I discovered last week that if one wants hundreds of likes and retweets on Twitter, one can do worse than to tweet this:
“Inexplicable drop in birthrates for generation systematically denied healthcare, affordable education and even the smallest prospect of economic security.”
…in response to this.
Of course, I was joking. Well, half-joking. What’s going on here isn’t merely an expression of the hopelessness of the current generation. It’s part of a longer trend, one oddly absent from Western SF: the demographic transition.
As the article notes, “The rate has generally been below replacement since 1971.” This isn’t unique to the United States. It’s part of a general process that demographer Warren Thompson noted as far back as 1929, in which economic transformation is accompanied by a demographic change. Nations go from high birth and death rates to low death and birth rates1. When birth rates fall far enough, populations decline.
Which is what seems to be happening across the planet, irrespective of nationality, religion, or culture2. The world as a whole seems to have passed Peak Child (the year in which the number of children peaked) back in 2011. Indeed, current projections suggest the entire world will see below-replacement level fertility rates at some point during the current century. Some models (some, not all) even suggest that world population in 2100 could be lower than it is now. What’s a reality in a handful of nations like Japan at the current moment could3 become the world’s reality. Note that there’s no need for any dramatic calamity like a plague or nuclear accident for this to happen. All that is needed is for shared economic conditions to convince billions of people to make similar rational choices4.
Now, someone might say “gradual population decline rooted in low-key, mundane causes doesn’t sound very dramatic.” Nobody wants undramatic novels; why else is there that mecha fight at the end of Pride and Prejudice? But processes which are themselves spectacularly undramatic can have very dramatic results. Erosion, for example, may not be interesting to watch but given time it can produce results like this:
A world where the entire planet had experienced the fifth stage of the demographic transition would be rather different than today’s. It would be a world in which young people would have become a smaller—possibly much smaller—fraction of the dwindling population, while the proportion of old people would have increased.
Perhaps the logical consequence of a modern economy and self-interested human behavior would be total human extinction. In some ways that would be a pity—but sound economic decisions must, of course, take priority over lesser concerns. (Thank goodness that automation may enable the economy to keep going without us.)
One would think that such a process (enormous, world-wide, moving like a glacier, slow but unstoppable) should make for enthralling fiction. For the most part, however, it hasn’t.
A few examples of demographic transition fiction do come to mind.
- In Natsuhiko Kyogoku’s SF novel Loups-Garous, the combination of a low birth rate and a world in which communication is increasingly limited to online contact leads to a cohort of teenagers who are unsure how to interact with each other in the real world. The protagonists must overcome their social anxiety and clumsiness if they are to catch a serial killer.
- Hiroshi Yamamoto’s The Stories of Ibis (translated by Takami Nieda) is a collection of short pieces that explain how the Earth transitions from a crowded, human-dominated world to one where a handful of humans persist in a world that belongs to intelligent machines. Many humans believe they live in the aftermath of a robo-apocalypse, but as the book makes clear, the robots are hardly to blame.
- In Xia Jia’s “Tongtong’s Summer” (translated by Ken Liu), a surfeit of the elderly challenges even high tech methods of providing them with a humane environment. Even multiplying the labour force with telefactoring has its limits. It takes a single old man, presented with a new companion, to see one possible answer.
Buy the Book
The Warrior Within
Note that most5 of these works are Japanese. In 2010, Japan’s population was 128,551,873. It’s currently 127,185,332. That’s testimony to what one can do with low birth rates and negligible immigration rates6. But it is only an extreme example of a general phenomenon.
There are books like The Handmaid’s Tale and Greybeard in which populations are declining, thanks to environmentally-driven infertility, but aside from Charles Stross’ Saturn’s Children, I am hard pressed to think of any Western SF that explores the implications of the demographic transition7.
This seems peculiar. There are whole schools of SF that have fun playing with different possibilities and ideas. Just not this idea. I can easily name more books that delve into the implications of wormholes, which probably do not exist, and faster than light travel, which most definitely does not, than I can books dealing with the demographic transition, whose effects are all around us. Isn’t that bizarre?
1: The intermediate stages can involve lower death rates without a proportionate fall in birth rates, during which the population increases markedly. It’s a veritable boom in baby-making. Someone should come up with a catchy term for it…
2: Ob-disclaimer: currently, Africa is an exception. Other regions that were exceptions no longer are. Some might argue that until Africa undergoes its own demographic transition, we should not assume that it will, in fact, do so. I cannot see what factors would make Africa immune to a process we have seen elsewhere.
3: See that “could”? Not “will”—could.
4: There doesn’t seem to be a magic bullet to reverse these trends, either, although governments have tried both persuasion and thuggish autocracy. I’d be happier at the failure of Decree 770 if I thought people would take a lesson from its failure. Alas, pointless cruelty is the first solution that occurs to humans faced with any problem, particularly if the victims are women. Women are, as many of you may know, widely considered to play a role in birthrates. The idea that they might play a voluntary role appears to be anathema to some.
Something that can at least delay population decline is life extension. If, for example, someone invented a real-world analog of James Blish’s anagathics, then people would stop dying. If babies kept being born, the population would grow. Worse of all, we’d be stuck listening to the Greatest Hits of the 1960s until the Sun burned out.
5: Xia Jia is the exception, being Chinese. China has its own looming demographic challenges, although these are not at present as plain as Japan’s.
6: Canada has very low domestic Canadian production rates, preferring to import foreign-built new Canadians. This is a functional short-term strategy, but what exactly will happen when every nation on the planet experiences low birthrates is an interesting question, particularly if economies have converged? If the Canadian economy becomes unremarkable in a global context, how to convince people to overlook our horrible climate? Just another good reason to pump more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in hopes of a return to the good old days of the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. I am happy to report great strides in this field.
