We need to plan for an economy which is not growth-dependent. We should already be moving toward that, but nobody seems to be working on it.

UNICEF while in Africa in the 1980s Accidentally discovered that leaving a TV in villages. Dropped the birthrates by 50% overnight. We put a screen in everyone's hand starting in 2010. So this trend checks out.

The rate of childless women as a percentage has doubled since the late 70s. The rate of young men not seeking relationships has doubled since the early 2010s. While there must be a lower bound out there (not extinction) my bet is this trend has way to run yet

The UN World Populations Prospects (WPP) assume a rise in fertility in the developed world in the second half of this century. No one knows where this assumption comes from 😂

waiting for corporations to start counting robots in population growth like they count ethanol as oil barrels

This is just like the IEA's renewable energy growth rates. They kept projecting flat growth of reneables each year but renewables keep growing exponentially. After 20 years, the IEA finally noticed something was going on and they are now showing modest growth rates of renewables. Looks like the population decline rates are going through the same (but inverted) projections.

Your projection seems much more plausible than the UN's to me. I think we're going to see more and more countries start to freak out about their declining populations over the next few decades, and a lot of head scratching from economists trying to figure out how we deal with negative growth.

In the developed world, the cost of living crisis coupled with more widespread awareness of potentially dark uncertainties for the future will likely dramatically accelerate population decline in the near to mid term. Vastly unaffordable housing poses significant obstacles to household formation, marriage and childbearing, effectively pricing young people out of participating in the continuation of our species.

We are following the "mouse utopia" curve and can expect a huge population collapse due to the psychological effects of generational overpopulation driving an increase in dysfunctional insanity across a large % of the population.

i rediscovered your blog a few months ago. Didn't know you had a youtube account, it only came into my suggested feed today. Subscribed

Declining population will wreak a fair bit of havoc on the world economy.

Very happy to see a pragmatic mathematician speak to demographics. Particularly impressed by your analysis, and description of linear projections as fantasy. Thank you.

Wonderfully illuminating video Tom. I learned a lot and this helps me think differently about likely future population size.

Thank you for adding to the discussion on this.

Since the decline in birthrates has consistently outpaced projections before, I think it's fair to project it will continue to outpace projections. I honestly hope the population peaks in the 2040s, because that would avoid the specter of overpopulation in Africa and the Middle East, where most of the growth is occurring, and also give the Western world no choice but to transition away from our growth-reliant system. What we should really be aiming for isn't to grow but to stabilise our population. At the current rate it will shrink until there's nothing left and that's also undesirable.

Nice work, you have proved it with data which appears a certainty when I see around. By the way I am from India and UN population projections are way off for India. Whoever I see around in my extended family, work place, neighborhood, see a clear trend. People are not marrying, if they are it is pretty late in 30s which was 20s earlier. People are not having children for years after marriage, even if they are, they stop at one child only. I guess data will be really really surprising whenever a fresh census in conducted. I feel its population could peak in this decade or next decade itself.

the decline in living standards is hitting child bearing really hard. of course people are having fewer children.

No idea why I got you recommended in my feed but great video! Learned a lot and learned the UN’s projections are kinda whack

It really depends on the timing for Africa's fertility rate changes since the rest of the world is already declining.

Thanks for such a clear presentation.

Child mortality plays a role, and there's an important aspect that is counterintuitive. 1) Low child mortality = If you want two kids, you can have two babies, and you'll end up with two kids (to a high certainty). 2) 50% child mortality = If you want two kids, you'll need to have about eight babies to assure (to a high certainty) two surviving kids, but the average is four kids. That counterintuitive oddity doesn't get the attention it deserves Cultures end up adapting to high child mortality, leading to very high population growth. Then, when health improves, you end up with huge families until the culture adapts.

Thank you for analysis and opinion.

The world has rapidly urbanized which has driven up the cost of having children. It is expected to continue to urbanize.

Two things: 0:17 That first chart always blows my mind. It's even crazier if you don't limit it to just the past 1000 years, but instead include the entirety of human existence. How about the studies that tracked the steady decline of human sperm counts over decades and implied we're on track towards zero by the middle of this century. Similar trends were also found to be true in other species.

