of them.

Again, I work in development. I’ve seen utter basket-case hellhole countries turn into reasonably comfortable lower-middle-class places where pretty much everyone has access to the basics and all the kid are in school, and that within a single long generation. In fact, that’s been the prevalent pattern across the world for the last 50 years. We all focus on the gruesome exceptions — the Afghanistans and Somalias — and ignore the fact that the average Chinese, Indian, Nigerian, Kenyan, Vietnamese or Uruguayan is vastly richer and healthier than their parents were back in 1990.

and every growing parts of the world begins to look like Syria, Libya, and Somalia,

— right now most of the growing parts of the world are looking more like India, China, Vietnam, Nigeria, Kenya or Uruguay.

not to mention the disruptions that the evacuation of Bangladesh, Florida,
Denmark, and many other areas will cause.

— Sea level rise is one of the harder aspects of climate change to model. That said, the current worst-case scenario is roughly a two meter rise by 2100. That’s bad — say goodbye to Miami and New Orleans — but we won’t be evacuating Florida or Denmark. ~98% of Denmark is 3m or more above sea level, as is over 90% of Florida.

Climate change is bad. It’s very bad! But it’s probably not going to be a civilization-ending catastrophe. And — this doesn’t get nearly enough attention — people all over the world are already investing in climate change resilience. (Like, I have literally watched poor African farmers adopting new crops in real time because rainfall patterns had shifted.) People are not going to just sit passively and wait to be overwhelmed.

You know that Douglas Adams quote about fairies in the garden? There’s an opposite version of that. Like, there’s a house that’s falling into ruin. And someone says, not only is that house a dangerous eyesore that will be expensive and difficult to deal with, but also there’s a monster living inside that will eat you.

The actual situation is bad enough! There’s no need to exaggerate it.

Doug M.

12

engels 09.21.24 at 11:11 am

We all focus on the gruesome exceptions — the Afghanistans and Somalias — and ignore the fact that the average Chinese

Hmm I wonder what China did right
https://www.routledge.com/How-China-Escaped-Shock-Therapy-The-Market-Reform-Debate/Weber/p/book/9781032008493

13

Doug Muir 09.21.24 at 11:44 am

the same forces that have brought us this progress have also made various
forms of life more and more unviable from peasant smallholdings
to high-street business

Let me just focus on one point here: high streets. Because the developing world is full of high streets!

There’s one a few minutes walk from my house in Rwanda. It’s a stretch several blocks long that is just packed with small shops of every sort. Want a sack of mangos? Need a tyre fixed? A fresh zipper for your suitcase? Some hot soup? Children’s toys, saws and hammers, sacks of corn meal, phone repair? It’s all right there. Want to get your shoes resoled, and have a hot cuppa around the corner while you wait? Boom, done. I’ve gone down there to buy gigs for my phone, to get torn jeans sewn up, to get an extension cord and a cold drink. And it’s /busy/ — motorbikes zipping around, vans and pickup trucks unloading stuff, people strolling past with shopping bags or with sacks balanced on their heads.

It’s not Queen Street or Gloucester Central Shopping. But it’s a high street by any reasonable definition. And while retail is not my field, I would bet a fair sum of money that at the global level the world has a lot more high streets today than it did twenty years ago.

(Will those developing world high streets disappear as incomes continue to rise? I honestly have no idea.)

Doug M.

14

qwerty 09.21.24 at 12:33 pm

“But at the global level, we are not headed for any massive world-wide crises in the near or medium term…”

Huh? What planet are you on?

15

engels 09.21.24 at 1:02 pm

D:ream plays

Inequality is growing for more than 70 per cent of the global population, exacerbating the risks of divisions and hampering economic and social development. … The study shows that the richest one per cent of the population are the big winners in the changing global economy, increasing their share of income between 1990 and 2015, while at the other end of the scale, the bottom 40 per cent earned less than a quarter of income in all countries surveyed…
https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/01/1055681

16

Alex SL 09.21.24 at 1:21 pm

Doug Muir,

I will admit that I have mixed time horizons a bit. I expect a gradual worsening of the situation with additional local collapses into failed states as resource overuse and global warming worsen, but it could well be that our equivalent to the end of the Western Roman Empire is as much as two centuries away. It takes a lot to collapse an empire. Then again, complex, as in complex society, is another word for fragile, and given the way our supply chains work, how many countries are unable to feed themselves without massive imports of grains, that various parts of the world will likely run out of ground- or glacial meltwater within decades, and that a few missed meals make people desperate, things could at a local level unwind much faster than we would like to acknowledge. And if there are enough such localities, things begin to add up.

I just don’t share the overall optimism. Two undeniable realities are, first, that we are living unsustainably, with carbon release in particular showing no signs of a sustained downward trajectory, and second, that few people are willing to vote for restrictions on their own comforts that may be required to achieve sustainability. One can predict a likely outcome from those two observations.

Your counterargument is that wealth has been increasing over recent decades, which I generally liken to a driver bragging about how fast they are driving towards the cliff, and that, surely, people will adapt. I think that is an enormous underestimation of the scale of the problem and over-estimation of people’s ability to adapt to heat waves so bad that the birds drop dead from the trees, to the disappearance of rivers and the drying out of wells, to soil erosion and salinisation, to the encroachment of ocean water onto many of the most densely populated areas, and to the sudden influx of millions of desperate climate refugees from one country over. You don’t just need to feed another two billion, you need to feed them just as crops are experiencing increased drought and heat stress.

I am certain that leaders of the Indus Valley Civilisation also thought they could adapt to crises before their rivers dried up. Today, we don’t even know how to decipher their writing, much less how they governed themselves. There is no reason to assume we are wiser or more resilient than they were. We have more technology, but that also means we will fall deeper and lose more, because we are each much more specialised and thus dependent on the complexity that we may struggle to maintain in a crisis.

17

steven t johnson 09.21.24 at 4:23 pm

My view of the demographic transition is exceedingly heterodox: It is a consequence that the families at the bottom can see the prospects of raising children with a chance of rising into the petty bourgoisie/labor aristocracy are slim. And middle strata families see the chances of even keeping that position for their children (much less rising higher) is also slim. [I confess my thinking on this was inspired by the late Marvin Harris.]

Since the prospects for children can play a role in the decision to have children, I believe both open and hidden crises/stagnation will play hob with the projections. The drop in South Korea’s TFR I believe is a proof the success of capitalism in the cannibal kingdom is not what it’s cracked up to be, but that’s me.

The other assumption in the report seems to be that capitalism/imperialism can solve the issues facing it globally. I think this is purely ideological, a false consciousness of the powerful and their employees that they are masters of the social universe which is fundamentally immutable, the final society.

The chances that the proportion of young people will drop so low they will be physically unable to support their families seem low. The chances the capitalists will refuse to allow a living wage so that they afford to support both their parents and their children seem very high to me.

I freely concede I do not know what the socialist law of population might be. I’m not even sure what it should be, other than a collective decision. Admittedly that’s a huge ask. I am not particularly afraid of a world government (of some sort) in which the majority of citizens are Asians and Africans.

