Economically the picture is dire: slower economic growth, less entrepreneurship, rising inequality and unserviceable public debt. Even living in an individual country where the population is declining is a fairly recent and new thing. Can we even do so? We have never experienced such a situation: a global population decline. Let’s just think take a moment about what such a world would look like, how it would feel like. If that’s right, then the demographic winter is coming. Once that decline begins, it will never end.” “The great defining event of the twenty-first century,” they say, “will occur in three decades, give or take, when the global population starts to decline. It is written by a Canadian social scientist, Darrell Bricker and journalist John Ibbitson and it claims that: Last week a new book was released entitled “ Empty Planet” which also challenges the assumption that overpopulation is the demographic danger in the future. Shannon mentioned a few of them in her blogpost and they generally predict a global population peak at a lower level than the UNPD, at an earlier time than the UNPD and then a continual decline from that peak into the future. While the UN Population Division’s predictions get the most press and are still foreseeing a global population expansion until the end of this century, they are not the only predictions floating around. As Shannon pointed out a couple of weeks ago, the shift from fears about global overpopulation to concern about population decline is starting to hit the mainstream media.

Empty planet