On this episode…
The global human population has been climbing for the past two centuries, but what is normal for all of us alive today — growing up while the world is growing rapidly — may be a blip in human history.
Children born today will very likely live to see the end of global population growth.
It is the 2080s when demographers at the U.N. expect the size of humanity to peak, the Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna places the peak in the 2070s, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington puts it in the 2060s.
Yes there is some wiggle room, but all the predictions agree that we peak soon.
Importantly, humanity will not plateau and stabilize. Instead it will begin an unprecedented decline, but, as long as people keep choosing smaller family sizes, as is now common in most of the world — then in the 22nd or 23rd century, our decline could be just as steep as our rise.
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