"The Sinister Neoliberal Plot To Crash Global Populations
By Scott Duncan:
"I know. It sounds absurd, but it’s working.
I have a certain, morbid attraction to movies and TV shows about the fantasy apocalypse and the day after doomsday. I think the granddaddy of them all was The Road Warrior with Mel Gibson. Titles like The Book of Eli, Terminator 2, Raised By Wolves, Station Eleven, Planet Of The Apes, and The Matrix, all tell the story of the world after the human race has been decimated.
All of them speak of a quick end to humanity as we know it. They’re wrong.
The end of humanity will be slow, increasingly boring, and, without much drama. Yes, we’ll have a few wars, but the only people who want to go to war are old and they’re not going to let go of their power but slowly. You know, through attrition.
The rest of us are just biding our time, watching our kids grow up, our lives burn out without kids, or hoping that some other force will save us.
On the same day that Russia invaded Ukraine, The Washington Post ran a story about population decline. The headline? “Deaths outpace births in most counties as U.S. growth slowed in 2020”. That’s a first for America. From the article:
The data released Thursday covered roughly 3,140 counties, more than 380 metropolitan statistical areas and over 540 smaller locales known as micropolitan statistical areas. The period covered by the data, July 2020 to July 2021, also coincided with some of the peak rates of the spread of the coronavirus, as reflected in reported cases. In that time, nearly 75 percent of all U.S. counties experienced a natural population decrease, compared with 55 percent of all counties in 2020 and 45 percent in 2019, the Census Bureau found. In Maine, Delaware, Rhode Island and New Hampshire, the natural population decrease occurred in every county.
Laurel sphinx (Sphinx kalmiae)
Ice Age National Scientific Reserve Unit, Wisconsin, USA
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Notice that the trend had been accelerating before the pandemic. And that’s just America.
Japan, a country with very little immigration, and a birth rate of 1.39 kids per woman, is projected to lose a third of its population by 2100. The young men spend most of their free time playing video games and most of the young women don’t want to have babies. They’re building an army of robots to take care of the elderly.
At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in 2019, Alibaba CEO Jack Ma and Tesla CEO Elon Musk both worried about population collapse. Jack Ma noted that in the previous year, China had only 18 million babies. He said that wasn’t enough to replace the people who died in China that year. You can see the video here. Musk had this to say:
Most people think we have too many people on the planet, but actually, this is an outdated view. Assuming there is a benevolent future with AI, I think the biggest problem the world will face in 20 years is population collapse.
They both agreed on a future with a human population collapse. But they both looked like outfielders looking at their mitts after they dropped the ball.
Every industrialized country in the world has seen a long trend of declining birth rates. Here is an OECD chart with the trend from the years 1970 to 2020:
Slow and steady birth rate declines, OECD, 1970–2020
We noticed this trend a decade ago. Back in 2013, Slate ran an article about population decline with similar findings:
A somewhat more arcane milestone, meanwhile, generated no media coverage at all: It took humankind 13 years to add its 7 billionth. That’s longer than the 12 years it took to add the 6 billionth — the first time in human history that interval had grown. (The 2 billionth, 3 billionth, 4 billionth, and 5 billionth took 123, 33, 14, and 13 years, respectively.) In other words, the rate of global population growth has slowed. And it’s expected to keep slowing. Indeed, according to experts’ best estimates, the total population of Earth will stop growing within the lifespan of people alive today.
The same article found evidence to project a world population of just one billion in 2300, 277 years from now. Analysis of population trends showed that controlling for all factors, the single greatest force at work against human population growth was educating girls. When girls are educated, they seek careers, delay childbirth, and have fewer kids.
This is a good thing.
Everything we use requires brains to build and maintain it. Everything that is composed must decompose. All the shiny toys we play with now require a team of brains to maintain. Our homes, our cars, our energy sources, all of our infrastructure, our phones…Unless there is a brain with a pair of hands to keep it running, it will eventually run down to “Error 404”.
This is one reason I have a gallows laugh whenever I see Elon Musk talk about going to Mars. It took a world population of 7.75 billion to have enough brains to build spaceships at SpaceX. They won’t have the brains to keep a colony running on Mars for very long. A colony on Mars will need the infrastructure to build the parts, ship them there, and install them. All of that requires brains.
I do most of my work on a Chromebook. It runs a network operating system such that everything that I create is stored redundantly in the cloud. All of that requires brains to run and to keep it running. Out of 7.75 billion people, we find just enough people with the education and the talent to keep our computers running.
The robots aren’t going to save us. Someone has to write code for the robot, make parts for the robot after the teenagers have their way with it, and watch the robot to make sure it doesn’t kill the senior citizen it’s charged to care for.
All of this is a draw on the earth's resources. Not everyone can have a robot.
Remember those two billionaire clowns on the stage who are worried about population implosion? They can’t see that they’re part of the reason for the population implosion. They played a zero-sum game and won. They promoted public policy outcomes that brought us here. The rest of us lost.
Billionaires are better than birth control to implode our population. Billionaires are almost better than educating girls for arresting the population growth of humans. Billionaires can’t see that the neoliberal policies they support made them billionaires while reducing the opportunities and incentives for young people to have kids.
And by a billion papercuts, the population of the world will start to decline sometime around 2040.
This is actually a good thing, but we should keep in mind that all the gloom and doom we see in the news is evidence of just how temporary our fortunes are, good or bad. What we have now is a blip in geological time. We just happened to be here in the right place at the right time to enjoy it.
And then it will be gone.
Write on.
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