The Coming Population Crash

By Fred Pearce

Fascinating.

I really enjoyed this book. It doesn't answer any questions. It doesn't solve any problems. It even acknowledges that the problems of too many people or a population crash have been predicted before and ended up never happening due to various reasons that were unpredictable.

The book starts out talking about Thomas Robert Malthus (read about him at the link) and how his views of population actually lead to actions that caused or worsened famines and thereby lead to his way of thinking to become true.

The book goes around the world looking at and trying to explain birthrates. My only complaint is that there is very little focus on the Americas.

A couple of interesting bits from the book:
In some parts of what was East Germany, to hide(?) the dearth of people, abondonded buildings and areas are torn down and converted back to open space. To disguise the fact that some towns have seen population drops of over 50%?

Only about 1/3 of China is subject to the one child policy yet some parts of China have a birth rate of 0.45!

Europe, which is currently struggling with the influx of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East may soon be so short of people (due to generations of below sustainable birthrates from which there might be no recovery) that they will NEED foreigners to come and keep the societies alive.

There are big changes for the world by 2100 and maybe even earlier.

While this isn't a post apocalyptic book by any stretch of the imagination it is an interesting read from a PA perspective. Could there be a scenario where homo sapiens die out with a whimper? Where people make the conscious choice to have so few children for so long that we won't rebound? Maybe. The book doesn't really say what could happen, and tells that the population should still increase till about 2050.

Only time will tell.