The world population is at 7.8 billion and on a steady increase.
It will, however, soon reach a peak and then enter decline. However, that’s not the relevant factor – people in Country A aren’t going to cover pensions or education subsidies or the like in Country B. You need individual countries to have something on the order of a sustainable population. That means that the combination of fertility and immigration (if the country has positive immigration; some countries, like many of those in Eastern Europe, have serious net outflow) needs to be sufficient to sustain that country’s population.
You can do some of it with immigration, and in the US, we’ve done quite a bit, but as can be seen by the political response to the European migrant crisis – a swing to the far right – populations get pissy when one pulls in more than a certain rate of immigration. So there’s only so much you can do via immigration.
EDIT: Oh, if you were responding to my comment as to “decrease”, I was responding to a comment about fertility rate decrease, which is what the article said – that is decreasing everywhere. I’m not saying that population is decreasing everywhere, not yet.
where fertility rates are supposedly in decline
They are in decline everywhere
The world population is at 7.8 billion and on a steady increase.
Global population will start to decrease as a result of that too. But that’s a trailing factor.
populations get pissy when one pulls in more than a certain rate of immigration.
So they’ll shrink and get problems. Either they learn from that and let immigrants in or they’ll die out completely. This might be a problem on a national level, but not on a global one.
It will, however, soon reach a peak and then enter decline. However, that’s not the relevant factor – people in Country A aren’t going to cover pensions or education subsidies or the like in Country B. You need individual countries to have something on the order of a sustainable population. That means that the combination of fertility and immigration (if the country has positive immigration; some countries, like many of those in Eastern Europe, have serious net outflow) needs to be sufficient to sustain that country’s population.
You can do some of it with immigration, and in the US, we’ve done quite a bit, but as can be seen by the political response to the European migrant crisis – a swing to the far right – populations get pissy when one pulls in more than a certain rate of immigration. So there’s only so much you can do via immigration.
EDIT: Oh, if you were responding to my comment as to “decrease”, I was responding to a comment about fertility rate decrease, which is what the article said – that is decreasing everywhere. I’m not saying that population is decreasing everywhere, not yet.
Global population will start to decrease as a result of that too. But that’s a trailing factor.
So they’ll shrink and get problems. Either they learn from that and let immigrants in or they’ll die out completely. This might be a problem on a national level, but not on a global one.