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Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by [Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson]

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Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline Kindle Edition

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An award-winning journalist and leading international social researcher make the provocative argument that the global population will soon begin to decline, dramatically reshaping the social, political, and economic landscape

For half a century, statisticians, pundits, and politicians have warned that a burgeoning population will soon overwhelm the earth's resources. But a growing number of experts are sounding a different alarm. Rather than continuing to increase exponentially, they argue, the global population is headed for a steep decline—and in many countries, that decline has already begun.

In Empty Planet, John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker find that a smaller global population will bring with it many benefits: fewer workers will command higher wages; the environment will improve; the risk of famine will wane; and falling birthrates in the developing world will bring greater affluence and autonomy for women.

But enormous disruption lies ahead, too. We can already see the effects in Europe and parts of Asia, as aging populations and worker shortages weaken the economy and impose crippling demands on healthcare and social security. The United States and Canada are well-positioned to successfully navigate these coming demographic shifts--that is, unless growing isolationism leads us to close ourselves off just as openness becomes more critical to our survival than ever.

Rigorously researched and deeply compelling, Empty Planet offers a vision of a future that we can no longer prevent--but one that we can shape, if we choose.

Praise for Empty Planet

“An ambitious reimagining of our demographic future.”—The New York Times Book Review

“The authors combine a mastery of social-science research with enough journalistic flair to convince fair-minded readers of a simple fact: Fertility is falling faster than most experts can readily explain, driven by persistent forces.”—The Wall Street Journal

“The beauty of this book is that it links hard-to-grasp global trends to the easy to-understand individual choices being made all over the world today . . . a gripping narrative of a world on the cusp of profound change.”—The New Statesman

“John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker have written a sparkling and enlightening guide to the contemporary world of fertility as small family sizes and plunging rates of child-bearing go global.”–The Globe and Mail

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252 pages
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English
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Crown
Publication date

February 5, 2019
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2946 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Arresting. . . lucid, trenchant and very readable, the authors' arguments upend consensus ideas about everything from the environment to immigration; the result is a stimulating challenge to conventional wisdom."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Warnings of catastrophic world overpopulation have filled the media since the 1960s, so this expert, well-researched explanation that it's not happening will surprise many readers…delightfully stimulating.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Thanks to the authors’ painstaking fact-finding and cogent analysis, [Empty Planet] offers ample and persuasive arguments for a re-evaluation of conventional wisdom."—Booklist

“The ‘everything you know is wrong’ genre has become tedious, but this book is riveting and vitally important. With eye-opening data and lively writing, Bricker and Ibbitson show that the world is radically changing in a way that few people appreciate.”—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now

“While the global population is swelling today, birth rates have nonetheless already begun dropping around the world. Past population declines have been driven by natural disasters or disease—the Toba supervolcano, Black Death or Spanish Flu—but this coming slump will be of our own making. In this fascinating and thought-provoking book, Bricker and Ibbitson compellingly argue why by the end of this century the problem won't be overpopulation but a rapidly shrinking global populace, and how we might have to adapt.”—Lewis Dartnell, Professor of Science Communication, University of Westminster, and author of The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch

“To get the future right we must challenge our assumptions, and the biggest assumption so many of us make is that populations will keep growing. Bricker and Ibbitson deliver a mind-opening challenge that should be taken seriously by anyone who cares about the long-term future — which, I hope, is all of us.” —Dan Gardner, author of Risk and co-author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

“A highly readable, controversial insight into a world rarely thought about—a world of depopulation under ubiquitous urbanization.” –George Magnus, author of The Age of Aging and Red Flags: Why Xi's China is in Jeopardy

“This briskly readable book demands urgent attention."–The Mail on Sunday

“A fascinating study.”–The Sunday Times

“Refreshingly clear and well balanced.”–Literary Review

About the Author

Darrell Bricker is chief executive officer of Ipsos Public Affairs, the world's leading social and opinion research firm. John Ibbitson is writer at large for the Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper. Successful authors on their own, their first collaboration was on The Big Shift, a study of change in Canadian politics that became a #1 national bestseller. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

It was a girl.

