Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline

by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

From the authors of the bestselling The Big Shift, a provocative argument that the global population will soon begin to decline, dramatically reshaping the social, political, and economic landscape.

For half a century, statisticians, pundits, and politicians have warned that a burgeoning planetary population will soon overwhelm the earth's resources. But a growing number of experts are sounding a different kind of alarm. Rather than growing exponentially, they argue, the global population is headed for a steep decline.

Throughout history, depopulation was the product of catastrophe: ice ages, plagues, the collapse of civilizations. This time, however, we're thinning ourselves deliberately, by choosing to have fewer babies than we need to replace ourselves. In much of the developed and developing world, that decline is already underway, as urbanization, women's empowerment, and waning religiosity lead to smaller and smaller families. In Empty Planet, Ibbitson and Bricker travel from South Florida to Sao Paulo, Seoul to Nairobi, Brussels to Delhi to Beijing, drawing on a wealth of research and firsthand reporting to illustrate the dramatic consequences of this population decline--and to show us why the rest of the developing world will soon join in.

They find that a smaller global population will bring with it a number of benefits: fewer workers will command higher wages; good jobs will prompt innovation; the environment will improve; the risk of famine will wane; and falling birthrates in the developing world will bring greater affluence and autonomy for women. But enormous disruption lies ahead, too. We can already see the effects in Europe and parts of Asia, as ageing populations and worker shortages weaken the economy and impose crippling demands on healthcare and social security. The United States is well-positioned to successfully navigate these coming demographic shifts--that is, unless growing isolationism and anti-immigrant backlash lead us to close ourselves off just as openness becomes more critical to our survival than ever before.

Rigorously researched and deeply compelling, Empty Planet offers a vision of a future that we can no longer prevent--but one that we can shape, if we choose.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Politics, Sociology, History, Economics, Anthropology

304 pages, Hardcover

First published February 5, 2019

Reviews

[Miranda Reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

Population decline isn't a good thing or a bad thing. But it is a big thing.

Throughout my childhood, I've heard time and time again about the rise and fall of human population.

Well, for the past few decades, we saw a rise like no other but soon (very soon) that will reverse.

And the consequences will affect everyone, everywhere.

The human herd has been culled in the past by famine or plague. This time, we are culling ourselves...

And what has changed so much that the human population is decreasing at such an alarming rate?

Urbanization, improved public health, increasing affluence and, above all, increasing autonomy for women had resulted in fewer babies per woman in each generation.

With an emphasis on women's rights. The authors' research showed that there is a direct correlation between education and children.

And as woman won more rights and greater power, they stopped having so many children. After all, babies are not always good news for women.

And this is a global phenomenon - from the U.S. to Europe to Africa - once the women have access to education and birth control, then the country's population begins to decline.

The book also goes into detail about the potential consequences of a global population decrease - which amounts to several severe shakeups to society (after all, fewer workers lead to less work being done).

The authors then focused on what can be done to stave off the negative consequences:

...in countries with a below-replacement fertility rate - which is pretty much every country in the developed world - economic migrants are essential to counteract the impact of population decline.

And they are quick to point out that this solution isn't the most popular one:

A dark thread of racist, nativist, populist intolerance flows through the American story. The latest immigrants are not like us...They will never assimilate...They're a threat.

And yet, Canada has seen a population and economy boom since adopting immigration-friendly policies.

Canada welcomed the whole world, but with the stipulation that new arrivals had to have skills and education needed to find work quickly...

Can the negative effects be postponed? Only time will tell...

Overall - I found this book fascinating.

I remember reading the statistics on globally how few children are being born and going, "Nahhh. There's no way..."

And then I thought of my own family.

Great-grandparents - 9-11 children (started having children immediately, ~18-19)
Grandparents - 5 children (started having children mid-twenties)
Parents - 2 children (started having children early thirties)

In less than half a century, the number of children in my family declined over 75%. The same happened with my husband's family, my friends, coworkers.

Not only are parents having fewer children, they are waiting longer to have them - just as the book said! (cue the spooky music)

Honestly, this is such an interesting global phenomenon and one that brings hope to all the over-population worries at the world.

And at the same time, what would the world look like with fewer and fewer people?

When children become a rarity, who will take care of the aging population?

So many thoughts to think about.

Our future will contain something we have never experienced: a world growing smaller in numbers by choice.

With thanks to the publishing company for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

All quotes come from an uncorrected proof and are subject to change upon publication.

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[Charles Haywood · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anybody who has been paying attention has long grasped the truth: underpopulation, not overpopulation, is our problem. This will soon be true on a global scale, it is already true in most of the developed world. "Empty Planet" explains why this is undeniably so. Unfortunately, the explanation is shrouded in confusion and ideological distortion, so the authors are never able to provide a clear message. Instead, they offer rambling, contradictory bromides combined with dumb “solutions” until the reader throws his hands up in despair, as I did. But then I got a stiff drink, finished the book, and now am ready to tell you about it.

The authors, two Canadians, Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson, offer an apparently complete story. Every part of the world is becoming more urbanized. Urbanization causes a drop in the fertility rate, for three reasons. First, when off the farm, children are a cost center, rather than a profit center. Second, urbanized women choose to have fewer children. Third, urbanization means atomization of social life, such that the networks in which people were embedded, most of which exercised pressure to have children, disappear, and if replaced, are replaced by friends or co-workers who do not exercise the same pressure. “Family members encourage each other to have children, whereas non-kin don’t.” These causes of population decline are exacerbated by two other factors not tied to urbanization—the worldwide decline of religious belief, and lower infant and child mortality, which means people don’t have children as insurance. And the end of the story is that when the fertility rate drops far enough, it is, in the modern world, permanent. It is the “fertility trap,” analogous to the well-known “Malthusian trap.”

Why do urbanized women choose to have fewer children (aside from the other two stated reasons, expense and less family pressure)? The authors cite the desire for a career; the desire for autonomy and empowerment; the desire to escape the control of men; and the desire for “crafting a personal narrative.” All of these things the authors tie to “education,” or, in their unguarded moments and more accurately, “being socialized to have an education and a career.” That is, modernity leads to women choosing to have fewer children, often no children at all, and far fewer children than are necessary to replace the people we have now.

Why the fertility trap? It’s due to two totally separate causes. One is mechanical—if a society has fewer children, obviously there will then be fewer women to bear new children. But the other is social. When there are fewer children, “Employment patterns change, childcare and schools are reduced, and there is a shift from a family/child oriented society to an individualistic society, with children part of individual fulfilment and well-being.” In other words, it’s not a trap, it’s a societal choice. Interestingly, according to the authors, drops in the fertility rate, and therefore the fertility trap, are not the result of legalized abortion and easy contraception, as can be seen from examples of fertility problems prior to the 1960s. For example, the birth rate was briefly at less than replacement in much of the West prior to World War II, when contraception was much less common, and abortion very much rarer (it is a total myth that illegal abortion was widespread prior to the modern era, at least in the West). But abortion and contraception certainly contribute to the fertility trap. That is, it is societal factors that cause the fertility rate to drop, but all else being equal, the easier it is to prevent (or kill) children, the harder it is to climb back up. In any case, the result is the same—fewer people, getting fewer.

"Empty Planet" then sequentially examines Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. There is a great deal of annoying repetition. Nonetheless, there is also much interesting data, all in support of the basic point—population everywhere is going to go down, soon and fast. True, the United Nations predicts that global population will top out at eleven billion around 2100, and then decline. The authors instead think, and make a compelling case that, the United Nations overstates fertility in the twenty-first century. The authors say, and do a good job demonstrating why, population will top out at nine billion by around 2050 (it is seven billion now) and then decline. Some declines will be precipitous and startling—China, currently at 1.4 billion but deep into the fertility trap, will have 560 million people by the end of the century. Strangely, the authors do not calculate global population estimates around, say, 2150, but eyeballing the numbers, it appears they will be around two or three billion, maybe less—and heading downward, fast.

