Will There Be Enough of Us?
Jumping off the fertility cliff
Risk & Progress| A hub for essays that explore risk, human progress, and your potential. My mission is to educate, inspire, and invest in concepts that promote a better future for all. Subscriptions and new essays are free and always will be. Paid subscribers gain access to the full archives.
Just a generation ago, the question we asked ourselves was…would there be enough food? Today, we ask ourselves…will there be enough of us? Instead of an uncontrolled population explosion, societies around the world are now grappling with the prospect of population implosions. One by one, governments are setting up fertility policies designed to encourage larger families. But how well do these policies really work and what does the data say about how we can improve them?
Why It Matters
Among the most shared essays on Risk & Progress argued that, in a bizarre twist of fate, in one generation, we have gone from worrying about too many people to too few. I made the case that when it comes to progress, scale matters. Economic growth models which track the steady expansion of human capability, are underpinned by an assumption that the population will continue to grow. This assumption is key, for current research suggests that population decline could lead to a dystopian world…