18

Doug Muir 09.21.24 at 4:29 pm

Alex SL,

Your comment is really a beautiful example of a particular sort of doomerism. I’m not being ironic! You’ve summarized a particular point of view very well.

That said, it’s a point of view that I personally disagree with pretty sharply. Let’s see…

complex, as in complex society, is another word for fragile,

— citation needed. We don’t have any examples of complex modern societies utterly collapsing. On the other hand, we do have multiple examples of modern societies being subjected to extreme stress, involving massive death and destruction, and then rapidly rebounding. The available evidence suggests that complex is also another word for “adaptable” or possibly “redundant”.

and given the way our supply chains work, how many countries are unable to
feed themselves without massive imports of grains,

Currently about 30-35 countries, representing about 1/6th of the world’s population. Which is a lot! (But OTOH, 5/6 of the world’s population is not dependent on food imports…)

Also: a lot of the current dependence is conditional. There are a bunch of countries that import foreign grain because it’s cheaper, but that in a pinch could grow their own or an equivalent substitute. To give one example: Senegalese like to eat rice. But rice is water-hungry and a lot of Senegal is dry so water in Senegal is expensive. So the Senegalese use their water to grow vegetables for export into the EU, which makes a lot more money and allows them to import all the cheap Asian rice they want. But if they had to feed themselves, they absolutely could.

Also: food production is an industrial technology. It has a technological frontier (which almost everyone is well behind) and it responds to investment, often dramatically. Most of the world’s net food importers are poor countries that have not historically been attractive destinations for investment. But there’s no inherent reason that (say) the DR Congo couldn’t grow its own food, with plenty left over for export.

There are a few countries that are kinda screwed by geography, being too small or dry or cold or densely populated or what have you. But it’s a surprisingly short list. Given a pretty modest level of investment, most of the world’s countries could feed themselves.

(Also, let’s note that “feed yourself” is a very slippery concept. Rich countries both import and export massive amounts of food — Canada could feed itself, but it would be a pretty boring diet. Meanwhile Singapore can’t possibly feed itself, while Ghana just can; where would you rather live? Wealthy Finland has been a net food importer for decades. And so forth.)

WRT famine… most people don’t know this, but we’ve almost certainly had the world’s first climate change famine already: Madagascar, 2021-22. Southern Madagascar got hit by something like a 500 year drought, unprecedented in all records and coming on top of several unusually hot and dry years. Basically nothing grew and every crop failed. Hundreds of thousands of people were thrown into food insecurity.

And… hardly anyone died. Morbidity definitely rose, of course, but almost nobody died of hunger. The government shipped in food for distribution, donors and the UN showed up, and what with one thing and another they managed to keep people fed. It was very unpleasant, there was lots of hunger and food insecurity, but there was not that much malnutrition and basically no starvation. Next year the rains came back. And today the government of Madagascar is encouraging people in the affected regions to change their planting and herding habits to reflect expected changes in the weather.

TLDR, food moves around. You want a global food crisis, you need to hit multiple global food production centers — hard, and all at once, and before they have a chance to respond.

[Indus Valley civilization] — I am generally not very impressed with this Jared Diamond stuff. In this particular case, the Indus Valley civilization /survived/ massive climate change for over 200 years before finally giving up. The droughts started after the 4200 ka event, but the population crash and de-urbanization didn’t kick in until around 3900 BP. Available evidence suggests that during those 250-300 years, the Indus Valley folks adapted: there’s more use of irrigation, population centers shift towards the areas that are still relatively moist, and so forth. There were stresses, things changed, but it was still a literate and sophisticated society with multiple urban centers.

IOW, the Indus Valley example makes a stronger argument against collapse than for it. If a civilization whose idea of cutting edge technology was the mud brick could survive 200 years of bad weather, that probably bodes more well than otherwise.

Doug M.

19

Chris Bertram 09.21.24 at 7:13 pm

@doug Thanks for the reply about high streets. A very good observation.

On the other hand, I’d be inclined to push back a bit on your “We don’t have any examples of complex modern societies utterly collapsing”, simply because modern industrial societies are such very recent things, dating back only a couple of hundred years in the places where they were first established, and that’s just the blink of an eye in historical terms. In most places, peasant societies with a very limited division of labour were the norm for most people until very recently (post WW2).

20

John Q 09.21.24 at 11:54 pm

Most statistical agencies are still defining “working age” as 15-64. It’s already more like 20-70 – the set of jobs that can usefully be done by a willing teenager is shrinking to zero and the set that wear you out physically is a lot smaller than it used to be. It’s true that lots of people still want to retire before age 70 and have earned enough to do so, but that’s only a problem of how society organizes itself, not the fundamental issue implied by “dependency ratios”.

21

Alex SL 09.22.24 at 12:12 am

Doug Muir,

You want a global food crisis, you need to hit multiple global food production centers — hard, and all at once, and before they have a chance to respond.

Yes, good point! Now you just have to accept that that is a thing that will definitely happen as the planet heats up and there are ever more people to feed on more stressed-out crop plants while there isn’t any irrigation water in spring because the mountain glaciers have disappeared.

‘The Indus Valley civilisation tried to adapt to climate change and then collapsed two centuries later anyway’ is not the great counter you think it is to somebody arguing that we will desperately try to adapt to climate change while collapsing locally and then fully collapse two centuries later anyway, as per my comment at 16. Translated to the scale of our present global and high-population context, your “stresses, things changed” and “population centres shift towards the areas that are still relatively moist” imply hundreds of millions of people dying and hundreds of millions of others fleeing to areas that will be hostile to the influx of such refugees, and economic disruption on a scale that makes WW2 look like a picnic.

Also, I think you under-appreciate the contradiction in saying that we can just ramp up agricultural production and also saying that farmers in regions affected by climate crises should shift to more resilient but less productive crops. Unless you are unaware that the latter trade-off exists. Perhaps you think that the more drought- and heat-resistant agricultural methods are also the most intensive and productive and will actually increase production over what was possible in optimal weather conditions?

You will not be convinced by this, as I won’t be by your optimism. We have very different takes on what is biologically and politically plausible, and apparently very different interpretations of what this trend of CO2 emissions in billions of tons implies for the future:
2020 – 35.01
2021 – 36.82
2022 – 37.15
2023 – 37.55
You admit climate change is bad, but you don’t appreciate the size of the problem that is looming ahead. You wave some issues away as political, as if convincing people to have fewer children isn’t demonstrably much easier than convincing them to forego two to three cars per family, an annual holiday overseas, and plastic packaging, and as if “population centres shift” doesn’t imply generationally-traumatic dislocation and social conflict. Until we go over the cliff, you will insist there is none, because, look!, we have been doing okay so far.

Yet cliffs still exist. From a European to Middle East and perhaps Indian perspective, ours is the third cycle of complex civilisation. The previous two went over the cliff. Again, they weren’t fundamentally more stupid people, not a different kind of being than we are today. The arrogance of “this time it will be different, so we don’t need to worry” is of the same kind as that of people who get caught up in financial bubbles. And this arrogance being such a predictably human error to make is a large part of the reason I am so pessimistic.