Bricker and Ibbitson are not kind to overpopulation doomsayers. They note how completely wrong those of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the infamous Paul Ehrlich, have been proven. (Charles Mann does it better in his excellent "The Wizard and the Prophet"). Bizarrely, Ehrlich is unrepentant, to a degree that suggests he is unhinged; the authors quote him as saying in 2015, without any reasoning, “My language would be even more apocalyptic today,” and analogizing children to garbage. They don’t believe modern doomsayers are any more correct. Most just have no factual basis for their claims, which are basically just anti-human claims of a religious nature, and the authors even dare to note the obvious fact that the United Nations, a device primarily used to extract money from the successful economies of the world and give it to the unsuccessful, has a vested interest in exaggerating the problems of the backward parts of the world.

So what problems result from an aging and then declining global population? Economic stagnation is what the authors focus on. This is driven by less consumer demand, but also, less visibly but more importantly, by less dynamism. Old people are takers, not makers. Moreover, they don’t do anything useful for driving society forward, let’s be frank. Not that the authors are frank; they skip by the dynamism problem without much comment, though at least they acknowledge it. But the reality is that for human flourishing, the dynamism of the young is everything, and far more important than consumer demand. One just has to think of any positive accomplishment that has changed the world, in science, art, exploration, or anything else. In excess of ninety percent of such accomplishments have been made by people under thirty-five. (Actually, by men under thirty-five, for reasons which are probably mostly biological, but that is another discussion.) The simple reality is that it is the young who accomplish and the old who do not. And when you have no young people, you have no accomplishments. Our future, on the current arc, is being the Eloi; hopefully there will be no Morlocks.

Governments from Germany to Iran recognize this problem. The authors give numerous examples, all failures, of trying to resolve the problem by, in effect, begging and paying women to have children. Even here, the authors feel obliged to tell us “The idea of governments telling women they should have more babies for the sake of the nation seems to us repugnant.” We are not told why that should be so, probably because it is obviously false, but regardless, it is clear that a modern government merely instructing or propagandizing women isn’t going to do the trick.

What is the authors’ solution, then? They don’t have one. Well, they have a short-term one, or claim to. Much of the back half of the book is taken up with endless variations on demanding that the West admit massive amounts of Third World immigrants. The claimed reason for this is necessity—without immigration, Europe and North America will not have enough taxpayers to support the old in the style they desire. They realize the disaster that’s befallen Europe by admitting alien immigrants with nothing but their two hands. (They claim to reject the Swedish “humanitarian” model. But all their soaring language of untethered and unexplained moral duty implicitly endorses the humanitarian model.) Instead, they recommend the Canadian system to America, where only the cream of the crop, educated and with job skills, is admitted—but we must, must, must immediately admit no fewer than 3.5 million such immigrants every year. And, of course, they fail to point out that the cream of the crop is by definition a tiny percentage of the overall amount of immigrants, so how exactly we are going to welcome only these worthwhile immigrants is not clear, especially if other countries are competing for them. Nor do the authors point out that at best, this is a short-term solution—if every country in the world will soon have a less-than-replacement birth rate, emigration will soon enough become rare, so no amount of competition will attract enough people. Therefore, their “solution” is no solution at all, and beyond this, Brickell and Ibbitson have nothing to offer, except muttering about how it’ll be nice to have a cleaner planet when there are no people to enjoy the clean planet.

I note that the authors do not tell us how many children they have, which seems highly relevant. If you are going to be a prophet, best inspect your own house, or acknowledge that others will find it relevant. If you dig, Bricker has one child, a daughter. Ibbitson appears to have no children. I cannot say why, of course, and it would be unfair to assume a selfish choice. But whatever the reason, it is undeniably true that as a result they have less investment in the future than people with children. (Since you ask, I have five children. I am part of the solution, not part of the problem.) Maybe this is why finding a solution isn’t very important to them.

The book has many annoying inaccuracies that seem to be endemic among this type of popular writing, where editors appear to be permanently out to lunch. It is not true that the nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosie” refers to the Black Death. The authors offer a half-page so parsing the rhyme, but that’s an urban legend—the rhyme first appeared around 1800. (Even Snopes, the left-wing political hack site notorious for lying propaganda, is correct on this, probably because there is no political element.) The word “dowry” only refers to payments made to the groom’s family; similar payments made to the bride’s family are “bride price.” The G.I. Bill did not create the American interstate highway system. The term is “cleft palate,” not “cleft palette.” India’s economic stagnation for decades after independence was not due to “protective tariffs”; it was, as everybody who is not a Marxist admits, due to socialism, exacerbated by refusal of outside capital, along with the Permit Raj. (Tariffs make perfect sense for many developing countries that rely on import substitution to grow their economies; both the Britain and the United States used them extremely successfully.) The fifteenth-century Portuguese caravel was not based on Muslim technology. The wave of migrants into Europe that peaked (maybe) around 2016 was economic, not because of war, and not a single person in Europe believes what the authors repeatedly claim, that most of those people will return to their countries of origin soon. Or ever. Sloppiness of this type makes the reader wonder about the other, more critical, factual claims in the book.

So that’s "Empty Planet." All of it could have been said in twenty or thirty pages. On the surface it’s a pat story, though one without a happy ending. That’s not for the authors’ lack of trying to be happy. Normative judgments abound, all of them oddly in tension with the gloomy top-level attitude of the book toward the problem of underpopulation. Thus, the authors assume that large populations are necessarily terrible for anyone who lives there; adjectives such as “miserable” abound for any people born in a high birth-rate country. Not for them any acknowledgement of Angus Deaton’s point in "The Great Escape" that people in poor countries are generally very happy. All population control is referred to with adjectives such as “beneficent.” We are didactically instructed that “Sex education and birth control [are] good things in and of themselves.” And in what may be the single most clueless paragraph in a book chock full of them, the authors offer this:

Small families are, in all sorts of ways, wonderful things. Parents can devote more time and resources to raising—indeed, cossetting—the child. Children are likely to be raised with the positive role models of a working father and working mother. Such families reflect a society in which women stand equally, or at least near equally, with men in the home and the workplace. Women workers also help to mitigate the labor shortages produced by smaller workforces that result from too few babies. It isn’t going too far to say that small families are synonymous with enlightened, advanced societies.

Given that the entire point of the book is that small families are a disaster for humanity, even though they try to deflect this obvious conclusion by unpersuasive and unsupported claims such as “Population decline isn’t a good or a bad thing,” this type of thing suggests, to be charitable, cognitive dissonance. Not to mention that cosseting children is not a good goal, although it’s not surprising that two people with one child between them think so, and that sending more women to work outside the home when sending women to such work is part of the problem seems, um, counterintuitive. But as we will see, this paragraph gives us a clue to what is really driving human population collapse.

Let’s try to figure out what’s really going on, because despite seeming to be so, the authors’ story is not complete. If you look at the story from another angle, not the one of received wisdom, strange unexplained lacunae appear within the text. The fertility rate in the United States and Britain begin to drop in the early 1800s, but only at the end of the 1800s on the Continent, even though urbanization came sooner in the latter, and the United States was almost all agricultural in the early 1800s. “In France, oddly, fertility declines were already underway by the late 1700s. No one is sure why. . . .” “Fertility rates appear to have increased in France and Belgium during the Second World War, even though both countries were under German occupation or control and supplies such as food and coal were increasingly scarce.” Some countries that are largely poor, uneducated, and not urbanized (Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay) have extremely low fertility rates, while other, very similar-seeming countries still have high rates (Paraguay, Honduras, Guatemala). Uneducated Brazilian favela dwellers, normally the type of people who have lots of children, have experienced a big drop in fertility. And on, and on, strange tidbits that jut out from the authors’ narrative, not fitting into the just-so story of urbanization followed by an inevitable and necessary choice to stop having children.