The main problem is urbanisation. Urbanisation continues and will continue for a long time until all the agricultural lands around the world are all farmed mechanically. Replacement rates in cities are typically in the 0.5-1 range and that is where the whole world will be going. The consequences of population decline are dramatic. We see this already in Japan, where the economy has stagnated ever since their population peaked. It starts with a major real estate crisis. Now we see the same thing happening in China. Korea is a ticking time bomb.

Thanks for the video. Open minded discussion around those themes are a must if one is to plan for long term life in this planet.

Years (decades?) ago, people were starting to talk about human population peaking at about 10B in about the 2040 timeframe. This is not new news. 8y ago Hans Rosling spoke about it. One of the largest unknowns is WHEN Nigeria's population growth is going to calm down. They're headed to a billion by themselves, so that's the critical unknown.

People having fewer children today than 50 years ago is not due to resource constraints; it's due to changes in values. Almost every population group on the planet is much wealthier now than fifty years ago. Today's population is more wealthy, educated, urbanized, materialistic, and hedonistic; but it is less religious. I know rich people with few (or no) children, and poor people with many children, all in the same suburban geographical area. The difference is values.

Great presentation. Reason for optimism. Assuming, of course, that population decline will alleviate many existing stresses.

Great content mate. But there is one crucial issue not addressed in the video, that has a correlation to the reason why the UN projections have this big gap with reality. Many states and institutions have plenty of reason to overstate their populations and projections since they are sustained by funds. So they deliberately overstate it. And in one specific case we can point out Butan that literally over state its population in 5x in the 50-60s, tp be able to join the UN, since they demanded any state to have at least 1 million inhabitants to be able to join in. But the same pattern happens in most countries especially from local governments. Also there is another problem counting to the Global population. The double or in some cases multiple counts from dual citizenships, most countries have no means to filter it out of its actual population, I was myself counted in Brazil and Australia for 7 years until I got it fixed due to some issues, but many people want to keep this status quo so they can manage their assets and legal rights more freely.

Edcuated smart People will only have kids if they can provide for them it's not to have 7 so 2 can survive into adulthood. It's to have 2 so 2 can thrive and have all the opportunity others kids have.The only way to improve brith rate is have a verry good wealth redistribution system.

I became a student of UCSD in 1969. Harold Urey talked to me about physics when I couldn't find my teaching assistant. Roger Revelle had a symposium on plate tectonics which I attended (partially because they were serving food). I was just a regular San Diego kid who could do math, yet they both saw value in educating their students. Scientist are human and want the "glory" of a Nobel . The JWST has given the current science community a lesson in humility. The standard model in Physics as well as demographic projections are at best a SWAG at a moment in time.

Hello tom interesting video. What is you final projection for the world? Will you be doing a deep dive of the impacts of the places with falling population? What does it mean for GDP growth, housing, immigration and debt?

That 2:04 graph... just put your phone up to the graph and make a line from the previous data. That UN projection is crazy optimistic, the line looks very steep eyeballing it

i'd love to get email notifications when you publish new blogposts. any chance that might be possible? with other blogs i follow i never miss a post but with yours i often do because i can't figure out how to subscribe.

The Bell Curve strikes yet again. Your final prediction mirrors the population graph of both a bacterial infection and a locust plague. All conform to the standard distribution graph as a function of time.

I really enjoyed your video, especially how you used statistical tools to look at current models. Have you looked into the impact of infant mortality on female fertility? There is a lot of research indicating that fertility is driven by infant and child mortality.

People who discuss demographics always assume fertility is individual or culturally determined. But environmentalists frequently bring up concerns about declining fertility from toxic chemical proliferation and bioaccumulation since WW2. So with demographic declines that steep it seems important to know the reasons? Do couples want to get pregnant but cannot succeed, or choose not to because of economic limitations and social constraints? It would be almost comedic if plastic exposure or PFAS contamination were rapidly driving humanity to extinction, and no one noticed.

I hope the population doesn't rebound. Along with the phasing out of fossil fuels, the population deflation could play a big role in saving this planet from climate change as the Baby Boomers pass away.

