Human population could start to fall sharply instead of increasing
Authors say pundits may be wrong and humanity might tip into terminal decline in 30 years
The sky is blue because it reflects the sea and the sea is blue as it reflects the sky. You can suck the venom out of a snake wound if you react fast enough. The same reflexes will be useful so you can bop a shark on the nose when it attacks. The Great Wall of China is the only man-made object you can see from space, unless you are as blind as a bat.
Such vertical knowledge, or “everybody knows” knowledge, is ingrained in our everyday consciousness. Too bad none of it is true. It’s called the “illusory truth effect”, a mechanism skewing a person’s perception of truth towards an understanding that feels familiar. We tend to assess new information against what we already know to be true, so if we hear the same thing repeated with some authority we tend to accept it.
The phenomenon was first detailed in the study Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity in 1977. Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein and Thomas Toppino asked students at Temple University in Pennsylvania to rate the plausibility of 60 statements — some true, some not — on three occasions over six weeks. Of the 60 “facts” presented, 20 would reappear, and the researchers found participants believed them a little more each time. They concluded that familiarity can overpower rationality. What’s more, the effect is likely to be more powerful when people are tired or distracted by other information.
At the height of an overtired, workaholic-glorification culture mixed with specialised information bombardment, we are facing an age where we are ripe for repetitive picking. No wonder we live in a time of antivaxers, flat-earthers and neo-Nazis. Not to mention Helen Zille’ s belief that if she tweets about the benefits of colonialism often enough, maybe someone will believe her. We don’t. Please
stop trying. But what if the facts are true only for now? It would appear the same phenomenon might be tied to our belief that certain well-worn facts will always remain true regardless of time passed.
That’s where Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrell Bricker come in. They confronted the ever-popular truth of population growth, whereby for the past half a century we have been told (repeatedly) that our insistence on breeding like rabbits will soon overwhelm the planet and its resources. Vegans are quick to tell you what the world will be like if all 9-billion people predicted to inhabit the earth in 2050 still eat meat. If the fire pits of the global-warming apocalypse don’t quite wipe us out in the next few decades, there may be 11-billion people by the time we hit 2100. Well, if you believe a report written by a little organisation called the UN, that is.
But Ibbitson and Bricker see things somewhat differently. They go so far as to argue that despite what “statisticians, pundits and politicians have warned”, the global population will “in roughly three decades” start falling sharply, they write in their latest book, Empty Planet.
“Once that decline begins, it will never end.”
The book does not present the facts in the usual style of empty God-fearing statistics and exhaustible data, but rather brings the numbers to life in the form of human interaction and experiences. The authors tell the tale of changing minds across some of the most populous poverty-stricken areas in the world, with some First World counterpoints, as readers are transported from South Florida to São Paulo, Seoul to Nairobi, Brussels to Delhi to Beijing. Regardless of location, we are shown how similarly we are moving towards a joint vision of the future in the fastest-changing time in history.
One such instance is when they polled 26 countries and asked women how many children they want, and found that across the board the answer tended to be about two. “The external forces that used to dictate people having bigger families are disappearing everywhere,” says Ibbitson. And what’s more this change of attitude is happening fastest in developing countries.
In the Philippines, they found fertility rates fell from 3.7% to 2.7% from 2003 to 2018. “That’s a whole kid in 15 years. In the US, that change happened much more slowly, from about 1800 to the end of the baby boom. So that’s the scenario we’re asking people to contemplate,” Ibbitson told Wired Magazine.
And it appears that South Africans are following this trend. Stats SA reported that from 2013 to 2016 the total of registered births continuously fell year on year to numbers we haven’t seen since 2009. Though there was a spike in 2017 again, it still indicates that South Africans are rethinking their life choices. This is also seen in the steady “fertility decline” of SA women. As it stands, we now hit the old international standard of 2.4 children, down from the 2.68 children rate we had in 2009. Some provinces’ statistics go beyond that, with the Western Cape averaging 2.2 and Gauteng 2.
According to the duo, growing access to technology and large-scale information may be shaping our decisions more than we thought. Austrian demographer Wolfgang Lutz has a saying that the most important reproductive organ for human beings is the mind, “that if you change how someone thinks about reproduction, you change everything”, says Ibbitson.
Based on Lutz’s analysis, the single-biggest effect on fertility is education of women. Locally, though we are still plagued by a high teenage pregnancy rate, the number of girls getting matric is rising slowly, up nine percentage points since 2007. This, along with growing urbanisation and access to smartphones, giving access to unvetted information, may have a bigger impact than even the UN could have predicted. If these are the stats in SA when smartphone access has risen by 12.3-million units to 22-million since 2014, imagine the impact 23.6-million units will have in 2023.
“And that’s just one cultural variable,” says Bricker. “So you can say that the old models always worked in the past, but what if the past is not prologue? What if we’re moving into a different cultural moment? What if it’s accelerating? And what if that cultural moment really is about the personal decisions women make about their lives?”
Now that’s something that bears repeating.
THE AUTHORS ARGUE THAT GLOBAL POPULATION WILL START FALLING SHARPLY IN ABOUT THREE DECADES
YOU CAN SAY THAT THE OLD MODELS ALWAYS WORKED IN THE PAST, BUT WHAT IF THE PAST IS NOT PROLOGUE?