7: The main exception being…how to put this nicely? Wildly racist Eurabian nonsense feeding a certain tendency’s racial paranoia that the Wrong People are having too many kids. It’s essentially just recycled 19th century yellow menace nonsense.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviewsand Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
Interestingly, it was common in the 1930s to expect really dramatic falls in population in European countries. I’ve got a copy of a book from 1936 on how Britain should defend itself, and among all the discussion of maritime trade, air bases, alliances and so on is a bit about demographics; by 1970, the author reckoned, the UK’s population would have fallen from 45 million to between 30 and 35 million. (Which would obviously have effects for defence because of the falling number of potential soldiers.) In fact, it had risen to 55 million…
The UK, like Canada, has a below-replacement TFR for its native population; the population is growing because of immigration.
It’s been a few years, well, decades, since I read it, but doesn’t “Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang” deal with this?
Really Interesting Article
I certainly think there should be more books on this issue – given that it’s a problem that’s going to get bigger in our society. I guess there’s still the taboo about ageing/dying.
Couple of Thoughts:
1. The book you haven’t mentioned is Children of Men by P.D. James which also looks at a world that becomes infertile. That really digs into the issue. For me this book really brought out the idea – that it’s children that help us build the better world, when there are no children it becomes very easy to focus on yourself.
2. The wealth/Africa example (I’m from South Africa). I’ve heard the argument that it’s wealthier countries that have less children, so is the feeling of being economically deprived the driver of low birthrates when compared to Africa they’re not deprived. So I think this needs digging into. – Another Aspect of the Africa population growth is the mindset around children. In many African cultures children are seen in more utilitarian way – e.g. they will have jobs and provide for me in my old age
As I recall, the fall in birth rates was due to environmental factors. SF where pollution or perfectly reasonable nuclear testing sterilizes the population is easy enough to find. It’s specifically demographic transition related material that I am unaware of.
There’s Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts, where Earth’s population is indeed declining, largely off-stage to the main plot. Until it turns around and starts to rise again, which is a very worrying sign of [Spoilers].
While granting this is just a model, consider the low population scenario in this UN report.
https://preview.tinyurl.com/ybg34w5c
Without the need of a nuclear war (A Fond Farewell to Dying), genetically engineered sterility plague(The Emortality series), or the distraction of really hot looking aliens (And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side), population has declined from its 21st century peak to about 2.3 billion people. That’s a pretty dramatic change. It’s a world where 2/3rd of the housing built a few centuries before was presumably abandoned.
There are very few ways to write interestingly about how white men freak out about population decline, because that is what population decline will involve in the west. It will be about white makes having a freak out and trying to strip rights from women while chuntering on about their right to have sex and how brown people are taking over. If I want to see that then I will flick over to the news.
Honestly, this is a sign of hope — until recently, we’ve been worried about overpopulation, and “population decline” feels very much like humanity naturally adjusting to head off a Malthusian apocalypse. There’s some good fiction yet to be written about the adjustments society would need to make to be able to deal with periods of both increasing and decreasing population, to stabilize the Earth at a sustainable level.
And then interstellar colonization would throw all of that into a cocked hat, presumably….
You might want to take a look at this paper:
“Demography for the Public: Literary Representations of Population Research and Policy”
by Alaka M. Basu
https://devsoc.cals.cornell.edu/sites/devsoc.cals.cornell.edu/files/shared/demography%20for%20the%20public.pdf
Is it just me or does the option to link to stuff come and go?
Sue at 8 beat me to it.
7: It’s been years since I read the books but I think part of the backstory to the Cassandra Kresnov books is a group of white people from Europe and the Americas freaking out about economic convergence (in particular that the center of the human economy is in Asia) heading out into deep space to found the Republic Of Inordinate Jerkface TechBros, which is the antagonist to the most conservative Earth-centric community (which is actually fairly liberal by current terrestrial standards).
8: I don’t know how interstellar colonization is supposed to work in scenarios where humans have a long term decline in population. Sure, the possibility of economic improvement could draw people out but the communities they found would be dependent on imported people, which only works as long as there are people to import.
OK, there is the Azi option…
8 + 11 But I invested time thinking about trillion human Earths. Now what am I to do with all that effort? Even MegaCity Toronto, a bucolic community of half a billion stretching from Detroit to Quebec City, might be unworkable due to a lack of people to inhabit it.
@12/James Davis Nicoll: For interstellar colonisation, cherry-pick people who want to have many children.
On a more general note, population decline may be a temporary phenomenon, as temporary as rapid population growth.
On the plus side, I don’t know that I particularly want to read about conditions in a MCT in a dozen steps down the Lastman > Ford progression.
I read something recently that placed it in perspective – that in some ways we are returning to our original population equilibrium, but mirroring it from a different angle. For much of human history (stage 1 of those demographic transitions), human population has been relatively stable – only slowly rising to a billion by 1800 or so (as opposed to the progressively more rapid accumulation of each billion after that. This was because of high mortality – high death rates matching high birth rates so that populations only increased slowly over time. Large families (as in large surviving families) were something of an anomaly in human history – the product of intermediate demographic stages of transition. Now, we are returning to that, but from low fertility as opposed to high mortality – low birth rates matching low death rates.
The base cause would appear to be women having priorities other than reproducing but the increasing distress over infertility suggest the problem may be delay rather than disinterest. Reversing the timing, children first then career, for bothe sexes since a present father is an advantage, could be one answer….a society of three generation families with tbe grandparents as breadwinners?
Maybe there are so few books about population decline because the global population is still increasing – and estimated to be around the 11 billion mark by 2100. The actual demographics might make some people uncomfortable, but there is no likelihood of humanity dying out in the near future.
Personally (largely for environmental reasons) I would be happier of the global population was around half its current level.
‘When birth rates fall far enough, populations decline.’
You say this as if it is a bad thing? The 700 non human species currently facing extinction would disagree.
However, as wiredog mentions, Kate Wilhelm’s ‘Where late the sweet birds sang’ addresses this and is classic read well worth revisiting.
…but the author of this article is right, I would love to read a moden take on this theme.
14: worst case scenario is it drops to zero. Other factors will then prevent it from getting lower. Or perhaps when the population gets low enough, the global economy will simply collapse and a few centuries later the whole cycle will start again.
