The Population Panic

Both the overpopulation and the collapse doomers make the same mistake - thinking in statics instead of dynamics. The world is not linear, and history has run this cycle before 

 

 

When I was a young teenager, the narrative that there were too many of us was incredibly strong. The planet was overpopulated, and we were headed for a bleak future - food and water shortages, drowned coastlines, soil farmed to dust, oceans fished to destruction. Paul Ehrlich had promised mass famine in the 1970s and 80s in The Population Bomb, and even though the famines never arrived on schedule, the mood never quite lifted. At the height of the green movement, the highest expression of virtue you could perform was to not reproduce. Having no children was reframed as responsibility - your carbon footprint and/or your refusal to drag an innocent life into a dying world. DINK - dual income, no kids - was sold to my generation as the purest form of freedom and responsibility there is.

Then, somewhere along the way, the script flipped a 180 degrees.

Now that same generation is being scolded for breeding too little. The criticism is especially targeted at the childless, fertile woman in the workforce - yesterday’s responsible citizen - is now being recast as a civilisational saboteur, selfishly choosing to “slave away for a boss” instead of becoming a tradwife and producing the 4-5 children that would save the West from collapse and potential extinction. And of course this birthed its own little economy: an entire ecosystem of influencers and podcasters monetising the panic, because for all the loud devotion to “traditional values,” a six-figure YouTube / TikTok cheque is still a six-figure cheque.

It isn’t only the cringe-merchants, either. The collapse narrative has serious converts now - Elon Musk, freshly minted as the world’s first trillionaire (on paper, which is a distinction worth keeping in mind), tenured academics, presidents and prime ministers. The panic has gone respectable.

In reality the overpopulation doomers and the depopulation doomers are committing the exact logical fallacy.

 

 

Lack of stochastic thinking. The human mind is built to think in straight lines, even when the world refuses to oblige. We take whatever trend is in front of us and project it forward forever, like Nassim Taleb’s turkey - fed generously every single morning, growing more confident each day in the benevolence of the farmer, right up until the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Sixty years ago, at the peak of the baby boom, you could draw the line forward and “overpopulation” looked like logical arithmetic. Today, with birth rates falling almost everywhere on earth - across the rich West and East Asia, across the socially conservative Middle East and Catholic Latin America, all the way into much of Africa - you draw the same line forward and “collapse” looks equally logical. Both camps are the turkey that mistook a moment on a curve for a permanent law of nature.

The world, however, is nonlinear and trend do not run forever - they exhaust themselves and reverse. Every boom carries the seed of its own bust, and every bust eventually composts into the next boom. If you want to understand where we actually are, you have to stop extrapolating and start reading history.

We’ve been here before

The first thing to understand is that the current fertility decline is not some unprecedented civilisational catastrophe.

Around the middle of the second century BC, the historian Polybius looked at a Greece whose cities were visibly emptying out and went looking for the reason. It wasn’t war, nor plague. The cause, he concluded, was that men had given themselves over to vanity, money, and the pleasures of an easy life, and so refused to marry - or if they married, refused to raise the children they had, rearing one or two at most so they could leave them rich and comfortable. Two thousand two hundred years ago, with no smartphones, no dating apps, no student debt and no childcare invoices, someone was already blaming the collapsing birth rate on status-chasing and soft living. The complaint is not new. 

 

 

And it kept recurring. The collapse in births during the Great Depression was steep - and it was itself preceded by a boom in the early 1900s, which then swung into the post-war baby boom, which swung again into the “baby bust” of the 1970s. The generation panicking about too many people in the 1960s had been born to parents who panicked about too few in the 1930s.

When the Black Death tore through 14th century Europe and killed off a third or more of the population, the survivors didn’t inherit a wasteland. Counterintuitively, they inherited leverage - labour had suddenly become scarce, and the people left standing could suddenly demand more for it. Real wages rose. Historians sometimes call the decades that followed a golden age for the ordinary labourer. That mechanism is worth remembering. When the population shrinks, the people who remain get more expensive, and the thing everyone was mourning quietly becomes the thing that lifts them. We’ll come back to it later in this essay.

Beginning in the late 1700s, something genuinely new happened in human history: death rates started to fall. Better agriculture meant more food. Better sanitation and medicine meant more children surviving to adulthood. For most of human history, births and deaths had run roughly in lockstep - high mortality matched by high fertility, more or less everywhere. Now mortality dropped first, fertility stayed high for a generation or two, and populations exploded before births eventually fell to meet the new, lower death rate. Demographers call this the Demographic Transition Model, and it is solid, well-documented stuff.

But notice what it explains and what it doesn’t. The Demographic Transition describes a one-time shift - a single move from a high-mortality, high-fertility world to a low-mortality, low-fertility one. What it cannot explain is the thing we keep actually observing: the repeated booms and busts in fertility, the up-and-down cycling that long predates and outlasts that single transition. For that, you need a different lens.