On Sunday, October 30, 2011, just before midnight, Danica May Camacho entered the world in a crowded Manila hospital, bringing the human population of our planet to seven billion. Actually, the scales could have tipped a few hours later, in a village in Uttar Pradesh, India, with the arrival of Nargis Kumar. Or it might have been a boy, Pyotr Nikolayeva, born in Kaliningrad, Russia.

Of course, it was none of them. The birth that took us to seven billion people was attended by no cameras and ceremonial speeches because we can never know where or when the event occurred. We can only know that, according to the United Nations’ best estimates, we reached seven billion sometime around October 31 of that year. Different countries designated certain births to symbolize this landmark in history, and Danica, Nargis, and Pyotr were among those chosen.

For many, there was no reason to celebrate. Indian health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad declared that a global population of seven billion was “not a matter of great joy, but a great worry. . . . For us a matter of joy will be when the population stabilizes.” Many share Azad’s gloom. They warn of a global population crisis. Homo sapiens is reproducing unchecked, straining our ability to feed, house, and clothe the 130 million or more new babies that UNICEF estimates arrive each year. As humans crowd the planet, forests disappear, species become extinct, the atmosphere warms.

Unless humankind defuses this population bomb, these prophets proclaim, we face a future of increasing poverty, food shortages, conflict, and environmental degradation. As one modern Malthus put it, “Barring a dramatic decline in population growth, a rapid decrease in greenhouse gas emissions, or a global outbreak of vegetarianism—all of which are trending in the opposite direction at the moment—we’re facing nothing less than the end of plenty for the majority of the earth’s people.”

All of this is completely, utterly wrong.

The great defining event of the twenty-first century—one of the great defining events in human history—will occur in three decades, give or take, when the global population starts to decline. Once that decline begins, it will never end. We do not face the challenge of a population bomb but of a population bust—a relentless, generation-after-generation culling of the human herd. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

If you find this news shocking, that’s not surprising. The United Nations forecasts that our population will grow from seven billion to eleven billion in this century before leveling off after 2100. But an increasing number of demographers around the world believe the UN estimates are far too high. More likely, they say, the planet’s population will peak at around nine billion sometime between 2040 and 2060, and then start to decline, perhaps prompting the UN to designate a symbolic death to mark the occasion. By the end of this century, we could be back to where we are right now, and steadily growing fewer.

Populations are already declining in about two dozen states around the world; by 2050 the number will have climbed to three dozen. Some of the richest places on earth are shedding people every year: Japan, Korea, Spain, Italy, much of Eastern Europe. “We are a dying country,” Italy’s health minister, Beatrice Lorenzin, lamented in 2015.

But this isn’t the big news. The big news is that the largest developing nations are also about to grow smaller, as their own fertility rates come down. China will begin losing people in a few years. By the middle of this century, Brazil and Indonesia will follow suit. Even India, soon to become the most populous nation on earth, will see its numbers stabilize in about a generation and then start to decline. Fertility rates remain sky-high in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East. Even here, though, things are changing as young women obtain access to education and birth control. Africa is likely to end its unchecked baby boom much sooner than the UN’s demographers think.

Some of the indications of an accelerating decline in fertility can be found in scholarly research and government reports; others can only be found by talking to people on the street. And so we did. To gather research for this book, we traveled to cities on six continents: to Brussels and Seoul, Nairobi and São Paulo, Mumbai and Beijing, Palm Springs and Canberra and Vienna. There were other stops as well. We talked to academics and public officials, but more important, we talked to young people: on university campuses and at research institutes and in favelas and slums. We wanted to know what they were thinking about the most important decision they will ever make: whether and when to have a baby.

