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

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

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An award-winning journalist and leading international social researcher make the 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 population will soon overwhelm the earth's resources. But a growing number of experts are sounding a different alarm. Rather than continuing to increase exponentially, they argue, the global population is headed for a steep decline—and in many countries, that decline has already begun.

In Empty Planet, John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker find that a smaller global population will bring with it many benefits: fewer workers will command higher wages; 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 and Canada are well-positioned to successfully navigate these coming demographic shifts--that is, unless growing isolationism leads us to close ourselves off just as openness becomes more critical to our survival than ever.

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.

Praise for Empty Planet

“An ambitious reimagining of our demographic future.”—The New York Times Book Review

“The authors combine a mastery of social-science research with enough journalistic flair to convince fair-minded readers of a simple fact: Fertility is falling faster than most experts can readily explain, driven by persistent forces.”—The Wall Street Journal

“The beauty of this book is that it links hard-to-grasp global trends to the easy to-understand individual choices being made all over the world today . . . a gripping narrative of a world on the cusp of profound change.”—The New Statesman

“John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker have written a sparkling and enlightening guide to the contemporary world of fertility as small family sizes and plunging rates of child-bearing go global.”–The Globe and Mail

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Crown
Publication date

February 5, 2019
Dimensions

6.33 x 1.06 x 9.32 inches
ISBN-10

1984823213
ISBN-13

978-1984823212
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Arresting. . . lucid, trenchant and very readable, the authors' arguments upend consensus ideas about everything from the environment to immigration; the result is a stimulating challenge to conventional wisdom."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“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)

"Thanks to the authors’ painstaking fact-finding and cogent analysis, [Empty Planet] offers ample and persuasive arguments for a re-evaluation of conventional wisdom."—Booklist

“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, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now

“While the global population is swelling today, birth rates have nonetheless already begun dropping around the world. Past population declines have been driven by natural disasters or disease—the Toba supervolcano, Black Death or Spanish Flu—but this coming slump will be of our own making. 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, Professor of Science Communication, University of Westminster, and author of The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch

“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: The Art and Science of Prediction

“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

“This briskly readable book demands urgent attention."–The Mail on Sunday

“A fascinating study.”–The Sunday Times

“Refreshingly clear and well balanced.”–Literary Review

About the Author

DARRELL BRICKER is chief executive officer of Ipsos Public Affairs, the world's leading social and opinion research firm. 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 #1 national bestseller.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

It was a girl.

On Sunday, October 30, 2011, just before midnight, Danica May Camacho entered the world in a crowded Manila hospital, bringing the human population of our planet to seven billion. Actually, the scales could have tipped a few hours later, in a village in Uttar Pradesh, India, with the arrival of Nargis Kumar. Or it might have been a boy, Pyotr Nikolayeva, born in Kaliningrad, Russia.

Of course, it was none of them. The birth that took us to seven billion people was attended by no cameras and ceremonial speeches because we can never know where or when the event occurred. We can only know that, according to the United Nations’ best estimates, we reached seven billion sometime around October 31 of that year. Different countries designated certain births to symbolize this landmark in history, and Danica, Nargis, and Pyotr were among those chosen.

For many, there was no reason to celebrate. Indian health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad declared that a global population of seven billion was “not a matter of great joy, but a great worry. . . . For us a matter of joy will be when the population stabilizes.” Many share Azad’s gloom. They warn of a global population crisis. Homo sapiens is reproducing unchecked, straining our ability to feed, house, and clothe the 130 million or more new babies that UNICEF estimates arrive each year. As humans crowd the planet, forests disappear, species become extinct, the atmosphere warms.

Unless humankind defuses this population bomb, these prophets proclaim, we face a future of increasing poverty, food shortages, conflict, and environmental degradation. As one modern Malthus put it, “Barring a dramatic decline in population growth, a rapid decrease in greenhouse gas emissions, or a global outbreak of vegetarianism—all of which are trending in the opposite direction at the moment—we’re facing nothing less than the end of plenty for the majority of the earth’s people.”

All of this is completely, utterly wrong.

