The herd of elephants in the room
The NY Times has an opinion piece on demographics and shrinking populations.
China, the most populous country on the planet for centuries, this month reported its first population decline in six decades, a trend that is almost certainly irreversible. By the end of the century China may have only around half of the 1.41 billion people it has now, according to U.N. projections, and may already have been overtaken by India.
The news has been met with gloom and doom, often framed as the start of China’s inexorable decline and, more broadly, the harbinger of a demographic and economic “time bomb” that will strain the world’s capacity to support aging populations.
There is no doubt that a shrinking global population — a trend expected to set in by the end of this century — poses unprecedented challenges for humanity. China is only the latest and largest major country to join a club that already includes Japan, South Korea, Russia, Italy and others.
And so on. The weird thing is that the sociologist who wrote it, Wang Feng, never mentions the climate issue. How can it make sense to talk about population decline or growth without mentioning what’s happening to the planet this “shrinking global population” lives on? It’s like being on a train approaching a collapsed bridge and talking about service in the dining car.
But the alarmist warnings are often simplistic and premature. The glass is at least half full. Shrinking populations are usually part of a natural, inevitable process, and rather than focus excessively on concerns like labor shortages and pension support, we need to look at the brighter spots for our world.
But the trouble is, labor shortages and pension support are going to look like luxury issues as the climate spirals out of control.
Compared to a half-century ago, people in many countries are richer, healthier and better educated and women are more empowered. China’s population, for example, is shrinking and aging, but its people are more educated and have a longer life expectancy than at any time in the country’s history.
Yes but. There’s that bridge up ahead.
I would think that it would be a good thing to have a shrinking population in a world that has fewer resources and less inhabitable land. Sure, the path to there will be bad (labor shortages to support the elderly, and the like), but it will mean better ability to use the planet’s shrinking resources.
There is this bit: “Fewer people on the planet, of course, may reduce humanity’s ecological footprint and competition for finite resources.”
I think that’s the only mention of anything related to climate, though.
I liked the opinion piece. It’s one of very few that I’ve seen that suggest that a shrinking population is a good thing. It suggests embracing the change and adapting, rather than trying to reverse it.
Paul Krugman wrote an opinion piece about China recently that almost came to that conclusion, but it was more about accepting the decline and adapting, rather than cheering the decline as a positive development.
There is actually a remarkably weak link between global population growth and the emissions driving climate change. China’s population has been close to flat over the past 20 years, and emissions have soared. US emissions have been in gentle decline over that period where US population growth is largely attributable to immigration, but the ~340M Americans are still responsible for 14% of total global emissions. Countries where population is growing are overwhelmingly low emitters and less developed economies.
It is not the poor countries of the world that are responsible for climate change.
Part of the problem is the focus on climate change; Naif makes some reasonable points. But the rest of the environmental problems, of which climate change is the fever of the planet that is warning us about the underlying problem, but which could kill us even before the disease it warns us of, tend to be ignored.
Shrinking land. Shrinking resources. Shrinking water. And all we hear is that it is only consumption; population is not the problem. We used to know better. It’s not hard to figure out that population is a huge part of the problem, when you realize that India, which has a footprint about half the size of France when you look per capita, becomes about three times that of France weighted by population.
Also, population is the number one argument against all environmental interventions. “We can’t do that, To many people rely on [fill in the blank with favorite environmentally disastrous action] for survival.”
It isn’t about the environment or the population size. The problem is with our economic system. With the current growth capitalism as the dominant model, you do lose when your population declines; you also lose when your population grows. We needed to be rethinking the way we approach provision of goods and services…and we needed to start rethinking it at least a hundred years ago. It may be too late now.
When China started their one-child policy, their population was only 600,000,000. They recognized the inability to continue providing for so many people. Whatever one thinks of the one-child policy, it is evident that they understood the problem back then. Now, they have lost sight of that. They are in the same mindset as so much of the world: constant growth is a good thing.
When your cells start to grow without limits, we call it cancer. When our population grows without limits, too many people see it as progress.
It feels like there are two steps in logic that keep getting missed by the shrinking-population panickers.
The first is economic: when you get down to absolute basic principles, surely the whole point of economic and technological advancement shouldn’t be growth for growth’s sake, but rather the enhancement of human quality of life, and that would ultimately look like a lot more prosperity to share with all of humanity, at a cost of a lot less labour required to achieve it.
(At the same time we’re talking about a shrinking labour workforce, we could well be looking at a shrinking amount of labour to go around. Historically, every time technology made one job redundant, it happened to also create a new type of job to replace it. Agriculture gave way to manufacturing, which gave way to the service sector, which is shifting increasingly towards high-tech. But this isn’t a fundamental law; new jobs aren’t a guaranteed outcome of technological advancement. Just ask the horses: when the combustion engine revved into the world, new jobs for the horses didn’t materialize. What happened instead was a precipitous decline in the horse population. And that’s ok! I’ll bet the relatively few horses living on the planet today are enjoying a higher quality of life than their ancestors did at the turn of the last century. As for humans today, there are signs this next round of technological innovations isn’t going to be generating as many new high-tech jobs as the old low-tech jobs it’s poised to eliminate. See: Amazon v. retail sales workers; Google’s self-driving cars v. truck drivers…)
Viewed this way, the problem is in the structure of the economy: a shrinking labour force producing more benefits that can be shared by all would look something like much higher taxes and much more social subsidies for the aging population, ideas that billionaire futurists like Elon Musk are constitutionally averse to. (They wouldn’t be billionaires otherwise, would they?)
I think Wang Feng’s NYT opinion piece does manage to make that first leap of logic, and for that I quite agree with it.
But then there’s the second leap, the one you’re pointing out, which is that climate change poses a far greater threat to human quality of life than whatever challenges we’ll face restructuring the economy to better distribute wealth beyond a shrunken labour force.
And that brings me back to the horses: not only are there far fewer of them, living happier lives. But they’re a much smaller burden on the ecosystem. Ultimately a smaller human population can only help lessen the climate crisis, can’t it? Fewer petroleum engines to drive us around; less livestock to feed us, etc.
Maybe the work to mitigate the climate crisis will end up being the next big labour market that emerges to pick up some of the jobs the high-tech economy will kill off. And maybe that, combined with a deliberate focus on shrinking the population, could actually be a roadmap towards a happy future for humanity.
Not likely. But it’s a small sliver of hope.
It’s always seemed a bit off… So much of that population is devoted to servicing the needs of a smaller portion of the population, but then they need to have entertainment, luxuries, etc… It’s the corn fed beef problem. Why grow food to feed your food? Better to automate as much as possible and pay people not to breed (while keeping genetic samples to preserve potential genetic diversity).
We could keep the planet going so much longer at the same rate of consumption if the slaves were replaced with machines.
We’re dealing with a problem of institutional capture on a huge, where the instruments of the state and international regulation and governance have been commandeered by forces whose primary objective is the concentration of wealth. They plunder and ransack the Earth in the name of the Ponzi scheme they’ve concocted, teetering at the top of the pyramid like some guild of apex predators, hoping to cash out before it all collapses from the weight of their unsustainable excesses, taking the rest of us, and the biosphere, with them.
“We’re dealing with a problem of institutional capture on a huge scale…”
China is facing a much bigger sledgehammer than declining birth rates: declining glaciers. There’s going to be a much nastier population crunch in the next handful of decades.