22

Doug Muir 09.22.24 at 8:27 am

My view of the demographic transition is exceedingly heterodox: It is a
consequence that the families at the bottom can see the prospects of raising
children with a chance of rising into the petty bourgoisie/labor aristocracy are slim.

— This seems testable. For a very crude first pass, you might graph TFR against Gini coefficient. If there’s a detectable negative slope — if TFR tends to fall as gross inequality rises — then you might be on to something.

Unfortunately, just quickly eyeballing TFR and Gini lists, this doesn’t seem to be the case. Europe has a bunch of countries with low-ish inequality — the Netherlands, Finland, Norway — and also with low TFRs. The developing world is full of countries that are drastically unequal (much of sub-Saharan Africa, for starters) but that still have quite high TFRs. To give an example of two countries with very similar demographics ad culture, Canada has significantly lower inequality than the USA, but Canada also has a lower TFR than the USA. At the global level, if there’s a slope to that curve, it looks positive.

Another way to check might be to compare TFRs across income levels within a country. If social mobility has shut down, then you might expect the upper decile to have /more/ kids, because their children’s futures are locked in. Unfortunately there’s not a lot of work on this that I can find, but anecdotally it really doesn’t look like this is what’s happening.

Finally, you might try to connect TFR with inequality /and/ economic growth. If a society is experiencing rapid growth, then things may be improving for the lower and middle classes even if inequality is also growing at the same time. In fact, this seems to be what’s happening at the global level: worldwide, the rich are getting richer faster than the poor, but the global poor are nonetheless better off than their parents were.

But I have to say, this doesn’t look very promising either. The world is full of societies that have seen hothouse economic growth and crashing TFRs at the same time. To give just one example, Germany’s TFR dropped below replacement in 1971 — at a time when Germany had extremely low inequality and had just seen a generation of furiously rapid economic growth.

All that said, this is a mildly interesting idea. The decision to have children is complicated and driven by a bunch of factors, most of which are not economic. So, “why have kids when they’ll just have to struggle endlessly to get nowhere” is a plausible explanation. But I’d want to see some actual evidence for it.

Doug M.

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JoeinCO 09.22.24 at 9:37 am

Some have argued that the Mediterranean Bronze Age collapse was due to a complex systems failure. The authors of 1177BC noted, much to my pleasure, that such an explanation is difficult to prove and is kind of a “non-explanation”… Still this paper was interesting https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378023001589
The problem with such collapses is that it is hard to see them coming when the system becomes too complex for the system itself to analyze.

I agree with the author that some of the climate change doomerism here is not in agreement with the bulk of modern climate science. in 2000 we were headed for a 4-5C global warming, now the best projections say 2.5 – 3C if current policies are maintained. Still not good, but not catastrophic unless we have bad luck and there are feedbacks that kick in sooner than expected (certainly possible! but not as likely as in the past). His point about agriculture being very quick to adapt is pretty much a truism among those who work in the field. The fear on that front is more of a food systems collapse (supply chains, trade, policy responses to ecological stress are more relevant).

24

steven t johnson 09.22.24 at 3:17 pm

Certainly must agree that more data both cross cultural and longitudinal is needed for a properly scholarly presentation for the notion. By academic standards, my suggestion the evidence available can’t refute the approach any more than it conclusively prove it, as of yet, can be dismissed, no doubt. But…

Being sympathetic to Marxism myself, I think of the birth control pill as a force of production. Peoples and states across the world and its cultures have been exploring its potential for decades now but it seems to me that this process still has not worked itself out (not that it can be finished any more than any history can.) Recent socioeconomic history in that sense is transitional. Drawing conclusions from that data set seems premature? (By the way, my conflation of petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy is not Marxist orthodoxy either, it just seems to me that the form it takes is the claim that “we” are all middle class, not workers. And all of us can acquire enough income to amass property and be “middle class” and it’s your fault if you don’t.)

Be that as it may, even in recent times, crises reveal any system’s dynamics. Even in modern states without birth control pills, birth rates tended to drop during wars, with a baby boom/Baby Boom after. The horrors of capitalist restoration in Russia and Ukraine led to a population drop according to what I have seen. It is unclear how this isn’t relevant data too.

Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies is contested, but the thesis the complexity ultimately causes collapse hasn’t been refuted either, so far as I know. The Indus civilization from what I know was unusually egalitarian and that may have enabled its relatively longer period of adaptation before collapse. I think this is an implication of Tainter’s approach. (When I get to The Dawn of Everything perhaps I’ll be reading their take on Indus?)

The thing there is, on a world scale there is no single ruling class, no government, not even a central bank and currency (not even since 2008, It’s hard to see “complexity” in the way Tainter spoke of it, I think. In terms of extraction of resources by a ruling class causing hypertrophy of a ruling class whose apparatus cannot continue to deal with the complexity of their creation, it is hard to see how the world as a whole is absent a theory of imperialism.

But such theories are distinctly not widely accepted either, are they? Not in academia and at this moment it’s not even clear that BRICS+ work with such a notion of imperialism as THE irreconcilable enemy. Peaceful coexistence with imperialism is the professed goal. The approach seems to be more like anti-trust, an ideal of “fair” competition to be enforced by…somebody?

As to the collapse of simple societies? Peter Turchin offered a post https://peterturchin.com/the-collapse-of-simple-societies/ of interest, to me at least.
Simple societies do collapse. Here in the US, there are the prehistorical collapses, the Anasazi in the southwest and the Cahokia complex. (No, it is not customary for historians of indigenous societies to see this apocalypse as playing any role, but I think that is simply wrong, bad history.) There was recently popular news about the population collapse in Britain and the near total replacement by continental immigrants, revealed by DNA studies.

Elsewhere, the disappearance of Mayan civilization/urban society is notorious, but the Toltec or the predecessors of the Inka are other examples. The archaeological traces of advanced cultures in the Amazon seem to be real even if The Lost City of Zed ended in a mystical epiphany. In Africa, the disappearance of Meroe and Axum and the original Ghana are candidates I think. The cultural disappearance of the builders of Great Zimbabwe is incontestable in my opinion. Once the disappearance of the Angkor Wat civilization was equally well known?

Closely related I think is irrevocable decline with a more or less permanent population loss,. Central Asian civilizations once produced world leaders like Bukhara and Samarkand and Balkh, no more. I suppose the similar disappearance of leadership from Damascus and Baghdad is too much blamed on Islam to be noticed?

Sorry to have gone too much into background, rather than specifics, made worse by bad style. Harris spoke of these questions in much of his popularizations of anthropology, but perhaps the most accessible place is his book America Now. The first issue is the division between periods and place where children cost too much for the parents to keep their lifestyle without limiting their reproduction. The old joke is that sex is for the upper and lower classes, because the first can afford the consequences (children,) and the lower can’t afford anything else. It’s the middle classes who need to resist temptations. This crude approach suggests that many areas with currently high TFR are those where the costs of children appear for now to be

The second division is between those who can afford their children’s education and help them get started in their careers, especially the family career of their first home. The preliminary tests suggested @22, TFR vs. Gini; TFR vs. income levels; TFR vs. both inequality and growth, do not come close enough to measuring the real cost of children.
Obviously I personally can’t do this but that is the task in my judgment.

