THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE ON EARTH!
Owing to a number of factors, world population for the first time since the 14th century is shrinking: Call it “the age of depopulation.”
What lies ahead is a world made up of shrinking and aging societies...
Nassau, NP, The Bahamas
Let’s set the stage for this discussion:
My thesis - really a recognition of a demographic fact - was aimed at The Bahamas and Caribbean maximising opportunities to serve this retiring demographic; which in the case of the U.S., must and will move south, but can’t really live in Florida or boiling hot Texas. If we Caribbean nations had prepared for them, in The Bahamas alone, that would require about 100 new “Lyford Cays”; designed this time with Bahamian certified “Occupational Licences” (see Dr Peter Blair) in mind; ensuring mass rapid professionalisation of the Bahamian labour force.
This would mean about $100 billion in economic opportunity in 20 years!
There are a few additional benefits, as I like to kill all the birds with one stone! (For the literalists, ain’t no one actually killing birds):
1. Financial Services - the 100 million retirees, besides the direct economic impact on construction services, would/could actually produce a larger impact in financial services than in all previous years combined. The reason is the “double transfer”:
a. $40 trillion from Baby Boomer’s parents to boomers
b. $27 trillion from Boomers to their children
This opens an unprecedented vista of options for Caribbean jurisdictions for which only Cayman Islands is primed.
2. Occupational Licensing - Dr. Peter Blair will eventually win the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in the area. But to simply it: imagine 10,000 retirees in The Bahamas, all of whom need services like nurses assistants, physicians assistants, certified caretakers, chiropractors, certified massage therapists, certified exercise physiologists, certified nutritionists, dialysis technicians, smart home technicians, certified gardeners etc. That does not include: estate managers, financial planners, trust protectors, family office experts, personal assistants etc. and those don’t include: electricians, plumbers, computer technicians, beauty stylists, private butlers and drivers.
Considered carefully, I’ve argued publicly and privately formallly and informally that this opportunity should be the main focus of our governments for the next 10 years, because in executing this opportunity, we’d likely triple Bahamian GDP…rather than wasting time on cruise ship tourists!
But what I did not see coming was the impact that several regionally discrete dynamic phenomena would have in limiting the number of humans on earth at a pace exceeding that of the organic passing of retirees!
Owing to a number of factors, world population for the first time since the 14th century is shrinking: Call it “the age of depopulation.”
At that time, the Black Death in 1347 wiped out nearly 1/3rd of humans in the known world. I explained this on the “Hitback” with Nahaja Black in 2020. Since 2020, we’ve seen a series of new phenomena:
1. The One Child policy in China has left a shortage in population
2. The Policy related to girls in China means nearly 200 million men who will never have wives or girlfriends, same for India, Russia and Ukraine
3. Drug wars in Mexico, Colombia and invasions in the Middle East and Central Asia has left high rations for women to men
4. Birth rates in the West and in Asia are falling precipitously
5. Social Media is promising girls that they can establish “choice and engagement” boundaries that hurt women in the long run by re-prioritising families too late for demographic balance. Economists have become enamoured of dating sites…because the data is a 30 year true account of the social world and human choices, where the input is voluntary: the data shows 80% of woman of all ages are attracted to about 4% of men (tall, handsome and rich), but that 4% of men are attracted to mostly young women, but as many young women as possible. That is, the 80% of women delusionally believe they are all 10s and that the 4% of men should prefer them. This means 96% of men go with no or very little interaction or gain interaction only after the women are rejected by the 4% of men. Social media platforms and dating sites (all social media are dating sites) are able to track these relationships and the men who are left out are and are becoming more and more hostile to women; whom they believe do not really prefer them, but give them attention only after rejection by ‘elite men’.
This sort of knowledge has never existed in such a scale. I don’t care about the reasons, just the effects…which are that it has a destructive impact in relationships, because both parties are looking beyond each other constantly across social media platforms for someone better.
That loss of trust, commitment or even convenient settling and so means fewer families!
In the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine - the influential journal for intellectual foreign policy - scholar Nicolas Eberstadt writes: “With birthrates plummeting, more and more societies are heading into an era of pervasive and indefinite depopulation, one that will eventually encompass the whole planet. What lies ahead is a world made up of shrinking and aging societies. Net mortality—when a society experiences more deaths than births—will likewise become the new norm. Driven by an unrelenting collapse in fertility, family structures and living arrangements heretofore imagined only in science fiction novels will become commonplace, unremarkable features of everyday life.”
I think Eberstadt is right but it goes further than he imagined. This will affect labour markets, social welfare systems, the economics of wages and income and the prices of land and other asssets. It will impact insurance, banking and commercial services to degrees heretofore unknown.
Eberstadt wrote further: “Human beings have no collective memory of depopulation. Overall global numbers last declined about 700 years ago, in the wake of the bubonic plague that tore through much of Eurasia. In the following seven centuries, the world’s population surged almost 20-fold. And just over the past century, the human population has quadrupled”. That is now at an end and the great population shrinkage has begun.
It is my job as a methodologist and strategist to notice things that are not noticeable readily:
1. If The Bahamas and the Caribbean fail to execute on this gift - a situation in which we don’t have to generate economic demand - we’ll be locked in circumstances in which we will have to deal with our own depopulation and find a way to pay for it, when we could have leveraged both American depopulation and subsidise our own, plus gain economic expansion
2. We would have missed the chance to reform our education and training system and raise nearly 70% of Bahamians to a level of certified professionalism
3. No one has coupled the (1) retiree phenomenon, with (2) fertility crisis to the (3) automation/digitisation dynamic, unfolding currently.
It is an interesting question whether we would get “balancing offsets”, meaning in productivity terms, technology could replace humans who are retired or unborn owing to fertility loss…but only in productivity terms.
It’s a complex question - which could be rationalised through advanced deferential equations - to determine whether automation could replace workers, but wouldn’t provide consumers to consume at those sustained productivity levels…even though retirees would still consume. That is because fertility loss means there would be no “replacement” humans or family systems - which coordinates consumer demand - and the world population would shrink…demanding radical system and structural adjustments.
