Is watching North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un shed earnest tears of sadness a cause for, well, if not jubilation, at least some schadenfreude?
Maybe not in this case: he was listening to a lecture on his country’s population collapse. He was pleading with young women to have more children. North Korea is experiencing negative population growth: well below the “replacement rate.”
An inevitable result of horrific North Korean tyranny?
Well, population decline is almost a universal phenomenon. North Korea’s population rate is alarming, but so is South Korea’s — which is much, much freer.
And Japan’s, for that matter; and Europe’s.
So what do we make of the population growth alarmists from the 1960s and ’70s? I refer to folks like Paul Erlich, who wrote The Population Bomb, and the “experts” who made up The Club of Rome, with its infamous 1972 report, The Limits of Growth.
Magnificently bad prophets.
But they had a huge impact — at least on Communist China, which instituted the One Child policy in 1979. Now, that country’s population trend has reversed, with an increasing rate of decline.
Moreover, there may be a lot less people in China than was boasted of — official government stats admit a 2.08 million person drop from 2022 to 2023, following the previous (and first official) drop of 850,000. We can only guess the actual population, because communists lie. Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, estimates that China’s population was less than 1.28 billion in 2022, not 1.41 billion, with the decline starting in 2018, not 2022.
Ask yourself: how many civilizations have survived a population implosion?
And for peoples with ponzi-like pension systems, this is even more devastating.
The Chinese are cursed, but so are we — for we all live in interesting times.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Population Trends
- Canada: 1.33 births per woman (2023).
- China: 1.0 – 1.16 births per woman (2023).
- France: 1.68 births per woman (2024).
- Germany: 1.46 births per woman (2024).
- Great Britain: 1.45 births per woman (2023).
- Japan: 1.26 births per woman (2024).
- Mexico: 1.80 births per woman (2023).
- North Korea: Estimates suggest a fertility rate of around 1.8 – 2.0 (2021), below replacement.
- South Korea: 0.72 births per woman (2023), the lowest globally.
- Taiwan: 0.87 births per woman (2023).
- United States: 1.64 births per woman (2023).
Illustration created with Krea and Firefly
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3 replies on “The Great Implosion”
Those who want to close the borders entirely should take note of an American birthrate below replacement. We’d be losing population if there were no immigrants.…
But were Ehrlich and the others really such bad prophets? The US population has grown from about 200 million in the 1960’s to over 330 million today. In that same time period automation has reduced the need for manual labor in many areas, including agriculture. Preventive medicine and other health advances have increased the human lifespan. Large parts of the earth are unsuitable for human habitation. We need to preserve wetlands and areas for wildlife. Will we find that Ehrlich and the others were right all along and that it just took longer than they expected to reach that point? I keep asking this one question: does Earth have a carrying capacity?
“How many civilizations have survived a population implosion?”
All of them — by becoming, or merging into, other civilizations.
There is no magical “right” or “wrong” number of people or “right” or “wrong” direction for that number to move in, but since the Industrial Revolution each increment of improved living conditions has required fewer humans engaging in back-breaking work to achieve and sustain.
Nor is there any valid moral principlw that requires any particular “civilization” to exist in perpetuity by maximizing breeding. The world is not necessarily worse off because some people are now Mexicans rather than Aztecs or Floridians rather than Appalachee.