Mark: I’m no more thrilled than you are by the prospect of a geezer-heavy population. It’s inevitable, though, so the sensible course of action would be to start thinking really hard of ways we might science ourselves out of the associated problems.
I’ll qualify that “inevitable.” There are actually two futures for the human population of Earth over the next century or so: (1) a big die-off, or (2) geezerization. There is obviously — inevitably! — some upper limit to the number of people our planet can support, so at some point the population has to stop growing. You can have an argument about where in time that point is located — past, present, or future (me: past) — but you can’t argue that the point exists. Not many things are inevitable, but this one is.
A mass die-off of course can’t be ruled out, and it’s Ma Nature’s preferred way of dealing with population issues. (The biologists’ joke is: “To a first approximation, all species are extinct.” Which is actually true — the figure for all known species is north of 99 percent, anyway.) However, we can reasonably hope that we have gotten far enough ahead of nature to be able to avoid the mass die-off scenario. If so, then geezerization is inevitable.
When the human race comes to a bridge like this, the first nation to figure out a way across the bridge gets a huge head start on the rest. Britain was the first nation to transition from agricultural to industrial society, and she dominated the world for a century afterwards. Whichever nation can first figure out a way through the Great Demographic Transition will likewise be at an advantage. Japan, with one foot already on the bridge, has an excellent shot at being that nation. Then the 22nd century will be the Japanese Century.
Of course — and as you say in your book — the thing we should worry about is not so much demographic decline overall as differential demographic decline, with more-civilized nations aging and dwindling ahead of less-civilized ones. A related problem is the differential demographic decline within civilized nations.
Unfortunately these topics are completely out of bounds under what Bill Buckley called “the prevailing structure of taboos.” Several Corner readers have already swooned in horror at my suggestion that some nations are more civilized than others. Since we are unable to discuss these issues, we have zero prospect of being able to solve the associated problems. Which may prove highly unfortunate.
