Japan's population was 44 million in 1900, it is 123 million now.
South Korea's population was 25 million in 1960, it is 54 million now.
We need to stop going over the top with claims of "population collapse". The 20th century to this day was abnormal at historical scale in that human population exploded like never before, and perhaps like never again and probably for the best considering how we have brought the planet to its knees.
South Korea's birth rate is 0.7, which means for every 100 grandparents there will be only 12 grandchildren if things don't change. At the current pace, the South Korean population will be 32 million in 2075 and 11 million in 2125, and most of the people alive will be old. That's nearly as massive a change in the opposite direction as the drop in childhood mortality in the 20th century.
Extrapolations over a century into the future are worthless.
We need to embrace and adapt to a decrease in population because the explosion that has happened is unsustainable and so are current global population levels. That's the best, if not only, way to both get rid of poverty globally and to preserve the climate and environment.
This does not mean that population should or will collapse to extra low levels...
>> Extrapolations over a century into the future are worthless.
Its just math showing the trend and it's not worthless as it should give you something to think about.
>> We need to embrace and adapt to a decrease in population
Of course, but it will be painful.
>> That's the best, if not only, way to both get rid of poverty globally and to preserve the climate and environment.
That simple math, which you deem worthless also tells you this is impossible. There will be a small number of young active people having to support a big group of elderly. They will not have the time to solve world problems. In fact a lot of knowledge will be lost as economy will contract and there will be less people available for specialization.
I don't know what point are trying to make, beside being sarcastic. Knowing that each succeeding generation will be a 1/3 of the previous one has huge influence on how to prepare a society to function when population pyramid will be so inverted.
If they don't change something drastically this is exactly what will happen according to science. It's like there is a comet on course with Earth, but you are saying, knowing it would be meaningless because something might change it's path. I still don't know what your point is.
According to science, the only thing that can change the second derivative of population is public policy? What has caused changes in this number throughout history?
The debate would go much nicer if you could just explain your point of view, which I kindly asked you twice now. Instead you are asking me what I assume are rhetorical questions from your perspective.
My point of view is that it is not useful at all to carry out predictions assuming that the second derivative of population will stay constant for a long time and that it is even sillier to propose public policy based on this.
By that logic we should not act upon anything. E.g. if a car is accelerating towards you while you are crossing the road it would be prudent to speed up or delay your crossing and not to ignore it and say they will surely decelerate at any moment now.
It is not impossible. It is going to happen and it is unavoidable. Even with a constant population this will happen if people live long.
We need to embrace this and use existing and new technologies to cope. We have AI, automation, robots progressing fast, this is exactly what we need in addition to investing in education.
The alternative is to keep pushing for an ever growing population and to end up in Soylent Green / Blade Runner.
>> It is not impossible. It is going to happen and it is unavoidable.
Based on history it hasn't happened. How do you know it's going to?
>>The alternative is to keep pushing for an ever growing population and to end up in Soylent Green / Blade Runner.
That is absolutely not the only alternative. One would be to have a stable population at the current size. Another on would be decreasing population slowly and not as drastically as it will happen in Korea. A third one would be growing it slowly. The fourth one would be oscillating around the current size, etc.
Yeah it is baffling to me that people are already on the "we are doomed" phase for this.
50 years ago people were saying "we are doomed" because of overpopulation. We had people saying that the optimal number of humans on the planet was just one billion and that we had to engage in extreme measures of international oppression to force as much of the unavoidable starvation on certain populations and not others. Now we are seeing "the world is doomed" because of underpopulation (despite the fact that the world population is still growing) and we are starting to see the proposed extreme measures of rolling back women's rights in order to address this.
Well the problem is people in retirement, caring only about size of their pension outnumbering working age people and effectively creating positive feedback for populist parties to constantly increase pensions despite the constantly shrinking working population and tax revenue.
This system can't work. This system is going to collapse. Just matter of time.
You miss the point - a larger population isn't necessarily good if most of them are not economically productive (i.e. don't have skilled working class). Are people supposed to work even in their old age, till they die?
South Korea's population was 25 million in 1960, it is 54 million now.
We need to stop going over the top with claims of "population collapse". The 20th century to this day was abnormal at historical scale in that human population exploded like never before, and perhaps like never again and probably for the best considering how we have brought the planet to its knees.