He is right, if he also stops well short of saying what he might. But "the politicians", as always, are only doing what the people are telling them to. The human species has decided to shut down.
> But "the politicians", as always, are only doing what the people are telling them to.
Incorrect. The politicians are doing what a very small, almost numerically insignificant, portion of the people are telling them to do. Those being the ultra-wealthy. It may be that what we are seeing is that what is best for the ultra-wealthy is not what is best for society as whole.
Would that it were a game of SimCity. If/when we get to 4B, 2B, it will be only after displacements of whole populations, mass-starvation, and likely brutal war.
It's amazing that we had oodles of "population growth will cause mass-starvation, we need global policy to limit the population to the current size" worries on the run up from 2B to 8B and now we've got "population decline will cause mass-starvation, we need global policy to limit the population to the current size" worries.
And the global population isn't falling. Birth rates are only below replacement among certain groups.
Good news, unfortunately, rarely radiates with the power or urgency of bad news.
The mass-starvation concerns of the '70s-'80s were resolved by an army of agriculture and biological scientists developing revolutionary breakthroughs in staple food crops and farming techniques. These fundamentally staved off the "cold equations" starvation risk (most starvation in the modern era is logistical error; the food exists, it isn't where people are).
Unfortunately, key pieces of the solutions involved practices we know aren't sustainable indefinitely (fertilizer production is fossil-fuel heavy), so there's more work to be done (and some non-zero benefit if we were to discover that the global human population was falling without some mass-tragedy causing it).
birth rates are below replacement in the majority of countries now. Global birth rate is down to 2.24 this year, and 2.11 is the baseline for maintaining the population. I'd bet a tremendous amount of money that we cross the threshold by 2030.
Really is amazing to me how the second derivative of population can be used to argue in this way. Mass starvation. Doomed civilization. While the population continues to grow.
People are capable of looking past their nose, and I've never claimed the outcome will be mass starvation or a doomed civilization. Societies will just have to change, in a way that is without precedent.
And I think you are being playful, but it's worth remembering that the second derivative of position is what kills you in a car accident, and the third derivative gives you whiplash. We also just had an election where a top issue was both the derivative and second derivative of the value of a dollar.
That is quite possible, but I was thinking more that several generations of people not reproducing above replacement rate isn't really a disaster by itself.
If we don't have war, displacement, and mass starvation, and people still decide just to not have as many kids for a few generations, the species will survive (and from a resource consumption standpoint the planet will probably be better off).
Incorrect. The politicians are doing what a very small, almost numerically insignificant, portion of the people are telling them to do. Those being the ultra-wealthy. It may be that what we are seeing is that what is best for the ultra-wealthy is not what is best for society as whole.