Empty Planet

Author: Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson

A couple of complaints up front. This feels like another one of those irritatingly fluffy non-fiction books. It has a sensationalized title. It discusses things that are mildly interesting sure, but it repeats itself, and rambles on seemingly just to get the book to a respectable length. It reads a lot more like a Globe and Mail article than a book, which is arguably due to one of the authors being a writer for the Globe and Mail. It has a lot of grabby sentences that don’t add much, and are obvious and not insightful. Just get to the point. I also found the book a bit pandering. They would often break from the point to politically “hedge” a sentence they said to make sure that it could not possibly be construed in a way that was offensive. Even on seemingly benign points. An example was they stopped the flow of the book after using the term “fertility rate” to explain why they are saying “fertility rate”, and if it sounds rather coarse, it is just because X and Y and boilerplate.

I checked out the book not because the idea of population decline is a shock to me, despite the claims of the title “The Shock of Global Population Decline”. I feel like most people who bother to look, know the population is going to decline soon. I checked it out because I wanted to better understand the impact on all of us, and on different countries. The book accomplishes that to an extent for sure. I guess I just feel bad that I was suckered in by the sensationalist title and read a fluffy book, which I work hard to avoid. Anyway.

As you might expect, the authors discuss that in their opinion, the global population is going to peak and decline a lot faster than the UN models predict. They say there are several factors at play which make their model likely much too aggressive in terms of population increase. One example is they say that the UN applies the same timeline of decline in fertility rates to countries that still have a booming fertility rates that developed countries like the US experienced years ago. This is pretty interesting. I do a lot of modelling myself (financial, not population), and understand the need to use historical data in the absence of better information. But the authors make a good point that just because it took England or the US so many years to see a decline in the birth rate, doesn’t mean it’s going to take nearly as long in places like Africa or the Philippines. Despite popular opinion, many societal issues are improving rapidly across the world like access to healthcare, contraception, education, (see Factfulness), all of which lower birthrates. The world is also urbanizing quickly. The authors say that in an urban society, having children is a cost as it is expensive to house them etc, and the economic incentive from having them do things like helping around the house is minimal. In rural societies, children are an investment as they are more hands on the farm for example. So as the world rapidly becomes more urban, the sentiment of wanting many kids quickly declines.

Within the middle of the book, the authors discuss some major countries and how population decline is unique to them. They discuss Japan, Kenya, Sao Paolo, the US and Canada as well as mention some other countries in passing. Again, the book becomes repetitive because population is declining for all the same reasons: Urbanization, education, access to contraception, etc. These countries are all at different stages of decline, or are possible still in growth, but will trend to decline soon. The only difference of course is the history and social/political/economic factors that led to that countries population decline. It was sort of interesting reading about the different factors that spurred baby booms in different countries and what is causing that to reverse.

The end of the book discusses Canada a bit. (I think at least one of the authors is Canadian). They argue that Canada and the States won’t have as much of a problem with a rapidly declining population because of their liberal immigration policies. They contrast this with many asian countries like Korea, Japan, China, which are very strict and allow citizenship for very few people a year. As a Canadian myself, I know that a big part of how we bolster our economy is by bringing in immigrants and I know that as a country, our leaders recognize the need for immigration. Our population is relatively small, we have a lot of space (though our cities are packed and absurdly expensive and we need to spread out a bit in my opinion) so we have the capacity to bring people in.