The Age of Depopulation

Foreign Affairs ^ | 10/10/24 | Nicholas Eberstadt

[EnderWiggin1970]

Although few yet see it coming, humans are about to enter a new era of history. Call it “the age of depopulation.” For the first time since the Black Death in the 1300s, the planetary population will decline. But whereas the last implosion was caused by a deadly disease borne by fleas, the coming one will be entirely due to choices made by people.

With birthrates plummeting, more and more societies are heading into an era of pervasive and indefinite depopulation, one that will eventually encompass the whole planet. What lies ahead is a world made up of shrinking and aging societies. Net mortality—when a society experiences more deaths than births—will likewise become the new norm. Driven by an unrelenting collapse in fertility, family structures and living arrangements heretofore imagined only in science fiction novels will become commonplace, unremarkable features of everyday life.

Human beings have no collective memory of depopulation. Overall global numbers last declined about 700 years ago, in the wake of the bubonic plague that tore through much of Eurasia. In the following seven centuries, the world’s population surged almost 20-fold. And just over the past century, the human population has quadrupled.

[EnderWiggin1970]

This is a long article but a good one in two respects.

1. It provides a lot of detail and summaries of the situation facing the planet (albeit always assuming a sort of best-case scenario of continued peace and prosperity), as the global population peaks and then begins a long decline.

2. It reflects the attitudes and thinking of the elites on this topic. For example, it helps explain the heavy emphasis on flooding the US with illegal immigrants in recent years.

This is needed to shore up against the native population collapse and because it will be harder in the future to find large numbers of immigrants as youth populations in other countries collapse. The resource wars of coming decades will be focused on the most important resource - humans - and the struggle of autocratic warlords in all countries to obtain and control them. No wonder American elites have taken such a liking to flooding the US with large numbers of presumed-compliant illegal immigrants.

[marktwain]

Foolish assumptions about the nature of reality in the article.

There are quite a few societies where populations are growing rapidly.

Most are in Muslim countries or Africa or both.

People who reproduce will inherent the future.

Societies who fail to reproduce will die out.

[lurk]

Now is a good time to get to know your extended family tree and start to work together.

And learn the life skills of your great grandparents.

[SecondAmendment]

The birthrate decline is primarily a First World problem, which make WEF types very very happy.

[rdl6989]

Just a few years ago the experts were worried about overpopulation.

[Diana in Wisconsin]

“Now is a good time to get to know your extended family tree and start to work together. And learn the life skills of your great grandparents.”

*BUMP*

I as blessed to have a very hands-on upbringing. I spent a LOT of time with my Grandma while my parents both worked. She was totally Old School and taught me to sew, to grow veggies, cooking from scratch, butchering chickens, hanging laundry on the line, making sausage, shelling peas/snapping beans, baking bread, etc.

And I still live that way. :)

[Varsity Flight]

I Timothy 2:15

2:15 Amplified Bible 15 But women will be [a]preserved (saved) through [the pain and dangers of] the bearing of children [b]if they continue in faith and love and holiness with self-control and discretion.

Noah’s Day
Lot’s Day

We’re here ✖️⚠️

[Erik Latranyi]

Musk has been posting warnings about this for a long time. The rates keep declining and it sets a future that is very grim.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

In 1968, American ethologist John B. Calhoun began his most famous experiment, “Universe 25”, in which he introduced eight albino mice into a 4.5-foot cube enclosure:

The enclosure was designed to be a utopia for mice, with abundant food and water, a stable temperature, and no predators.

The population doubled every 55 days, eventually peaking at 2,200 mice. Then the mice began to exhibit abnormal behaviors, including:

Refusing to engage in courtship

Females abandoning their young

Dominant males becoming aggressive and attacking females and the young

Some mice becoming exclusively homosexual, while others became pansexual and hypersexual

Mothers neglecting their infants

Infant mortality rose as high as 96% in some sections of the pens

The population plummeted and did not recover.