As to the notion the factors inducing the choice (at this point in history much more possible) mostly by “non-economic” reasons, it seems to me that crass considerations of cost condition most of them, are basic presuppositions that in general determine what value the choosers can even assign to their non-economic preferences. I’ve forgotten who suggested that the rich don’t have larger families. But is this even true? Monarchs who keep harems have had enormous families. The famous genetic studies of Genghis Khan suggest his “children” are an appreciable fraction of humanity.

Other monarchs commonly didn’t have (legitimate) children willy nilly precisely in order to simplify succession. Those who left unnamed bastard children don’t prove the thesis the rich don’t have more children but that more a valid case of “Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.” Similarly the truly wealthy have an impetus to limit families in order to concentrate their wealth, essential to family competition with other rich people. They’re not all Elon Musk.

Again, sorry to be so prolix, can’t write well enough to be pitchy, much less witty, can only half do the job.

Least and last, for what it’s worth, neither Harris nor Turchin are Marxist. If anything they considered themselves scientific replacements for Marx, principled opponents. (And Tainter I gather is entirely innocent of such heresy.)

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steven t johnson 09.22.24 at 3:24 pm

PS As long as this was, forgot to address the famous example of the collapse of the western Roman empire. Perhaps the best argument that it didn’t collapse in the way popular imagination has it, is Chris Wickham The Inheritance of Rome. But even that I think is weak because the real example of continuity and change is the eastern Roman empire, which is largely neglected for comparison purposes. The apparently immortal image of barbarians crushing the civilization is wrong, wrong, wrong, but the notion there was no collapse of civilization is I judge wrong, wrong, wrong too. The lure of the Golden Mean can be deceiving because the Golden Mean doesn’t necessarily exist anywhere but the hopes, true. So no, I can’t be authoritative on that either.

26

Kaveh Hemmat 09.22.24 at 4:29 pm

IOW, the Indus Valley example makes a stronger argument against collapse than for it. If a civilization whose idea of cutting edge technology was the mud brick could survive 200 years of bad weather, that probably bodes more well than otherwise.”

It’s also telling that we have to reach back over 1500 years for examples of any kind of general collapse of urbanized society–critically, to times and places where urbanized society was exceptional. It’s been argued that we can define a ‘Middle Ages’ in the eastern hemisphere as beginning at a turning point somewhere around 500-600 CE when urbanized societies mostly cease to undergo any episodes of permanent collapse like the fall of the Western Roman Empire. I think part of the reason is that even if an urbanized society were to completely collapse, by this point there were many others to move in and take its place. Even the Western Roman Empire–well, the explanation’s there in the name: it sustained cities in formerly less urbanized regions for hundreds of years, then lost the ability to do so, partly because the peoples they dominated adopted some of their technologies and social organization–a lot of the ‘fall’ is actually ‘barbarians’ asserting increasingly effective claims to being Roman. The parts of the empire with older histories of urbanization did not suffer this collapse. Basically, what’s fragile and/or prone to collapse is any kind of social organization that is too small and limited in scale. A well-placed comet strike or invasion might have stopped the industrial revolution in Britain in the late 18th c., for a while at least, but I don’t think any institution or organization of global importance today couldn’t be pretty quickly reconstituted if it were suddenly eliminated.

27

Alex SL 09.22.24 at 11:18 pm

Kaveh Hemmat,

4,000 years, actually. But I did this because it is considered likely that this civilisation collapsed because of climate change, specifically, as opposed to some combination of external invasion, infectious disease, internal strife, or deforestation and soil erosion, or where it is much more controversial what exactly caused the collapse.

When looking at it that way, another thought readily occurs: a few degrees of warming while humanity is billions of people is unprecedented. We have no experience to draw from how something like that can be managed. Previous societies imploded regularly because of much less serious and theoretically much more manageable problems like the nobles considering not paying taxes or squabbling over who gets to be emperor more important than uniting against an external threat, like new plagues, or like unsustainable agricultural practices. Why didn’t they “just” prioritise the empire over their own advancement? Why didn’t they “just” change their agricultural practices to be sustainable? And here the idea is that we are so uniquely much better humans than they were that we can handle all of these challenges plus all climate zones shifting within decades plus having to relocate enormous numbers of people living in coastal areas and still come out the other side prosperous and without significant loss of life.

(I am unsure where I would have implied that urbanised society would disappear. I assume that even if several degrees of warming and resource over-consumption combine to produce a crisis that collapses global population to, say, under three billion, there would still be enormous numbers of cities, just much poorer and more traumatised than they could have been if we had decarbonised and restricted population growth to sustainable levels. That urbanisation angle is entirely yours, but it would be difficult to argue, I think, that the Mayan city states, Imperium Romanum, Minoan civilisation, Tang dynasty, and Khmer kingdom are still around or that their inhabitants didn’t suffer during collapses, even as towns survived their collapses and new empires arose after them.)

28

John Q 09.23.24 at 2:15 am

Our most urgent environmental challenge is to reduce net carbon dioxide (equivalent) emissions to zero (that is, by 100 per cent) by 2050. Looking at the graph, the range of uncertainty in population by that date is about 5 per cent (0.5 billion people). Decarbonising cement (7 per cent of emissions) or making reforestation more effective matter more than changes in this range.

Conclusion: population is an important environmental issue, but a secondary one.

29

Alex SL 09.23.24 at 4:48 am

Sorry to be commenting so much on this thread, but the last comment I see by John Q is very odd. It takes the predicted population trajectory as fixed but the carbon trajectory as easily malleable to argue that one shouldn’t even think about the former. But both of these are equally political and cultural issues. I could just as well fit a curve to the carbon emissions per capita over recent years, show that it is effectively more or less a straight line that can be projected to go down only insufficiently slightly until 2100, then note that we can “simply” implement a one child policy worldwide to bring down population very radically by 2100, and conclude that population is the only environmental issue.

This is the exact same logic, I just made up exactly as unilaterally that we cannot decide to change carbon per person output as John Q made up from thin air that we cannot decide to have fewer children than the above paper projects. And given how deeply people are in love with cement, plastic, and air travel, and how readily they decide to have fewer children when they are secure, well educated, and incentivised to put career first, I am not even sure my deliberately specious turn-around is actually less plausible than the proposition that we will ever voluntarily decarbonise.

Of course the idea of a global one child policy is ludicrous and would lead to conniptions of various racists, great replacement theorists, and religious leaders of the “Be fruitful, and multiply” persuasion, but is it more ludicrous than convincing the same people to become vegetarians, commute via bicycle in 15 minute cities, and vacation on their own balcony? I wish we would decarbonise 100%, I really do, but we don’t collectively seem to be willing to do it, whereas South Korea is already right now at less than one child per family, so that is at least demonstrably achievable.

30

David in Tokyo 09.23.24 at 5:39 am

An age ago Doug M. wrote:

“That said, the current worst-case scenario is roughly a two meter rise by 2100.”

Either Greenland or a big chunk of Antarctica falling into the sea would be a lot more than that. A lot. More like 5 to 7 meters. Meanwhile, every time Science has an article on Greenland or Antarctica, the story is that it’s melting/sliding “faster than anyone expected”. Every time.