Or maybe the poor robots will get stuck with the job of trying to keep humans around, as in Charles Stross’ series.
One of the homebrew rpg campaigns I’ve never run is a setting where the synchronizing event that explains why every alien civilization has the same tech level is that humans explored the entire galaxy, spreading high tech in their wake [1] , then retreated back to Earth as their numbers fell. By the modern era, humans are essentially an endangered species, a handful extremely high tech hermits who are rather uncooperative when helpful aliens try to jumpstart breeding programs little inhibited by detailed knowledge of how human biology works. Basically, “what if pandas were not cute but did have nuclear weapons and also possibly roving killbots?”
1: I imagine there was a great filter effect as worlds failed to survive going from the stone age to the nuclear age in a few centuries. Humans are, for our fault, actually pretty good at not collapsing into violent conflict at the drop of a hat. At least compared to chimps. And ants…
@Ajay
Also postwar Britain explicitly encouraged significant immigration from the colonies in response to labour shortages in the homeland. Historically there has always been more emigration than immigration in the UK, going back to the 1800s, but the demographics of those coming in tend to be different to the ones going out – individual workers vs entire families. In the colonies it tends to be the reverse – the young people have made their fortune and are returning to raise families.
Combine that with the massive increases in caloric intake and decreases in infant mortality from 1945-1975, and it’s no wonder the population boomed.
18: I’m not saying 2.3 billion person Earth would be a bad place, just a very different place.
17: Ethan of Athos seems relevant, in that because Athos is forced to track all the costs of getting a person from sperm and egg to useful adult rather than assuming women will be willing and available to do all that essentially for free, Athos has to work to maintain its population. For various reasons, immigration to Athos is fairly low and can be ignored as far as maintaining population.
Probably because people see the opposite problem (i.e. population overgrowth). I personally can’t see any reason for the population to decrease naturally, especially given the large percentage of poverty in the world. So you get your classic sff books where humans have to colonize other planets because the Earth couldn’t hold the population anymore.
Asimov deals with this somewhat in his Robot Trilogy (starting with Caves of Steel). The planet Solaria comes to mind. The entire planet is automated and the very few humans live separate lives from each other on vast estates. They have very small populations because robots do everything. It’s a cold and strange world. It’s been a while but I don’t even think they have sex, automation is used for breeding too.
A key issue with sub-replacement birthrates — as Japan is finding out, the hard way — is that it skews the ratio of working-age adults to dependents (children and pensioners) heavily towards dependents. So workers have to be more productive to support the same total population, or retire later in life. It also correlates with deflationary economics: the shortfall in growth of the Japanese economy since 1990 is apparently attributable almost entirely to the declining birth rate leading to a shrinking labour force (per an article in The Economist I read lo these many years ago in a paper edition). Also, there’s a delayed knock-on effect on real estate prices for housing: you have smaller family groups so need more small homes but you have fewer family groups overall, by and by, so house prices will eventually slump (except in hot-spots that are socially desirable, e.g. capital cities).
The deflationary issues may be a non-issue if AI and robots come along in time to shoulder the workload and condemn us all to a worthless life of idleness, vice, and hedonism, but the policies of our current crop of kindly neoliberal oligarchs (“work or die! Welfare is for layabouts! Get out of that wheelchair and pick up a shovel, or starve!”) lead to a glut of cheap labour which drives prices down further …
So some aspects of our global future may come to resemble Weimar Germany (especially if, in the fullness of time, deflation-obsessed rulers forget the lessons of the past about why not to print money until the presses glow red-hot and we end up with hyperinflation a la 1923, as opposed to it’s 2008 bizarro-world clone, “quantitative easing”).
@20/James Davis Nicoll: How could it ever drop to zero? There will always be people who’ll have children because they love children. With birth control and with no more need to have children to care for you in your old age, these will make up a higher percentage of parents. Perhaps this trait is passed on genetically. In this case, there will be more and more of them in each new generation, with the result that population decline will be temporary after all.
I personally can’t see any reason for the population to decrease naturally, especially given the large percentage of poverty in the world.
Because around the planet, Africa currently excepted, total fertility rates have declined to or below replacement levels.
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
It’s pretty straightforward: if each cohort produces fewer babies than there are people in the cohort, when the cohort dies of old age, population will be lower.
“Drop to zero” is the extreme but it’s interesting in fiction to look at extreme cases. What if the population growth rate actually went infinite (as some simple models suggested it would)? What if humans died out completely thanks to simple economic prudence? Well, for one thing it would easier to find parking in the second scenario than in the first (which presumably involves a sphere of human flesh expanding at the speed of light.).
I wonder how much effect the belief that the Earth is full has on birthrates. Would an off-world colony have higher birthrates because they figure there’s more space?
What about John Ringo’s Council Wars books? IIRC, they’re way past that demographic transition happening world-wide, specifically call it out, and are about the result of a fanatic seeing the ‘inevitable’ extinction of the human race due to it.
@24, Solarians have sex but they hate it. They are working towards a future without reproductive sex but haven’t managed it yet.
I love this discussion and am only commenting so it shows up in my conversations, I don’t have anything new to add right now.
Dealing with demographics correctly is apparently difficult since so many fictional works get it wrong (for example: Star Trek: Insurrection has a small, apparently constant population of near-immortals – who have a large proportion of children around). Asimov even blunders a bit in The Naked Sun, since Solaria has
1) A constant population of 20,000 – births are regulated to keep the population from growing (and in fact, the real danger seems to be population decline)
2) A very healthy population, with lifespan greatly in excess of “normal” (Baley meets a woman of 33 and notes that from what he knows of Spacers, she could just as easily be 133 – in later books, lifespans of 300 are mentioned, but not specifically in this book)
3) 15-20 live births per month (presumably “Standard” months).