The great defining event of the twenty-first century—one of the great defining events in human history—will occur in three decades, give or take, when the global population starts to decline. Once that decline begins, it will never end. We do not face the challenge of a population bomb but of a population bust—a relentless, generation-after-generation culling of the human herd. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

If you find this news shocking, that’s not surprising. The United Nations forecasts that our population will grow from seven billion to eleven billion in this century before leveling off after 2100. But an increasing number of demographers around the world believe the UN estimates are far too high. More likely, they say, the planet’s population will peak at around nine billion sometime between 2040 and 2060, and then start to decline, perhaps prompting the UN to designate a symbolic death to mark the occasion. By the end of this century, we could be back to where we are right now, and steadily growing fewer.

Populations are already declining in about two dozen states around the world; by 2050 the number will have climbed to three dozen. Some of the richest places on earth are shedding people every year: Japan, Korea, Spain, Italy, much of Eastern Europe. “We are a dying country,” Italy’s health minister, Beatrice Lorenzin, lamented in 2015.

But this isn’t the big news. The big news is that the largest developing nations are also about to grow smaller, as their own fertility rates come down. China will begin losing people in a few years. By the middle of this century, Brazil and Indonesia will follow suit. Even India, soon to become the most populous nation on earth, will see its numbers stabilize in about a generation and then start to decline. Fertility rates remain sky-high in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East. Even here, though, things are changing as young women obtain access to education and birth control. Africa is likely to end its unchecked baby boom much sooner than the UN’s demographers think.

Some of the indications of an accelerating decline in fertility can be found in scholarly research and government reports; others can only be found by talking to people on the street. And so we did. To gather research for this book, we traveled to cities on six continents: to Brussels and Seoul, Nairobi and São Paulo, Mumbai and Beijing, Palm Springs and Canberra and Vienna. There were other stops as well. We talked to academics and public officials, but more important, we talked to young people: on university campuses and at research institutes and in favelas and slums. We wanted to know what they were thinking about the most important decision they will ever make: whether and when to have a baby.

Population decline isn’t a good thing or a bad thing. But it is a big thing. A child born today will reach middle age in a world in which conditions and expectations are very different from our own. She will find the planet more urban, with less crime, environmentally healthier but with many more old people. She won’t have trouble finding a job, but she may struggle to make ends meet, as taxes to pay for healthcare and pensions for all those seniors eat into her salary. There won’t be as many schools, because there won’t be as many children.

But we won’t have to wait thirty or forty years to feel the impact of population decline. We’re feeling it today, in developed nations from Japan to Bulgaria that struggle to grow their economies even as the cohort of young workers and consumers diminishes, making it harder to provide social services or sell refrigerators. We see it in urbanizing Latin America and even Africa, where women are increasingly taking charge of their own destinies. We see it in every household where the children take longer to move out because they’re in no rush to settle down and haven’t the slightest intention of having a baby before they’re thirty. And we’re seeing it, tragically, in roiling Mediterranean seas, where refugees from wretched places press against the borders of a Europe that is already starting to empty out.

We may see it, very soon, influencing the global contest for power. Population decline will shape the nature of war and peace in the decades ahead, as some nations grapple with the fallout of their shrinking, aging societies while others remain able to sustain themselves. The defining geopolitical challenge in the coming decades could involve accommodating and containing an angry, frightened China as it confronts the consequences of its disastrous one-child policy.

Some of those who fear the fallout of a diminishing population advocate government policies to increase the number of children couples have. But the evidence suggests this is futile. The “low-fertility trap” ensures that, once having one of two children becomes the norm, it stays the norm. Couples no longer see having children as a duty they must perform to satisfy their obligation to their families or their god. Rather, they choose to raise a child as an act of personal fulfillment. And they are quickly fulfilled.

One solution to the challenge of a declining population is to import replacements. That’s why two Canadians wrote this book. For decades now, Canada has brought in more people, on a per capita basis, than any other major developed nation, with little of the ethnic tensions, ghettos, and fierce debate that other countries face. That’s because the country views immigration as an economic policy—under the merit-based points system, immigrants to Canada are typically better educated, on average, than the native-born—and because it embraces multiculturalism: the shared right to celebrate your native culture within the Canadian mosaic, which has produced a peaceful, prosperous, polyglot society, among the most fortunate on earth.

Not every country is able to accept waves of newcomers with Canada’s aplomb. Many Koreans, Swedes, and Chileans have a very strong sense of what it means to be Korean, Swedish, or Chilean. France insists its immigrants embrace the idea of being French, even as many of the old stock deny such a thing is possible, leaving immigrant communities isolated in their banlieues, separate and not equal. The population of the United Kingdom is projected to continue growing, to about 82 million at the end of the century, from 66 million today, but only if the British continue to welcome robust levels of immigration. As the Brexit referendum revealed, many Brits want to turn the English Channel into a moat. To combat depopulation, nations must embrace both immigration and multiculturalism. The first is hard. The second, for some, may prove impossible.