What could explain all these facts? The authors certainly don’t know. But I do. What brings together all these seeming outrider facts, and in the darkness binds them, is the inevitable human tendency toward selfish self-interest. Once this was universally recognized as vice, but it has always been recognized as a large part of what drives human beings unless we struggle against it. The creation of virtue, through self-discipline, self-control, and, in Christian thinking, caring for others at our own expense, aiming at true freedom and the common good, was once the ideal. Virtue helped control our baser impulses, and was the goal toward which a good and well-formed person was expected to strive and to lead others. It was, and is, the opposite of “living as one likes,” of the quest for supposed emancipation. Having children is among the least selfish and most self-sacrificing things a woman, and to a lesser extent a man, can do; thus, when being selfish and self-centered both become exalted, we have fewer children. It is not a mystery.

How did we get here? As the result of two late-eighteenth-century developments. The first, the fruit of the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, is wealth. I have pondered elsewhere whether a rich society can ever stay a virtuous society, and population decline is merely a subset of this question. The second, the fruit of the Enlightenment (which had nothing to do with the Scientific Revolution or the Industrial Revolution), is the exaltation of individual autonomy, of self-actualization as the goal of human existence. The problem with urbanization and its impact on birth rates, especially in the West, is not something inherent to urbanization, but that city dwellers are more wealthy (or at least exposed to wealth) and have, in practice, fallen prey more easily to Enlightenment ideas.

Either of these anti-virtue developments can crash fertility by itself. Combined, they are lethal to human progress. For example, a rich society, such as Venice in the 1600s, can never undergo the Enlightenment, but wealth alone will lead to depopulation, as virtue fades and pursuit of self becomes exalted. And a poor and not urbanized society, such as late 1700s France or early 1800s America, can experience an ideological erosion of virtue solely through embracing Enlightenment principles. Or, to take a more modern example, the South American countries with high rates of fertility are those that are still strongly Christian, and hew to the Christian virtues. The authors themselves note this correlation, but gloss over the implications. Similarly, poor Brazilians are not converted to the gospel of self directly by Rousseau and Locke, or by wealth, both of which they totally lack, but indirectly by both—by obsessive watching of telenovelas, the plots of which, as the authors note, “involve smaller families, empowered women, rampant consumerism, and complicated romantic and family relationships.”

For a final set of proofs, it is obvious from Empty Planet’s own statistics, though apparently not obvious to the authors themselves, that as the material blessings of the West finally spread around the world, fertility rates drop in tandem with adoption of the West’s techniques for acquiring wealth, further exacerbated when countries adopt Enlightenment values. And to the extent the country’s elite push back against Enlightenment values, such as in Hungary and Russia, some progress can be made in increasing birth rates. Similarly, when a country’s people experiences shared challenges, social pressure against atomized Enlightenment individual autonomy can increase greatly, resulting in more children. Such was apparently the case in wartime Belgium and France. It is also why Jews in Israel, alone among advanced economies, have a birthrate far in excess of replacement, even if you exclude the Orthodox. They value something beyond their own immediate, short-term desires, which counterbalances the natural human tendency towards vice.

[Review completes as first comment.]

[Henk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting read, but at times repetitive and bit light on the analysis of reasons of current differences in fertility - 2.5 stars rounded up
The United Nations estimates that the nations of Eastern Europe collectively have lost 6 percent of their population since the 1990s, or eighteen million people. That’s the equivalent of The Netherlands simply disappearing from the earth.

In general I found Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline a smooth and convincing read. In terms of message, that fertility rates are plummeting and much faster than currently projected, the writing sometimes feels a bit repetitive, but this is mainly due to the message being the same for all regions of the world visited by the authors.
Urbanization, secularism, education, breakdown of family/clan pressure (co-workers and friends don't nag you to have children) and social economic consequences making children a large expense instead of cheap labour, are mechanisms at work all over the world. And even in your own group of friends; I reflected upon this based on the book and noted that our group is far below the replacement rate. These patterns work even in an ever strengthening loop in a way.

The first chapters, focused on debunking Malthus thoroughly (albeit being in my view overtly complacent on the current concurrent challenges of ecosystem collapse, climate change and resource depletion) were in my opinion most interesting.
And the matter of fact way the authors address if population decline is really a bad thing is another interesting take. I mean an additional 1 billion humans per 15 years is not normal at all, as the authors rightfully highlight at the start of the book when they focus on trends in fertility from the past, it’s just recent experience.
In 1800 there were 1 billion humans, in 1960 3 billion, and we can hardly say that those were era’s of low innovation and human discovery. Although it is true that older people spend less and innovate less off course.
Interestingly during the depression before WWII the fertility rate was already at around replacement rate in the rich world, even before abortion and contraception were available, but I do feel that the authors gloss over the baby boom after the war and how this was undoubtedly influenced later on by the emergence of these two factors.

Later on in the book, the disparity in fertility rates between countries are still poorly understood and explained by the authors, even though the broad trend is clear. The broad strokes approach is sometimes a bit annoying, like somewhere at the end the authors say about some future event "we don’t know/we are not saying how this will play out and if this trend will last".
That's all fine and honest, but don’t start to make predictions in the first place would maybe be a bit safer approach.

In terms of depth I noted Belgium is portrayed in such a way that I, as a neighbouring country resident, feel like the authors just googled it and did a focus group a.k.a. dinner with a small group of highly educated group of people and then put a tick mark behind the country.
Other countries I am less familiar with but the above made me sometimes doubt the broad statements and explanations provided by the authors.

Immigration and multiculturalism (with their own Canada as shining example) is proposed as a solution but in an in general shrinking world this means just retreating to the highest hill while waiting for the flood; this doesn’t solve anything in the longer run. Also the notion that remigration will become more common, and that already most migrants return to their home country, seems limitedly supported by facts. It is also asserted that only 3,3% of the global population is an immigrant and that this is a relatively stable figure, but that makes the group larger than the population of whole Indonesia, the fourth most populous country on the planet.
The view on refugees and Asian countries not doing their fair share in this perspective was interesting:
Japan next door is even less compassionate with a refugee rate (per 1.000) of 0.02. South Korea sits at 0.03. Remarkably, this is unremarkable. No one expects wealthy Asian nations to accept refugees.

And I wonder why the authors did not talk to the UN statisticians, I mean those people are not blind and stupid. The authors just kind of accuse the UN of overstating the problems for political and monetary gains so a bit of back and forth would have strengthened the book.

Finally the level of Western centriscism in the book is sometimes cringeworthy, take for instance the next observation about South Korea:
A military coup in 1961 launched the period of modernization. Military juntas can be unpleasant to live under, but if they aren’t too corrupt, they can instill the economic discipline and social welfare needed to transform a society.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 5 out of 5]

WSJ Review: https://www.wsj.com/articles/empty-pl...
(Paywalled. As always, I'm happy to email a copy to non-subscribers)
"Pulling examples from extensive on-the-ground research in settings as disparate as São Paulo favelas, Seoul universities and Nairobi businesses, the authors combine a mastery of social-science research with enough journalistic flair to convince fair-minded readers of a simple fact: Fertility is falling faster than most experts can readily explain, driven by persistent forces. In Brazil and China astonishing numbers of women opt for permanent sterilization well before the end of their fertile years (half of Chinese couples take this route). In South Korea and Japan women delay childbirth until their 30s or forgo it altogether. There even has been an unexpected collapse in fertility among Hispanics in the United States: They, like most of America’s other ethnic groups, now have below-replacement birth rates. The drivers of global fertility decline are here to stay."

