Population decline

Population decline is any great reduction in any species' population.

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

There are more forty-year-old women than there are thirty-year-old women, who outnumber twenty-year-old women. That's what 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

World population may shrink for multiple reasons, including poor nutrition and epidemics.
- Gail Tverberg, "The world has a major crude oil problem; expect conflict ahead" (April 21, 2022)

We cannot know in advance exactly how the economy will shrink back its energy consumption, besides regionalization and pushing the US dollar (at least partially) out of being the reserve currency. Some other areas where the physics of the economy might force cutbacks include the following: Vacation travel; Banks, insurance companies, pension programs (much less needed); The use of financial leverage of all kinds; Governmental programs providing payments to those not actively in the workforce (such as pensions, unemployment insurance, disability payments); Higher education programs (many graduates today cannot get jobs that pay for the high cost of their educations); Extensive healthcare programs, especially for people who have no hope of ever re-entering the workforce. In fact, the population may start to fall because of epidemics, poor health, or even too little food. With fewer people, limited energy supply will go further.
- Gail Tverberg, "2023: Expect a financial crash followed by major energy-related changes" (January 9, 2023)

A lot of technologies have been utilised in storing food or growing more of it. And we know that increased access to food increases population size. The reverse is also true, of course, so we should expect population to fall as harvests come under stress from the effects of climate change. […] At every possible fork in the path of the future, humans, generally, will always choose the route that gives them more convenience or more comfort. Only when none of the possible routes provide that option will humans start down the contraction and lower energy path.
- Mike Roberts, "The inevitability of our predicament" (September 14, 2024)