Decline and Fall of Homo Sapiens
Sub-title: How capitalism regained its grip in the 21st century but failed to spot it wasn't in the 19th Century anymore.
Many of the problems that beset us in the 21st Century arise from the rapid increase in global population over the last century. Increases in wealth and improvements in health accounted for an increase in childhood survival and, average age of death, which in turn fuelled a Malthusian increase in population numbers globally.
Technology has largely met the increase in the consumption of energy to feed, warm and transport the populations. But with catastrophic environmental consequences. This much is all so well known and a path so well trodden that it hardly needs to be restated here.
What is gradually dawning on the world however is that humans may be dying out, just like any organism that explodes into profusion exhausts its environment and declines. Below without any supplementary, exhaustive referencing are some facts easily gleaned from a thousand official websites
Global Population Decline is due to:
1) Birth rate decline
a) declining sperm count
i) increased oestrogen and phyto oestrogens in diet
b) older first time mothers
i) daughters of older mothers have none or fewer children
c) gender disphoria/identity/sexual orientation
i) change in male-epigenetic signalling
ii) changes in female epigenetic signalling
iii) homosexual partnership increase
iv) low reproduction in LBGTQ+ individuals*
2) Elective smaller families
a) increased access to contraception
b) increased access to abortion
c) reduced authority of religious/societal mandating access to sex only through mariage
3) Mortality increase
a) pension age increase
b) increase in type 2 diabetes
c) reduced health care access
d) pandemics
Add, them up, no one factor is deciding the issue and there is no escape, humans are not reproducing at anywhere near replacement levels from Dublin to Bejiing ( India is still increasing but it is due to reduced infant mortality which will level out).
The interesting thing from my point of view is, how was the Malthusian nightmare avoided? Malthus himself formulated his over-population 'expansion to crisis' model in the mid 18th century, having witnessed first hand pre-famine Ireland where the newly-acclimatised carbohydrate rich potato, combined with a religious imperative to procreate, created a population boom which was accompanied by incredible, epic poverty amongst the poor.
Here is how I think we were saved, or will be saved from overpopulation and then doomed by depopulation: Economics, in this case Capitalism.
The logic is simple. Children have always been a blessing and a burden. To support dependent children in a capitalist society you need your own money. If you procreate beyond your means to support your progeny, you will be poor, or very poor and may have to give up children to illness, realtives or strangers.
Population control, that is intercourse without procreation, could be achieved in the past by abstinence, coitus interuptus, good menstrual cycle timing and use of condoms (from mid 19th century). Unless of course particular religious practices forbade these already unreliably methods. Finally , abortion was available at great personal risk and with universal condemnation from most societies.
Once hormonal contraeptive pills became available and chemical or physical abortion became safer, the game changed completely.
A family of one child or two has more disposable income than one with more children. Modern living, the good life, from London to Moscow to Delhi to Bejing depends upon disposable income in order to buy goods and services which define the good life and keep the people 'happy'. Most countries, with exceptions like North Korea, prefer the capitalist 'carrot' to the socialist stick to keep the population quiet.
Capitalism produces near unlimited wealth for the few and minor aspirational wealth for the many. In the latter instance it is obvious that having fewer to no children will maximise personal wealth. With contraception readily available and with dimished authority of religious demands to reproduce it is obvious that the number of children will reduce.
Logically if you want to be maximally wealthy in a capitalist society then no-children is the answer.
Second best is one maybe two children conceived as late in life as passible.
Population decline means labour shortages. Once again technology can solve the probllem. Automation which started seriously in the period called the Industrial Revolution has developed markedly into the era of autonomous robotics and AI. A cycle is generated, fewer workers means more automation: more automation means fewer people are needed. Simply put, if birth rates recovered what on earth would you do with the people? Meta-work, the work that occurs in offices and meeting rooms as opposed to productive work still convinces most people that it is meaningful mostly becasue their time is well compensated but the illusion will vanish inevitably thereby generating an existentail crisis.
Terminal capitalism therefore, like terminal popultion growth is not far away. The means of production will no longer depend on labour and so compensation for labour beomes meaningless for the majority. The rich will pay the remaining people to simply to consume or the whole cycle of manufacture fails.
As Margeret Thatcher onced observed in a monetarist pure-capitalism,along the lines that 'there is no such thing as society': well, it'll have to be re-invented, and quickly, if we are to survive.
*LBGTQ+: Less than 20% of same sex couples have any off-spring, under 50% of women identifying as bisexual have given birth and transgender pregnancy is in laboratory stage so is numerically effectively zero.
post script:
It is worth noting that Sapiens is the only surviving species of the once quite diverse Homo genus. It is not unlikely in my opinion that the Neandethals and Denisovans to name two species simply died out because they stopped reproducing in sufficient for existentail reasons rather than environmental. Consciousness has a price.