Very interesting, and will have society-shaking effects if they are right. Their most profound insight: women are the key to this whole fertility business. Well, doh. As women become urbanized, better educated and better able to control their own fertility -- the old paternalist, "husband is BOSS, period" business gets tossed. Having kids in the city is *very* expensive. As opposed to on the farm, where you could put them to work. When the women figure this out, they have fewer kids. It's an irreversible decision, for each woman. And very fast. And the UN hasn't noticed yet -- see second comment.

Last 3 0r 4 chapters suffer a bit from repetition, but the book holds up, and I think they are right: the "population bomb" has been defused, likely forever, and more countries will face the problems of graying populations that Japan is facing now. The next big nation to face that will be China: after the disastrous one-child policy, fertility rates there haven't recovered. The book predicts 1.4 to 1.5 children per Chinese woman for the rest of this century, which would collapse China's population to as low as 625 million by the end of this century, with a peak population of maybe a billion? I'm not sure I have these numbers right--confusing paragraph (p.162-163), and book is overdue.

Highly recommended for those interested in population trends! 4.6 stars. Very good, thought-provoking book.

[Chris Edwards · Rating 3 out of 5]

Empty Planet is a worthwhile read, though it does have its blind spots. Its fundamental thesis that urbanization and education are accelerating fertility declines at a much faster rate than the media and powers that be are indicating, and that that will have profound consequences, is sound. Indeed, it’s refreshing to read a book that aims to go against the grain of opinion – as so many claim to do – that’s written by professionals who have worked in the field. The complex topics of demography, large scale social changes, and politics are laid out in a digestible and enjoyable fashion. The urbanization and sexual emancipation that the developing world is currently experiencing, which will produce a much less crowded world, has for too long been underestimated. It’s nice that this belief is finally being given due consideration.

As someone who is interested in demography as a hobby, I can’t speak much to the trends taking place in Africa and South America (though I do believe the authors’ points on them), but I was bothered by their analysis of the United States.

Namely, I don’t understand how anyone who has spent so much time studying demography could have the opinion that “Spanish will supplement English as the common tongue” in the US. There are widely available studies that disprove this assertion. Five minutes on Pew Research will tell you that Spanish in the United States is on the same trajectory that German took in early 20th century America: dead by the third generation. And if every other group on earth is going to become less religious over time, why doesn’t that apply to American Latinos? It is nice however that they (briefly) allude to Richard Alba’s belief that our social categories will simply expand, and never reach a majority-minority tipping point.

But it’s in later chapters that this book’s issues really become apparent. Its attitude is deeply neoliberal, and some of its analysis ultimately comes across as contradictory. Increasing immigration is a fundamental necessity for Bricker and Ibbitson, who have little time for its critics. Yet the book’s central thesis is that in the not so distant future, developing nations aren’t going to have surplus populations to send to us. The push and pull factors will lessen over time. So where will these people come from?

Increasing population is the foundation of economic growth, the authors say, which is of course the key to everything. Now, I understand the benefits of regarding humans as economic units, but it’s not the be all and end all. There will be some positives to a smaller population in Japan and elsewhere, alongside just a smaller ecological footprint. The glut in housing will make it more affordable again. Labor shortages will finally improve wages. The book spends zero time dwelling on these benefits to regular people. I can’t help but feel that Bricker and Ibbitson run in Toronto circles dominated by affluent business and property owning people, who are more than happy to see wages continue to stagnant, and property prices continue to rise.

In fact if you’re from Canada, perhaps you’ll know the sort of Toronto-bubble that I’m referring to. The hard capitalistic attitude hidden behind the insufferable virtue signaling. Bricker and Ibbitson champion multiculturalism purely because it facilitates greater immigration, which in turn creates economic growth. Economic growth is the only thing that’s important to them. They have no love for regional or indigenous cultures of any kind in the long run. The book even bizarrely goes so far as to lament that mass immigration has doomed Indigenous populations around the world to cultural and demographic annihilation, whilst waxing romantic about Canada’s own mass immigration system that will continue that process for its own indigenous population. Oh well! It’s sad, but Canada must maintain its GDP growth! They even go so far as to admit that “the weaker the culture, the easier the task of promoting multiculturalism. The less the sense of self, the less the sense that another is the Other”. In what universe should a "weak culture" and "less sense of self" be sought after? Let alone be enriching?

So, Bricker and Ibbitson come across in these later chapters as the perfect example of naïve, sheltered cosmopolitans who speak of vast changes with an air of detachment, and are contemptuous of their critics. They will never see their own culture wiped out by globalization. They will never experience the indignity of a layoff that comes with being viewed solely as a unit of output in a global economic system. It leaves a bad tastes in one’s mouth when you appreciate their way of viewing the world.

[Gina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received this book as a First Read. I considered doing a DNF but decided to finish reading it just to see what other nonsense the author had to share. He uses some serious semantic and mental gymnastics to declare that we have already eradicated famine and extreme poverty throughout the world. He also spins some yarns about natural resources not being depleted. The book as a whole reads as a giant propaganda piece by corporations to encourage people to continue to do what they're doing and make no changes because the world is fine, everyone is doing well, and resources are plentiful.

[Murtaza]

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One of the unspoken implications of the environmentalist movement is a Malthusian sense that the planet is literally filling up with more human beings than it can hold. Since the earth is finite this assumption has a ready logic to it. Luckily for us, we are not in fact reaching carrying capacity for the planet, nor are we ever likely to do so. The great urbanization of the human race over the past century has sent birthrates around the world plummeting, as people crowd into cities where cultural and economic changes makes having tons of kids unlikely. The West and Japan were the first to modernize in this way, but the rest of the world is already progressing down the same direction. Birthrates in China, Brazil, and even possibly India are already below replacement level. In the long-term this is good news for the planet, as cities themselves are more ecologically sustainable forms of living. The more complicated reality though is that this new status quo of low birthrates may be bad news for us, since we live in societies dependent on continued economic growth for stability.

The two authors of this book are Canadian journalists who go on a mini-world tour to Brazil, China, Kenya, and India to determine what’s going on with global demographics and why it matters. Canadians are particularly proud of the success of their immigration model, which combines ruthless selection with large numbers of net annual immigrants, and these two guys take a decidedly liberal stance on the whole matter. What they find is that Brazil and China have already settled into birthrates well below replacement, the former because rapid urbanization in the 20th century and the latter due to the disastrous consequences of the CCP’s One Child policy. India is also ageing slowly but surely, whereas Africa is likely to be the youngest and most populous region of the world in the foreseeable future, though it will level off some time this century. One way or another we are not going to overfill the planet. Although some Westerners fear that their countries will be overwhelmed by immigrants in the future, it seems quite possible that the supply of foreigners may well dry up. Birthrates are tapering off in much of the Middle East, South Asia, and the more developed Latin American countries. China used to be a major net exporter of immigrants to the West. It seems likely that they won’t have people to send at all in future. The rest of the world is treading this path, slowly but surely.

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Not everyone likes this new reality of low birthrates but there is also not much that can be done about it. Government policies aimed at boosting fertility rates have never met with much success. Pro-natalist programs are expensive, underwhelming in impact, and are usually the first thing to get cut first when budgets are tight. The problem is both economic and cultural. Rural people simply need children more than urban ones on an economic level – kids are more likely to be a net economic cost to city-dwellers in fact. But birthrates are also negatively correlated with female empowerment, and we are living in a modern world where women’s rights are expanding more broadly than ever. As women become more emancipated, they are far less likely to want to spend their best years pregnant and at home. To return to a world of high birthrates we’d effectively have to end modernity itself. Short of a literal apocalypse that’s not happening.

