The coming global depopulation

Demography is undoubtedly the most reliable foresight science. The future is essentially contingent, but the issue of inhabitants of a country in the coming decades is accurately predicted by the births that have been occurring in recent years. The declining birth rate, in many places with a fertility rate below replacement level (2.1 children per woman), suggests that later this century the world population will begin to decline after having reached its highest Issue Some UN experts place this turning point in the 2080s and others advance it to the 2060s. The world population will peak at about 10 billion people and then begin to shrink.

That horizon, really close, has often been pointed out. But it rarely goes beyond it. The book by economists and demographers Dean Spears and Michael Garuso, of the University of Texas, looks at what comes next. After the Spike' warns that the exponential population growth that humanity has known will be followed by an equally exponential decline. This, far from representing idyllic conditions in the face of current reports of overpopulation, will constitute a serious brake on the progress of the generations that will follow.

The book calls for an increase in the birth rate -voluntary, not coerced- so that the world population, in decline after reaching its peak, can stabilize at a figure not too far from the current one. However, he recognizes that if there is no drastic change in attitudes towards procreation - and it is not clear how this can happen - the destiny of humanity is that of a plummeting of the issue of inhabitants on the planet. And that is bad, very bad, as the authors go on to explain.

At the rate at which the fertility rate is falling, Spears and Garuso indicate that four-fifths of all the individuals who will ever be born in the history of mankind have already been born in the world. Since the first humans, some 120 billion people have been born on Earth (including the 8 billion of us who live today), so there are 'only' 30 billion more to be born until the estimated figure of 150 billion is reached (here we are not talking about extinction, but rather that smaller and smaller cohorts will add up to very little in this total).

Logically, these figures are not fixed and the authors are not tied to them because there are variables at play, but the coming population collapse is unquestionable. For the time being, from an upcoming peak of 10 billion people living simultaneously on the planet, in about three hundred years it will have dropped to 2 billion, if a rate of 1.6 children per adult couple is maintained, the average for the United States today. "Depopulation will come soon and it will happen quickly," say the authors, while warning that migration does not really play a role in this, since all societies will stop growing, including those with the highest birth rates in Africa.

Once the thesis , already advanced by Spears in an article published in 'The New York Times' in 2023, is exposed, the book devotes most of its space to defend the advantages of maintaining, if possible, a population Issue not very distant from the current one (they speak of achieving a 'stabilization' at some point in the fall), and to point out the risks of global depopulation, as the subtitle of the book remarks. The book is a plea in favor of the population, in clear opposition to the pessimistic proclamations that a few decades ago predicted catastrophes due to overpopulation, which have not occurred.

The authors argue that the material and technological progress we know today has only been possible thanks to the innovation contributed in a context of billions of people, and it is not clear that the line of progress will accelerate in the same way in the generations living in the coming centuries if there is a drastic reduction of gray mass ("populous is prosperous": "the relationship between people and prosperity is a virtuous circle of acceleration"). On the other hand, they argue that environmental problems cannot be solved with fewer inhabitants (progress in the reduction of polluting gases and in recycling is taking place when we are still heading towards the population peak). Likewise, the higher or lower birth rate in a given country has nothing to do with gender equality or inequality or the wage gap that women may suffer.

The work is weak when it makes its only moral argument, relying on a principle of what the authors call 'population ethics': "It is better if there are more good lives," they argue, because the quality of life has moved globally forward and it is a good wish that there are many more lives in the world, and above all that they be of good quality. It is certainly a nice wish, but it will hardly lead anyone to action.

This allusion to ethics contrasts with the absolute defense of abortion that is made throughout the book, without opening up to the possibility that certain values, including respect for the newly begotten life, could help to change the attitudes that the authors claim to want to promote (beyond the legality or not of the termination of pregnancy).

It is possible that Spears and Garuso intend to preserve their conviction that having more or fewer children depends only on what, in their internal regional law , parents want to do, without the coercion or economic incentives that many countries today offer to improve their birth rate seriously influencing the fertility rate. The ban on abortion in Ceaucescu's Romania or the opposite one-child policy in China may have changed the population size of these countries at a certain point in time, but neither affected the evolution of the fertility rate, which is declining in both places at rates comparable to those of countries in their geographical environment.

In the end, the authors point to the 'opportunity cost' hypothesis as the main reason for not wanting to have children or not increasing the issue of children one already has. Such are the comforts and the possibilities of staff projection and entertainment offered or promised by today's society, that prospective parents prefer not to risk these tangible goods by spending time and effort to take care of a new life.

Having reached this diagnosis, the book is incapable of offering solutions. It is true, as the authors conclude, that "there is no solution with a capital S", but little progress will be made if society does not make freely fashionable, as examples to imitate, the attractiveness of large families, the joy of motherhood and fatherhood, the beauty of generosity in the time dedicated to others... or the attitude of dismay in the face of abortion.