The population of the world will decline to at least a quarter, or
even a tenth, of present numbers within the next couple of centuries.
The signs are clear in the advanced countries already. Birth rates of
indigenous populations in Western Europe are now much less than
replacement and non-Hispanic America is on the verge of it.
Nor does it matter how many immigrants -- desperate for our consumer
goodies -- enter these countries, legally or illegally, in the coming
years. If they find jobs, their family sizes will continue to adjust
to indigenous birth rates within a couple of generations, as they are
already doing. If they don't find jobs, then governmental welfare
schemes in one country after another will collapse all the quicker
and the immigration from poor countries will obviously then dry up
automatically. As to the rest of the world's population, almost all
of it will have been pushed or pulled into the major shanty cities
where each family, as now, will spend what little money they have on
television sets and dish aerials instead of more than one or two
vastly more expensive children.
In a couple of centuries, the descendant well-educated quarter (or
tenth, or twentieth, etc) of the present world population who still
have well-paid jobs will have already decided whether they want to
continue to go extinct, like everybody else, or whether to have 2.2
children per family and thus stabilize their population size (just as
'primitive' hunter-gatherers used to do before they discovered the
rest of the world outside Africa). There won't be any excessively
rich individuals in those days because the mass markets of consumer
goods, on which they presently profit from, will have long gone. In
present-day crude GDP terms, however, the economies of countries will
be able to 'grow' by means of continuously improving the efficiency
of their production and transportation systems. Profits will still be
available for investment in further infrastructure and scientific
exploration (and even, perhaps, in gentler, shorter working weeks!).
All around, nature will reassert itself both in the vast areas of the
presently industrialized countryside and urban wastelands (as is
occurring in present-day Detroit already). For the highly educated
human population remaining in a couple of centuries, the world,
including the quantum world below and the cosmological world above,
will be even more enjoyable and fascinating than now. Putative
parents will also be steadily sidelining the more egregious mutations
that we have been accumulating during our present dysgenic phase of
medical 'care'. Yes, the world will be highly liveable in, and my bet
is that they'll certainly want to stabilize their population size.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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