My bet is we’ll see major climate-change induced disruptions within the next 25, not 75, years. Even if everyone reading this blog stopped driving and flying.

31

John Q 09.23.24 at 7:03 am

I had a go at the food supply question back in 2011.

https://crookedtimber.org/2011/02/12/can-we-feed-the-world-will-we/

Shorter JQ: We can feed the world if we make the right choices. There is no greater moral obligation facing the world as a whole and particularly those of us who are well-fed and live in wealthy countries.

32

Tm 09.23.24 at 8:57 am

Agree mostly with Alex SL but would like to get back to the demographic projections.

You note that this projection predicts an earlier and lower population peak that the previous. I think the UN predictions have already been criticized for being biased in the direction of higher estimates. A recent study in the Lancet predicts a global TFR of 1.8 by 2050. Due to population inertia, population may still increase for a while beyond 2050 but hardly as long as 2080 (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)00550-6/fulltext).

An earlier 2020 study also in the Lancet projected a peak in 2064 at 9·73 billion
(https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)30677-2/fulltext; also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth#After_2050)

In many countries, birthrates have been in steep decline in the last few years, notably in the US and Europe but also Asia. China’s population is already contracting, earlier than generally expected. Estimated fertility rates of India, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines, Vietnam, Turkey, Iran are below already at or below replacement (these are among the top 20 by population).

I’m convinced that many more people in high fertility countries would use contraception if they had easy and reliable access so a lot will depend on whether that access improves in the next 10 or so years, especially in Africa. Fertility rates in these countries might fall faster than expected if the conditions are favorable.

This demographic development in my view is one glimmer of hope in dark times. Our societies in low fertility countries will certainly face new challenges (and the xenophobic hate now spreading like a virus throughout Europe and the US will make it very hard to deal with those challenges) but it will make the necessary transition to a decarbonized lower-consumption economy more feasible.

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Doug Muir 09.23.24 at 11:29 am

Tm @32: Agreed — the UN projections have been criticized for being too conservative. But they’re the biggest and the ones that attract the most attention. That said, I won’t be surprised if we never do quite reach 10 billion people.

That said, one quibble:

I’m convinced that many more people in high fertility countries
would use contraception if they had easy and reliable access so
a lot will depend on whether that access improves in the next 10
or so years, especially in Africa.

This is a popular, er, misconception. The majority of the developing world already has access to basic contraception. In fact, the majority of the developing world probably has better access to contraception than the average American or European did circa 1950.

In particular, condoms are everywhere. In Rwanda, they’re sold at supermarket checkouts, along with gum and candy bars and cigarettes. And, man, there are a lot of condoms for sale — Rwanda is a young country, and you really see it. I suspect the HIV crisis did a lot to make condoms “respectable”. But whatever the reason, they’re publicly and widely available across much of the developing world now.

Access to contraception isn’t a universally solved problem by any means! It’s still an issue in a lot of the poorest and most socially conservative parts of the world. Good luck finding condoms, never mind an IUD or the Pill, in Yemen or Afghanistan or Chad.
But at a global level? Lack of access to contraception is no longer a major driver of high fertility.

Doug M.

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Tm 09.23.24 at 12:42 pm

“In fact, the majority of the developing world probably has better access to contraception than the average American or European did circa 1950.”

Fun fact: all forms of contraception were completely illegal in France until 1968. Fom 1946 to 1964, TFR remained essentially unchanged at or just below 3. It then plummeted below replacement within just a decade.

TFR in Ruanda peaked at above 8 in 1978, a mindboggling number, and declined to currently 3.7, an amazing reduction (about 1 per decade). If the trend continues, replacement level will be reached by 2040. The transition from a society in which having 8 children was normal to one in which having 3-4 children is the social norm must have been tremendous. Surely access is not the only factor, cultural and economic factors play a decisive role – but access is a precondition for people making choices.

There are countries like Niger where fertility hardly decreased over the decades (currently about 7). Is access to contraception really not a factor? Not the only one obviously but it’s hard to believe that nobody would want to use contraceptives if they could.

35

Tm 09.23.24 at 12:51 pm

From the NYT:

“More Women in Africa Are Using Long-Acting Contraception, Changing Lives

Methods such as hormonal implants and injections are reaching remote areas, providing more discretion and autonomy.”

Seems that for various reasons, condoms aren’t enough to meet the needs.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/17/health/long-acting-contraception-africa.html

36

bekabot 09.23.24 at 3:16 pm

“This argument is usually made by pro-natalists, who are usually conservatives. But that doesn’t mean it’s inherently wrong or stupid.”

No, it’s not. The reason it doesn’t mean anything when they make is that they’ve shown, time and time again, that they don’t want the problems solved (Trump, border; etc. ad infinitum and just one example) because more problems mean more desperate and disaffected people who are willing to succumb or submit to tyranny. (Especially when/if the problems prove to be intractable or are treated as such, or are slow-walked in such a fashion that over time they become intractable even though they didn’t start out that way, as in the case of climate change.)

37

Doug Muir 09.23.24 at 4:25 pm

Fun fact: all forms of contraception were completely illegal in France until 1968.
Fom 1946 to 1964, TFR remained essentially unchanged at or just below 3.
It then plummeted below replacement within just a decade.

It’s even weirder than that. French TFR dropped below 3.0 around 1895 — not a typo — and bottomed out in the early 1920s at around 1.7. Then it rebounded modestly, and hung around between 2.0 and 2.5 until the postwar baby boom kicked in.

Anyway: France’s TFR dropped from around 4.5 under Napoleon to under 3 in the Belle Epoque, almost entirely without the use of contraception. Just… lots and lots of coitus interruptus, as far as we can tell.

TFR in Ruanda peaked at above 8 in 1978, a mindboggling number,

Those crazy high figures tend to get a bit less mindboggling when you look at infant and child mortality figures. [googles] Yeah the official 1978 figure for infant mortality in Rwanda was 126 deaths per 1000 live births. Under-five mortality in developing countries tends to be roughly comparable to infant mortality. So of those 8 kids, one died before their first birthday, and a second one died by age five, and it wouldn’t be unexpected to lose one more by adulthood. So in terms of population growth, that “8” was effectively more like a “5.5”.

There are countries like Niger where fertility hardly decreased over
the decades (currently about 7). Is access to contraception really not a factor?

Lack of access to contraception absolutely plays a role in those places where TFR is still crazy high. If you look at the countries with highest TFR, they’re almost all both socially conservative (meaning most forms of contraception aren’t available) and dirt poor (meaning most people can’t afford even condoms).

But at the global level, most people in the developing world do have access to contraception. There are only a handful of countries left with TFRs over 5, and world TFR is continuing its relentless downward march.

Doug M.

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J, not that one 09.23.24 at 4:37 pm

I don’t want to pull this discussion off-topic, but I think bekabot raises a good point, which I understand as essentially that conservative pro-natalism is not intended to solve problems but to do something else.

I might suggest rewriting the sentence from the original post as “these are not consequentialist arguments, aimed at increasing people’s happiness, or even an orderly society, but something else — but that doesn’t mean the arguments are wrong or stupid,” and then ask whether this is also true?