The problem with this is that with a constant population birth rate=death rate, and 180-240 deaths per 20,000 per year is way too high for a long-lived people (it’s fairly close to modern American death rates, where the life expectancy is (sadly) much less than 250 or even 133). I suppose it’s possible that children are dying off at a great rate on Solaria (given how they raise the children (very little human contact) I suppose that’s possible), but since this issue is never mentioned, it just seems that Asimov missed this aspect.
Yes, well. Asimov had blind spots where population was concerned. I’ll give him a pass on the wildly crowded world of Caves of Steel (because the planet is not crowded, only the cities into which people have crammed themselves, which makes perfect sense from a Canadian perspective [1].). Trantor, on the other hand, has so much floor space the effective population density is less than Canada’s. Someone on Trantor could wander the corridors for months without seeing someone else.
1: Which is to say, experienced population density is higher the national average would suggest. Canada is bigger than the USA with one ninth the population. For the country considered as a whole, low population density. But the population isn’t evenly distributed. Most of us live in a semi-habitable strip roughly the area of the island of Hawaii and within that region, population densities are much higher. The average Canadian experiences a population density higher than the national average.
@@@@@ 17 – I always find it curious that we frame the conversation around fertility mainly around women. I understand why since women actually give birth (which is obviously VERY important to the discussion), but many women I know want children and would be happy to have them younger but have not found a male partner who is of a similar mind. Of course, women can choose the single motherhood route, but in my experience that is more often forced upon women than chosen since most women are aware that raising children requires an immense amount of work that is much easier with support. I have started seeing billboards around where I live (Charlotte, NC area) encouraging fatherhood. I believe the purpose of this is to encourage fathers who already have children to be more present in their lives, but I wonder why no one encourages men to be fathers at younger ages either. My husband and I are the same age (28) and have 2 kids, and we are the youngest of our educated friends to have kids on purpose. In our nightly haze of exhaustion, we always wonder how our friends will manage this when they are close to 40 and ostensibly need more rest.
All this to say, I was happy to see you mention men also having kids before reaching the pinnacle of their career. I know everyone feels differently about these things, but I am so happy that my parents were relatively young when I was born (29 and 30) because they are now highly involved grandparents with the energy and health to keep up with my very active toddler son. My in-laws are wonderful people, but my father-in-law is 68 and starting to experience age-related health problems. This is what convinced my husband to have kids earlier; he didn’t want to be an old dad. I am wondering if we will see a shift within the next 10 years or so of families starting to have children younger, at least in the US, since I think the issue of declining fertility with age is starting to weigh more heavily on people’s minds as the older millennials struggle to have children, then realize their parents are now too old to help care for those children.
I think most reasonable people agree men are best used in 100 hr/week work environments, which leaves a good 68 hours a week to socialize with their kids. Unfortunately, a lot of people waste their spare time on activities like eating or sleep: seven hours of sleep a night is 49 hours a week! Probably the only thing keeping the men from a more prudent one hour a night is lack of moral fibre.
We _could_ try to rearrange work life so the men had more time to devote to their family lives (giving men parental leave) but any mitigation policy not based in wildly vindictive punishment is nothing less than wild-eyed socialism. It would be more reasonable to simply arrange lengthy prison terms for men who fail to make 100 hrs of work a week + 49 hours of sleep + 100 hours of family activity/week work.
There’s an example in Star Trek, of all things; several of the “relaunch” novels (those set after the ends of DS9/Voyager/TNG) involve the Andorian reproductive crisis, brought on by narrowing reproductive windows (between puberty and menopause), with several Andorian characters basically being required by law to give up their careers in the name of raising families.
Somehow type A personalities became the norm instead of the exception. Men used to be able to balance work and family, and yes men have to balance those things too even when married to a stay at home wife and mother. Nobody gets to ‘have it all’. At least not all at the same time.
As lifespans and healthy adulthood lengthen we can start thinking about living multiple lives instead of just one. Of switching focus from family to work and back again over decades. But that’s going to mean changing a lot about how we think and and our culture starting with the worship of youth over age.
A quick google reveals that there are a number of factors in population decline – ie, that although certain countries are below replacement levels, their population will continue to increase in the short to medium term; not simply because of immigration but because of ‘population momentum’. My original understanding was that global population would stabilise at around ten billion, so maybe eleven billion+ would constitute the peak?
I think a drama on BBC radio about an old man whose resentment of a robot carer companion is transcended by an odd-couple relationship between man and machine was either a thought-provoking play or a half-hour situation comedy series, but I don’t remember which. It may be a figment of my imagination. The nearest similar example of dramatised nonhuman companionship whose existence I am sure of is “When the Dog Dies”, which it doesn’t.
Another present vision of the future is BBC’s programme archive broadcasts on “Radio 4 Extra”, where most of the people you hear are dead, or in such a fragile state that the excitement of the extremely modest repeat fee sees them off. I’m not sure what this really means about the future of humanity, but if Robinette Broadhead can have a synthetic Albert Einstein as best friend, you could certainly have an Orson Welles – if you wanted to.
I seem to recall that the humans in Simak’s “City” dwindle dramatically because humans stop reproducing (a bunch also leave the planet, but the remaining ones lose all interest in carrying on the species).
Current trends of population decline, other than depopulation due to wars, disease or natural disasters, is drive to westerm model of middle class prosperity level and combination of women working (now necessary for comfortable level of living for married couple), ongoing expectation that women still take most if not all burden of rearing children, and decline of multigenerational close knit families, where retired grandparents were expected to take on, for free, most of babysitting duties. When those trends are ameliorated, population start to increase (France right before migration crisis). Women have to wait longer to have children, in order to establish a decent career, since 3-6 month break early on in career during early twenties will delay your career for years to come. Those are the years to work extra hard, crazy overtimes, get promotions, etc and just happen to councide with most fertile years of child-bearing. During thirties, your career is more or less established, you are considered senior associate to manager type, your work hours become flexible, thus you have opportunity to have your children without affecting your career much. (Unless going to senior management counts). Thirties is also when fertility declines and other bad staff comes up. Most studies also shown that birth defects and autism in children mostly appear from older parents.
