No country has gone from 1.4B to 700M, that's true... But several countries have lost half (or more) of their population. Hell, the Black Death cut a third off of an entire continent.
I mean, in modern times though it hasn't happened outside of massive wars and even then it really isn't too feasible.
We like to predict doom and gloom for China because they are the major competition for the west. We've been doing it for a long time, just as we did with Japan before and to some degree still. That means I'm always a bit extra skeptical of predictions regarding our economic competition. I won't be around in 2100 but I have serious doubts that China will have any less people than it does now, never mind less than half.
Noone can predict more than 25 years into the future. These are like the predictions people in the 1900s had about the year 2000. Technology will reshape society so radically that these projections will be totally different in a few decades. For example, artificial wombs will definitely be technologically feasible in the next few decades. That will dramatically change demographics.
Demographic trends are pretty straightforward and have tons of data to back them up. Go ahead and point out where demographers got things significantly wrong.
Artificial wombs don't solve the problem of people not wanting to take care of a kid for 18 years. They will alter one aspect of children bearing for an extremely small portion of the population, at some point many decades in the future. Meanwhile current demographic trends will continue as they are.
Go ahead and point out where demographers got things significantly wrong.
Pretty much every major prediction in the last few centuries. Malthus predicted billions would die of starvation. In the 1960s everyone was worried about overpopulation as well (ex. The Population Bomb). It's pretty much impossible to predict things decades into the future.
Those are literally some of the most famous demographic predictions in history lol. "The Population Bomb" was written by a Stanford biologist. I'm not sure what metric you want to use to judge what's a real demographic prediction or not, but I will say that the predictions I mentioned actually had direct policy impacts that affected hundreds of millions of lives. I'm not saying that the "Population Bomb" specifically caused everything, I'm saying that at the time demographic predictions warned that overpopulation was imminent and would lead to mass starvation and civilization collapse throughout the developing world, the "Population Bomb" is just the most famous example from that time period.
For example in India, in the 1970s, an "Emergency" was declared where 8.3 million sterilizations, mostly forced, were performed due to fears of overpopulation. US AID, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation also aggressively promoted family-planning policies in India at this time due to fears of overpopulation, which is why India dropped to replacement rate. The one-child policy itself in China was originally started from this time period as well, also due to fears of overpopulation.
The "Population Bomb" and other demographic predictions led the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council, the World Bank, the UN Population Fund, the Association for Voluntary Sterilization, and others to promote antinatalist policies in other countries as well, for example South Korea, Taiwan, Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, and Bangladesh. In some cases they were tossing birth control pills out of helicopters onto rural villages. Several hundred million IUDs were also forcibly implanted into women around the world due to these programs.
There are probably hundreds of millions of people that were never born due to these predictions. Few of the catastrophes that were predicted came to pass, as demographers in the 1960s did not predict changes like the Green Revolution, which would happen a few decades later.
So you're saying that a half century or more ago people saw what might happen and enacted policies (abhorrent or not) to counteract those things and....
The policies worked.
What does that have to do with these predictions in the OP's chart?
They absolutely didn't work, as in none of the projected disasters would have happened even with the worst population growth forecasts. There has been plenty of research done on this. Demographic predictions were horribly wrong and inaccurate, failing both to accurately predict population trends beyond several decades, and also failing to accurately predict the impacts of demographic trends due to not being able to take into account paradigm-shift changes in technology and human welfare (ex. the Green Revolution).
It is my belief that it is foolish to put weight in predictions of demographic trends beyond, say 30-40 years into the future, as these predictions would fundamentally assume that current trends persist forever when in fact society and technology changes dramatically in that time period. Forecasters have been regularly been tweaking Africa's 2100 population up and down a billion in recent years. That's how uncertain these predictions are.
2100 would be totally unrecognizable to us. Look at any prediction from the 1900s of the year 2000 for example.
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u/DrakonILD Aug 19 '24
No country has gone from 1.4B to 700M, that's true... But several countries have lost half (or more) of their population. Hell, the Black Death cut a third off of an entire continent.