Population decline isn’t a good thing or a bad thing. But it is a big thing. A child born today will reach middle age in a world in which conditions and expectations are very different from our own. She will find the planet more urban, with less crime, environmentally healthier but with many more old people. She won’t have trouble finding a job, but she may struggle to make ends meet, as taxes to pay for healthcare and pensions for all those seniors eat into her salary. There won’t be as many schools, because there won’t be as many children.

But we won’t have to wait thirty or forty years to feel the impact of population decline. We’re feeling it today, in developed nations from Japan to Bulgaria that struggle to grow their economies even as the cohort of young workers and consumers diminishes, making it harder to provide social services or sell refrigerators. We see it in urbanizing Latin America and even Africa, where women are increasingly taking charge of their own destinies. We see it in every household where the children take longer to move out because they’re in no rush to settle down and haven’t the slightest intention of having a baby before they’re thirty. And we’re seeing it, tragically, in roiling Mediterranean seas, where refugees from wretched places press against the borders of a Europe that is already starting to empty out.

We may see it, very soon, influencing the global contest for power. Population decline will shape the nature of war and peace in the decades ahead, as some nations grapple with the fallout of their shrinking, aging societies while others remain able to sustain themselves. The defining geopolitical challenge in the coming decades could involve accommodating and containing an angry, frightened China as it confronts the consequences of its disastrous one-child policy.

Some of those who fear the fallout of a diminishing population advocate government policies to increase the number of children couples have. But the evidence suggests this is futile. The “low-fertility trap” ensures that, once having one of two children becomes the norm, it stays the norm. Couples no longer see having children as a duty they must perform to satisfy their obligation to their families or their god. Rather, they choose to raise a child as an act of personal fulfillment. And they are quickly fulfilled.

One solution to the challenge of a declining population is to import replacements. That’s why two Canadians wrote this book. For decades now, Canada has brought in more people, on a per capita basis, than any other major developed nation, with little of the ethnic tensions, ghettos, and fierce debate that other countries face. That’s because the country views immigration as an economic policy—under the merit-based points system, immigrants to Canada are typically better educated, on average, than the native-born—and because it embraces multiculturalism: the shared right to celebrate your native culture within the Canadian mosaic, which has produced a peaceful, prosperous, polyglot society, among the most fortunate on earth.

Not every country is able to accept waves of newcomers with Canada’s aplomb. Many Koreans, Swedes, and Chileans have a very strong sense of what it means to be Korean, Swedish, or Chilean. France insists its immigrants embrace the idea of being French, even as many of the old stock deny such a thing is possible, leaving immigrant communities isolated in their banlieues, separate and not equal. The population of the United Kingdom is projected to continue growing, to about 82 million at the end of the century, from 66 million today, but only if the British continue to welcome robust levels of immigration. As the Brexit referendum revealed, many Brits want to turn the English Channel into a moat. To combat depopulation, nations must embrace both immigration and multiculturalism. The first is hard. The second, for some, may prove impossible.

Among great powers, the coming population decline uniquely advantages the United States. For centuries, America has welcomed new arrivals, first from across the Atlantic, then the Pacific as well, and today from across the Rio Grande. Millions have happily plunged into the melting pot—America’s version of multiculturalism—enriching both its economy and culture. Immigration made the twentieth century the American century, and continued immigration will define the twenty-first as American as well.

Unless. The suspicious, nativist, America First groundswell of recent years threatens to choke off the immigration tap that made America great by walling up the border between the United States and everywhere else. Under President Donald Trump, the federal government not only cracked down on illegal immigrants, it reduced legal admissions for skilled workers, a suicidal policy for the U.S. economy. If this change is permanent, if Americans out of senseless fear reject their immigrant tradition, turning their backs on the world, then the United States too will decline, in numbers and power and influence and wealth. This is the choice that every American must make: to support an open, inclusive, welcoming society, or to shut the door and wither in isolation.

