| That article is...wow. > But as my colleague Robin Hanson has pointed out, dwindling populations create their own inexorable logic. “have their own inexorable logic” seems to stand in for “cam be scaremongered via naive assumption that trends extend to infinity”. > If the Japanese population shrinks by half, to 65 million or so, what’s to stop it from declining to 30 million? Or 20 million? The same negative feedback pressure that is why the runaway growth that was the concern when people projected then-current trends forward ~50-60 years ago didn’t happen, either. It’s much more plausible that global human population is approaching the horizontal asymptote of a logistic curve than that the slowing of global growth points to a shift to permanent population loss that would be an existential threat. One obvious factor: strong non-family economic support systems are one of the strongest predictors of low natural population growth, but shrinking populations strain thlse systems, reducing their long-term viability. There are many more negative feedback mechanisms at work, too. |