Elon Musk believes the human population is headed for decline. REUTERS/Mike Blake
In a tweet on Friday, Elon Musk doubled down on his theory that the global population will be in decline by 2050.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO first backed the theory in 2017 in response to a New Scientist article about a “population bomb.”
The conventional wisdom is that the global population is hurtling toward catastrophe — some project it could hit a staggering 11 billion by the year 2100.
But a new book examines the data and comes to a radically different conclusion: instead of continuing to rise, the population will level out in about 30 years — and then start to decline, possibly forever.
Continue reading… “New projection : World population will level off, then fall forever”
Spoiler alert: It’s simply not the case that families with kids have disappeared from urban America.
Look around a hip neighborhood in Lower Manhattan or downtown San Francisco, and you’ll see lots of young people, and Baby Boomers whose kids have left the nest. There are also some stylish moms (or nannies) pushing tots in strollers. But you won’t see many traditional nuclear families with school-age children.
There’s a growing consensus that our cities are becoming “childless.” This past October, Axios ran a story on the ”great family exodus,” showing data that the share of families with children under the age of 20 has fallen in 53 large cities across the country. As far as I can tell, the phrase “childless cities” was first advanced in 2013 by Joel Kotkin in an essay of that title for City Journal.
Several factors are said to be pushing families with kids out of cities: the expensiveness of city living; the lagging performance of urban versus suburban public schools; and the preference of immigrant families for the suburbs over urban locations. But just how childless are our cities, really?
Continue reading… “Which U.S. cities have the most families with kids?”
The Earth and humanity will survive as fertility rates fall almost everywhere.
Some of the most spectacularly wrong predictions in history have been made by those who claim that overpopulation is going to swamp the planet. Thomas Malthus, a British economist writing in the late 1700s, is the most famous of these. Extrapolating past trends into the future, he predicted that population growth would inevitably swamp available food resources, leading to mass starvation. That didn’t happen — we continued to develop new technologies that let us stay ahead of the reaper.
Continue reading… “The Population Bomb Has Been Defused”
It might come as a surprise that New York City, Los Angeles, and Honolulu are among the cities U.S. residents are fleeing in droves. They’re all places you would think would be popular destinations for Americans.
Continue reading… “Top 20 cities Americans are ditching”
Demographers, teachers and politicians will stop talking about the population pyramid and start referring to the population dome in 2015. The change in terminology will reflect a profound shift in the shape and structure of societies. This is a shift that has been going on for 50 years and is only half complete.
Continue reading… “The world reshaped in 2015: The end of the population pyramids”
The International Energy Agency has come out with an in-depth analysis of Africa’s energy sector. According to the IEA report, there are 620 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who don’t have any electricity at all — and fixing that could require burning a lot more fossil fuels.
Continue reading… “Here’s where 620 million people in Africa live without electricity”
Futurist Thomas Frey: What’s the value of a human life?
For some of you this is a very disconcerting question because it attempts to put a dollar value on a person, something we value in far different ways.
Continue reading… “Seven Reasons Why the Value of Human Life is Increasing Exponentially”
Humans have been migrating around the planet in great numbers since they first left Africa 60,000 years ago. The advent of international borders certainly did not stop global migration. Although the percentage of the world’s people living outside of their birth countries has remained steady in recent decades, the world’s increasing population means that the sheer number of international migrants has never been higher.
Continue reading… “Top 7 facts about world migration”
America’s largest metro areas are currently gaining population at impressive rates. This trend is driving much of the population growth across the nation. But that growth is the result of two very different migrations – one coming from the location choices of Americans themselves, the other shaped by where new immigrants from outside the United States are heading.
Continue reading… “Two different types of migrations are driving population growth in U.S. cities”
America is in the midst of two demographic transformations right now. Our population is becoming majority non-white at the same time a record share is going gray. Each of these shifts would by itself be the defining demographic story of its era. The fact that both are unfolding simultaneously has generated big generation gaps that will put stress on our politics, families, pocketbooks, entitlement programs and social cohesion.
Continue reading… “America’s changing demographics: Pew Research”
A city is a large, permanent human settlement. But try and define it more carefully and you’ll soon run into trouble. A settlement that qualifies as a city in Sweden may not qualify in China, for example. And the reasons why one settlement is classified as a town while another as a city can sometimes seem almost arbitrary.
Continue reading… “‘Natural cities’ emerge from location-based social media”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.