Underpopulation

Population decline in humans is any great reduction in a human population caused by events such as long-term demographic trends

Quotes

• The ultimate measure of human success is not production but reproduction. Economic productivity and profit are means to reproductive ends, not ends in themselves.
  • Pierre L. van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon (1981), Bloomsbury Academic

• On a farm, a child is an investment—an extra pair of hands to milk the cow, or shoulders to work the fields. But in a city a child is a liability, just another mouth to feed.
  • Darrell Bricker & John Ibbitson, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019), Robinson

• With populations aging and declining almost everywhere, countries may one day be competing for immigrants.
  • Darrell Bricker & John Ibbitson, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019), Robinson

• In the 1990s, as the consequences of a chronically low birth rate begin to sink in, Ottawa opened the floodgates, inviting 250,000 immigrants a year to come to Canada.
  • Darrell Bricker & John Ibbitson, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019), Robinson

• Among millennials, especially, the fertility rate is very low. Between 2007 and 2012, the birth rate among Americans who came of age after 2000 dropped by 15 percent, to the lowest birth rate ever recorded in the United States: 0.95, less than one baby for every mother.
  • Darrell Bricker & John Ibbitson, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019), Robinson

• All of this is completely, utterly wrong. The great defining event of the twenty-first century—one of the great defining events in human history—will occur in three decades, give or take, when the global population starts to decline. Once that decline begins, it will never end. We do not face the challenge of a population bomb but of a population bust—a relentless, generation-after-generation culling of the human herd. Nothing like this has ever happened before.
  • Darrell Bricker & John Ibbitson, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019), Robinson

• [W]hat makes population decline so implacable; once it sets in, it’s virtually impossible to stop, because every year there are fewer women of child-bearing age than there were the year before.
  • Darrell Bricker & John Ibbitson, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019), Robinson

• The low-fertility trap, once in place, is irreversible.
  • Darrell Bricker & John Ibbitson, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019), Robinson

See also

• Eugenics
• Children