Among great powers, the coming population decline uniquely advantages the United States. For centuries, America has welcomed new arrivals, first from across the Atlantic, then the Pacific as well, and today from across the Rio Grande. Millions have happily plunged into the melting pot—America’s version of multiculturalism—enriching both its economy and culture. Immigration made the twentieth century the American century, and continued immigration will define the twenty-first as American as well.

Unless. The suspicious, nativist, America First groundswell of recent years threatens to choke off the immigration tap that made America great by walling up the border between the United States and everywhere else. Under President Donald Trump, the federal government not only cracked down on illegal immigrants, it reduced legal admissions for skilled workers, a suicidal policy for the U.S. economy. If this change is permanent, if Americans out of senseless fear reject their immigrant tradition, turning their backs on the world, then the United States too will decline, in numbers and power and influence and wealth. This is the choice that every American must make: to support an open, inclusive, welcoming society, or to shut the door and wither in isolation.

The human herd has been culled in the past by famine or plague. This time, we are culling ourselves; we are choosing to become fewer. Will our choice be permanent? The answer is: probably yes. Though governments have sometimes been able to increase the number of children couples are willing to have through generous child care payments and other supports, they have never managed to bring fertility back up to the replacement level of, on average, 2.1 children per woman needed to sustain a population. Besides, such programs are extremely expensive and tend to be cut back during economic downturns. And it is arguably unethical for a government to try to convince a couple to have a child that they would otherwise not have had.

As we settle into a world growing smaller, will we celebrate or mourn our diminishing numbers? Will we struggle to preserve growth, or accept with grace a world in which people both thrive and strive less? We don’t know. But it may be a poet who observes that, for the first time in the history of our race, humanity feels old.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown; 1st edition (February 5, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1984823213
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1984823212
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.08 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.33 x 1.06 x 9.32 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #472,935 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #115 in Demography Studies
- #1,975 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)

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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

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Joel D. Hirst

What most politicians don't want you to know

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 16, 2019

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We have been taught by the deejays of doom in the media, the hard-left apocalyptic political class and their ‘scientists’ at the United Nations that the end is nigh. Water wars; energy shocks; rising of sea levels swamping first Venice then Miami and Los Angeles and Rio. ‘Climate change’ bringing drought first and then flooding causing agricultural collapse and heralding famine beginning with the poorest and then working its way up the “Great Chain of Being” to our new nobilities sitting enthroned in their ivory towers or in an old mansion atop a swamp. It has so permeated our thinking and planning that we have only to wait for the next announcement of our coming anarchy after the near miss of the last: the ozone layer’s evaporation will cook us all; the water wars are upon us; the asteroid just missed!!; the oil is running out; ebola will make us all bleed from our orifices – how about 2012 anybody…? Even the calendar is conspiring against humanity, helped along by the ancient Mayans who foretold of our catastrophe so many years ago.

Have you ever considered that everything you think you know might in fact be incorrect? That is, at least, the contention of “Empty Planet” by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson. According to their ground-breaking book, the world is becoming wealthier (see Angus Deaton and Stephen Pinker); more environmentally friendly (as a wealthier world looks at its destroyed picnic spots and polluted lakes and is willing to make increased sacrifices to fix them – as disposable income works its way into the natural places around especially those of us in wealthy countries); and older. Much older in fact. Median age in the United States is approaching 40 – in other places of Asia (Japan and Korea) it has already passed that number. Population growth in most of the world is collapsing; the dependency ratio is creeping steadily towards 1-1. The population, somewhere in the seven-billion range right now might grow to perhaps nine before it starts to fall; the first time since homo-sapiens began to roam the world, returning to the current seven-billion by the end of the century and continuing its downward spiral.

Well that doesn’t fit our “The sky is falling” punditry, does it? We may be forced at last to consider that perhaps the climate-doom prophets are mostly about serving their own interests (perish the thought): using the faux emergency to push a Gramscian ‘Green New Deal’ or a nouveau Marxist wealth redistribution to the poorest and most corrupt dictatorships via a ‘carbon tax’ administered by the tyrants’ minions installed in the expansive UN bureaucracies. It is for this reason they will find as many excuses as possible to discount Bricker and Ibbitson. It won’t help their cause that both are self-proclaimed Canadian “liberals”. At any rate, this is one of those things that time will certainly show – however if our Canadian friends are correct the world has some serious preparing to do (and not in the way we are being instructed).