Too many people are looking at the total population size and growth. More important is the pressure each of us is putting on the planet.. Even if the population drops significantly but everyone wants to live like people in North America, the planet is in trouble. Even if the population continues to grow, but per capita consumption drops, the global economy is in trouble. How to navigate between those two is the challenge.

Thanks, Tom, a mathematician here. I can't fathom why projections look like this. I can't fault your comments, which are what I have been saying for the last 5 years. That said, the world can change, and those projections can be altered as we can't guess what the future will hold.

I'd like to see the correlation of population growth or fertility with the trend in median disposable income.

I suggest increasing the font size in the graphs for legibility, otherwise perhaps upload at 1080p resolution?

The lower population curve is closer to that shown in the Limits to Growth models. (do a quick search for the graphic) The LtoG model actually shows a peak of less than 8 billion, which we have already passed. I haven't seen an explanation for that discrepancy.

Projections are really tenuous in times of rapid change. Will the rapid declines in fertility since 2008 continue, return to the slower declines of the previous 20 years, or do something else? Tom assumed the first alternative, and the UN assumed the second. Official projections by their nature don't assume rapid change.

Great analysis. One linkage that I would examine more closely is how a declining birth rate impacts overall life expectancy. Hard decisions will need to be made as the number of active workers to retired workers continue to decline. In the US, we are presently at 2.9 workers per retiree. However, by 2030, this ratio will decline to 2:1. Something will need to give, and I expect it will be end of life care. If that is the case, then it would potentially have little overall impact to your analysis. However, if other solutions are adopted because older people vote at greater proportions to the young, then I might expect to see worsening health outcomes in younger generations.

I have to say that I commend your cautious and conservative approach to this subject. There are informed folk out there in media-land who are saying that we, as a species, are actually in serious trouble and I think they are right. The collapse that will follow the population dwindling will not be fun, even tho' there may be better times after that period. I keep telling myself that we went down to a thousand 'breeding pairs' in the ice ages so we are pretty resilient but it is still concerning that this is not getting much attention in the political sphere.

Falling amount of young and increasing amount of older people - is also very impactful - and is happening now - more important that peak population (if you ask me). Total Population is like counting all the monsters in a tower defence game.

I think they dont want to talk about declining population because our economic system simply cannot handle it. Capitalism will collapse when there is no more growth. We will need a new solution

Looks a lot like the Club of Romes 'Limits of Growth' prediction of population. But rather then driven by accelerated death rates from a collapsing food supply, it's a collapse of birth rates due to the cost of living, housing etc.

Nice to see a projection from more realistic fertility forecasts, in light of recent declines. I would suggest a downward revision of Latin American fertility, considering recent drops in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica and Puerto Rico. Seems fertility in this region can reach the levels previously only seen by East Asia. I would have noted the impact of the century on the racial/ethnic/cultural makeup of the world population. Africa will account for the majority of births well before the end of the century by this model, no? The number of European or East Asian people is going to see a great decline proportionally.

In John Calhoun's rat studies, the decline did not stop. The rats developed antisocial anti breeding behaviors and even though surrounded by plentiful space nesting materials and water they went extinct at the end. Google rat universe 133 to learn more about the seminal 197o's studies. However the decline of other species may indicate that we are poisoning our environment in a way that makes it difficult for vertebrates to reproduce.

"Trust the science". The science: "I have no f idea"

As civilisation we tend to create a new pyramid of power and money because social networks caused acceleration opposite to altruistic expectations: everyone chases wellbeing upon empathy and living for others. I mean this egoism is declining humanity in overall. Active woke distortions, passive and forgotten ethical life. Life is pricy? It's all about greed. We can hope life will be long and content even without children, but sometimes it's clear it won't.

Financial markets will not respond like a gradual deflation to gradual population decline. We have a boom and bust cycle. So, instead, we will get more financial crises that either have to be papered over by central banks or governments or will devastate the housing markets, stock markets, and auto markets.