Young people consume, produce, and innovate more than the old, who by nature require expenditures to support. Countries that are old, but do not have cultures of immigration, are doomed to a future of stagnation, if not total collapse. Viktor Orban’s Hungary, beloved by U.S. right, is haemorrhaging population every year. How he plans to answer practical questions about taxation and public services with an ever-dwindling population of productive young is unclear. He can continue giving angry speeches, but man cannot live by angry speeches alone. Sovereign countries can choose whether to take immigrants or not, but they should be honest with their citizens about what is actually at stake rather than engaging in demagoguery or suggesting that they can simply have their goulash and eat it too.

Warnings about the threat of population decline are often taken as a bit of an ironic riposte by conservatives towards liberals, whose anxieties are usually more Malthusian. The reality is though that there is really something to it. We can see by the age-based population tables that there are going to be less human beings, a lot less, and more old and few young among those that remain, in many countries in the future. What that world will look like is impossible to say, but it will be unlike anything we have experienced before.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is so bad it doesn't deserve the time and effort it takes to write a review, but I feel obligated to at least say that it is garbage. The authors seem to be completely out of touch with the impact that human beings are having on earth's support systems. They seem to think 7 billion people living on this planet is not a problem and that the 8.5 or 11 billion they are predicting we will top out at in 2050 by their calculations is no big deal. As though the environmental impact humans are currently wreaking is somehow manageable and that 2 or 3 or 4 more billion more for another 50 or so years will be manageable as well. What a bunch of crap. These guys are journalists and pollsters not ecologists or biologists and have missed the fact that even at current population levels we are in big trouble. Even if their numbers are right, which I doubt, the destruction to the planet will be hideous as the result of the billions more people we are going to add in the next 25-50 years and they basically wave all this away as something we are handling just fine. They seem to think their predicted return to 7 billion after the 2050 peak means all will be well despite the fact that we are over-consuming the world's resources so badly at 7.5 billion people now that virtually all of our ecosystem support systems and biodiversity are horribly degraded and in distress. This book is a waste of time and dangerous for the mountain of disinformation it spreads. Shame on Toronto's Globe and Mail where Ibbitson works for supporting this project.

[Angie Boyter · Rating 3 out of 5]

A 3+ for sure and maybe rounded up later if I find myself talking about the book to friends!
A different take on world population trends and their implications
It is almost a cliché today to speak about global overpopulation and its implications for humanity and our planet. The United Nations predicts that the world population will grow from seven billion to eleven billion in this century then level off sometime after 2100. In Empty Planet Canadian authors John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker challenge predictions such as these but instead think population will peak around the middle of this century and then begin to decline. The future they envision is a much more favorable one, although certainly not without its challenges. The environment will be healthier, and fewer people will lack adequate nutrition, but old people will constitute a larger portion of society, requiring services but not themselves any longer contributing to economy.
The authors cite a wealth of sources and provide copious footnotes. In addition to using various academic and government studies, they visited all the inhabited continents and explored social and demographic trends worldwide, from Japan to Kenya to Quebec to Australia. They liven their statistics with interesting glimpses of cultural practices. I was intrigued, for example, by the Kenyan dowry tradition whereby the groom’s family pays the bride’s family for the right to claim the bride. This use of the term “dowry” to refer to a payment from groom’s to bride’s family (rather than vice versa) was so unusual that I actually did some research to make sure it was correct. I should have trusted the authors more!
An aspect I found somewhat less satisfying was the authors’ anecdotal accounts of their visits to cities on six continents (Brussels, Seoul, Nairobi, Sao Paolo, Mumbai, Beijing, Palm Springs, Canberra, and Vienna). In each location the authors describe a social gathering organized by someone like a local academic where they met generally well-educated, upwardly mobile people to talk about their lives. For example, in Sao Paolo the women graduate students surprised the authors with their descriptions of the pressures they felt. These accounts were interesting, but each represents one very nonrandom data point, and it is hardly valid to generalize or consider them typical of the society.
A great deal of the book is devoted to immigration as a solution to the declining birth rate in developed countries, arguing that immigration is needed to beef up the economy, provide fodder for the workforce and sources of innovation, and keep the ratio of working people to non-productive retirees and children under control. This left rather unsettled the question of what the immigrants’ homeland can do to protect its own interest, but the authors did not claim to have perfect answers to all aspects of the challenge of population shifts, growth, and decline.
Empty Planet presents a more optimistic picture of our planet’s future than most of what I see today, which tends to emphasize “the global overpopulation crisis”. It is full of interesting data and insights and a colorful picture of world culture. Even if you do not accept all of the authors’ conclusions or agree completely with their projections, it is definitely worth your time, as it will give you a much better basis for making up your own mind.
My thanks to Netgallet and the publisher for an advance review copy of this book.

[Portal in the Pages · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dnf

[Raghu · Rating 4 out of 5]

As far as I can remember, the received wisdom on the future of the earth has always been that humanity is reproducing at unsustainable rates, consuming more and more resources in the process. Thomas Malthus suggested it first in 1798. It was reiterated more forcefully in the 1960s by William Paddock, Paul Paddock, and Paul Ehrlich. Now, in the 21st century, we have almost daily reminders of the earth's bleak future by climate change activists. If overpopulation doesn't get you, climate change will get you anyway. Amidst all this gloom and doom, this book gives you some back-handed relief, if not on climate change, at least on overpopulation. It says dramatically, "The great defining event of the 21st century – one of the great defining events in human history – will occur in three decades, give or take when the global population begins to decline". However, before we could rejoice in the good news, they douse it with, "Once that decline begins, it will never end." This book is a contrarian one, arguing against the prevalent impression on population growth and its fallouts. Let us look at the arguments of the authors in greater detail and evaluate them critically in the following sections.

I would summarize the book's thesis as follows:
Societies go through fertility in five stages. If we take Sweden as an example, in the 18th century, it was in Stage 1, when birth rates and death rates were both high. In the 19th century, it transitioned to Stage 2, where birth rates remained high, but death rates began to slowly decrease, mainly due to significant advances in the war against disease. In the early 20th century, Sweden entered Stage 3, where both birth rates and death rates declined slowly from their highs. The main reason for the declining fertility was urbanization. As societies develop economically, they become more urban. Urbanization leads to universal education, irrespective of class, and gender. Education paves the way for women's liberation and contributes to waning religiosity. Greater feminine freedom means less pressure from family and church to make babies and more opportunities in the world outside. This freedom leads to reduced fertility and hence, smaller families. Gradually, the reduction of fertility leads the country to Stage 4, which is the Goldilocks Stage. At this stage, the death rates continue to decline, but the birth rate is at or near the level needed to sustain the population. Up to this point, most demographers agree.

The authors' point of departure occurs here. They contend that the process does not stop at Stage 4. The march of urbanization continues relentlessly across the world, leading to women's liberation in all societies. It results in greater secularization and fewer kids in all nations. Once there are fewer kids, people organize according to the new reality leading to even lower fertility. Eventually, societies reach a fertility rate of 1.5, which is the 'Low Fertility trap' called Stage 5. Once a country reaches this Stage, the fertility rate cannot rise back above it again. Unfortunately, many countries in the world are already there. Hence, the world will get much smaller and much sooner than most people think.

The UN projects the world population to rise from its present 7.6 billion to 11 billion by the year 2100. However, the authors and many other experts do not agree with this forecast. The authors say that the planet's population will peak at around nine billion sometime between 2040 and 2060 and then start declining after that. By the end of this century, we could be back to where we are right now, which would be 7.6 or 7.7 billion.