The human herd has been culled in the past by famine or plague. This time, we are culling ourselves; we are choosing to become fewer. Will our choice be permanent? The answer is: probably yes. Though governments have sometimes been able to increase the number of children couples are willing to have through generous child care payments and other supports, they have never managed to bring fertility back up to the replacement level of, on average, 2.1 children per woman needed to sustain a population. Besides, such programs are extremely expensive and tend to be cut back during economic downturns. And it is arguably unethical for a government to try to convince a couple to have a child that they would otherwise not have had.

As we settle into a world growing smaller, will we celebrate or mourn our diminishing numbers? Will we struggle to preserve growth, or accept with grace a world in which people both thrive and strive less? We don’t know. But it may be a poet who observes that, for the first time in the history of our race, humanity feels old. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07CWHYVW5
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown (February 5, 2019)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 5, 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2946 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 252 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #458,998 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #49 in Demography
- #181 in Demography Studies
- #730 in Cultural Anthropology (Kindle Store)

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About the author

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Darrell Bricker
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Dr. Darrell Bricker is CEO, Ipsos Public Affairs. Ipsos’ Public Affairs has offices in 38 countries and a staff of 800 research professionals. It is the world's leading social and public opinion research firm.
Ipsos Public Affairs is part of Paris-based Ipsos which is the 3rd largest market research company in the world.
Prior to joining Ipsos in 1990, Dr. Bricker was Director of Research in the office of Canada's Prime Minister. He was also a research consultant with firms in Ottawa and Toronto.
Dr. Bricker holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Carleton University (where he was a Social Science and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellow), and a BA and MA from Wilfrid Laurier University. He has also been awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws Degree by Wilfrid Laurier University, which named him one of their top 100 graduates in the last 100 years.
Darrell is a prolific author. He's written five national bestselling books, Searching for Certainty: Inside the New Canadian Mindset (with Ed Greenspon - Doubleday, 2002), What Canadians Think About Almost Everything (with John Wright – Doubleday, 2005), We Know What You’re Thinking (with John Wright - Harper Collins, 2009), Canuckology (with John Wright - Harper Collins, 2011), and The Big Shift (with John Ibbitson - Harper Collins, 2013). In February 2019, Dr. Bricker will publish his sixth book, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline (with John Ibbitson).
For Empty Planet, Bricker and Ibbitson travelled to six continents, talking with specialists and a wide assortment of women and men--from university students in Seoul to slum-dwellers in Delhi--as they explored the conviction held by a growing body of demographers that global population decline, rather than rapid growth, will define this century. The book is published by The Crown Publishing Group in the United States; Little, Brown in Great Britain and McClelland & Stewart in Canada. The work is also available around the world in English through Little, Brown, and is being published in Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and Korean.
Darrell is also a popular public speaker who regularly engages with audiences around the world. He is interviewed frequently in the media, appearing on CNN, the BBC, Bloomberg, and Al Jazeera, as well as on all of Canada's major television and radio networks. He's written articles for publications as diverse as Canada's Globe and Mail and France's Le Monde.
You can follow Darrell on Twitter at @darrellbricker
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Dave Rice

The is a heavily biased political hit job by two morally superior Davos types

Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2019

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I cannot recommend this book. The subject is one that I know well and have studied professionally around the world. Although the facts this book presents are mostly accurate, they are highly selective and presented along with strong opinions about the political implications as though no other point of view can be credible. This book is a form of propaganda, masquerading as information.

Fertility declines are due to multiple factors, but the authors only include causes that fit their argument. They never mention or quantify the impact of abortions on the falling fertility in the US (the number of abortions is about equal to the number of immigrants that replace the unborn). The authors mention that fertility has declined the most in black communities but fail to acknowledge this is because of higher rates of abortions among blacks.

Nor do the authors assess the causes of fertility decline objectively. Women’s empowerment is claimed to be a root cause of declining fertility. In fact, fertility falls especially fast in Latin America where female empowerment is limited. They describe the fall in foreign adoptions as a trend, though actually it is due to the Hague Treaty that almost completely ended foreign adoptions by cutting off the prior path to citizenship for adopted children. A reader that is new to the subject would never be able to discern when they were getting the whole truth, and the authors work hard to conceal this.