The cost of living is the main driver of fertility rates decline, it would be interesting to see how that tracks.

a log scale on the y coordinate would make the graph easier to see the lower tfr

(All of the following comments are just my uninformed speculation - so take it as a theoretical possibility). One factor that seems to be at play is the redefinition of childhood. Back in the 1920's (and before), children in rural areas were seen as a necessary resource (in addition to being loved offspring). More children meant more economic output and potentially greater wealth. Basically an additional child brought in more economic wealth than they cost. They were also less likely to survive. So in an effort to increase family wealth (nobody was wealthy, just trying to survive) and to account for the possibility that some of the children would not survive, it was in the best interests of a family to have many children. Fast forward to later generations and children are no longer a part of the workforce. This started in urban areas but since the 40's has started to creep into rural areas as well (child labor laws in the U.S. began in the late 30's). By the late 50's children basically no longer worked (or if they did, it was not enough to overcome their expenses making them a net negative in terms of family wealth). By the turn of the century this has only accelerated. Children now are meant to play, learn, and grow up as slowly as we can let them (with obvious, often tragic exceptions). Couple this with the time and physical impacts having a child has on a woman, and you start to see disincentives to having multiple children. Especially as women gain more political and economic power. Having a child now becomes a product of wanting one (or more) more than the necessity of having them. This incentive to not have as many children might have had to fight with a cultural expectation to have many children. I am guessing that that explains why we didn't fall off a cliff in the 50's. If a woman of (typical) child-bearing age is roughly 20-40 years of age, then we have had between 2 and 4 generations since the incentives changed. I can see where it could take that long for cultural shifts (responding to economic realities) to change. Africa is still on an earlier part of this trend line. But their shift is happening faster than happened in the western world. I expect that as the role of children (and the corresponding role of women) changes there, we will see a rapid progression to a lower birth rate there as well. TLDR: We used to need children as an economic resource. So more children meant more wealth. About 80 years ago (in the west) that role shifted to be one where children are an economic burden (at least till they reach maturity, though sometimes beyond as well). This has happened quickly and will continue to permeate throughout the world, hitting Africa last (though their trend lines seem to indicate it is happening faster there).

Compare your last graph of population to that of a graph of bacteria growth in a petri dish. Not surprisingly they are very similar.

Some scientists say that the planet's ability to sustain human life is between 3 to 5 billion people. We're currently over 8 billion so many of us will exit the scene if this is correct.

We need to starting planning for a degrowth economy now! Economic models that rely on never-ending growth in our finite world are doomed to failure.

It will be interesting to see what happens when large countries start to decline in population. I don’t think we really understand what that’s going to look like

Links to the blog?

It's hard to understand how a diligent assessment of future population trends could be done without considering climate change and ecosystem collapse.

Why wouldn't human behavior change when circumstances changed? If population fell back to the 1980 level, why wouldn't some populations change their norms etc to deal?

I agree with you that there are many factors that decide the future population. I think the world oil production will rather soon start to permantely decline. By 2100 there will be very little oil left. So a lot less than 10 billion people.

All the models around population growth are likely to be mistaken. They all just assume Africa is going to follow the trend and there is no reason to think that it will. There is survey data from within Africa where women are asked how many children is the ideal number and in some places the average answer was 13.