Many environmentalists might rejoice at the idea of fewer and fewer humans on the planet. But the book cautions against the downside of population decline by pointing out the prevalence of a large number of the elderly, lack of innovation, slower growth, fewer schools, less demand on the economy, extinction of small indigenous communities and their languages, etc. The book bats for higher immigration on the Canadian model for countries that have reached Stage five. It does not hold out much hope for China, though. The authors feel that China will get old before it gets rich, unlike Japan. Its population could plummet to as low as 600 million by the end of the century from its present 1.4 billion. The authors paint an optimistic picture of Africa and its growth this century.
In the Americas, they believe that the US and Canada would do well in the 21st century. The main reason for this is their acceptance of immigration as an essential part of their nationhood. It will help them combat the low fertility trap and keep their societies young, vibrant, and innovative. The US may see its population reach 550 million and Canada at 100 million by the end of the century.

I agree with the authors' prophesy about the world's population peaking by mid-century and then declining after that. However, this is not a new idea. Even twenty years ago, Fred Pearce had advanced the same thesis of population decline in his book 'Peoplequake.' The authors' other contention that a nation is condemned to perpetual population decline once it reaches the 'low fertility trap' is more interesting. It is substantiated by what has been happening already in some countries. Fertility had fallen below 1.5 births per woman by the early 1980s in Germany, Austria, and Italy. Their experience is that it has continued to fall to even lower levels and has remained below 1.5 births per woman for more than 20 years now, almost a demographic generation. Since then, countries in Southern Europe, East Asia, and most Central and Eastern European countries have joined them.
This book does not provide much data to support many of its futuristic projections on Africa, China, and India. For example, they base their predictions on China and India on what they heard from NGOs and bureaucrats sotto voce, in contrast to official statistics. Elsewhere, it is mostly anecdotal evidence through interviews in slums and other places. The main argument here is that the world is fast urbanizing, which will lead eventually to low fertility.

I am skeptical about scientists' long-term projections for humankind as a whole. I feel that they do not give enough credence to the strength of humanity's survival instincts and the ability to take corrective measures when faced with existential threats. Historically, population-based forecasts have been wrong by stunningly wide margins. The future does not arrive overnight. It comes gradually, over decades. These changes progressively and continually affect the way we live, the way we interact with one another, and the way we adjust to them. Societies respond in real-time to these changes and find ongoing correctives for their survival. In the 1960s, futurists predicted a famine-stricken future for a poverty-stricken India with a hundred million deaths due to starvation. But a newly independent India responded to the severe droughts in the 1960s with a lot of policy initiatives and determination. Famine-like conditions never occurred in independent India.

In the same way, it is possible that in the future 'Stage 5 world', with young people being at a premium, we may see a different dynamic between Capital and Labor. Labor, being a scarcer commodity, may get dominance over Capital and force the ruling classes to provide for substantial welfare towards supporting and raising their families. Such a shift could result in fertility rates going up again towards Stage 4. Consequently, women may achieve greater fulfillment by having both a career and a family with a couple of children. Even if women do not go for more than one child, society's attitudes towards immigration might undergo radical changes when confronted with Stage 5 existential angst. It could result in making hitherto insular Asian cultures like those in Japan, China, and Korea more foreigner-friendly. Today's Persian Gulf countries are a great example. As countries with great wealth, small populations, and severe labor shortages, the Gulf states rely heavily on imported labor to fuel the development process. They have twice as many foreign immigrants as native Arab citizens.

All this means is that it is too early to predict an empty planet heading for terminal decline with too many unsustainable older people or massive socio-economic and political problems. We hear today alarming portends of rising oceans, inundated coastal cities, a hot planet melting its icy poles, and so on from environmentalists. Only our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will know for sure whether all this fear-mongering bears a resemblance to reality. But, if history is any guide, even if none of this comes true, it wouldn't stop the next generation from believing in a new catastrophe that scientists and environmentalists would predict for their future!

[Delaney · Rating 1 out of 5]

I finished this book because I wanted to be sure that after chapters of saying the world's population is declining due to women getting more rights and urbanization he was surely going to recommend policy that focuses on access to childcare and women not being penalized in their careers for having children but by the end of the book he had not (other than to briefly say childcare programs like in Quebec are costly but have no real impact). What an oversight. If we want women to have more kids maybe we need to support.

Interesting topic/concept but very repetitive and narrow.

[Cara · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was a one page article, at most, expanded into book form.

[Alfred · Rating 2 out of 5]

Extremely Disappointing

Based on the title, you'd think that this book would be about the reasons behind and effects of population decline.

Instead, you get a few fertility ratios and some guessing at the causes followed by a manifesto on why Canada is the best country in the world and hyper-optimism towards forced demographic shifts caused by taking the most talented people from the poorest countries and putting them in the richest countries, without offering any solutions to the talent dearth left behind in those poor countries.

[Ailith Twinning · Rating 1 out of 5]

A badly defended assertion, wrapped entirely in cliche and outright shibboleth.
As for the politics. . .ugh. America desperately needs an actual left. His take on immigration is outright offensive, imperialist, trash. Bloody Liberals.

[Fran Urriola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un ensayo muy interesante sobre cómo ha funcionado, funciona y funcionará la población mundial y qué pasaría en el mundo si esta desciende o asciende.
Amé leer este libro porque me ayudó a salir de mi zona de confort literaria. ¡Quiero más libros de este estilo!

[Sara · Rating 1 out of 5]

Disappointing. I began listening to the audio version of the book hoping for an in-depth, well researched and reasoned analysis of population growth/decline and demographic insights. Instead, I found the book to be a political agenda-driven defense of the authors' particular point of view. Yes, the authors did present "some" facts to support their viewpoint, but the facts were selectively presented so as to not exactly give a complete picture. And then, from that sketchy foundation, the authors built an even weaker argument. At the end, I felt like I had just listened to a rather long op-ed.

The authors raise up Margaret Sanger as some sort of saint who single-handedly freed women from the "burdens" (their word) of bearing and raising children, but they fail to mention Sanger's eugenics beliefs. The authors raise up Canada's immigration system as flawless, but they fail to recognize the geographical buffer the US provides. The authors support mass immigration but fail to realize the disenfranchised underclasses often created. Oh, and of course, the authors toss in the obligatory Trump-bashing rant. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

Empty Planet is waste of time to read (or listen to), which is a shame because the subject matter is important and interesting and worthy of informed reasoned discussion and analysis. Unfortunately, the authors failed to provide that.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contrary to the very popular doomsayer warning, we should not worry about the overpopulation, but rather take heed of the alarming trend in declining fertility rate on the global scale. Soon enough the overwhelming boom will reach its peak and the numbers will slowly start counting backwards. For some nations, like China, the change will come like a crashing down avalanche. For some it will be a slow trickle. But nevermind the pace, the reality is that most countries will end up with the largest number of elderly than ever before. This will in turn take a toll on the social systems, economy, innovation, etc., leaving our children and our children’s children in a world of uncertain jobs and financial struggle. While I do think that the authors paint too rosy of a picture about Canada’s immigration tolerance and integration, we are fairing better than a lot of other societies. Excellent antidote to the cacophony of singleminded prophets.

[Jen Juenke · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was an eye opener. I never thought about some of the ramifications that can/could/are happening with population stagnation and population decline.
The authors lay out their argument of depopulation of the Earth might be the best thing to happen. The more educated women are, less religion in the society, and other factors are driving the decrease of fertility rates.
I loved all of the facts, stats, and stories, especially the dinner parties around the world.
The future is not all doom and gloom and we should embrace immigrants.
I finished the book feeling hopeful for the future even when the present is full of turmoil.

[Kai Inkinen · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 & 1/2 stars. Really didn’t feel that insightful. The prediction of population decline and lower fertility is believable, but should’ve come with a bit more than ”we feel this way”-type of anecdotal interviews and stories.

