At least the reporters are now waking up to the developing problem of population contraction. The most recent modernization boomer is Africa which has reached about the same level as China and India. Both those have passed through their modernization boom and Africa was the last to actually kick in. I must admit i dispaired for several years about this, but that is well past.
It is reasonable that the global population will reach 9,000,000,000 at which we will no longer have significant modernity boomer populations to deal with. What will be critical though is that we then transition to the poverty free natural community protocol governed through the rule of twelve. This secures the role of women and of child bearing and child care as a natural community project while releasing productive women from the task of both production and full time child care.
The natural community produces a sisterhood which can readily reassign childcare and allow productive individuals to safely step away from this role. Such an environment can also easily manage community birth rates as well. Support availability ends the necessity of a male economic threshold in particular. Women can then choose to have children much younger as the whole thing is supported. Men are folded into all this as well and effectively.
The present dispensation is no longer satisfactory and has not being for a long time. The natural community can resolve that.
Once this is accomplished, we will actually increase population on demand to occupy attractive niches as we continuing sustainable Terra forming of the earth. The real future target is 100,000,000,000 for land based residence and much more fore ocean living.
By the End of This Century, the Global Population Will Start to Shrink
The fertility rate is falling in every country on the planet
Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson
https://medium.com/s/story/by-the-end-of-this-century-the-global-population-will-start-to-shrink-2f606c1ef088
The
great defining event of the 21st century — one of the great defining
events in human history — will occur in three decades, give or take,
when the global population starts to decline. Once that decline begins,
it will never end. We do not face the challenge of a population bomb, so
rampant in the popular imagination, but of a population bust — a
relentless, generation-after-generation culling of the human herd.
Nothing like this has ever happened before.
If
you find this news shocking, that’s not surprising. The United Nations
forecasts that our population will grow from 7 billion to 11 billion in
this century before leveling off after 2100. But an increasing number of
demographers around the world believe the UN estimates are far too
high.
More
likely, they say, the planet’s population will peak at around 9 billion
sometime between 2040 and 2060 and then start to decline. By the end of
this century, we could be back to where we are right now and steadily
growing fewer.
“Once a woman is socialized to have an education and a career, she is socialized to have a smaller family. There’s no going back.”
Populations
are already declining in about two dozen states around the world; by
2050, that number will have climbed to three dozen. Some of the richest
places on earth are shedding people every year: Japan, Korea, Spain,
Italy, much of Eastern Europe. “We are a dying country,” lamented
Beatrice Lorenzin, Italy’s health minister, in 2015.
But
this isn’t the big news. The big news is that the largest developing
nations are also about to grow smaller as their own fertility rates come
down. China will begin losing people in a few years. By the middle of
this century, Brazil and Indonesia will follow suit. Even India, soon to
become the most populous nation on earth, will see its numbers
stabilize in about a generation and then start to decline. Fertility
rates remain sky-high in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle
East. Even here, though, things are changing as young women obtain
access to education and birth control. Africa is likely to end its
unchecked baby boom much sooner than the UN’s demographers think.
Why
is the UN’s prediction wrong? According to Wolfgang Lutz, of the Vienna
University of Economics and Business, the reason, in a word, is
education. “The brain is the most important reproductive organ,” he
asserts. Once a woman receives enough information and autonomy to make
an informed and self-directed choice about when to have children and how
many to have, she immediately has fewer of them and has them later.
“Once a woman is socialized to have an education and a career, she is
socialized to have a smaller family,” he explains. “There’s no going
back.” Lutz and his fellow demographers at Vienna’s International
Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) believe that advancing
education in developing countries, brought about by increasing
urbanization, should be factored into future population projections,
which the UN doesn’t do. Using those factors, the IIASA predicts a
stabilizing population by midcentury, followed by a decline. Lutz
believes the human population will be shrinking as early as 2060.
His is hardly a lone voice. Jørgen Randers is a Norwegian academic who co-authored The Limits to Growth,
which predicted that global population would reach unsustainable levels
by 2100. But since publishing the book, he has changed his mind. “The
world population will never reach 9 billion people,” he now believes.
“It will peak at 8 billion in 2040 and then decline.” He attributes the
unexpected drop to women in developing countries moving into urban
slums. “And in an urban slum, it does not make sense to have a large
family.”
The Economist is
also skeptical of the UN estimates: Previous projections, it observed
in a 2014 analysis, failed to forecast “the spectacular declines in
fertility in Bangladesh or Iran since 1980 (in both countries, from
roughly six children per woman to about two now). At the moment, Africa
is the source of much new population growth and the authors assume that
fertility rates will continue to fall more slowly there than they did in
Asia and Latin America. But no one can be sure.”
One way to begin to understand the problem is to look at what has changed about the way we measure population trends.
The
demographic transition model, which was first developed in 1929, used
to contain only four stages. Stage four, the final stage, envisioned a
world in which life expectancy was high and the fertility rate was low,
around the level needed to sustain the population: 2.1 babies per mother
(one per mother, one per father, and an extra 0.1 to account for
children who die in infancy and women who die before childbearing age).
But as it turned out, there is a fifth stage: one in which life
expectancy continues to slowly increase, even as fertility rates
continue to decline below the replacement rate, eventually leading to a declining population. Just about the entire developed world is in stage five.
In
the 1970s, the fertility rate began to drop below 2.1 in the most
advanced economies and began dropping in developing countries as well, a
phenomenon that has been described as “one of history’s most astounding
global shifts.” In hindsight, it shouldn’t have been a surprise at all.
The more a society urbanizes and the more control women exert over
their bodies, the fewer babies they choose to have. Today, in most
Western nations, such as the United States (fertility rate: 1.9) and
Canada (fertility rate: 1.6), 80 percent of the population live in
cities, and women have something close to total control over their
reproductive choices.
