A shrinking world will turn our problems upside down

{"text":[[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":9.35,"text":"The era of global depopulation is coming, and sooner than we once thought. According to the UN’s latest projections, there is now an 80 per cent probability that the number of people on Earth will peak in this century then begin to decline, compared with a 30 per cent probability a decade ago."}],[{"start":32.73,"text":"For one in four of us, that future is already here. A quarter of the people in the world live in countries whose populations have already peaked, including China, Germany and Japan. Between now and 2054, the UN expects them to be joined by many others, including Brazil and Vietnam."}],[{"start":60.709999999999994,"text":"There has been a lot of debate about why women are having fewer babies, and whether anything can or should be done about it. But the fact we see this trend in so many different societies, from developed countries like the UK to developing ones like Nepal, from conservative ones like Iran to liberal democracies like Finland, complicates the search for simple explanations or solutions."}],[{"start":88.3,"text":"So let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the projections prove correct and the global population peaks in the mid-2080s at over 10bn, then starts to slowly decline. What would it look and feel like to live in a shrinking world?"}],[{"start":106.64,"text":"One view is that it would be bleak. Too few people of working age trying to support too many old people would mean not enough money to go around, not enough growth, not enough innovation and not enough cultural dynamism."}],[{"start":124.48,"text":"I tend to be more optimistic. As I have argued before, chronological age is not a particularly useful metric of “ageing” because what it means to be 70 today is not what it meant 20 or 30 years ago. In the UK, for example, levels of poor general health for women aged 70 in 2017 were around the same as for those aged 60 in 1981."}],[{"start":154.86,"text":"Over time, people have grown healthier and more economically active at older ages and there is no reason to think that cannot continue. Recent research also suggests that our cognitive abilities are more malleable than once thought. Many people can remain skilled if they continue to exercise their brains."}],[{"start":180.9,"text":"As for cultural dynamism, just look at South Korea: a rapidly ageing country that nonetheless produces cutting-edge music, films and fashion that are lapped up by young people across the world."}],[{"start":196.23000000000002,"text":"That doesn’t mean a depopulating world wouldn’t face problems. Some would be more acute versions of issues we face today, such as the fiscal unsustainability of pay-as-you-go state pension systems."}],[{"start":214.02,"text":"Others might be quite different. Although many people today fear that robots will take their jobs, in a depopulating future the problem might be that there aren’t enough robots to go around. As Sam Altman of OpenAI has written, it used to be “the conventional wisdom” that “AI would first impact physical labor, and then cognitive labor, and then maybe someday it could do creative work”. But since the invention of generative AI, “it now looks like it’s going to go in the opposite order”. In a shrinking and ageing world, we would surely prefer to preserve the desk-based jobs that could help older people stay economically active and cognitively sharp, and automate the physical jobs that are most suited to the fit and young."}],[{"start":269.27,"text":"Another of today’s preoccupations might seem very different in a depopulating world: immigration. If the UN projections are right, populations in some countries, many of them in Africa, will continue to expand after much of the rest of the world begins to shrink. Is it possible that one day, countries in the developed world will compete to attract young immigrants, rather than try to keep them at bay?"}],[{"start":300.79999999999995,"text":"Future-gazing exercises like these are inevitably highly speculative. But they serve to remind us just how different the world might seem on the other side of the “population peak”. The obsessions and preoccupations we have today might look quite alien to the smaller generations that follow us — perhaps even perverse. They might struggle to understand why we tried to make our countries so hostile and unattractive to outsiders, or why we invested so much money into large language models to automate cognitive tasks, rather than focusing more resources on dementia or the automation of tough physical labour."}],[{"start":347.47999999999996,"text":"“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” as LP Hartley put it in his 1953 novel The Go-Between. That has always been true. But it might feel especially so for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren when they look back at us. If we have any, that is."}],[{"start":379.94999999999993,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1764231311_3769.mp3"}