Western society prosperity is build on male career model, having less children and later, is sacrifice women had to made to adopt to inflexible career path jury rigged for males.
College education requirement didn’t help. How many males made it big without going to college or dropping out of college? 30%? How many women made it big without college degree or inheritance? Zero? That delays it too.
Gradual depopulation due to those reasons is not romantic, sexy, awful nor crazy, thus not interesting enough to be put in fiction, as compared to impact of quick depopulation within short period of time due to some kind of disaster.
Kate Wilhelm wrote a vivid book on population decline years ago: Where late the sweet birds sang.
It involves cloning as a stopgap tactic, raising interesting questions about how humanity as we know it is constructed socially in ways that could change dramatically under changed circumstances.
i haven’t read it for years— as a teenager I found it terrifying. But I also remember thinking it was very thought provoking,
Inexplicable drop in birthrates for generation systematically denied healthcare, affordable education and even the smallest prospect of economic security.
So the idea is that you got lots of likes from people with no understanding of fertility rates, based on an erroneous argument? Good for you.
What’s going on here isn’t merely an expression of the hopelessness of the current generation.
It has, in general, almost nothing at all to do with “the hopelessness of the current generation”, as you demonstrate in the next few paragraphs. So why bother suggesting it does?
@@@@@ 27:
Because around the planet, Africa currently excepted, total fertility rates have declined to or below replacement levels.
You have to ignore most of Latin America], almost all of the Middle East, and much of South Asia in order to make that claim.
In general, much SF shies away from specifying exactly which category of human does the non-glamour work, and how necessary care work is distributed. It is also hard to find SF novels that address how societies change their distribution of non-glamour work and care work. And as for the real-life demographic transition, children have shifted from being potential laborers in an agrarian society to being expenses in highly technological and highly competitive societies. I don’t think that it is a huge surprise that a certain proportion of women are reproductive refuseniks, and that the majority of women see that they can only afford one or two children. Childbearing and childrearing are instances in which individual women take the risks and the society reaps the benefits.
cstross @25:
It also correlates with deflationary economics: the shortfall in growth of the Japanese economy since 1990 is apparently attributable almost entirely to the declining birth rate leading to a shrinking labour force (per an article in The Economist I read lo these many years ago in a paper edition).
So how does that work with all the other advanced (mostly European) nations that have similarly low fertility rates but did not end up with something like the Japanese post-1990 malaise?
a glut of cheap labour which drives prices down further …
So some aspects of our global future may come to resemble Weimar Germany…
So, you’re saying that cheap labor will lead to lower prices, which will then lead to hyperinflation. That really doesn’t make much sense.
As far as I can recall, the frame story–though it runs throughout the entire book–of Michel Houellebecq’s “The Possibility of An Island” depicts a future that came about largely as a result of catastrophic population decline (in typically misanthropic Houellebecq fashion). Pretty hauntingly done, too–though it’s been a while since I read it.
This post is making me think about what Jo Walton calls ‘cosy catastrophes.’ Getting a world in which things are better because now all the wrong people are gone.
https://www.tor.com/2009/10/14/who-read-cosy-catastrophes/
James: in your last footnote that should be “yellow peril”. It was the Reds that were a Menace.
There’s a story in Dangerous Visions, I think, where it’s posited that children from birth to four or five don’t use much of the resources, so the count starts at about five, leading to lots of births and cute babies, but a dearth of older children, as the parents get tired of them.
@44 Peter Irwin: You have to ignore most of Latin America], almost all of the Middle East, and much of South Asia in order to make that claim.
Latin America has an average fertility rate of about 2.1. The Middle East 2.8. Southeast Asia 2.3. Here’s where I’m getting the numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate
Where are you getting yours?
About Asimov’s Robot Novels. I think his idea is that while we are drawn to the company of other people, we also find other people to be a bit irritating. Having practical needs like having to work together as well as needing to have someone to split the rent makes the balance come out in favor of living as part of a community instead of retreating to a cave. But once you have 10,000 robots to maintain a private 25,000 acre estate in park-like condition with a design-to-order house, and once you are still able to interact with others through a 3D holographic imaging system that convincingly simulates physical presence, then you begin to feel less of a need for actual physical presence, and eventually the actual physical presence of others begins to seem a bit icky – partly a symptom of territoriality, and partly a symptom of becoming abstracted from one’s own physicality. Then when you finally succeed in creating humaniform and highly responsive Sexbots, it’s all over.
I hear the Japanese are creating robots to keep their elderly company. I wonder if they are on a similar path – next creating robots to keep the kids occupied, and then creating robots for the adults to complain about work to, and finally Sexbots to replace the husband/wife with.
So how does that work with all the other advanced (mostly European) nations that have similarly low fertility rates but did not end up with something like the Japanese post-1990 malaise?
First, here’s an article explaining the point – not the print article Charlie remembers, but one from 2015 along similar lines. https://theweek.com/articles/589197/why-cant-japan-shake-economic-malaise-two-words-old-people
The answer to your question is simple: those European countries still have a much higher proportion of working-age people than Japan does. Here is data from the OECD: https://data.oecd.org/pop/working-age-population.htm
If you roll over each line you’ll see which country it represents. Japan’s population is much less working age and much more elderly than pretty much any other advanced economy (though not actually that much less fertile, at 1.5 TFR vs average 1.7). Those European nations have similarly low fertility rates but that hasn’t yet fed through into low working-age populations, in part because European nations are far better at taking in immigrants than Japan is.
And, to add to that: note also how fast Japan’s working-age population declined. The malaise seems worse because it came suddenly after decades of rapid growth.
Bruce A Munro @51
Latin America has an average fertility rate of about 2.1. The Middle East 2.8. Southeast Asia 2.3. Here’s where I’m getting the numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate
Where are you getting yours?
