216 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬ZACHARY KARABELL is the author of The
Leading Indicators: A Short History of the
Numbers That Rule Our World.ZACHARY KARABELL is the author of The
Leading Indicators: A Short History of the
Numbers That Rule Our World.The Population
Bust
Demographic Decline
and the End o Capitalism
as We Know ItZachary Karabell
The Human Tide: How Population
Shaped the Modern World
BY PAUL MORLAND. PublicAairs,
2019, 352 pp.Empty Planet: The Shock of Global
Population Decline
BY DARRELL BRICKER AND JOHN
IBBITSON. Crown, 2019, 304 pp.F
or most o human history, the
world’s population grew so slowly
that for most people alive, it
would have felt static. Between the year
1 and 1700, the human population went
from about 200 million to about 600
million; by 1800, it had barely hit one
billion. Then, the population exploded,
¿rst in the United Kingdom and the
United States, next in much o the rest
o Europe, and eventually in Asia. By
the late 1920s, it had hit two billion. It
reached three billion around 1960 and
then four billion around 1975. It has
nearly doubled since then. There are
now some 7.6 billion people living on
the planet.Just as much o the world has come to
see rapid population growth as normal
and expected, the trends are shifting
again, this time into reverse. Most parts
o the world are witnessing sharp and
sudden contractions in either birthrates or
absolute population. The only thing
preventing the population in many
countries from shrinking more quickly is
that death rates are also falling, because
people everywhere are living longer.
These oscillations are not easy for any
society to manage. “Rapid population
acceleration and deceleration send
shockwaves around the world wherever
they occur and have shaped history in
ways that are rarely appreciated,” the
demographer Paul Morland writes in The
Human Tide, his new history o demo-
graphics. Morland does not quite believe
that “demography is destiny,” as the
old adage mistakenly attributed to the
French philosopher Auguste Comte
would have it. Nor do Darrell Bricker
and John Ibbitson, the authors o
Empty Planet, a new book on the rapidly
shifting demographics o the twenty-¿rst
century. But demographics are clearly
part o destiny. I their role ¿rst in the
rise o the West and now in the rise o
the rest has been underappreciated, the
potential consequences o plateauing and
then shrinking populations in the
decades ahead are almost wholly ignored.
The mismatch between expectations
o a rapidly growing global population
(and all the attendant eects on climate,
capitalism, and geopolitics) and the reality
o both slowing growth rates and absolute
contraction is so great that it will pose a
considerable threat in the decades ahead.
Governments worldwide have evolved
to meet the challenge o managing more
people, not fewer and not older.Return to Table of Contents