This topic is soooo fascinating, and I've been following it for a while now. I think there are a lot of unknown unknowns that are going to make everyone wrong, myself included. But here are some of the things that I am watching out for. 1) life extension tech is coming. I think that it is going to blow a lot of estimates away. It will be too late for boomers, but a lot of GenX and younger will be living and extra 5-10 years past our expected experation date, and younger generations will likely live progressively longer. There is evidence that there will be a natural limit around age 120, so extension beyond that will have social and moral questions of engineering ones self rather than just maintaining for longer... But even what can be done with "natural" life extension methods will throw a lot of wrenches in a lot of metrics. 2) the weaponization of kids. This goes 2 directions. The first is what Russia is trying right now with government, media, church, and every voice screaming at their population that having lots of kids is theit patriotic duty to keep their national existence in the fight against "the west". But it isn't just a push to keep the front lines full of young blood to literally fight for esistance. There are economic benefits to being the growing population in a shrinking world will be palpable. And it isn't just nationalistic countries doing this. Japan and South Korea are pushing hard for their population to have more kids... And it's just not working. But the flip side to this is what China effectively did the last 20 years. Everyone assumed that China was the inevitable coming leader of the world. This prevented fights, and attracted business... But last year we found out that a chunk of their 25 and younger crowd simply never existed. Extra benefits for would be parents who could spend those resources on themselves. Localities that get extra funding from government and world support organizations for humanitarian aide... Lots of reasons to do this. And China largely did it on accident, but others have taken notes and will do it on purpose. 3) the great wealth transfer. Boomers take a lot of flack for things that aren't totally their fault... But they did break the norms of social expectations and have soaked up a lot of resources. Previous to the boomers there was an expectation that you have a lot of kids, and give them your all, move in with one of them as part of your retirement, and help take on some of their domestic front. No generation built much wealth, and what wealth existed wasn't as siloed within a generation. Boomers are the first large generation with a lot of wealth, and they intend to be independent through retirement... But also intend to horde the bulk of their wealth until the end to remain independant. Not saying that this is any better or worse than previous sociatal expectations... But what happens when the boomers eventually die? Their own kids will be well onto retirement when they get their inheritance, and the next generation won't be planning on an inheritance so they will be well onto their own retirement plans. My assumption is that a lot of that inheritance will trickle down to the grand kids in one way or another. With so many complaints of increasing inflation, lack of housing, etc... What happens when those resources are focused on a much smaller generation at a much younger age? With a lot of those economic stresses alleviated, will they start having kids younger? And by extension have more of them? 4) automation will play a massive role. AI is largely Over-hyped... It's coming, but that revolution is largely 10-20 years away. But physical automation and robotics (with or without AI) is rolling out quick. On the one hand, it is coming before population decline, which will make for interesting times when the largest ever working population starts being less needed. But then as populations start declining in earnest, automation will be a requirement for economic survival as smaller populations have to provide goods and services for larger retired populations. Less of an issue on the US where out population chart looks more like a smokes tack than a collapse. But for many countries, automation will be essential. Anywho, I'm not sure how these will play out, but I think these will likely be a lot of the biggest things to shape the coming decades as demographics change quickly. Going to be interesting times!

Population decline is strongly aligned with urbanization. In a city it's very hard to raise a big family and you have to provide for them instead of children helping out. Now, an average person in the city pollutes in an order of magnitude more than a person living in a rural area especially in a developing country. That means that though we think that curbing population is a good thing, in fact it is due to urbanization and thus will only accelerate emissions and global warming...

Those conversations are already starting, but unfortunately from a position of complete ignorance.

Under estimated factors: - The degradation of our environnement is accelerating and will put more and more pressure on our health which will eventually lead to reduce the life expectancy. - The fear of the futur is growing amount the population which will lead to not want to have a baby in these scaring future - The cost of living is increasing a lot and the power of purchase for the young generation is rather low comparatively to the young baby boomer time. In 1990 I bought my house for twice my salary, today it is 10 times my salary (in Canada). When your purchase power is low then you do not want to add another expense as a child - The cost of raising a child today is way higher than in the 70s so why have a child you can not afford So that is why I think that the earth population will peak sooner than forecasted and will decrease more rapidly than forecasted.

And yet our civilization is built around continued growth which was always a preposterous notion.

It's been apparent for the last decade that the UN is WAY behind the curve in its population assumptions. The UN seems to think that industrial revolutions and transformations today will happen at the same pace they did a century ago, and that, in the long term, everything will return to "normal", as defined by the UN. The IIASA projections and those from more independent sources such as the book Empty Planet (by Bricker and Ibbitson in 2019) have shown lower peaks and much earlier than the UN projections.

I am waiting for the day that the world population clock starts going backwards.