Now I’ll own up to the fact that I have been for a while what I think I myself have self-dubbed a “Neo-Malthusian”. We are a product of our experiences, of the lives that we have lived – and my decade on the African continent watching those wars extend, the populations explode, the forests slashed and burned to feed the wood-fires in which are fried the last tiny minnows of the desiccated lakes emptied of water by over-irrigation in the desperate attempts to coax a harvest from land burned by fertilizer and over-farmed by the next in an endless line of desperate poor; ya that didn’t help. I often wrote about it, about the arriving ordeal and what is coming. And I am not entirely certain that Bricker and Ibbitson are not overly sanguine about the future of Africa specifically. Read “The Bottom Billion” if you wish to consider why Africa might just not make it (as an outlier in the world, like it always has been); and why this will be existential for a Europe that is getting older and more conservative (as all old people naturally become) while unable to use smart immigration as a pressure-release-valve. That being said I am certainly willing to consider the fact that I am wrong, at least to a certain degree. And so, in that spirit, what if Bricker and Ibbitson are in fact correct? This would mean all the assumptions of the revolutionaries attempting to plunge the world into Russia 1918 are in fact desperately mistaken. The current wave of conservatism sweeping the globe is not an outbreak of ‘fascism’ but is in fact a response to an aging citizenry becoming more thoughtful and calculated as their experience and knowledge meld into their consciousness in the form of wisdom and they are increasingly able to discern the foolishness in so much that is proposed by the know-nothings (a few notable exceptions aside). And what might this mean for future elections? No, Americans are not interested in a workers revolution; but instead are looking for a welfare state which can accommodate age and increased frailty and protect their golden years from the rumble-tumble of the markets. And capitalism? Dependent upon constant population growth (people from 30-50 consume the most, people who are retired begin the process of downsizing from their large houses and their expensive keep-up-with-the-Joneses SUV); as the world gets older and begins to shrink, our markets will also do the same. And as the world gets more urban, and agricultural production by mega-corporations (especially in Africa – the last continent to still practice stone-age-agriculture, but maybe not forever?), more of the hinterlands will be surrendered back to the jungles and the re-greening of the world which has already begun will extend. And our existential China threat? According to Bricker and Ibbitson the Chinese are in deep, deep, deep trouble. Their population might have already started declining (as has Russia’s, Japans, South Koreas, etc.) and in the next several decades they might face a halving of their citizenry, down to six hundred million – and those older. Their “one child” policy was extraordinarily stupid and short-sighted. And their emergence into urbanization and middle income, too quick. For this reason they will be too obsessed with attempting to deal with the massive expense of their elderly that they will abandon all thoughts of Tianxia in their desperate attempt to care for their aged (think Japan). And don’t forget no Asian country – China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, none of them are recipients of any immigrants to offset this challenge. For this reason adoption from the Middle Kingdom has already virtually dried up; and we might see a day in the not-too-distant future when China starts to pay bounties for the return of their citizens from abroad.

And in this, the United States? Along with Canada and Australia and other freedom-loving countries; smart immigration to our free prosperous societies will blunt the coming population collapse and keep us competitive (as it always has) long after China and Russia and Europe become geriatric wards. What are the recommendations, then? Sensible immigration reform – such as Canada has – policies which scope out and bring to us the best and the brightest from the world over. Public policy which facilitates integration and English language acquisition. Embracing of our free market system which will bring in the people who will keep inventing and innovating (and paying taxes) long after the Chinese retire to the shuffle board tables. And figuring out how we will pay for the massive social safety net we will need for the elderly in our midst – which I will be as well in the intermediate future (yes this is going to have to involve real health care reform – somebody please get rid of Obamacare!!).

All said, this is not a tale we often are told – which is why this book was so interesting. I recommend you read it as well.

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Snaz

Some good stuff but don't just accept it all

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 7, 2019

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The authors contend that underpopulation, not overpopulation, is where we are headed, and sooner, rather than later. They believe the UN predictions are based on outdated assumptions and proceed to show why. They do a pretty good job at this, despite some largely unrelated factual errors.