[Bryan Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a powerful, very accessible, and at times very surprising book.

Why is Empty Planet a surprise? Because for a couple of generations many people dreaded human overpopulation as a planetary challenge of the highest order. As I wrote in 2017,

Back in the 1960s and 70s many people feared overpopulation, and for good reasons. Human population was rising. Serious research, most notably The Limits To Growth (1972; based on a powerful computer simulation), suggested crises to come, ranging from overcrowding to starvation. Science fiction and popular culture echoed this with novels like Stand on Zanzibar (John Brunner, 1968), books like The Population Bomb (1968), and movies like Soylent Green (1973) and Z.P.G. (1972).

(I remember clearly reading the liner notes for a piece of electronic-ish music around 1975. I was about eight, and the album cover back described music for an overpopulated future, when the earth was covered by giant buildings, packed tightly with far, far too many humans. I wish that memory was clear enough to include a title or composer.)

Readers will have noticed that we did not arrive in such an overcrowded future, despite the deplorable appearance of a drink called Soylent. That's because, in part, we were terrified of such a scenario, and responded by altering our behaviors.

That huge, history-transforming change is what Bricker and Ibbitson ably explain.

In brief, Empty Planet describes a multi-decade, multi-continental shift in human life, whereby we produce fewer and fewer children. A growing number of populations are actually spawning "below replacement level" - i.e., fewer children than parents, below two for every couple.

The reasons are multiple, including advances in medical science, public health, and the education of girls and women. Smaller families means fewer demands on fertile people to produce more kids (50; 111-112). Teen pregnancy rates have plummeted in developed nations (95-6). Pop culture now presents interesting lives with fewer or no children (135). Female sterilization, increasingly voluntary in nations like Brazil and India, further reducing total fertility (136).

Implications: national leaders can view underpopulation as a security threat, and might not react well (62). Creativity and invention may slow down, as "it's hard to innovate when your society is old" (83). Some nations will have to deal with a drop or collapse in their working-age, tax-paying population. Some cultures and languages may fade away, if they dwindle below certain levels (198, 205). Carbon emissions may start to decline once total population turns around (230). Wars might decline along with the primary war-fighting population, leading to a "geriatric peace." (232) Politics can lag behind reality, as, for example, Latinx immigration into the US has declined for more than a decade, as those nations have seen their fertility rates fall, but, alas, Trump (149).

And migration politics become difficult if not heinous. Bricker and Ibbitson are unabashedly pro-immigrant, urging under-reproducing societies to more generously welcome populations from elsewhere (148, 209).

In the rest of the developed world, principally the United States and Canada, immigration will become the sole driver of population growth starting sometime in the 2020s. (151)

In response, some nations may try to encourage more reproduction. Bricker and Ibbitson are skeptical about the efficacy of such moves (examples from Sweden, Singapore), finding them expensive, politically fragile, and accomplishing little (72).

Although I do recommend this book highly, I have some questions and concerns. The point about innovation and age; have the authors received charges of agism? To what extent are voluntary reductions in child-bearing the province of the wealthy and well-educated, leaving out the poor and rural? The authors touch on this (122), but I'd like to see more. I'm curious about the authors' thoughts on the role of media, since they see South American tv driving women's decisions there, but find some Indian women immune to Bollywood's romances (171).

Once more: an important and engaging book for our time.

[Anita Lyons · Rating 3 out of 5]

Super interesting read. Would give 3.5 stars. They are a bit US/Canada centric — this part was mediocre — I found the most interesting chapters the ones where they talked about other parts of world because I learned a lot.

Good news: the global population will likely start declining by mid century! They predict a “geriatric peace” as old people abound. Environment will be happier too

[Mark Lawry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing new here to anybody who read books on economics at any point after about 1900. We all know rich nations such as France and Canada well before WWI knew they had a problem. They have been trying to implement policies to push up fertility rates all this time. None of them have ever worked. This fact was known before modern cheap birth control methods.

After WWII there was a global conspiracy to improve lives everywhere by building international institutions such as the United Nations. This was because in 1945 we figured out with new destructive toys war is really bad. Those of us who are globalists need to race to end war. Toward this effort we (evil globalists) wanted to spread prosperity everywhere. Improving lives with increasing prosperity reduces war and violence. Steven Pinker wrote a great 600 page book on just this subject. There are many others but his is a good one. Improving lives ALSO reduces fertility rates. For those of you who are living in Kansas who don't get why we want lives improved in places like Pakistan and India this is why. A nuclear war between these two (or any two) ending life on Earth would adversely effect you, even if you build a wall around yourself.

All of this is old news. Two interesting facts that might be new. First, the collapse of fertility is happening far faster than most of us expected, everywhere. Second, when nations have a falling fertility rate it doesn't reverse. Prosperity and urbanization will push fertility down. If nations do manage to destroy themselves and become impoverished again this will not reverse the process. Take a look at Venezuela, Ukraine, Syria. Obviously we want to end such violence and rebuild these because we want a better world. However, until we manage to fix the crisis Syria they are not about to go back to a fertility rate of 5. Nobody else is either.

[Krishna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the most hopeful books I have read in a while. For years, demographers and environmentalists have warned of the Malthusian trap; increasing human numbers coupled with limited natural resources will lead to widespread famine, economic dislocations, wars and ultimately the breakdown of society. After Malthus's initial prediction failed to materialize, subsequent generations have put forward similar stories with their own twists: Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb, the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth, and Jared Diamond's Collapse. Bricker and Ibbitson say these fears are overblown and unlikely to materialize. The reason: plummeting fertility rates.

The United Nations has estimated, using moderately declining fertility rates, that the population of the world may increase to as much as 17 billion by the start of the 22nd century. If it does, the carrying capacity of the earth will be severely strained, if not exceeded. Farmlands, forests, non-renewable resources, even water, will be desperately in demand. As humans expand their footprint, the outlook for other species is likely to be dire, with another mass extinction very possible.

But Bricker and Ibbitson, surveying the latest data and demographic research, state that fertility rates have fallen much faster than anticipated. The major developed economies, and many middle-income and even some low-income countries are already under 2.1, the replacement rate. (China is at 1.6 now.) And large developing countries like India are reaching that level very quickly. The result is that, according to the new calculations, the population is likely to reach 9 billion by mid-century, and is likely to begin a decline thereafter, falling to present levels by 2100.

Bricker and Ibbitson argue that fertility rates are falling due to two factors. First, urbanization. As people move from the countryside to the city, they are separated from familial and religious pressures for large families, gain access to new ideas and better healthcare. But most importantly, children who were an asset in an agricultural setting become costs in the urban. There is less space, and food and clothing have to be bought, creating pressure for a smaller family.

The second factor is women's emancipation. Traditionally, women were under pressure from families, religious leaders and husbands to stay home and procreate. But as women get educated and enter the formal employment sector, they begin to delay marriage and pregnancy, space children further apart and limit the number of children they have over their lifetime. The costs of large families, including lost wages and opportunities, more housework and potential medical complications, fall disproportionately on women. The desired number of children for women all over the world--even in developing countries--is now one or two.

Bricker and Ibbitson conduct focus groups with women and couples from around the world --Brazilian college students, Indian slum dwellers, Korean academics, residents of a Swedish artists' commune, Kenyan executives. And with minor variations, the story stays the same. The aspiration to get educated, the difficulty of finding a spouse who will be supportive of jobs and careers, the professional penalties for pregnancy and childcare, the easy availability of birth control and sterilization. Everywhere the same desire comes up -- small families, with one or two children.