Let’s
take Spain as an example. The former imperial giant is firmly in stage
five of population growth. It has a very low fertility rate — 1.3 births
per woman, far below the rate of replacement. It also has a very high
life expectancy: 82.5 years, the fourth highest in the world (behind
Japan, Iceland, and Switzerland). But even with all those old people,
Spain’s population started to decline in 2012, because in some regions,
two people die for every baby that is born. Thus far, the drop has been
gradual, shaving 400,000 souls from the 2011 population of 46.8 million.
But the trend is about to accelerate. Madrid estimates that a million
people will disappear from the country within a decade and 5.6 million
by 2080. The government is so eager to reverse or at least slow this
trend that it appointed a “sex tzar,” charged with developing a national
strategy to address Spain’s demographic imbalances.
Most
European countries, especially those that limit immigration, are like
Spain. But Europe is not alone. Japan’s population is expected to
decline by 25 percent over the next 35 years, taking it from 127 million
to 95 million. The numbers are similar for South Korea and Singapore,
two other fully developed Asian societies.
But
fertility declines aren’t unique to the developed world. Urbanization
and the empowerment of women are global phenomena. We know that China
and India are at or below the 2.1 replacement rate. But so are other
developing countries: Brazil (1.8), Mexico (2.3), Malaysia (2.1),
Thailand (1.5). Birth rates are still very high in Africa (Niger: 7.4;
Malawi: 4.9; Ghana: 4.2) and parts of the Middle East (Afghanistan: 5.3;
Iraq 4.6; Egypt: 3.4). But these high-fertility countries share one
thing in common with their low-fertility counterparts: Everywhere,
virtually without exception, birth rates are coming down. Nowhere are
they going up.
We
know that urbanization changes the economic calculus of having children
and leads to the empowerment of women through education. Recent
research has shown that other factors are in play as well. One of them
is the decline in the ability of kin to influence kin. If you live in a
more rural, less developed society, your social environment most likely
revolves around the family, in which the elders endlessly nag the young
to get married and have kids. But as societies become more modern and
urban, friends and co-workers replace siblings, parents, uncles, and
aunts. “This change is the critical factor in decreasing birth rates,”
writes psychologist Ilan Shrira, of Chicago’s Loyola University,
“because family members encourage each other to have children, whereas
non-kin don’t.”
Another
factor is the declining power of religion in most parts of the world.
There is no question that societies in which religion wields
considerable influence over individual decisions have higher fertility
rates than societies in which religious influence is minimal. Three
WIN/Gallup polls, taken in 2008, 2009, and 2015, asked respondents
whether they felt religious. In Malawi and Niger — which, as we’ve seen,
have among the highest fertility rates in the world — 99 percent of
those polled answered yes. Only 39 percent said yes in Spain, which is
now considered one of the least religious countries in the world. (Interesting
correlation: Societies where the power of the Catholic Church rapidly
collapsed, such as Spain, Quebec, and Ireland, tend to go from having
relatively high to relatively low fertility rates especially quickly.)
Another
example that wraps all these forces together is found in the
Philippines. As the Philippines urbanizes, the rights of women in
Filipino society grow stronger. In 1965, the Filipino fertility rate was
seven. Today, it’s three and falling at a rate of about half a baby
every five years. Half a baby every five years! The Philippines
population is expected to increase from its current level of 101 million
to 142 million by 2045 and will then probably start to decline. This
story is repeated throughout the world.
You might think this would be cause for celebration. The planet’s lungs would surely breathe easier without the press of so many billions of humans; famine and poverty would surely wane with fewer mouths to feed and families to house. And you would be right — partly. The economic and geopolitical impact, however, would be more mixed.
Population
decline isn’t a good thing or a bad thing. But it is a big thing. A
child born today will reach middle age in a world in which conditions
and expectations are very different from our own. She will find the
planet more urban, with less crime, environmentally healthier but with
many more old people. She won’t have trouble finding a job, but she may
struggle to make ends meet as taxes to pay for health care and pensions
for all those seniors eat into her salary. There won’t be as many
schools, because there won’t be as many children.
Once having one or two children becomes the norm, it stays the norm.
Population
decline will shape the nature of war and peace in the decades ahead as
some nations grapple with the fallout of their shrinking, aging
societies while others remain able to sustain themselves. The defining
geopolitical challenge in the coming decades could involve accommodating
and containing an angry, frightened China as it confronts the
consequences of its disastrous one-child policy.
Some
of those who fear the fallout of a diminishing population advocate
government policies to increase the number of children couples have. But
the evidence suggests this is futile. The “low-fertility trap” ensures
that once having one or two children becomes the norm, it stays the
norm. Couples no longer see having children as a duty they must perform
to satisfy their obligation to their families or their god. Rather, they
choose to raise a child as an act of personal fulfillment. And they are
quickly fulfilled.
+
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The
human herd has been culled in the past by famine or plague. This time,
we are culling ourselves; we are choosing to become fewer. Will our
choice be permanent? The answer is: probably yes. Though governments
have sometimes been able to increase the number of children couples are
willing to have through generous child care payments and other supports,
they have never managed to bring fertility back up to the replacement
level of, on average, 2.1 children per woman needed to sustain a
population. Besides, such programs are extremely expensive and tend to
be cut back during economic downturns. And it is arguably unethical for a
government to try to convince a couple to have a child that they would
otherwise not have had.
As
we settle into a world growing smaller, will we celebrate or mourn our
diminishing numbers? Will we struggle to preserve growth or accept with
grace a world in which people both thrive and strive less? We don’t
know. But it may be a poet who observes that, for the first time in the
history of our race, humanity feels old.
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