People of the Paul Ehrlich era would no doubt see today’s problems as beneficial: Fewer people means more stuff to go around, right? Not exactly.
Demographer and futurist Joel Kotkin writes: “On the contrary, we need to worry about the potential ill-effects of depopulation, including a declining workforce, torpid economic growth, and brewing generational conflict between a generally prosperous older generation and their more hard-pressed successors.”
Shrinking populations tend to do poorly, economically, socially and militarily. One need only look to China, where the one-child policy is producing a huge overhang of pensioners with not enough people to support them, or to Japan, where the average age keeps climbing while young people seem to lack direction and confidence, to see what lies in our future.
As Kotkin notes, “John Maynard Keynes warned that ‘chaining up of the one devil [of overpopulation] may, if we are careless, only serve to loose another still fiercer and more intractable.’”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member