Could a major decline in world population make our problems worse?

New research in 2023 revealed that the world's population might not stay as high as it has been and that it will soon drop dramatically. But would a major decline in the global population be a good thing?

The world population is set to reach a global high of 8.8 billion by mid-century based on current trends and will decline to 7.3 billion by 2100 according to a new Earth4All study. 

The study was commissioned by the Club of Rome as a follow-up to its groundbreaking 1972 Limits to Growth report, which used computer modeling to estimate Earth’s population and resources limits. 

The 1972 study predicted the world would reach its growth limit within a hundred years if trends remained unchanged and then rapidly decline in population and industrial capacity. 

Luckily, the disastrous predictions of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth study never came to fruition, but the institution’s 2023 findings may pose problems that are just as serious.

“The most important fuel of economic growth in the past several centuries has been people. And with fewer people, less work can get done,” wrote  Sebastian Dettmers, an expert on the issue, in a 2022 Business Insider opinion piece on the chaos global population decline could cause.

Dettmers is the CEO of StepStone and the author of a book on what the world would look like with a smaller population. His assessment was that things would get very rough for humanity.

In his opinion piece for Business Insider, Dettmers argued that every sector of the world economy will be impacted by population decline as global human capital dried up and key jobs went unstaffed. 

Production and performance would suffer in a low population environment and that would ultimately lead to lower sales and faltering profits, which in turn would drive less economic growth. 

“The combination of a declining labor force and stagnating productivity is toxic,” wrote Dettmers, adding that such a scenario could lead to stagnation and “an era of stasis.”

However, not everyone views the world’s probable population decline in such dire light, some see changing global demographics as a chance to reshape our economic models for the better. 

Stephanie Feldstein is the Center for Biological Diversity’s Population and Sustainability Director and wrote in a recent Scientific American article that a future where there are fewer people could increase opportunities and create a healthier global environment. 

“Where our current model of endless growth and short-term profits sacrifices vulnerable people and the planet’s future, population decline could help create a future with more opportunity and a healthy, biologically rich world,” Feldstein wrote, and she’s not wrong. 

According to the study from Earth4All, there is a second scenario of global population decline they termed the Great Leap, and it would see the world reach 8.5 billion by 2040 and 6 billion by 2100, a reduction that could fundamentally change the Earth’s environment. 

“By 2050, greenhouse gas emissions are about 90% lower than they were in 2020 and are still falling,” the Earth4All study noted before explaining additional steps that could be taken to bring the global temperature to just above pre-industrial levels. 

Admittedly, the Great Leap is a bit fantastical and presupposes world governments would be willing to address global economic inequality and adopt policies like wealth taxes and universal basic income to address any runaway wealth inequality. 

While it is impossible to know just how a world with fewer people will fare in the future, it's reassuring that great minds on both sides of the debate are looking for solutions to the potential problems we face before humanity needs an answer to those issues—and maybe that's enough to create a better world.