One possibility is that conservative pro-natalists would be persuaded to change their policy positions by being shown how bad the consequences of their policies are. Another is that they would declare that they think those consequences are good. (I tend to agree with bekabot that they’d declare they think disorder is good; I don’t think this is a new thing, some kind of defensive reaction to us horrible liberals making them uncomfortable about their beliefs by existing or something.)

I think there are few pro-natalists on this thread, though.
Those aren’t the only possibilities — they might declare they have special knowledge that following their preferences, which they naturally call something else, will inevitably lead to a much better result — but they seem the most plausible ones.

39

bekabot 09.23.24 at 5:47 pm

“conservative pro-natalists would be persuaded to change their policy positions by being shown how bad the consequences of their policies are”

For reasons I hope I’ve already hinted at, I don’t believe that would work.

“they would declare that they think those consequences are good”

Yes. Good in a capital-G, Godly-nonsecular way.

“they’d declare they think disorder is good”

Not really; at least, that’s not what I’m talking about. The people I’m referring to are very unlikely to declare that disorder is good. They pride themselves (externally, anyway) on standing firm against disorder, on all fronts. Their whole thing is that they and they alone hold the secret to a rightly-ordered existence. None of them have many any declaration(s) in favor of disorder, at any rate not that I know of, and I don’t think any of them are about to. What they would say instead (and what they do occasionally say at times when urgency overrides caution) is that what they’re after is a higher order, a greater virtue, a superior state of wholeness on the part(s) of both the individual and society — ‘human flourishing’ is a phrase which gets tossed around a lot. This state of earthly satori carries with it demands which far outweigh the mandates of mere worldly prosperity — which can be the reward of the righteous but which in the case of the unrighteous (in other words, in the case of most of the rest of us) constitutes a trap and an incitement to wrongdoing. Consequently where the imperatives of the first meet the requirements of the second, the requirements of the second must go to the wall, ‘cuz Deus Lo Vult. “The world is well lost for the love of God” would be one way to put it, though most pro-natalists have declined to phrase it in that way thus far, because they feel outnumbered and endangered in an almost ecological sense. (The short version would be that they don’t feel brave enough — yet.)

There are people on the political right who would declare that disorder is good (‘move fast and break things’, and so forth), and they can overlap with the occupants of the pro-natalist camp in a Venn-diagram sense, but aside from that they’re two different breeds of cats. To begin with, the disorder-yay folks aren’t pro-natalist, at least not necessarily, though they may think of themselves as personally superior to most humans and therefore more fit to breed. Elon Musk, for example, obviously thinks it’s a good thing if he has kids — but does he think it would be a good thing if everybody had kids? I doubt it. But I’m straying from the topic at hand and before I go any further afield I think it would be a smart idea to stop here.

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Tm 09.23.24 at 5:58 pm

„But at the global level, most people in the developing world do have access to contraception.“

Yes, I mentioned a bunch of developing countries with low TFRs. The countries with high fertility are often very traditionalist and patriarchal.

41

engels 09.23.24 at 6:07 pm

42

J, not that one 09.23.24 at 6:46 pm

bekabot: I think I see what you’re saying. The people you’re describing would seemingly look at earthly disorder and say it doesn’t matter because they’ve redefined “orderly” to mean something supra-earthly. It probably becomes unhelpful to ask if they’re still consequentialists at that point.

It’s interesting that at that point the onus shifts to the person pointing to (earthly) evidence to understand the true meaning of true order, as the person defending “non-consequentialist” policies sees them. (What’s even more interesting is that this special meaning of “order” doesn’t become manifest at the beginning of the discussion, but only at this point.)

But as you pointed out in your earlier comment, if I understood it correctly, what they want is order in a private world for themselves, and disorder for others as an incentive to seek out someone to help them and/or tell them the conditions of moving into the private, orderly world.

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Peter T 09.24.24 at 11:59 am

Two points. The first is that 2050 or 2100 are arbitrary dates. Climate change operates on centuries and longer and (even if emissions go to zero by 2050) will keep changing the weather for quite some time. At some point food production will be hit at multiple points, just as if you keep throwing dice you will get a double six.

A second point is that, accepting Doug’s picture of general improvement is accurate, there still seems to be a widespread growth of what might be called the politics of discontent (Trump, AfD, AF, radical Islam in Pakistan, Hindu grievance in India, populist vs army politics in Thailand …) coupled with a gradual spread of disorder since the 80s – in Africa much of the Sahel, in the Middle East Syria, northern Iraq, Lebanon; Pakistan, Myanmar, various countries in Central America. My impression is that there is more of the world on the ‘do not visit’ list. Am I wrong?

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silburnl 09.24.24 at 4:12 pm

@Peter T, where ‘quite some time’ = at least 50k years, yes.

45

bekabot 09.24.24 at 5:32 pm

“what they want is order in a private world for themselves, and disorder for others as an incentive to seek out someone to help them and/or tell them the conditions of moving into the private, orderly world”

Yes, and in the last analysis, that’s the basis of my disagreement with them. What they espouse is gated-community logic, and it’s very much dependent on a system which says that the way you run a planet, from the core of the Earth on up, is that somebody or other moves in on a pile of resources and squeezes them for everything that’s useful and then decamps, leaving the sludge behind. It doesn’t matter whether the resources in question are material or immaterial; the pattern is the same, and it’s a prescriptive pattern: a blueprint of what’s supposed to happen and of the way things are supposed to work from floor to ceiling and from soup to nuts. It’s the polar opposite of trying to make the world a better place, or even wanting the world to be a better place; the world’s not qualified to be a better place; that’s the point. There’s a horrifying scene near the end of the Left Behind series in which a group of the saved is in transit from one spot to another in the midst of a doomed ecology, and one of their number inwardly remarks on how raddled and exhausted the landscape looks (because of a bouquet of earthquakes and other natural disasters which are down to the wrath of the Lord) but comforts himself with the thought that since the apocalyptic clock has almost run out, the Savior is due to return at any time, and that when He does, he will, as per His promises, remake the wreck into something more acceptable to Himself. That’s an extreme expression of the idea I’m trying to describe. I don’t think it’s an extreme form of the idea, though; the idea is what it is. I think I’ve already said enough on the subject to make it clear that it’s an idea I consider almost impossible to argue with.

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Kenny Easwaran 09.25.24 at 3:11 am

David in Tokyo claims “every time Science has an article on Greenland or Antarctica, the story is that it’s melting/sliding “faster than anyone expected”. Every time.”

And yet, the very first paper I found in Science about Greenland ice was this one: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado5008
It very specifically says that the rate of melt in Greenland has been slower than expected.

You only get support for the doomer perspective if you ignore a significant amount of the research.

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Alex SL 09.25.24 at 8:34 am

Kenny Easwaran,

I assume you also read the summaries and explainers that stress how this is about one very specific glacier at one very specific time before the context of Greenland overall experiencing accelerating ice melt? The tenor of climate researchers and of those experiencing the impacts on the ground, like flooding or ecosystem collapse, is overall that things are happening even faster than we thought they would. So, “every time” may not be correct at the most literal level, but that is simply because there is some noise in a very complex system. The trend is indisputable.

