Peak Population: Prepare for a Shrinking World

Earth is going to hit “peak population” before the end of this century. Within 25 years, most of the world’s developed nations will be facing sharp population declines, with shrinking pools of young people working to support an ever-aging population.

The reason is not famine, war, or pestilence. We did this to ourselves, by creating a set of draconian solutions to a problem that didn’t even exist. Fear has always been the best tool for social control, and the fear of humanity was deployed by generations of “thinkers” on the control-obsessed left. 

Most starkly, Paul Ehrlich made a remarkably frightening, and entirely false, prediction in 1968, in his book Population Bomb (PDF):

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines —  hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…

We may be able to keep famine from sweeping across India for a few more years. But India can’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980. Nothing can prevent the death of tens of millions of people in India in the 1970s…

And England? If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.

PJ O’Rourke explained what was going on, in his 1994 book All the Trouble in the World:

The bullying of citizens by means of dreads and fights has been going on since paleolithic times. Greenpeace fundraisers on the subject of global warming are not much different than the tribal Wizards on the subject of lunar eclipses. ‘Oh no, Night Wolf is eating the Moon Virgin. Give me silver and I will make him spit her out.

Family Planning and State Intervention

But there is more going here than just gulling the gullible; the overpopulation hysteria of the 1960s and 1970s had world-changing consequences, effects that are just now becoming clear. It’s not fair (though it is fun) to blame Ehrlich; the truth is that the full-blown family-size freakout emerged from a pseudo-science that held growth was a threat to prosperity. Influential organizations were founded by very worried people. The Population Council and the International Planned Parenthood Federation were both created early on, in 1952. Developing nations began promoting aggressive family planning initiatives, often with substantial support, and sometimes with coercive pressures, from Western governments and international agencies.

The United Nations, the World Bank, and bilateral donors, particularly the United States through USAID, increasingly integrated population control into foreign aid programs. High fertility rates, particularly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, were viewed not merely as demographic trends but as Malthusian obstacles to modernization, poverty alleviation, and global security. China implemented its infamous “One-Child Policy” in 1979 with coercive measures, including forced sterilizations and abortions. India conducted mass sterilization campaigns, particularly during the Emergency period (1975–1977), often using force or extreme social pressure, including withholding ration cards. A number of countries in East Asia saw aggressive state-controlled programs, often funded by the World Bank, that sought to use questionable and coercive methods to reduce population growth quickly and permanently.

In more than a few cases, of course, the availability of contraception was actually a means of freeing women to make a choice to have fewer children. But combining this choice with state-sponsored coercion meant that even those who wanted more children, or would have wanted more children if the social pressures had been more sensibly used, were diverted from their private dream of several children.

That would be bad enough, if that were the end of the story. But it is only the beginning, because the sanctimony of scientism has created an actual population crisis, one that will affect the world for decades. Some nations may never recover, at least not in their present form. That crisis is the population bust.

Shrinking Planet: Which Nations Will Peak When?

I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations, using available data. What I was trying to calculate was the year of projected peak population, for the 26 countries where the data are reliable enough to make an educated guess. That projection is based on Total Fertility Rates, and accounting for immigration, and mortality (life expectancy) trends. These estimates are, at best, approximations, because in some cases the data are not strictly comparable. But the data I do have are drawn from the United Nations World Population Prospects, OECD statistical reports, and national demographic data.

Peak population years are based on UN World Population Prospects (PDF) mid‑variant projections, supported by regional reports noting that most European/North American nations will peak in the late 2030s. Japan already peaked around 2008, South Korea around 2025, and Israel — with TFR near 3.0 — may not peak this century.

As is noted in the final row of the table, the replacement rate for total fertility is about 2.10, given trends in life expectancy and assuming no net migration.

This raises a question: if all these countries have TFRs below replacement, what is actually happening to the world’s population? The answer is simple, though it has not been talked about much. The world population is going to peak, and then start to decline. The total number of people on Earth will begin to fall sometime in the near future. The actual date of the peak is a matter of conjecture, since it depends on specific assumptions, but the estimates appear mostly to fall between 2060 (assuming current TFRs are constant) and 2080 (if TFRs increase slightly, and life span increases):

None of this needed to happen, folks. There is plenty of room on Earth, as you know if you have ever flown across Australia, Canada, or for that matter the US, at night. There is a lot of empty space.

Let’s do a thought experiment: there are 8.1 billion people on Earth now. Suppose all of them lived in the US state of Texas (for those Texans reading this, I know it seems like we are moving in that direction; the traffic in Dallas is remarkable!). Texas has an area of 676,600 square kilometers. So supposing present trends continue, and literally the whole world did move to Texas; what would that look like?

Well, 8.1billion / 676,600 is about 12,000 people per square kilometer. That’s slightly more dense than the five boroughs of New York (about 11,300 per square kilometer), but much less than Paris (20,000), and dramatically less than Manila (nearly 44,000). Now, New York and Paris are pretty crowded, but people do live there, and even go there voluntarily to visit sometimes. Even if the entire current global population had to move into Texas, it’d be only marginally more annoying than Manhattan at rush hour. 

So, here’s the takeaway: there was no good reason for the population hysteria of past decades. As I tried to argue in an earlier piece, those predictions were ridiculous even at the time. And we need not be concerned about reviving the “population bomb,” because there is plenty of room, even if the human population does start to grow again, and even if we all had to move to Texas.

The effects of population decline are already starting to be felt in countries such as South Korea and Japan. As the average age climbs, the absolute number of people under 40 starts to decline. Unless something changes, the world population in general, and many specific countries, will  face circumstances that, until now, have only ever been observed during catastrophic plagues or savage wars: blocks of empty houses, abandoned cities, and hordes of elderly people who lack the ability to provide for themselves. The difference in the present case, however, is that we are not suffering from famine or war. As Antony Davis pointed out, the current collapse of world civilization is a consequence of a striking failure to recognize that human beings are the most valuable resource we have.

 Some Notes on Sources

• TFR data comes from OECD and UN: OECD average TFR was 1.5 in 2022
• OECD Social Indicators 2024
• The Real Reason People Aren’t Having Kids, The Atlantic 
• Fertility Rate, Total for OECD Members, St. Louis Federal Reserve
• List of countries by past fertility rate Wikipedia.org
• Country‑specific TFRs drawn mostly from UN/EU data such as: Total fertility rate Wikipedia.org
• Charted: When Every Continent’s Population Will Peak This Century visualcapitalist.com
• More countries, including China, are grappling with shrinking and aging populations, The Atlantic
• Denmark’s TFR (1.55 in 2022) is from its national statistics
  Korea’s extremely low TFR (0.7 in 2023) is from OECD press releases