World population reaches 8 billion...

 

Residents of Hong Kong, China. USA Today/Getty.

The world population has reached 8 billion people. USA Today. The milestone comes as global fertility rates are plummeting and are barely above the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. The population is expected to add 1 billion people by 2037 and reach 10 billion people by 2058, after which population growth is expected to level off. Most of the growth happened in Asia and Africa, while Europe is already close to population decline. India will likely take over from China as the most populous country sometime next year. 

My Comment:

This is a huge milestone and one that I don't really view positively. I think there are far too many people in the world and it's a major reason why we are running out of resources at an alarming rate. I am far from an environmentalist but I think that much of our problems in that area is due to overpopulation, especially in Asia and Africa. 

At the same time much of the developed world is crashing in terms of fertility rate. Many countries, including Japan and the United States, along with much of Europe is already in a population decline. America's fertility rate is at 1.7, which is far below the 2.1 needed to maintain population. Europe and the United States only have population growth due to immigration. 

Population decline is usually a very bad thing for economies, especially ones that are generous to the elderly like America and Europe is. When that happens there isn't enough money to collect to pay for things like social security. We are already seeing some of the repercussions for this. 

Of course Africa and the rest of Asia has the other problem where population growth is out of control. That causes massive problems with pollution and use a tremendous amount of resources. Many of these countries have more people that they can deal with and many times their solution is to dump those people on other countries. Eventually though, that will change as people finally decide that it isn't smart to bring millions of people in from foreign countries. 

The problem isn't how many people are having kids, it's who is having it. The most productive and intelligent people on earth are almost universally not having kids while the lowest of the low are having tons. That's probably going to be a major problem down the road as well. 

Will population continue to grow or will it level off even quicker than the predictions? I have no idea. I do think that there are groups in the United States that are already trying to look at reversing the birth rate. Indeed, I have argued that the best way for conservatives to win in the long term is by having as many kids as possible and then raising them right. 

But I also think that the population growth could end up being reversed due to some kind of major disaster. I do expect the global economy to collapse sooner rather than later and when that happens I expect many of these huge population countries to have real problems feeding their people. That could cause a major population decline.