Empty Planet
The Shock of Global Population Decline
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
From the authors of the bestselling The Big Shift, a provocative argument that the global population will soon begin to decline, dramatically reshaping the social, political, and economic landscape.
For half a century, statisticians, pundits, and politicians have warned that a burgeoning population will soon overwhelm the earth’s resources. But a growing number of experts are sounding a different alarm. Rather than continuing to increase exponentially, they argue, the global population is headed for a steep decline—and in many countries, that decline has already begun.
In Empty Planet, international social researcher Darrell Bricker and award-winning journalist John Ibbitson find that a smaller global population will bring with it many benefits: Fewer workers will command higher wages, the environment will improve, the risk of famine will wane, and falling birthrates in the developing world will bring greater affluence and autonomy for women. But enormous disruption lies ahead, too. The United States and Canada are well positioned to successfully navigate these coming demographic shifts—unless growing isolationism leads us to close ourselves off just as openness becomes more critical to our survival than ever.
Rigorously researched and deeply compelling, Empty Planet offers a vision of the future that we can no longer prevent—but one that we can shape, if we choose.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The world faces not an overpopulation crisis but a birth dearth that will reshape civilization, according to this arresting and contrarian look at the planet's demographic future. Bricker, CEO of the research firm Ipsos Public Affairs, and journalist Ibbitson, authors of The Big Shift, critique the United Nations model that predicts world population will grow from 7.6 billion today to 11.2 billion by 2100; they instead cite demographers who foresee global population peaking at 9 billion by 2060, then shrinking to 7 billion (and falling) by 2100. They point to two main causes of the coming cull: urbanization, which makes children's labor less valuable, and above all feminism, which encourages women to pursue education and careers instead of early childbearing. The authors interview people from Brussels to Nairobi who are planning on having just one or two kids, below the replacement rate. The authors see pros (less resource depletion) and cons (stagnating economies, fewer workers to support pensioners, extinction of small cultures, loneliness) in the population bust and predict the collapse of an aging China and the resurgence of the U.S. if it embraces immigrants. Lucid, trenchant, and very readable, the authors' arguments upend consensus ideas about everything from the environment to immigration; the result is a stimulating challenge to conventional wisdom.
