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Darrell Bricker

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline Hardcover – International Edition, February 5, 2019

by Darrell Bricker (Author), John Ibbitson (Author)

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From the authors of the bestselling The Big Shift, a provocative argument that the global population will soon begin to decline, dramatically reshaping the social, political, and economic landscape.

     For half a century, statisticians, pundits, and politicians have warned that a burgeoning planetary population will soon overwhelm the earth's resources. But a growing number of experts are sounding a different kind of alarm. Rather than growing exponentially, they argue, the global population is headed for a steep decline.
     Throughout history, depopulation was the product of catastrophe: ice ages, plagues, the collapse of civilizations. This time, however, we're thinning ourselves deliberately, by choosing to have fewer babies than we need to replace ourselves. In much of the developed and developing world, that decline is already underway, as urbanization, women's empowerment, and waning religiosity lead to smaller and smaller families. In Empty Planet, Ibbitson and Bricker travel from South Florida to Sao Paulo, Seoul to Nairobi, Brussels to Delhi to Beijing, drawing on a wealth of research and firsthand reporting to illustrate the dramatic consequences of this population decline--and to show us why the rest of the developing world will soon join in.
     They find that a smaller global population will bring with it a number of benefits: fewer workers will command higher wages; good jobs will prompt innovation; the environment will improve; the risk of famine will wane; and falling birthrates in the developing world will bring greater affluence and autonomy for women. But enormous disruption lies ahead, too. We can already see the effects in Europe and parts of Asia, as aging populations and worker shortages weaken the economy and impose crippling demands on healthcare and social security. The United States is well-positioned to successfully navigate these coming demographic shifts--that is, unless growing isolationism and anti-immigrant backlash lead us to close ourselves off just as openness becomes more critical to our survival than ever before.
     Rigorously researched and deeply compelling, Empty Planet offers a vision of a future that we can no longer prevent--but one that we can shape, if we choose.

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Signal
Publication date

February 5, 2019
Dimensions

6.3 x 1.02 x 9.29 inches
ISBN-10

0771050887
ISBN-13

978-0771050886
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Empty Planet

"Warnings of catastrophic world overpopulation have filled the media since the 1960s, so this expert, well-researched explanation that it's not happening will surprise many readers . . . delightfully stimulating." --Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"The 'everything you know is wrong' genre has become tedious, but this book is riveting and vitally important. With eye-opening data and lively writing, Bricker and Ibbitson show that the world is radically changing in a way that few people appreciate." --Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now and The Better Angels of Our Nature

"To get the future right we must challenge our assumptions, and the biggest assumption so many of us make is that populations will keep growing. Bricker and Ibbitson deliver a mind-opening challenge that should be taken seriously by anyone who cares about the long-term future--which, I hope, is all of us." --Dan Gardner, author of Risk and co-author of Superforecasting

"A highly readable, controversial insight into a world rarely thought about--a world of depopulation under ubiquitous urbanization." --George Magnus, author of The Age of Aging and Red Flags: Why Xi's China is in Jeopardy

"In this fascinating and thought-provoking book, Bricker and Ibbitson compellingly argue why by the end of this century the problem won't be overpopulation but a rapidly shrinking global populace, and how we might have to adapt." --Lewis Dartnell, author of The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch

About the Author

DARRELL BRICKER is Chief Executive Officer of Ipsos Public Affairs, a leading international pollster. JOHN IBBITSON is Writer at Large for the Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper. Successful authors on their own, their first collaboration was on The Big Shift, a study of change in Canadian politics that became a number-one national bestseller.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Signal (February 5, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0771050887
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0771050886
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.25 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.3 x 1.02 x 9.29 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,107,313 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,113 in Demography Studies
- #15,267 in Evolution (Books)
- #19,359 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)

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348 ratings

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Darrell Bricker

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Dr. Darrell Bricker is CEO, Ipsos Public Affairs. Ipsos’ Public Affairs has offices in 38 countries and a staff of 800 research professionals. It is the world's leading social and public opinion research firm.

Ipsos Public Affairs is part of Paris-based Ipsos which is the 3rd largest market research company in the world.

Prior to joining Ipsos in 1990, Dr. Bricker was Director of Research in the office of Canada's Prime Minister. He was also a research consultant with firms in Ottawa and Toronto.

Dr. Bricker holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Carleton University (where he was a Social Science and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellow), and a BA and MA from Wilfrid Laurier University. He has also been awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws Degree by Wilfrid Laurier University, which named him one of their top 100 graduates in the last 100 years.

Darrell is a prolific author. He's written five national bestselling books, Searching for Certainty: Inside the New Canadian Mindset (with Ed Greenspon - Doubleday, 2002), What Canadians Think About Almost Everything (with John Wright – Doubleday, 2005), We Know What You’re Thinking (with John Wright - Harper Collins, 2009), Canuckology (with John Wright - Harper Collins, 2011), and The Big Shift (with John Ibbitson - Harper Collins, 2013). In February 2019, Dr. Bricker will publish his sixth book, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (with John Ibbitson).