From the link that James provided as evidence for his claim. Specifically, from the 2015 numbers for total fertility rate (the “Children born per woman” graphic). It has, for example, four South American countries at or below the replacement rate (Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Uruguay), with the other eight above (ranging from Venezuela’s 2.34 to French Guiana’s 3.36). Of the Central American countries, two are at or below replacement rate (Costa Rica and El Salvador), while the others are higher (ranging from 2.21 for Mexico to 3.03 for Guatemala).
I don’t know whether that page (which says that it gets its data from the UN World Population Prospects) is more or less accurate than the various estimates on the Wikipedia page you link to. I will point out that both 2.3 and 2.8 are larger than 2.1 (the usual figure given for the replacement rate), not “at or below”, as James suggested.
(Also, I was referring to South Asia, not Southeast Asia. The estimates for South Asia on the Wikipedia page you link to range from 2.4 to 2.6; the extreme case for South Asia is Afghanistan, with estimates from 4.3 to 5.3.)
ajay @@@@@ 55:
Thanks for the links.
But, looking at the OECD data, I see that Germany’s working-age population fraction began declining even earlier than Japan’s (starting around 1987), and has continued to decline. In fact, Japan’s working-age fraction remained higher than that of Germany (and Belgium, France, Denmark, Finland, and several other European countries) up until about 2004 or 2005.
I can believe that the continued decline in working-age fraction in Japan might explain part of why it’s had trouble recovering in the last decade or decade and a half. But Charlie’s claim was that the “the shortfall in growth of the Japanese economy since 1990 is apparently attributable almost entirely to the declining birth rate leading to a shrinking labour force”, which is hard to square with the fact that several European countries with even smaller labor forces, and declines in labor forces that started earlier, didn’t suffer continued economic stagnation in the 1990s or early 2000s.
Similarly, the “elderly people are a terribly unproductive burden on the economy” argument that The Week article advances is plausible, but… Germany’s “65 and older” fraction is currently 21%, midway between the US’s 15% and Japan’s 27%. Shouldn’t Germany’s economy be showing signs of the Japanese malaise? (The article in question doesn’t address this because it only compares Japan and the US, ignoring other countries entirely.)
58: those are all really good questions! And I don’t know the answers.
Sorry if by skipping right to the bottom of the comment section I miss something relevant to my post, but: world population is in decline? This is spectacularly good news! Doomsayers have been telling me for years we’re going to overpopulate the planet, and now this issue is almost miraculously curing itself. That is the best news since I heard the ozone layer was growing back.
@50: Lee Hoffman’s “Soundless Evening”, from Again, Dangerous Visions. But the characters don’t “get tired” of children; euthanasia is required at age 5, before the children start taking up too many resources. (The story tells us a proportional rule is applied to kittens.) In other words, it’s an especially grim variant on people-are-having-too-many-children — not surprising given that Hoffman was of the same generation as many SF writers who took that theme (Silverberg’s urban monads, Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room!, Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar…).
When I was listening to all the old sf radio shows I could find, I was a bit surprised how many of them were about evil (or sometimes, super) children. Later, it became clear this seemed to track the Baby Boom: evil kids of the 1950s became evil teens a decade later and evil university students by the time books like Kampus came out. Now I wonder, was this childless SF authors reacting to their friends’ kids or parents reacting to their own?
Say, why was Simak’s Cemetery World so empty?
@62 Maybe not reacting to any specific kids but reflecting a general anxiety about the influence that generation would wield due its sheer size. As in, the ones they know personally are great but what about the rest?
I’m sure a crisis of masculinity was also involved.
@61,
Thanks- I was blanking on the author.
cecrow @@@@@ 60:
world population is in decline?
No, it’s still increasing. It’s the rate of increase which is in decline (and has been for a while).
The most recent UN projection forecasts a population of about 11 billion by 2100, with peak population not yet reached.
As this document shows, even if fertility rates instantly went to and stayed at the replacement level, the global population would still increase to about 9 billion before stabilizing, because the current global population is strongly biased towards younger ages.
58: Charlie’s claim was that the “the shortfall in growth of the Japanese economy since 1990 is apparently attributable almost entirely to the declining birth rate leading to a shrinking labour force”
Yes, and I think that the “almost entirely” is the problem here. He should have said “partly”. Look at this here:
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/japanese-relative-performance/
So you have two things going wrong with Japan after 1990. You have a real and serious decline in output per working-age adult in the 1990s. That’s obviously not a demographic effect. That’s about the after-effect of an absolutely tremendous debt crisis, compounded by mismanagement by the governments of the time. Companies go bankrupt and their workers lose their jobs, or companies are unable to get funding to invest in training and equipment; that makes output per worker fall. It would happen whatever Japan’s demographics were.
And then, as Japan starts to recover and its output per worker grows again, the number of workers keeps dropping. Demographics made the 1990s slump worse and they’re counteracting the recovery in the 2000s and 2010s. Demographics aren’t great for a lot of other countries either, but those countries didn’t have a massive debt crisis in the early 1990s so they aren’t doing as badly.
I hope that helps.
Peter @58: “As of 2014, about 16.3 million people with an immigrant background were living in Germany, accounting for every fifth person.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Germany#1993-present.) Whereas Japan actively makes it very hard to immigrate, meaning their supply of new workers is constrained by the native birth rate, the German economy relies on immigration to maintain a supply of workers. If you poke around the wikipedia piece on the demographics of Germany, the age “pyramid” is more like an age football — fat in the middle, balanced on a point at the bottom and tapering a bit less sharply at the top.
69: all that is true, but Peter’s point was about the working-age fraction of the population.
Japan had more of its total population working than Germany right through the 1990s, as you can see from the OECD figures. Whether those were native-born workers or immigrant workers is irrelevant; it still means that, whatever happened to Japan in the 1990s, it couldn’t have been solely because Japan didn’t have enough of its population working. Japan dips below the OECD average in the early 2000s and just keeps on going down.
As I say, what you’ve got in Japan is two problems; a huge financial crisis and the aftermath in the 1990s, which had run its course by the early 2000s, and a steady, steep and continuing decline in the working-age share of the population that started in 1990 and is still going on.