Sadly, they then spend a goodly percentage of nearly every chapter explaining why every developed country should be scrambling for immigrants to boost their demographics and avoid economic stagnation.

All at once I have three objections right off the bat. The first being that I believe our planet would be a lot better off if human population could be reduced to about a billion. That would be a billion people that could be supported at US middle-class or better standards, and they could be considerably more educated and productive than even our current seven to eight billion people. The authors talk about people being selfish by refusing to have more kids; I say it is selfish to have more kids just to shore up the economy.

The second being that they ignore the incoming automation transformation. The one where people who want to work will be in very low demand due to most occupations being significantly reduced, or even eliminated outright, and with new occupations that emerge thereafter requiring relatively few humans compared to the losses in other occupations. How many self-driving software programmers and hardware engineers will ever find employment, compared to the losses of six million taxi driver, chauffeur, bus driver, and trucker jobs in the US alone?

Third, there is the other problem with enormous immigration. My ancestors came from a smallish Northern European country. I've visited there, and I like it there. The locals seem pretty happy with it, too. If I went back and found it predominantly occupied by people of another culture, I would be less than happy. I expect the current locals would be less than happy, too. They would surely prefer to see it a bit less densely populated rather than become a minority in their ancestral homeland. Then too, there is the question of tolerance. Almost any other culture replacing their own would be less tolerant than they currently are. To be tolerant of a less tolerant culture supplanting their own would require them to be tolerant of intolerance, a logical absurdity in theory, and cultural suicide in practice. If you value and embrace tolerance, then you cannot be tolerant of intolerance

I don't believe in practicing discrimination on the basis of skin color, race, ethnicity, gender, and so on. I do believe that everyone on this planet discriminates on the basis of culture and they are not wrong to do so. Are you going to tell me that a culture that embraces female circumcision is better than your own? How about cannibalism? How about not permitting female suffrage? If you are from a culture that is fine with these things then you can't. A culture than embraces toleration is a very good thing, unfortunately, the one thing it cannot tolerate is intolerance.

A country is just lines on a map (and an empire, a far more fragile beast, is just a collection of countries). A nation is a country that shares the same culture. Culture is not defined by preserving native dances or handicrafts, or even by geographic origin. Culture is defined by shared cultural values. The US cultural values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are open-ended enough to give it tremendous strength and resilience as a nation (despite often being incompletely embraced). But an immigrant that can't get behind these values is not an immigrant that strengthens the nation. Instead, that is an immigrant that will help bring the nation closer to being a country, and that's a step in the wrong direction; countries are inherently less stable.

The author's viewpoint on this makes a lot more sense when you realize they are Canadian. Canada is a country that nearly fragmented due to conflicting cultures within it. Remember that whole Quebec thing? Even today there are many people in French-speaking Canada, who have a fine command of the English language, but who will not speak a word of it to another Canadian (although the ones I've encountered will do so quite freely once they realize I am not a Canadian).

Overall, the book is still very interesting and worth a read. While I had already worked out the now unavoidable catastrophe that is Russia, I only had some inkling of China's. I had not realized just how bad it was going to be. I had not realized that Brazil is already plunging. Nor had I realized that North American adoption of foreign born children had gone from very large to almost none at all, as other countries, realizing just how serious their population situation is going to be, have found excuses to cut off the flow (without admitting why, presumably so they won't panic the masses).

None of it need be an actual existential problem as, within a century or less, it is entirely possible people or even governments, will find solutions. Even if some are as seemingly esoteric as creating their children online, and then later having them embodied (in forms either organic, inorganic, or some combination) or not, depending on whether they even need to exist in the purely physical world. Failing that, we might still see the crèche babies created by the State in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, as a means of preserving that State. Hopefully, they wouldn't be quite so brainwashed.

Again: Overall, the book is still very interesting and worth a read, but keep your mind open and, even though some of it is extremely interesting and well done, don't blindly accept all of it .

15 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

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.

7 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

ky

A Powerful Insight

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 3, 2022

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A powerful insight into human female behavior with large consequences. It will change humankind’s trajectory. The “butterfly effect” first postulated by Lorenz suggested that the flap of a butterfly’s wings might ultimately cause a tornado. Darrell and John’s insight will resonate across every aspect of human activity. The butterfly effect, also known as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” has a profound corollary: forecasting the future can be nearly impossible.

NikonD3100

The truth at last

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 4, 2021

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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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