But falling populations is not an unmitigated blessing. There is a downside to it too: less economic activity since young families are heavy consumers of everything from appliances to entertainment, a shrinking tax base, less support for the elderly and children, even less creativity. Declining powers may become aggressive, burgeoning cities with creaky infrastructure may feed civil unrest and political turmoil. Schools may close as communities have fewer young people. Less spoken languages disappear and cultures die; the world becomes a more homogeneous and boring place. Countries like China, according to Bricker and Ibbitson are going to face a veritable collapse of the population due to the one-child policy. They estimate that China might even shrink to 560 million people -- a catastrophic fall of more than 50 percent of the current population -- by the end of the century.

Bricker and Ibbitson are also strong supporters of immigration -- but of the selective and controlled kind. Both Canadian, they argue for the benefits of the Canadian model of immigration based on the point system. Immigrants are carefully screened based on education, language skills and age to select the ones most likely to make a positive impact on the Canadian economy. Bricker and Ibbitson argue that such policies are likely to be more palatable to natives as well, since they too will benefit from economically productive immigrants.

But Bricker and Ibbitson have a warning too -- Canadian immigration policies work because of a strong commitment to multiculturalism. New immigrants are not required to assimilate and their traditions and religions are respected. The problem with nations like Korea, Hungary, Italy and Japan that face a shrinking population and economic contraction, is that their sense of national identity is too strong to tolerate many non-natives in their midst. And immigrants too, faced with the prospect of learning difficult new languages to assimilate or constantly questioned about their allegiance to their new country's values, are reluctant to move to these countries. Bricker and Ibbitson rue that these countries -- with almost irreversible fertility trends and low levels of immigration -- face almost certain decline.

In spite of these, Bricker and Ibbitson end the last chapter on the most hopeful note. Urbanization moves people into more energy-efficient high rises in cities, and frees up land for rewilding. Reduced pressure on fisheries, farmlands and forests allows regeneration and species recovery. With fewer young people, nations may even become more reluctant to go to war.

[Frank Hermens · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars for the writing and narrative. 4.5 stars for the message it tries to deliver. The read / listen was pleasurable and easy. The message however - world population will reduce about 50% the next decades - is shocking and a relief at the same time.

[Christopher Moellering · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is cliché to call a book paradigm-shifting, but I don't know how else to describe this work by Canadian authors on the future of global population trends. In the same way that The Lexus and the Olive Tree opened my eyes to globalization twenty years ago, this one revealed the forces shaping our future as a species.

With a large number of citations (endnotes, alas) they tell the impact of urbanization upon global population trends. The debunk the rhetoric and fears of the zero-population growth advocates I read in college. In a nutshell, in an urban environment--as opposed to agrarian--children are a liability, not an asset from a financial point of view for families. The world is increasingly becoming more urban, and therefore, we are reproducing at much lower rates.

Europe and Japan, most notably, are already shrinking in population. A declining population has significant economic implications. Our future, if the trends hold, will look very different than anything we've seen in our history as humans.

Well worth the read. Gripping, well-written. It will take me some time to assimilate the ideas and even longer to grapple with the implications.

[Cherry (_forevermint) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was such a fascinating book to read! I enjoyed how the book goes into depth of how population is declining in various places all over the world and the causes. Some of the stuff did get repetitive and some chapters were a little more dry than others but overall, it was a really interesting read. I also appreciate the authors' humor sprinkled throughout.

[Pete · Rating 4 out of 5]

Empty Planet : The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019) by Darrel Bricker and John Ibbitson is a fascinating book that makes the case the global population is likely to peak sooner than UN population predictions suggest and looks at why populations are declining and the what the impact of declining populations is likely to be. It's a fascinating book because the fact that fertility levels are below replacement in almost all developed countries and many other countries is largely ignored.

The book starts by looking at the incorrect claims of various environmentalists from Malthus to Ehrlich. They point out that share of the world that is starving has plummeted and the share in absolutely poverty has also plummeted.

The book then starts looking at Europe, where populations are already starting to shrink. Throughout the authors interview people around the world to talk about their ideas of family. In Europe it is most drastic, a number of couples from Belgium who have a combined fertility rate of less than one talk about kids.

Then Korea and Japan are investigated. Japan being really 'the country of the future' in that populations are declining there. The book looks at how women wanting a career find it very hard to have kids as well given traditional roles for men in not helping much with parenting or around the house.

There is a great discussion of the economics of babies, how they have gone from a boon in agricultural societies to an economic burden in modern, urban ones. The impact of teenage pregnancy is discussed along with having kids at an older age.

The critical role of Africa in global population predictions and what is going on there is then investigated. There the fact that UN population predictions rely on African populations exploding is discussed and the impact that mobile phones and greater education and urbanisation is having is described.

Empty Planet then looks at how fertility is likely to change the size of India and China is outlined. The authors show how China's already low fertility will very likely lead to a population reduction and how India's fertility has changed and is likely to change gets a good discussion. Again the impact of information, urbanisation and education is likely underestimated.

Empty Planet then looks at how immigration driven by countries wishing to enrich themselves, such as Canada and Australia is likely to lead to those countries avoiding some of the impact of declining populations. It's a very well made point.

Empty Planet is really a fascinating book that makes a very strong case as to why global populations will peak sooner than expected and are likely to decline sooner than expected. It would have been good to get the case from a UN statistician as to why they think that population will be higher than the authors, but other than that Empty Planet is a really excellent book that describes a fascinating new phenomenon.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Forget about Malthus and his spiritual descendants. Depopulation is the real problem. Urbanisation, high living standard, contraception, abortion, emancipation and education of women and government intervention (one child policy, stop at 2 in Asia) all drive this trend. There is no escape. The authors travelled around the globe to interview women and asked how many children they would like: basically mostly 1 to 2.

Countries without immigration such as Japan, Korea, China, Russia and Eastern Europe are going to get hit the worst. Their population is going to shrink quite dramatically over this century. There is simply no escape.

Developing countries had been relied upon to provide children. However as Africa and the middle east develop and urbanise, there will be fewer people to migrate and they may not want to, anyway. Just look at China.

Governments have been trying hard to encourage babies, for example Denmark’s sponsored holidays, and increased maternity leave etc. However these are only marginally effective.

Immigration (while it lasts) will be the only solution. Canada is doing it right, with Trudeau welcoming refugees. Canada and America will probably do okay, being English speaking and generally welcoming to immigrants.

Bricker thinks that world population will peak mid-century and then drop incessantly. Then we will have fewer but older people. Few children will be around, innovation will suffer and economies crash. Global warming will finally slow down and pollution less. They feel that the current UN estimate is too generous, because it assumes that birth rates in advanced countries will go up magically again. Bricker posits that they will surely not.

A great book about population!

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.4
I really have mixed feelings on this book.

If I rated it in terms of how well-written and interesting it was, it's an easy 5. I was really impressed with the amount of data that was presented to support the thesis - that we have much more to fear from dwindling population in the future vs. the commonly-accepted theory that the earth will be overpopulated - as well as the easily understandable and often humorous way in which it is presented.

But it goes astray with a leftist view of open borders immigration, which is presented as a certain and perfect solution to the issue raised for the last quarter or so of the book. Not only does that disregard a number of critical issues that we've seen with unchecked immigration, but it also ignores the information that is argued in much of the book. The authors make the case that even the developing world, which supplies the push/pull immigration described, is rapidly decreasing in numbers due to lowered birthrate. But at the same time the solution advocated is to increase immigration. Even the author admits that the immigrant pool will be in rapid decline based on these two opposing concepts.

Overall an interesting read, it's just that the problem (birth rates at or trending to lower than the replacement rate - caused interestingly by things that are generally considered positive such as education and women's autonomy) is presented as solvable by immigration, which is not only a very controversial position (not everywhere works like Canada, thankfully in many respects) but is not even supported by the author's primary conclusions on future populations.