The authors skip over the negatives of the mass migration they prescribe. They don’t mention the huge disenfranchised underclasses that have been created in Asia and the Middle East based on the policies they recommend. Nor the emergence of similar underclasses in California today. They don't mention the impossibility of enforcing the rule of law when transnational criminal organizations exploit open borders. They even fail to present the positives of Japan's choices to preserve their homogeneous society, despite that fact that Japan continues to pursue this policy and must see some benefit.

These Canadian authors present the Canadian approach as a panacea. They don't acknowledge the Canadian situation is unique geographically, because the United States provides protection through strategic depth. Critically, the Canadian immigration system is merit based, but they fail to include this in their prescription. Instead that authors answer is simply to resist Donald Trump and any political point of view that attempts to protect the interests of a country’s citizens.

What I found most offensive was that they didn’t make a recommendation and try to defend it, rather they gave a prescription as though they know more than the rest of us and have higher moral standards than we can only accept as absolute. I found the unscholarly, ideological mindset of the authors sickening.

This is an important topic that deserves a fact-based discussion. But for that discussion to be helpful, options need to be considered objectively and pros/cons acknowledged from the perspectives of all constituents. Instead we get selective facts to fit a predefined narrative with extensive condescending rants, hurling insults at those that would questing their prescription in any way.

188 people found this helpful

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sien

A Fascinating and novel book on global demography

Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2019

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Empty Planet : The Shock of Global Population Decline (2019) by Darrel Bricker and John Ibbitson is a fascinating book that makes the case the global population is likely to peak sooner than UN population predictions suggest and looks at why populations are declining and the what the impact of declining populations is likely to be. It's a fascinating book because the fact that fertility levels are below replacement in almost all developed countries and many other countries is largely ignored.

The book starts by looking at the incorrect claims of various environmentalists from Malthus to Ehrlich. They point out that share of the world that is starving has plummeted and the share in absolutely poverty has also plummeted.

The book then starts looking at Europe, where populations are already starting to shrink. Throughout the authors interview people around the world to talk about their ideas of family. In Europe it is most drastic, a number of couples from Belgium who have a combined fertility rate of less than one talk about kids.

Then Korea and Japan are investigated. Japan being really 'the country of the future' in that populations are declining there. The book looks at how women wanting a career find it very hard to have kids as well given traditional roles for men in not helping much with parenting or around the house.

There is a great discussion of the economics of babies, how they have gone from a boon in agricultural societies to an economic burden in modern, urban ones. The impact of teenage pregnancy is discussed along with having kids at an older age.

The critical role of Africa in global population predictions and what is going on there is then investigated. There the fact that UN population predictions rely on African populations exploding is discussed and the impact that mobile phones and greater education and urbanisation is having is described.

Empty Planet then looks at how fertility is likely to change the size of India and China is outlined. The authors show how China's already low fertility will very likely lead to a population reduction and how India's fertility has changed and is likely to change gets a good discussion. Again the impact of information, urbanisation and education is likely underestimated.

Empty Planet then looks at how immigration driven by countries wishing to enrich themselves, such as Canada and Australia is likely to lead to those countries avoiding some of the impact of declining populations. It's a very well made point.

Empty Planet is really a fascinating book that makes a very strong case as to why global populations will peak sooner than expected and are likely to decline sooner than expected. It would have been good to get the case from a UN statistician as to why they think that population will be higher than the authors, but other than that Empty Planet is a really excellent book that describes a fascinating new phenomenon.