For Empty Planet, Bricker and Ibbitson travelled to six continents, talking with specialists and a wide assortment of women and men--from university students in Seoul to slum-dwellers in Delhi--as they explored the conviction held by a growing body of demographers that global population decline, rather than rapid growth, will define this century. The book is published by The Crown Publishing Group in the United States; Little, Brown in Great Britain and McClelland & Stewart in Canada. The work is also available around the world in English through Little, Brown, and is being published in Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and Korean.

Darrell is also a popular public speaker who regularly engages with audiences around the world. He is interviewed frequently in the media, appearing on CNN, the BBC, Bloomberg, and Al Jazeera, as well as on all of Canada's major television and radio networks. He's written articles for publications as diverse as Canada's Globe and Mail and France's Le Monde.

You can follow Darrell on Twitter at @darrellbricker

Customer reviews

5 star		56%
4 star		22%
3 star		12%
2 star		6%
1 star		4%

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Dave Rice

The is a heavily biased political hit job by two morally superior Davos types

Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2019

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I cannot recommend this book. The subject is one that I know well and have studied professionally around the world. Although the facts this book presents are mostly accurate, they are highly selective and presented along with strong opinions about the political implications as though no other point of view can be credible. This book is a form of propaganda, masquerading as information.

Fertility declines are due to multiple factors, but the authors only include causes that fit their argument. They never mention or quantify the impact of abortions on the falling fertility in the US (the number of abortions is about equal to the number of immigrants that replace the unborn). The authors mention that fertility has declined the most in black communities but fail to acknowledge this is because of higher rates of abortions among blacks.

Nor do the authors assess the causes of fertility decline objectively. Women’s empowerment is claimed to be a root cause of declining fertility. In fact, fertility falls especially fast in Latin America where female empowerment is limited. They describe the fall in foreign adoptions as a trend, though actually it is due to the Hague Treaty that almost completely ended foreign adoptions by cutting off the prior path to citizenship for adopted children. A reader that is new to the subject would never be able to discern when they were getting the whole truth, and the authors work hard to conceal this.

The authors skip over the negatives of the mass migration they prescribe. They don’t mention the huge disenfranchised underclasses that have been created in Asia and the Middle East based on the policies they recommend. Nor the emergence of similar underclasses in California today. They don't mention the impossibility of enforcing the rule of law when transnational criminal organizations exploit open borders. They even fail to present the positives of Japan's choices to preserve their homogeneous society, despite that fact that Japan continues to pursue this policy and must see some benefit.

These Canadian authors present the Canadian approach as a panacea. They don't acknowledge the Canadian situation is unique geographically, because the United States provides protection through strategic depth. Critically, the Canadian immigration system is merit based, but they fail to include this in their prescription. Instead that authors answer is simply to resist Donald Trump and any political point of view that attempts to protect the interests of a country’s citizens.

What I found most offensive was that they didn’t make a recommendation and try to defend it, rather they gave a prescription as though they know more than the rest of us and have higher moral standards than we can only accept as absolute. I found the unscholarly, ideological mindset of the authors sickening.

This is an important topic that deserves a fact-based discussion. But for that discussion to be helpful, options need to be considered objectively and pros/cons acknowledged from the perspectives of all constituents. Instead we get selective facts to fit a predefined narrative with extensive condescending rants, hurling insults at those that would questing their prescription in any way.

205 people found this helpful

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sien

A Fascinating and novel book on global demography

Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2019

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Empty Planet : The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019) by Darrel Bricker and John Ibbitson is a fascinating book that makes the case the global population is likely to peak sooner than UN population predictions suggest and looks at why populations are declining and the what the impact of declining populations is likely to be. It's a fascinating book because the fact that fertility levels are below replacement in almost all developed countries and many other countries is largely ignored.

The book starts by looking at the incorrect claims of various environmentalists from Malthus to Ehrlich. They point out that share of the world that is starving has plummeted and the share in absolutely poverty has also plummeted.

The book then starts looking at Europe, where populations are already starting to shrink. Throughout the authors interview people around the world to talk about their ideas of family. In Europe it is most drastic, a number of couples from Belgium who have a combined fertility rate of less than one talk about kids.

Then Korea and Japan are investigated. Japan being really 'the country of the future' in that populations are declining there. The book looks at how women wanting a career find it very hard to have kids as well given traditional roles for men in not helping much with parenting or around the house.

There is a great discussion of the economics of babies, how they have gone from a boon in agricultural societies to an economic burden in modern, urban ones. The impact of teenage pregnancy is discussed along with having kids at an older age.

The critical role of Africa in global population predictions and what is going on there is then investigated. There the fact that UN population predictions rely on African populations exploding is discussed and the impact that mobile phones and greater education and urbanisation is having is described.

