Eight Billion on 15th November, extinct by 5,400C.E.?

 

"Just your friends making reasonable choices"

The UN has named Tuesday as ‘Eight Billion Day’, see: 8 Billion Day 15 Nov 2022 - Population Matters. Clearly this is the forcing function for all our environmental problems (proportional to ‘N’) and a good many of our wars.

The best response to 8bn is to spread a pointed message: “if you don’t like your first two children, have a third”, and have smart, humane tax and migration policies. But I’ll save practical suggestions for another time (it would include a bollock tax for individuals like Boris Johnson and… *see below!).

Demographers are now seriously considering ‘peak human’ and started to map out various scenarios of decline – but all far enough away not to affect current economics. An exception is Elon Musk* Elon Musk IsTotally Wrong About Population Collapse, who is dead right about the collapse but only worried because it spoils his dream about him being the enabler of humankind’s expansion out of the Solar System (he’s dead wrong about that, see AMiTe page on this blog).

But the collapse, yes. I started thinking about this twenty years ago after many years business in Japan.  With a female friend experiencing professional sexism and ‘expectations’ around marriage, and making some consequent choices, I was interested-but-not-surprised to learn of the very low Total Fertility Rate in Japan and Korea and also noted the low Western Europe rate of 1.6. I did a thought-experiment extrapolation at the time and have been banging on about “the human race dying out in 5,400CE due to lack of interest!” ever since. See the graph above which I published in a scientific paper in Feb 2021 (see AMiTe page for its unusual context and link to the full paper).

TFR = 1.6 might sound impersonal but think of it in the following way. How about where your friendship group of [ten] all pair up, let’s say for life; four couples have 2 kids each (or 3,2,2,1), and one couple just decides not to. Ten parents, eight kids. That’s TFR of 1.6, just by your friends’ choices. Sound familiar? Try your siblings & cousins as a check. Repeat for a few generations. TFR = 1.6 is also the average of OECD countries and 40 countries are at that rate or below.

Those thinking that something will turn to reverse this trend had better sharpen up their arguments; Matt Reynolds deals with it pretty well in the Wired article using France as an example. See also my personal French famille nombreuse discount card below from 1995, another failed government attempt to stimulate breeding. This population collapse is an example of ‘de-Darwinization’ – departure from Natural Selection – a phenomenon implicitly recognised by Charles Darwin and explicitly by Daniel Dennett: see From Bacteriato Bach and Back, eg p148. Darwinian evolution and de-Darwinization neatly link two of the subjects of this blog!

Since bringing a child into the world is now, or is becoming, pretty much a matter of absolute choice, the driving force is individual happiness in a modern (constrained) society rather than Natural Selection.  

But there’s plenty of time before my log graph reaches the ‘last humans’ – over 3,000 more seasons of the Premier League and Strictly Come Dancing. I included the population graph in the AMiTe paper to show that, while there isn’t likely to be time enough for humans to reach the Stars, there’s plenty of time to get the technology right to get the Stars to come to us.

My discount card from 1995 - valid for two children!