48

reason 09.26.24 at 1:17 pm

Peter T @43
“coupled with a gradual spread of disorder since the 80s”

Now what happened in the 80s I wonder? I know Reagan and Thatcher and the advent of what in Europe is called “neoliberalism”. The market is magic and solves all problems. How they told us that if the winners compensate the losers, then everybody is better off – but then never did the compensation bit.

49

engels 09.27.24 at 1:18 pm

Problem with this post is the ongoing environmental catastrophe it doesn’t want to talk about is intrinsically linked to the endless economic growth it views as the genius of capitalism and the salvation of the poor.

50

steven t johnson 09.27.24 at 4:01 pm

engels@49 The problem with talking about the menace of “endless economic growth” is twofold. It presumes that growth is the problem, not capitalist growth. Even worse it tacitly presumes that capitalism can deliver endless growth absent crises and wars, a problem it shares with the paper. This approach allows, if it doesn’t compel, portraying the correct future as one with travel passes, sumptuary laws, food rationing, compulsory birth control (which must include forced abortion,) people required to train and fill pre-selected jobs. Or worse, it allows, if it doesn’t compel, population reduction, which is unlikely to be fair and promises to foster exterminism as a social strategy. The seemingly benign version, one committed to some sort of unspecifiable market reform, maybe supplemented by a dirigiste Green state…which is pretty much the standard reformist approach right now, extrapolated. Maybe on steroids?

If you conclude that capitalist growth cannot deliver the kind of life the wealthiest have now to all, that is an argument against capitalist growth. Simply arguing against growth just isn’t useful, in my opinion.

51

Alex SL 09.28.24 at 12:23 am

steven t johnson,

I am as anti-capitalist as they come, but I don’t understand this at all. If you have 3,000 people on an isolated island that can sustainably feed 2,000 people and sustainably grow enough trees for timber to house 2,000 people, it really doesn’t make a difference if the land is owned by five private enterprises or by the state or by cooperatives. If air travel can never be decarbonised, then it really doesn’t make a difference if the people who insist on having access to air travel are being accommodated by a state-owned airline or by a privately owned airline. Unsustainable growth is unsustainable whether it is capitalist growth or feudal growth or stone age hunter-gatherer growth or socialist growth.

52

engels 09.28.24 at 12:45 am

Well okay but actually existing socialist growth was also pretty environmentally disastrous if I’m not mistaken. I’m not calling for sumptuary laws (travel passes seem like a good idea ymmv) but I do think socialism ought to mean thinking (rationally and democratically) about how we as a society want to live rather than bigger better faster more.

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steven t johnson 09.29.24 at 3:54 pm

Alex SL@51 has two arguments. The first only makes genuine sense if the “island” is somehow meant to stand in for the entire planet. Pretending for a moment the literal reading of the hypothetical does make sense, it does make a difference if the “island is owned by private enterprises, because the private parties will engage in hiring some of the excess population to guard their property and the rest will live or not regardless. And the further use of timer resources will be controlled by their interests, profit. Cooperatives, here undefined, would have presumably more familial or other personal connections to the population as a whole plus fewer systemic imperatives to pursue precisely because the profits to be distributed will be smaller. This is called less incentive in economics, I believe.

The reason this version makes no sense is that such an island would have to import timer or export people. I don’t think it is at all reasonable to assume private owners would approach imports the same way cooperatives would. It’s even less likely the cooperatives would deal with their many members emigration needs the same way private owners would. It’s notable that planning is omitted from both perspectives, which is why I can’t accept that this vision of reality is as anti-capitalist as it comes.

The second example assumes air travel can never be “decarbonized.” Without proposing relying on SF (even superficially plausible aka “hard”) the question of how much air travel should be subsidized by limiting carbon dioxide emissions in other spheres cannot be solved I think in a capitalist system. Maybe not even asked? I suspect that the assumption technique is inherently limited is deeply conservative. I also suspect that in the very long run, socialist growth with be largely determined by improvements in technique, substantially identical with learning to do more with less. But this emphasizes the role of production in creating the nature of our world. The phrasing in Alex SL’s air travel even suggests to my eyes a notion that consumption, greed on the part of the common people, drives the capitalist system. I think it is the pursuit of profits. The notion of a relatively stationary economy that grows only by innovation is not unheard of. I gather Sismondi and Mill and other unsavory parties I will not name now have broached it. But we do not need John Quiggin to demonstrate how wrong-headed I am. Everybody who cares to read my comments has seen that, I imagine.

Continuing in that vein, I must confess that I rather suspect that in a capitalist system, land (which means all environmental resources, such as air, water and trees,) must be priced in the long run at whatever level is compatible with the pursuit of profit. Private ownership means those who own the land can charge rents heedless of the actual utility in that same long run. The prices at which “land” is sold fluctuates around the costs of reproduction in due to changes in technique, the social division of labor (which by the way folds in the varying periods of reproduction of different commodities,) and the profitability, all mediated by the laws of supply and demand in a market system.

The thing is, so far as I can tell (not my original observation by the way) it is precisely the pricing that compels land owners (as a group, again in the long run) to price land in all its forms according to the costs of appropriating the land now, or the next quarter. Even allowing for the next business cycle is unlikely, especially since economics has been curing the business cycle ever since capitalism developed enough to generate capitalist crisis to resolve difficulties in the accumulation of capital (well, strictly the profits thereof.)

I suppose you could think of capitalist accumulation as being like Keynesian deficit spending, priming the pump until normal comes back. The rationale there is that there is a normal, which I am bullheaded enough to disbelieve. Capitalism as a world system began centuries ago when there was much more “slack” in the natural economy. The accumulation of capital, which in this context includes people, has proceeded to a scale and pace to threaten the biosphere. Now there are people who think the capitalist system has created enough capital that the whole system is increasingly obsolete. But again, we do not need John Quiggin to explain how the system need merely be reformed.

engels@52 obliges community sentiment by attacking actually existing socialism. I do not know how China’s One Child Policy can be both a tyrannical false solution to environmental pressures and a proof of heedless expansionism due to King Consumer demand. Pick one please. As for sumptuary laws? I’m not sure whether engels sees the Mao jacket as a sumptuary law? My memory is that such customs were regarded as proofs of tyranny and I’m not sure that’s changed.

For that matter, the large shift to green policies like EVs in the PRC strike me as a rather strong empirical argument against engels, unless engels sees the salvation of capitalism in opening up and reform? I think one part of the world revolution will involve something like a world government that coordinate the activities of subsidiary bodies (aka “national governments”) to permit rational local planning using global information. Von Hayek’s obsession with undefined local (even personal “knowledge”) is standard economics I gather but I think every complex economic system requires information about the system as a whole. That’s why every stock market invests heavily in communications technology to track information useful to them as rapidly as possible, in my opinion.

This is excessively long in one sense. But trying to explain such a different perspective is harder for my limited writing skill, is something like translating a historical document from a foreign language. I suppose many would see it as compounded by the difficulty of being a translation from something as imaginary as Tolkien’s Elvish or Trek’s Klingon.