At the time, “overpopulation” was a slogan of the left, and it was assumed that the Earth would soon reach human “overpopulation”, resulting in catastrophe. HOWEVER, they neglected to consider the very first *variable*, that of limited space.

Indeed, when packed into densely crowded cities, people will indeed start to exhibit behavior like mice. But when they can spread out in the world’s vastly uninhabited but arable wildernesses, the perils of overpopulation disappear.

This conflicts with leftism, that actively strives to push more and more people into cities, as there they are much easier to control.

[HYPOCRACY]

All the government ponzi schemes are going to crumble massively. That’s the only thing these idiots are worried about. You can’t tax the unborn for your retirement if they aren’t being born.

Importing the dregs of other countries is a crappy bandaid on a gaping wound.

[alternatives?]

That is a currently popular interpretation. An alternative is families are supposed to raise a bunch of Christian offspring. It is popular to think you can just sing a song to have people convert as opposed to the laborious labor of raising children. We will find out which is correct when we die.

[Regulator]

“At the time, “overpopulation” was a slogan of the left”

And now the same people scream endlessly that we need millions more “immigrants”.

Funny, back then, they howled for abortion to prevent “overpopulation”....which of course they did not say in Africa or India or South America or...any place that wasn’t White.

Funny that.

Maybe, just maybe, they thought there was only one group of genes that there were too many of.

[9YearLurker]

Yes, the West is being “outbirthed”. But the idea that we don’t have enough people globally is ridiculous.

The world’s population is said to have more than doubled in my lifetime (https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth), and the planet is being polluted on a massive scale as the number living our lifestyle has grown more quickly than that.

FA is a top globalist publication, and they are simply covering for their massive depopulation plan.

[Red Badger]

The age of de population?.............about 45...............

[G Larry]

Population Control is intentional.

It's the motivation for the "Global Warming" scam, the destruction of the nuclear family, abortion, birth control, damn demolition so that we can't irrigate our most productive farm land....etc.

[EnderWiggin1970]

Your perceptions are decades out of date. Ironically the only developed nation sustaining a survivable birthrate is Israel. The Muslim nations have gone negative, and Africa’s birthrates are plummeting along with everyone else.

[Valpal1]

Here's the good news...

"According to the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, the estimated population of North American Amish in 2023 was 384,290 (6,100 in Canada), a 116% increase from 2000. Statistics show that the population nearly doubles every 20 years."

https://dailyyonder.com/amish-population-growth-rural-america/2024/04/10/

The immigration flood is really a temporary bandaid, because

"The current TFR of immigrant women of 2.15 is now just above 2.1, the level necessary to replace the existing population. It seems likely that immigrant fertility will soon dip below replacement level, which means that, in the long run, immigration will add to the aging of American society."

https://cis.org/Report/Immigrant-and-NativeBorn-Fertility-2008-2018

Basically, it's another poorly thought-out scheme of the left who as usual fail miserably at predicting actual human behavior.

"fertility rates among weekly-attending Americans have never dropped much below 2 children per woman, and as recently as 2008 were around 2.4 children per woman. Fertility among religious people did decline after the 2008 recession, but by 2017 to 2019, it was once again rising. In other words, there was no long slump in births to the most devout parents."

"COVID has not reduced these differences. Across four waves of the DIFS, including about 9,000 women, from fall 2020 to spring 2022, women who never attended church reported a fertility rate of around 1.3 children per woman, vs. 2.1 for women who attended weekly: very similar to the rates found in the NSFG for 2019."

https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secular-fertility-divide

[EnderWiggin1970]

Yeah, the Amish are a fascinating case. I recall reading that there were only like 5,000 of them just over a century ago. At this rate they'd take over the world in a few more centuries.

But as economists say, when a trend can't possibly continue, it won't. The pacifist culture they maintain needs be protected, and is vulnerable outside stable, safe larger cultures. The restrictions they hold to (with laudable goals even if one doesn't agree totally with the methods) limit their economic participation and risk saturating the economic niches they participate in, which at some point could become a limiting factor in their growth, or force them to adapt into something that today we would not recognize.