Good video.. Agree with the analysis that population might peak much ahead than UN estimates.. If not 2040, surely around 2050.. But surely not 2080, that is way off mark

Assuming unsustainable consumption and populatiions can be sustained is a modern form of faerietale. Biodiversity loss, top soil loss, radically unsustainable agribusiness aka "green revolution" required to feed today's world which basically boils down to converting petro chemicals and a few other inputs applied by industrial machines into food. None of these can be sustained. It's safe to say the further beyond sustainable limits we push the lower the long term population will and can be, since we will be using up non renewable, or very slow to renew (like topsoil and aquifers) resources to maintain or expand our numbers. And that's barely touching on the pollution we are generating to do this. One part of which we focus on, namely greenhouse gas emissions leading to global heating, but that's just one symptom of the larger artempt to convert the planets finite resources into an infinitely growing human population. Formula is somewhat basic: each region that can produce its own food and water sustainably is probably going to do ok. Warning signs are desalinization, declining water tables, top soil loss, farmland loss due to soil degradation, import of food staples. In terms of further expansion numbers it's common to ignore the massive amounts of toxins being released by industrial practices, plus the increasing stresses of living in an overpopulated world. Of course birth rates are decling, depending on your optimism levels, we are easily 3-8x over the Earth's carrying capacity. Insect collpses in industrial world are all you need to see. Or desert nations with populations easily 20x over their carrying capacity converting oil exports into population expansion. Each region is different in this regard.

In Victorian times it was not unusual for a woman to have a dozen children or more So even an average of 5 is a drop compared to (say) 1850

This is a good perspective. UN projections are very optimistic...

Peter Zeihan's book "The End of the World is Just the Beginning" is a good place to start on the impacts of population decline. In some cases, deglobalization can lead to worse outcomes for the environment. For example, as Russia depopulates, they could lose the ability to keep their natural gas outputs up, leading to countries switching back to coal. We have already seen this happen due to the Ukraine war. There are other population models. The Wittgenstein Center predicts global population to peak in 2070 at 9.4 billion.

Housing and dating / social media. Mostly. I mean the drop after 2010.

Unfortunately this analysis aligns with what my "gut" (I know...) has been telling me after years of digging into the dire situation humanity appears to be heading into. Digging into all sources I could find for the numerous issues impacting global society my gut has told me we have ~20 year until societal collapse (I do not exactly know what that means) and about 50 years until humanity is essential done being the dominant species (I feel like it means the end of humanity as we know it, but that could be my interpretation - personal bias is really hard to filter out) . I think (hope?) those are sequential, giving us ~70 years. And yes, I am well aware that a "gut" feeling is far from science but it isn't that kind of a thing. It's more of a subconscious synthesis of all the data I've been taken in being processed at a more fundamental level. All I can say is my "gut" has been right way too many times in telling me things that I only come to understand *fully* much later. Again, it's not simply a "feeling" although I wish it was.

@Tom Murphy I completely understand why you changed the assumptions in the birth rates. However I believe you might have inadvertently made an assumption you have not even realized you were making in the death rates. It is understandable why you can imagine no new medical technology in the developed economies, and therefore no increase in life expectancies in the developed economies. It makes no sense however to assume zero reduction in infant mortality, zero reduction in child mortality, and zero implementation of existing medical technology in the less developed economies and least developed economies. The country of Romania had zero economic growth from 1980 to 2000 ( when analyzing GDP in constant dollars, or accounting for the inflation). Even with zero economic growth, the country reduced infant mortality, reduced child mortality, and implemented existing medical technology to increase total life expectancy over that 20 year period. The implicit assumption you are making by assuming zero growth in life expectancies in lesser developed economies and least developed economies is a continuous global recession lasting until the end of the century.

Never in all of history have we not had a population that was growing: handling this change is going to be one of the biggest challenges of this century 🤷‍♂️

It is all Africa. The rest barely matters. Africa projected to add 600 million by 2040 and another 800 million by 2060, and another 600 million by 2080. Those assume high fertility rates don't come down quickly, but even if they do the % of young people in these countries is very high, so even with lower fertility lots of women in the child bearing ages. Nigeria alone is projected to add 100 million by 2040, another 100 million by 2060 and another by 2080. Is this possible ...???? Similar with Ethiopia. If these do not happen, a peak at 2040 is quite likely. What can stop them??? Hopefully something. A world population back at 2 billion would make the survival of humanity a much safer bet ... and much better for the planet.

