The New York Times on population
I just found this opinion piece in the New York Times from 2023: The World’s Population May Peak in Your Lifetime. What Happens Next?
It starts:
The global human population has been climbing for the past two centuries. But what is normal for all of us alive today — growing up while the world is growing rapidly — may be a blip in human history.
Children born today will very likely live to see the end of global population growth.
A baby born this year will be 60 in the 2080s, when demographers at the U.N. expect the size of humanity to peak. The Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna places the peak in the 2070s. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington puts it in the 2060s. All of the predictions agree on one thing: We peak soon.
And then we shrink. Humanity will not reach a plateau and then stabilize. It will begin an unprecedented decline.
With some interesting graphs, including this one, which looks to most people scary, but it explains it well.
I compare it with the graph that podcast guest Tom Murphy described as one of his most important:
Tom’s discussion of his graph in his article The Energy Trap I consider essential reading. I consider his book the most thorough, thoughtful, and credible on the subject, which is why I call it the science book of the decade and recommend it beyond just this New York Times piece.
Still, I found the piece reasonable, which I find rare in mainstream articles on population, no matter the source or its biases, whether liberal, conservative, religious, not religious, old, young, etc. It also linked to many relevant sources.
The letters to the editor in response that they printed got the headline The Upside of a Population Decline.
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