54

Alex SL 09.29.24 at 11:32 pm

steven t johnson,

Yes, obviously the island it is an analogy to the entire planet. The problem is that people assume we can do some unspecified efficiency gains or innovation to make the limited resource base of the world magically infinite, whereas they easily intuit that an island is an island and has limited resources.

And, yes, part of my point is that markets and capitalism overuse resources because consumers want to overuse resources. Unless you have a 1980s cartoon villain model of capitalists, sitting in their office towers cackling over how they poison the planet by running poison factories at a loss, you must realise that they sell cars because people buy cars, they sell flights because people want to fly, and they sell cheese in convenient plastic packaging because few consumers are willing to take it in an unmarked paper wrapper instead. Talk to a few people outside your bubble to understand their purchasing decisions, and consider the idea that “for profit” is, under a market economy, exactly the same as “because that is what the buyers want”, as, again, the only alternative is running poison factories at a loss for the evulz, i.e., no profit. This is our reality, as upsetting as it is.

55

engels 09.30.24 at 11:13 am

“for profit” is, under a market economy, exactly the same as “because that is what the buyers want”

Ever heard of advertising? Or monopolies?

56

steven t johnson 09.30.24 at 3:44 pm

Plastic packaging for food is not just convenient it’s also hygienic. Imputing to people in general the most trivial motive possible for perpetrating a (dubiously) evil act like buying cheese wrapped in plastic is odd. Why not pick a stronger, less ambiguous example of the evil intent of the greedy consumers who rule the economy? Private jets, superyachts and luxury post-apocalypse bunkers come to my mind. Given how much of the economy is companies buying goods from other companies to create products and services, I’m not sure it’s very helpful to focus on the bubble around the individual consumer.

Where I live, I could buy cheese wrapped in paper, assuming I can get there before the deli is closed, hoping it won’t be a long wait, assuming I’m willing to pay the higher price. The deli is usually understaffed, so the wait can be surprisingly long. The visit should be timed so that the cheese isn’t sitting in a (often hot) car for too long, incidentally. But strangely enough I’m not sure whether the trees killed to make paper and don’t take up atmospheric carbon dioxide anymore are in the long run worse than the locking up of carbon in plastic? Maybe doing away with paper bags for groceries turns out to be a good idea? On the other hand, maybe plastic wrapped cheese should be priced higher than paper wrapped deli cheese? The problem there of course is that pricing is not under the consumer’s individual control.

The clause “the only alternative is running poison factories at a loss for the evulz, i.e., no profit,” suggests to me the problem is capitalist growth, not growth. I suppose I should point out that capitalist world economy has generated quite a few periods of diminished consumption, relatively long periods of slow growth and “best’ of all, huge portions of the population saved from sin by poverty (everywhere actually, though mostly in the neocolonial world by far.) The logical conclusion, that capitalism has some saving graces, doesn’t strike me as anti-capitalist. Also, I’m not sure that attacking consumption, praising asceticism, is quite as just a critique of humanity as apparently conceived.

That’s what attacking growth in general leads to, I think. It’s a little like religion I suppose, some believers often simply refuse to accept the logical implications, stopping in revulsion when others are more consistent regardless of human costs? The thing is, I don’t think religious organization actually do can be justly dismissed as merely the personal preferences of the congregation writ large. This is even more true since so much religion is basically inherited from family, family friends and social surroundings. An undifferentiated attack on growth, rather than on capitalist growth, seems to me to work out in the end in much the same way.

57

Alex SL 09.30.24 at 10:46 pm

engels,

I am not saying that Microsoft products are as good as they could be if there was a functioning market in corporate software services, or that monopoly profits are morally justified. But I am saying that even if you own the monopoly for petrol in your country, your profits come from people wanting to buy petrol. That is why you can get away with that monopoly. If too few people want the service or product a monopoly provides, it goes bust just like any other enterprise.

The ‘steelman version’ of your case is that as long as car manufacturers don’t offer, say, an EV, the consumers who want to buy EVs cannot do so. I would still assume that if the manufacturers see sufficient demand in customer surveys, they would grasp the chance to make the profit that is up for grabs in that area. Their CEOs are paid to make profit even if it destroys our basis for survival, not to destroy our basis for survival at a loss. (The first half of the previous sentence, and not growth as such, describes the specific problem with capitalism.) The problem in cases like these is usually that it takes a lot of R&D and investment to get to the point where the new product becomes profitable, and that gully may only be bridged with government subsidies and investment, or with one large enough company taking a gamble, as profit-seeking enterprises are unwilling to invest that far into the future; but that is just another way of saying that consumers (understandably) weren’t willing to pay a high enough price to make EVs profitable in 1985.

On the other hand, I must admit to being mystified by advertising. I have no idea why it works on other people, as for me the result is nearly always despising the company whose advert I have seen for the stupidity of that advert. I can here, however, withdraw to the observation that adverts are incapable of forcing people to buy things they do not actually want. If they act on an advert, they are still using their own agency.

58

engels 09.30.24 at 11:24 pm

I’m not going to respond to Steven’s claims about “capitalist vs socialist growth” because I can’t begin to understand them.

59

Doug M. 10.01.24 at 7:30 am

“Problem with this post is the ongoing environmental catastrophe it doesn’t want to talk about is intrinsically linked to the endless economic growth it views as the genius of capitalism and the salvation of the poor.”

— I honestly have no idea where you’re getting any of this stuff from. I mention global warming and environmental issues right up front. I don’t anywhere say economic growth should be “endless”. I don’t actually mention economic growth at all! Nor do I mention capitalism, or any other economic system.

I do say that the average human in 2024 is significantly richer, healthier, better fed, better clothed, better housed, better educated, and likely to live longer than the average human of the 1990s. These are all readily checkable objective facts, so I assume this isn’t what you find annoying.

I also say that climate change notwithstanding, there’s every reason to expect that the world of 2080 will be healthier and more prosperous still. That’s a projection and a speculation and it could certainly be wrong! And I’m guessing this is what bugs you. Okay! If you dislike this projection, fine — tell us why it’s likely to be wrong. But argue with what I actually wrote, if you please?

60

Alex SL 10.01.24 at 9:49 pm

Doug M.,

I cannot speak for engels, and yes, you did mention climate change, as an aside to quickly dismiss.

But I assume you must see the problem with your position:

If the average human is now “significantly richer, healthier, better fed, better clothed, better housed, better educated, and likely to live longer than the average human of the 1990s” BECAUSE (!!!) we are using roughly 1.5 times as many miscellaneous resources as the planet can sustainably supply, cf. Earth overshoot day, and infinity times as many fossil fuels as we can use sustainably, and you expect 25% more people to be exactly as prosperous for an implied resource overuse of 1.5 x 1.25 = 1.875 times as much as the planet can sustainably supply, then that prosperity is maybe not entirely something to be proud of? As mentioned before, I liken it to bragging about how amazingly fast we are driving, just look at our speed, isn’t this an awesome car? … while heading towards a cliff.

Now, maybe that same level of prosperity can be achieved sustainably. But right now, it demonstrably isn’t. That limits my optimism when considering that we need it to be achieved for another two billion people on top of that.

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