A large bunch of old people sitting around, having to care for each other, and live simply, with the youth needing to live caring for themselves, or the old, and not enough young people capable of filling conscription ranks such that, border conflicts will be smaller and more localized due to fewer bodies available for large armies. Food will need to become more locally grown and transported. Sounds a more positive future.

Thank you for explaining your model in detail ... I think you may need to make some changes to this model as a result of the COVID vaccine ... I think that will affect the birth rates but only time will prove (or disprove) this possibility!

China's birth rate plunged after 2000 because a generation had grown up in the cities where most of the people around them were an only child. Being the only child had been normalised. The government no longer had to restrict births. Having one child had become people's expectation. Now the government finds it can't get most people to consider having more children. Is this a cultural trend that can ever be reversed, to stabilise the population? I suspect it would take a generation of higher birth rate compulsion, like the one child policy.

It's plausible more deaths and low fertility continue to accelerate. An economic recession is underway in many places and with a globally synchronized monetary system it will catch up everywhere and it could be worse than 2008. We could have more war break out and with the dying off of old white men we could see competency plummet. Not only could infrastructure crumble, we might not be able to feed all those Africans. With shrinking population economic/funding systems stop working. Healthcare, pensions, taxes all plummet. Maybe hormone disrupters like micro plastics continues to get worse, women and men ideologically continue to drift apart, fertility continues to free fall with no bottom other than an asymptotic 0.0.

28/06/2024 India's population 1.5 billion in government record 1.45 billion life is very difficult because the population explosion here

8.9 billion...ive predicted this for the last decade

UN projections are still the same for decades now, without change, so forget that model! I did study this subject long ago, and I still remember this one. Best current projection is peak at 8.8 billion. Murphy is actually doing a very good job at explaining population, which I rarely see these days. My own guess is that peak will be sooner, which will be due to climate change issues, food production peaking, and could also add the latest news.............Tesla Optimus......taking over blue collar jobs.........trust me......this will happen soon, and they do not need food. Willing to bet 100 rupees that peak will be 8.4 billion, then decline will begin very slowly, then speed up. (Except for Musk's kids, which will be the future CEO's taking over planet earth! )

I really want to live to see world population park and decline. That is a planet I want to explore, even though we have no economic model for it.

countries need to encourage people to clusters in particular areas stop spending money on long range infrastructure, look at countries with really livable cities as best practice Amsterdam, Tokyo for eg. Less sprawl makes them more livable and cheaper to run. Less roads. less distance for buses etc. let some areas of your country return to nature imagine a vibrant Singapore type city surrounded by nature , look Ottawa Canada awesome setting,

I think it’ll be before then. I’m thinking 2030 census will be a shock because we will have peaked. IMO we’re peaking now. Recently it was discovered China to have drastically overcounted their population by over 100 million people. In the long run it is a good thing for the planet.

Latin America is plummeting recently. They might fall below 1 soon. It's crazy. Others might stabilize a bit.

The last time Europe had a demographic catastrophe, the result was the Renaissance.

Great video. Absolutely right projections seem to have been consistently optimistic. Our population forecasting has been poor. One thing I'd point out, in regards to your "limits to growth" comment, is that fertility is not evenly distributed. Most children being born today are not being born in OECD, or even rapidly developing countries, where fossil resorces are widely exploited. They are being born in Africa and Central Asia. In fact many of them are being bor in countries without the agricultural base to support the current population. That's why small changes in commodity prices cause hardship in these places.

I've started paying closer attention to this subject and appreciate your skepticism of those cheery UN projections. While I think the US decline in life expectancy is a Covid anomaly the falling birth rate across the globe is very real. Religious conservatives think it's caused by overconsumption of pornography. While I still can't believe such a wild claim the porn industry has seen exponential growth as faster internet becomes available to billions of people around the world. Globally over 30% of viewers are women now.

If I was a betting man, I'd say we reach peak population around 2050. Even India is now at a stagnant growth rate.

The decline of mondial population might be the solution to our non respect of our environment. This decline might save our species of auto destruction.