Despite Germany’s openness to immigration, meanwhile, it’s been seeing a steady (but less steep) decline since the 1990s as well. The problem here may be that, well, all those immigrants started coming in the 1950s and 1960s, and now they have got to retirement age…
ajay @67:
Yes, that’s a more plausible account of things; thanks.
69, 70: Do the statistics about Germany count Gastarbeiter, or only citizens? It seemed to me that there – as well as where I am, the United Kingdom – the government promised to import people who would work for citizens, and be repatriated when they ceased to work. Whether or not this repatriation would actually happen. It seems ungrateful.
The United States, I gather, has a large population of non-citizens, semi-officially recognised as permanent.
I’m aware that I was born in privilege, compared to most other people on this planet at the same time, and that doesn’t seem to me a right thing. But I do not have enough of a sense of what to do about that, to do anything.
@72/ Robert Carnegie,
” The United States, I gather, has a large population of non-citizens, semi-officially recognized as permanent.”
If you call about 3% of the population a lot.
I am a fan of the BBC news, but I imagine it gives you a slightly skewed version of the U.S. You might have a bit more luck with PBS/NPR, New York Times, and Washington Post. Which all have slants and biases of their own of course.
I imagine that it is difficult for me in the U.S. to get a balanced view of the United Kingdom and Europe as well, especially given that I’m not sufficiently interested to access the local newspapers or similar sources.
I was also born into privilege, just to be living on the West Coast of California, instead of … wherever. I think we do well just to have an attitude of gratitude, and to recognize what difficult circumstances many other people have to contend with. Of course, if we are also blessed with finances well in excess of our needs, we can think about how we might be helpful. But personally I don’t have that problem ( or opportunity).
@72 Any population of non-citizens in the US is transitory. They may not be citizens or even legal residents but their children will be. It would take a constitutional amendment or incredibly wrong Supreme Court ruling for the children for guest or temporary workers not to get citizenship.
Check out “But What of Earth” by Piers Anthony
World population is still increasing.
Population decline is in industrialized countries.
For the most part ONLY MEN seem to be concerned.
Women like controlling their own bodies.
I believe all these facts are related
In other words, I think this is a first world, white guy issue.
The realities of the world are mostly opposite of what current novels portray and most indoctrinated people, especially youth, are told. Humans became concerned about the environment and the reality is humans have worked for hundreds of years to improve the environment with great success. Just as any caretaking, the work is never completed, can always be improved, but the work is ongoing a n d successful. Part of that has been the reproduction decrease. There were active discussions 60 years ago to limit population and those have worked. The reality is that humans are taking good care of the planet, are not overpopulating, and the world is not ending. All this apocalypse fiction is just wrong. It is just bizarre to read college students hold these literally childish nihilistic ideas that they are on the verge of apocalypse and it is sad to see al! the sci fi that is based on apocalypse. We live in the Age of E n d Times Hyperbole. Sci fi reflects that. But, no, the world is not ending or changing in fundamental bad ways.
Whether world population is decreasing or increasing is not the question here but how society views its increasing number of aging population. The few novels that approach this topic tend to look at those individuals as an unnecessary even if they possess great knowledge not fully comprehended by those younger. Remember most individuals in SYFY fantasy are portrayed as strong and powerful. Even Allanon the powerful Druid in the Shannara tales had a shelf life.
Min a society where all wealth is shared by all, population will stagnate (equal births /equal deaths ). But in areas of extreme poverty and little economic growth we see high births and high deaths by not only the elderly who are the second most fragile but in the amount of children who don’t survive long after birth. I call it an ingrained tendency to procreate to continue survival. Humans only stop procreation levels when their lives are stable economically.
: Do the statistics about Germany count Gastarbeiter, or only citizens?
Total population.
“There were active discussions 60 years ago to limit population and those have worked”
Since then the world population has tripled…
Excellent article!
There are a few reasons.
One, few people know about the declining birth rate problem, at least few people in the sci fi world. Most people in this field have a certain political leaning, and that leaning takes it for granted that overpopulation is still the big challenge of the world. And people really like to cling to their political narratives.
Two, here is what causes the declining birthrate: capitalism and the hope for prosperity. As capitalism has spread across the world, families are trying to reduce their size in order to allow for enough capital creation to make it possible for them to improve their lives and the prospects for their children. I once saw a lecture about an African family that was using birth control, limiting their family to two kids. They were trying to save money for a bicycle, which would allow them to deliver their prodcutsII forget what) to the market every day. Without a bicycle they could only reach the market on foot once a week.
Anyway, it’s capitalism and prosperity that has resulted in dramatically declining birth rates all across the globe. Only where capitalism is not on stable ground do the birth rates remain high.
But prosperity does not make for juicy sci fi stories. And it does not allow for the tried and true narrative about using up our resources because we’re too greedy.
There is the Partials series by Dan Wells. It has a low population problem, triggered by a war, then complicated by more war. While it’s not the greatest story around, low birthrates and high child death rates is a key element of the story.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12476820-partials
I’m having difficulty seeing population decline as a problem. If 7+ billion people achieve solid middle-class prosperity, that’s going to be quite a strain on world resources.
As for care of the elderly, that’s a prosperity problem.
I’m nearly 60. If other people want to live longer than that, that’s up to them. But if most people believe in God and an afterlife, then why cling to life when your health is failing and you’ve pretty much seen it all anyway?
I think the World would be a much better place if its population were around 2 billion, all with solidly middle class incomes and lifestyles. And at that population level, people would also have the option of going back to Nature – for there would exist a Nature to go back to.
Interesting that we don’t seem to be controlled by our genes in this – selection forces necessarily select for higher reproductive rates, as long as this can be coded for in the genes.
Ilium by Dan Simmons, as I recall, is set in a distant future in which the population of the remaining humans of Earth is restricted to one million.