This is where Peter Turchin’s work has contributed a lot to this debate - what he calls structural-demographic theory - the recurring rise-and-fall cycles that complex societies have run since the first states appeared thousands of years ago. Population sits at the centre of these cycles, and the mechanism is more interesting than anything the linear-thinking doomers are capable of producing.

During the good stretches - Turchin calls them integrative phases, periods of internal peace and broad prosperity - births run high and deaths run low. The population swells. But a pre-industrial economy can only feed and employ so many people, and eventually the swelling population presses against that hard ceiling. Living standards stop rising and start falling. As they fall, births slide down and deaths creep up.

But there is a second, nastier dynamic riding alongside the first, and Turchin has examined it in details in his latest book, End Times: elite overproduction. All that demographic growth during the fat years doesn’t just produce more peasants - it produces more aspirants to the top. More sons and daughters of the wealthy, more credentialed families, more people who were promised a seat at the table than there are seats available. The competition for elite positions turns vicious, and often - violent. And a society that combines a frustrated, downwardly mobile mass at the bottom with a class of elite-wannabes at the top has assembled the chemistry for an explosion - rebellion, revolution, civil war. Those violent stretches give way to the disintegrative phase, and during that phase the demographic numbers keep getting worse and births keep falling.

We also understand, in surprisingly concrete detail, how hard economic times translate into fewer babies. When childbearing happened almost exclusively inside marriage, and where young people refused to marry until they could afford a household of their own. In good periods people earned what they needed more quickly and married young. In bad periods, people had to wait - and waiting meant marrying late, or never. The fertility valve, in other words, was the age at which women began having children, and that age moved with the economy. When the well-being of ordinary people declines, so does the birth rate.

And while, yes, we are far better insulated today from the crude Malthusian pressures - outright famine is mostly off the table in the developed world. The pressures have simply evolved with the times. What stops a middle-class couple from having a third child today isn’t the threat of starvation - it’s the price of a house, of childcare, of health insurance, of putting a kid through school.

And before someone fires off the standard rebuttal - but poor countries have higher fertility than rich ones, so it can’t be about money - understand why that misses the point. The driver isn’t absolute prosperity. It’s relative prosperity. When a young Westerner asks himself whether he has reached the level of security that lets him start a family, he is not benchmarking his life against a farmer in Mali, but against his own circumstances, against the very affluence he grew up in. In the 1950s and 60s, you could clear that bar fast; stable partnership and children came early because the economic threshold was low and quickly met. Today you have to grind for an extra decade to reach the same sense of “ready.” So people delay. And delay long enough, often enough, and more often than not - the delay quietly becomes never.

It’s (not) all about the economy, stupid

This is where I part ways with the people who think identifying the economic factor in this equation equals to solving it, because I have argued this point endlessly: economics is a powerful factor, but it does not determine everything. Social norms changed too - and they changed in ways that spreadsheets simply can’t capture.

What the online trad movement conveniently forgets, when it lays the entire collapse of the birth rates at the feet of working women, is who raised those women. Many of them were raised by tradwives - by mothers who looked at their own lives and told their daughters to get an education and secure financial means independent of their husbands, regardless of how good of a husband they ended up with. Why would a traditional woman tell her daughter that? Because life goes off-script. I understand this dynamic very well: I am the child of a young widow. My mother was 47 when my father died. Death, infidelity, illness - these things happen, they happen without warning, and any woman who has been forced into the workforce late in life by one of them can testify to exactly how brutal that re-entry is, especially when you spent a decade or two not accumulating marketable skills. A generation of mothers decided their daughters would never be that exposed to such the risks of life itself.

The young men aren’t having an easier time of it either. Every male friend I have has confided some version of the same thing: he wants a family, genuinely, but he cannot let himself think about children until his finances and his life are in order - which pushes the whole project deep into his 30s, and sometimes even their 40s. By the time the foundations feel solid, the window has narrowed, and even meeting the right partner is no guarantee. Unless both people are willing to simply jump into the fire and figure it out on the way down, those relationships often quietly fail because the partner that is ready won’t wait forever for the one that is not.

And the standards on both sides have risen too. An Irish friend who reads this publication put it perfectly: not so long ago, you married and had kids with someone from your village, or the next one over if you were feeling adventurous, and very often it had nothing to do with love. It was survival - a household, a division of labor, an insurance policy against poverty. Now women earn their own money, men are measured against a longer list, and crucially, people have a choice they never used to have. Technology shattered the confines of geography: a young person today can meet a partner from the opposite end of the country, the continent, or the planet. That’s a genuine good - you might actually find someone you’re compatible with rather than settle for someone who simply lived nearby. But it also hands an entire generation the illusion of infinite supply, the infinite-scroll sense that there is always one more, better option just one more swipe away.