31 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Dr J P Mckeown

even if low forecast were true, still 7+ billion at end of this century

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 6, 2019

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The authors claim that UN demographers have got their population forecast wrong, pointing to alternative demographers' low forecasts in which global population peaks around 2050 at 8.5 or 9 billion, and then declines by 2100 to 7 or 8 billion. But even if we believe this, it means population will continue to be above 7 billion for at least 80 years. That hypothetical future is not an "empty planet". According to analyses such as planetary boundaries, and Ecological Footprint, human impact was already unsustainable when our population reached 7 billion. And the Living Planet Index (ZSL) says other species' numbers have, on average, been declining since 1970, when the human population was "only" 3.7 billion. So even if we believe the low forecast, the world faces at least another century of overpopulation stress: time enough for bad effects. The authors' rhetoric -- "All of this" [fear of species extinctions etc] is "utterly wrong" -- has no logical basis in the low forecast.

I hope the low forecast comes true, but sadly it is not as easy as the authors imagine. Most demographers think some countries in middle Africa will only slowly reduce fertility (and it only takes one high outlier country to perpetuate global population growth). The low forecast has two other less well=known weaknesses. One was explained in Eric Kaufmann's 2010 book: the higher fertility (obscured by national-scale data) of some sects; members often avoiding contact with strangers and therefore probably under-sampled by Bricker and Ibbitson’s conversational approach to research at "university campuses … favelas and slums". The other weakness is that some forecasters neglect evolutionary factors as explored recently in an article by Jason Collins and Lionel Page, "The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future" in Evolution and Human Behavior 40, 2019.

Let us hope the low forecast comes true, but Bricker and Ibbitson’s book would be much better without its anti-environmentalist rhetoric, and the sensationalist title.
Dr J P McKeown.

26 people found this helpful

William Jordan

thought provoking book on demographic trends

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 27, 2021

Verified Purchase

This book was a great read. The authors have discussed with young women around the world their lives and the part that having children will play in them. They paint memorable pictures of a great diversity of societies. In all birth rates are declining. In some population numbers are already in decline. Causes include urbanisation, education of women and affluence. 'Answers' for individual countries may include immigration - but needs to be accompanied by Canada style multiculturalism. The final chapter suggests that living in towns is also the single best answer to global warming (alongside the declines in fertility discussed in the book)....Strongly recommended...

One person found this helpful

Simon Beckett

The book lets itself down - too much anecdote, insufficient data

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 1, 2021

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There are some interesting ideas in this book but all too often the authors go off on fashionable tangents - immigration, me too, Israel & Palestine, climate change: population is going to start to fall and sort out all these problems. As a result I found the book glib and written with an agenda - maybe to grab headlines - certainly to put just one side of the argument.
I wanted to know about population trends. There is too much anecdote and insufficient data. Falling birth rates are wholly attributed to urbanisation - I had thought the principal cause was falling infant mortality.
There is no discussion of what level of global population is sustainable. The fact that population is likely to level off and start falling in about 30 years may be too late if we are already well over a sustainable population level.
Similarly there is no discussion about where the population is likely to be. A european person is likely to consume more and do more damage to the environment than an African. So falling population is not sufficient to avoid catastrophe.
All in all - some interesting ideas that got lost in the authors' agenda.

Otto Kjï¿½rgaard

Everyone who are scared for the future should read this book.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 1, 2019

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The book is a good reminder of that the future might be very different from the what mainstreamers believe.
The authors argues very convincing for a different scenario.
Everyone who works with a long time planning horizon should read this book.
Lack of space, ressources and mass pollution might not be the main problems of the future.
The book is not a scientific paper but a solid analysis based on comprehensive research.
As investor in farmland the consequences of the conclusion in the book is worrying, the increasing demand for more agricultural product might end sooner than I hope for.
Everyone who are scared for the future should read this book, they might still be scared, but their anxiety will be about other topics.

2 people found this helpful

NikonD3100

The truth at last

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 4, 2021

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At last an honest book. I am sick and tired of the kids about overpopulation and baby booms.
There are very few babies being born now. Humankind is in decline. Pampered, selfish ,riddled with Covid.

One person found this helpful