Maybe I’m strange this way, but I don’t find observing the process of erosion to be dull at all. Ocean waves smashing against the sea stacks that rise out of the water off the Olympic coast here in Washington state, for example, are an exhilarating sight, and no two waves ever strike quite the same sea stack. Nor need the process of erosion be incomprehensibly slow. The aforementioned sea stacks have changed perceptibly even over the course of a human lifespan. A more dramatic example from this region are our periodic landslides, such as the one in Oso in 2014, a sudden tsunami of mud that entombed more than 40 people.
The world’s population is NOT declining. It is increasing exponentially. It is one of the biggest problems the world is currently facing precisely because of where this population boom is primarily occurring: in the worlds poorest countries; in the countries that don’t look like us, so we have obviously already forgotten about them. While innovation has made it that agricultural and resource developments CAN keep up with most population booms, these developments are only being used and shared in select rich countries where they can use these developments to drive these poorer countries out of the market, further straining THEIR resource crises, and further hampering their development.
This is a very misleading title and article, and is a very Western/White-centric world view. If any one gets out of this article that the worlds current population is decreasing, that would be the biggest evil and misconception conceivable.
THE WORLD’S POPULATION IS not DECREASING.
@76:
In other words, I think this is a first world, white guy issue.
Declining birth rates raising concerns in Asia.
(And James’s three examples of demographically literate science fiction were from East Asian writers, one of them female.)
Fewer people?? Oh no!!! Sounds great actually, as long as it happens peacefully.
@85/Kade,
I think the point is that once Africa achieves the kind of prosperity currently found in the West, then their population might also be expected to stabilize and then decline. Although possibly not in time to save the lion from effective extinction.
Somehow I do not think that suggestions from the predominantly Caucasian West that Africans would be better off if they lowered their birth rates would be well received.
It’s interesting to look at China in this context–the book AN EXCESS MALE by Maggie Shen King looks at possible adaptations in Chinese society to the men/women gap currently in place. And though China has just recently dropped the one-child policy, it’s anybody’s guess how many women will want to have more than two children anyway, given that the cost per child in middle-class families mostly goes up (plus, women in China do not, as far as I know, become education mamas the way that women do in Japan–though that practice is one of the reasons so few Japanese women are getting married these days).
12[8]: Maybe space colonization as a means of population relief just never worked, anyway. Without either deus ex magico (e.g. Spindizzies) or scam-colonization a la “The Marching Morons”, we’re never going to lift millions (let alone billions) of living people off the earth. So those narratives were always fantasies.
Really, most of the human-rich universe we see in traditional SF is a product of the assumption that humans will always continue to breed at high rates. Demographers have understood for a very long time that as conditions improve, population growth slows or even reverses. Urbanization plays a huge role in this [http://longnow.org/seminars/02005/apr/08/cities-and-time/], but one of the features of the late-anthropocene (& the internet era in particular) is the virtual-urbanization of most people: As transportation & communication tech grow more effective, they connect us into virtual cities, and the net effect is to reduce the historic pressure to reproduce. We’re left then only with the drive, & for many people (most, it seems), the drive is satisfied by reproduction at less than replacement rate.
The world’s population is NOT declining. It is increasing exponentially.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth
The world’s population has been increasing linearly, not exponentially, since the 1960s, just like Malthus said it would. Four billion in fifty years=80 million a year.
Technically it’s not just as Malthus predicted, because growth rate is falling & will go negative within our lifetimes, barring unforeseen events.
But I think focusing on whether Malthus was “right” or not misses the larger point: Any system which relies on continually increasing population is unsustainable in a closed system. And we have absolutely no reason to believe the system will not remain closed for the foreseeable future.
So, population stability, if not outright decline, while it messes with industrial capitalism, is pretty much a necessity for survival of the race.
Growth rate “falls” under Malthus’s model in exactly the same way: arithmetical increase divided by an increasing denominator. In 1968 it was 75 million/3.5 billion=2.1%pa. In 2018 it’s 80 million/7.5 billion=1.1% pa.
population stability, if not outright decline, while it messes with industrial capitalism
You can have economic growth without population growth… industrial capitalism doesn’t care about counting heads. It cares about demand for products and supply of the factors of production.
del @92:
The world’s population has been increasing linearly, not exponentially, since the 1960s, just like Malthus said it would.
No, Malthus’s growth model is exponential growth.
Capitalism doesn’t care about growth; it cares about more rent. It would be no use assuring capitalism that economic growth was a healthy 1% p a., if it saw a lost opportunity for it to be 1.01% p.a. It always wants more rent. So a lack of more workers and tenants than possible will always be a source of existential pain for capitalism.
@97 Which is why I think’s Thanos’ planet was afflicted by a particularly nasty form of capitalism.
Avoiding mass misery for old people isn’t just a matter of prosperity but its distribution and the choices societies make. A cultural with a Gini Coefficient of 1 and a total absence of a social safety net system will play out very differently for the person in the street than a society with a Gini Coefficient of, oh, .01 and solicitous Humanoids attending to their charges.
I thought many if not most of the worlds built in fantasy novels, by genre convention, are riddled with ruined cities, overgrown temples, lost knowledge, ancient mysteries, libraries full of books no one writes anymore, etc. precisely because they are about places that have declined both in terms of population and culture. References to a past glory are almost cliche in fantasy. Of course, this all recalls the Western European experience/memory of Ancient Greek and Roman culture from roughly AD 500 or so up to the mid-1400s, which is also the standard setting for a lot of fantasy anyway, so not a surprise. What else is Bilbo’s Middle Earth (especially the Wild) other than a place that has experienced a population decline?
I wonder if there’s a sweet spot for decline, where it’s bad enough legends take note of it but not so bad even memory of the event vanishes? Where are all the tragic stories of the Bronze Age Collapse?
(I fall into the “Plato made up Atlantis from whole cloth so please don’t cite it,” school.)
I go to that school too. Atlantis is a fiction created by Plato. There is no trace of any such legend anywhere predating him. But the lost Golden Age is a constant meme all over the world and need not be based on anything factual.
@101:
Makes me think of this “Sometimes the biggest disasters aren’t noticed at all—no one’s around to write horror stories. ” from “A Fire Upon the Deep”