Empty Planet then looks at how fertility is likely to change the size of India and China is outlined. The authors show how China's already low fertility will very likely lead to a population reduction and how India's fertility has changed and is likely to change gets a good discussion. Again the impact of information, urbanisation and education is likely underestimated.

Empty Planet then looks at how immigration driven by countries wishing to enrich themselves, such as Canada and Australia is likely to lead to those countries avoiding some of the impact of declining populations. It's a very well made point.

Empty Planet is really a fascinating book that makes a very strong case as to why global populations will peak sooner than expected and are likely to decline sooner than expected. It would have been good to get the case from a UN statistician as to why they think that population will be higher than the authors, but other than that Empty Planet is a really excellent book that describes a fascinating new phenomenon.

36 people found this helpful

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Dr J P Mckeown

even if low forecast were true, still 7+ billion at end of this century

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 6, 2019

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The authors claim that UN demographers have got their population forecast wrong, pointing to alternative demographers' low forecasts in which global population peaks around 2050 at 8.5 or 9 billion, and then declines by 2100 to 7 or 8 billion. But even if we believe this, it means population will continue to be above 7 billion for at least 80 years. That hypothetical future is not an "empty planet". According to analyses such as planetary boundaries, and Ecological Footprint, human impact was already unsustainable when our population reached 7 billion. And the Living Planet Index (ZSL) says other species' numbers have, on average, been declining since 1970, when the human population was "only" 3.7 billion. So even if we believe the low forecast, the world faces at least another century of overpopulation stress: time enough for bad effects. The authors' rhetoric -- "All of this" [fear of species extinctions etc] is "utterly wrong" -- has no logical basis in the low forecast.

I hope the low forecast comes true, but sadly it is not as easy as the authors imagine. Most demographers think some countries in middle Africa will only slowly reduce fertility (and it only takes one high outlier country to perpetuate global population growth). The low forecast has two other less well=known weaknesses. One was explained in Eric Kaufmann's 2010 book: the higher fertility (obscured by national-scale data) of some sects; members often avoiding contact with strangers and therefore probably under-sampled by Bricker and Ibbitson’s conversational approach to research at "university campuses … favelas and slums". The other weakness is that some forecasters neglect evolutionary factors as explored recently in an article by Jason Collins and Lionel Page, "The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future" in Evolution and Human Behavior 40, 2019.

Let us hope the low forecast comes true, but Bricker and Ibbitson’s book would be much better without its anti-environmentalist rhetoric, and the sensationalist title.
Dr J P McKeown.

28 people found this helpful

William Jordan

thought provoking book on demographic trends

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 27, 2021

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This book was a great read. The authors have discussed with young women around the world their lives and the part that having children will play in them. They paint memorable pictures of a great diversity of societies. In all birth rates are declining. In some population numbers are already in decline. Causes include urbanisation, education of women and affluence. 'Answers' for individual countries may include immigration - but needs to be accompanied by Canada style multiculturalism. The final chapter suggests that living in towns is also the single best answer to global warming (alongside the declines in fertility discussed in the book)....Strongly recommended...

3 people found this helpful

Simon Beckett

The book lets itself down - too much anecdote, insufficient data

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 1, 2021

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There are some interesting ideas in this book but all too often the authors go off on fashionable tangents - immigration, me too, Israel & Palestine, climate change: population is going to start to fall and sort out all these problems. As a result I found the book glib and written with an agenda - maybe to grab headlines - certainly to put just one side of the argument.
I wanted to know about population trends. There is too much anecdote and insufficient data. Falling birth rates are wholly attributed to urbanisation - I had thought the principal cause was falling infant mortality.
There is no discussion of what level of global population is sustainable. The fact that population is likely to level off and start falling in about 30 years may be too late if we are already well over a sustainable population level.
Similarly there is no discussion about where the population is likely to be. A european person is likely to consume more and do more damage to the environment than an African. So falling population is not sufficient to avoid catastrophe.
All in all - some interesting ideas that got lost in the authors' agenda.

4 people found this helpful

Otto Kjï¿½rgaard

Everyone who are scared for the future should read this book.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 1, 2019

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The book is a good reminder of that the future might be very different from the what mainstreamers believe.
The authors argues very convincing for a different scenario.
Everyone who works with a long time planning horizon should read this book.
Lack of space, ressources and mass pollution might not be the main problems of the future.
The book is not a scientific paper but a solid analysis based on comprehensive research.
As investor in farmland the consequences of the conclusion in the book is worrying, the increasing demand for more agricultural product might end sooner than I hope for.
Everyone who are scared for the future should read this book, they might still be scared, but their anxiety will be about other topics.

2 people found this helpful

NikonD3100

The truth at last

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 4, 2021

Verified Purchase

At last an honest book. I am sick and tired of the kids about overpopulation and baby booms.
There are very few babies being born now. Humankind is in decline. Pampered, selfish ,riddled with Covid.

2 people found this helpful

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