While we’re on technology - social media, gaming, streaming, the whole apparatus of cheap, infinite, on-demand entertainment - has enabled a degree of escapism unmatched in human history. Building a family is hard, expensive, irreversible work, while the alternative has never been more comfortable.

There’s a healthier shift hiding in here too, and I’d argue it’s a real improvement: people increasingly have only as many children as they can genuinely provide for - not just financially, but emotionally. Ask anyone who was the sixth of eight kids how present their exhausted parents managed to be. A lot of them will tell you, honestly, that they didn’t get the attention, the care, or sometimes even the love they needed growing up, simply because the household was drowning. Today’s young parents tend to want to give their children the best possible start rather than produce children for the sake of the number. A preference for smaller, better-supported families persists for a reason that has nothing to do with selfishness.

And finally - information. Ask your parents or grandparents what they actually knew, going in, about the realities of marriage, childbirth, or raising kids, and you’ll likely get the same answer: nothing. Many went in blind and winged it. Today an average young woman can read, in detail, about every way a marriage can collapse, every way a pregnancy can kill you, every way a sick child can upend two lives permanently. An average young man can read horror story after horror story about divorce - the assets split, the house gone, the access to his own children rationed by a court. The result is that caution and vetting are dramatically higher than they were, especially among the more deliberate demographics - the people who don’t make these decisions on impulse.

What comes after

Despite all the comforts of modern life, the truth is we are living through an age of instability - fractured elites, volatile politics, and a pervasive social pessimism. Below-replacement fertility is a symptom. And the catastrophists never acknowledge this fact, because they refuse to read past the first chapter - every society in history has passed through stretches exactly like this one. None of it is unprecedented. And these cycles are not dead ends - they are…cycles. They carry, folded inside them, the conditions for their own reversal.

 

 

Everyone fixates on the first-order effects, because first-order effects are easy to grasp and exploit for fear-mongering: shrinking labor pools, pension systems sliding toward insolvency, not enough young workers to carry the old, etc. All true, yes. But run the system one step further - as labor grows scarce, its price goes up. Workers who were squeezed for decades suddenly have leverage they haven’t had in living memory, and employers who got used to holding bigger leverage will be forced to compete for them with wages. This second-order effects will take time to arrive, but over the long run, rising wages are exactly the mechanism that reverses the immiseration that drove fertility down in the first place. The thing the doomers are panicking about is the same thing that ends the panic. The scarcity is the cure.

This is where the demographic question stops being a lifestyle debate and becomes a hard geoeconomic one. The states whose strategic futures are most hostage to their fertility curves are not abstractions here. A Russia hemorrhaging men into a losing war. A China still paying the price for one-child policy and disproportionate abortions of female babies, as it tries to age and grow at the same time. A Europe that has discovered it wants to rearm and re-industrialise but cannot find the manpower to fill the labour gaps. Demography is destiny’s slowest-moving variable.

The part I refuse to hand to either the doomers or the spreadsheets that treat human beings as cattle is that…people learn and adapt. As the younger generations mature - better informed about the generational trauma they’re carrying than any cohort before them - they become more likely to break the cycle rather than re-run it, to raise children who turn into well-adjusted adults instead of walking trauma patients. They prioritise health and education for their children, not just having children for the sake of it. You can already see it. The fathers of today spend more time with their kids, and are more emotionally present in their children’s lives, than their own fathers ever were. Quality over quantity, and when the disintegrative phase reaches its’ logical conclusion, quantity will resume with an upgrade in quality. 

The Balkan candor

I grew up between two apocalypses - as a kid I was told the world would end because there were too many of us; as an adult I’m told it’ll end because there are too few. Same prophets of doom, same certainty in the voice, completely opposite reasoning - and not once, in either era, did any of them stop to consider that they were simply standing at a different point on the same curve, mistaking the slope under their feet for the shape of the whole world.

There’s a level of comfort coming from a part of the world that has watched multiple empires rise, conquer, and disintegrate. It gives you a certain immunity to people who insist the present trend is forever. Nothing is forever. Not empires, not population trends, nothing. The baby boom wasn’t, and the baby bust won’t be either.

So no, I’m not joining the chorus on either side of this debate. Both camps are too busy performing certainty for clicks and clout to notice the obvious: this is a phase. And phases have a beginning as well as an end.

The boring truth - the one that doesn’t go viral and get clicks - is that history never moves in straight lines. The people panicking in opposite directions are often making the same mistake: taking the current moment, making it a default setting and projecting it to forever, and calling it analysis.

I’m not interested in that. The smarter move is to stop mistaking a cycle for destiny, and start preparing for the reversal that usually follows.

Don’t be a turkey.