This is a fictional story based on the very real risk of the fertility crisis getting out of hand (if it ever was under our control), and based on the ecological understanding of our existence. Will social and political trends take an unexpected turn as we realize that we might be the last generation of our species?
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Premises
Like it or not, humanity as a species is in absolute ecological overshoot. This means that we use much more natural and mineral resources than what could be regenerated in a given year, and pollute way more than what could be absorbed by Nature without damaging it. As a result we are in the process of rapidly burning through all of “our” easy-to-get resources from fish to freshwater or from copper to oil, leaving us with still plentiful but ever more uneconomic to get stuff. In order to stave off decline we are thus forced to go after ever harder-to-get resources, requiring an ever higher energy and material expenditure to extract in the same amount.
On the pollution side of the equation we are releasing more and more waste every year, not just CO2 messing up a once stable climate, but plastics and countless other chemicals, too, from endocrine disrupting PFAS to carcinogenic substances. Many of these pollutants will keep circulating the atmosphere and oceans and pollute the land for a thousand millennia to come. This increased pollution load, together with the destruction of wildlife habitat — in our search for arable land and minerals — has already kicked a mass extinction event into motion. 70% of wild mammals and birds have disappeared in the past 50 years, together with half of the healthy sperm produced by males. If present trends continue — and we have every reason to believe that the destruction of Nature won’t end overnight — many keystone species might go virtually extinct by the middle of the century, including us, humans. If sperm counts indeed drop below a critical threshold globally, as studies suggest, then its game over: no species could survive without having enough offspring to compensate for the dead.
Economic trends
Socioeconomic factors, such as income, education, employment, community safety and social support are all downstream to our material reality outlined above. Human ecological overshoot and it’s many symptoms from the depletion of economically viable resources to climate change, has upended a centuries-long increase in living standards; giving rise to stubborn inflation and political polarization, together with skyrocketing income inequality and the immiseration of the masses. The overproduction of elites and the wealth pump making the rich super-rich — as described by Peter Turchin (1) — is thus as much of a reaction to as much it is a cause to our worsening economic and political state of affairs…
Take note how the process feeds on itself: as cheap, easy-to-get resources start to run low, economic expansion slows then stops, unlike the production of elite aspirants. The produce of degree-mills keep flooding the job market, even as working class jobs are outsourced in waves in search for cost reduction and extra profits. In the meantime productive investment in capital assets, resource extraction and manufacturing grinds to a halt, while financialization (turning everything into a financial asset with the aim of increasing stock prices and dividends) soars. Bullshit jobs are created en masse to soak up the excess elite aspirants, but the real benefits are still keep accumulating in the hands of a tiny elite on the top. These billionaires then finance politicians who promise to keep their profit-reaping machines intact, while steadily removing social safety nets, curbing worker rights and privatizing just about anything.
Everything which has a beginning has an end, though: as the masses get increasingly immiserated by profit seeking elites, scarcely anyone is left to buy the once famous companies’ ever sloppier, ever less innovative but nonetheless very pricey products. Meanwhile other nations, such as China, who are at a much earlier stage in the very same process (2), start to outcompete the overfinancialized “mature” economies and dump markets with their cheap and innovative goods. Old monopolies, who were previously reaping outsized profits, are now forced to lay-off their “elite” workers (lawyers, managers) and automate every process they can in response. Meanwhile the degree mills, turned into profit centers and wealth pumps themselves, keep churning out elite wannabees with massive student loans to pay… The social pyramid rapidly becomes top heavy with too many billionaires (and a million times more billionaire wannabees) vying for power. The result, as always in history, is a rebellion at the very top, overthrowing the old elite, and replacing it with another cadre of rich folks so far kept away from power.
From now to then
The new elite begins to destroy their old rivals’ funding mechanisms without hesitation in an attempt to prevent them from returning to power. In parallel they embark on a slash-and-burn project to cut back the excesses of empire before it all collapses on them. However, they are not only firing key people of to the old guard, but also decimate the entire administration… With unforeseen consequences to come. But for now the immiserated rejoice: their old overlords are now gone, the fraudsters have been exposed and a ton of money has been saved. Here comes the brave new world!
What everyone forgets amidst the loud noise of popping champagne corks, however, is that the underlying dynamics did not improve an iota. Quite to the contrary. The wealth pump did not stop for a minute: it just got a new owner who wants to get even richer than their predecessors ever got. Meanwhile the number of unemployed (former) elites and administrators swell to unprecedented levels, suppressing wages in other parts of the economy and further exacerbating the under-consumption crisis. Back in the real world the depletion of easy-to-get resources accelerates further, together with the pollution crisis and the destruction of remaining natural habitats. Previously protected lands are now open for resource extraction, giving one final (but a rather mediocre) boost to the economy. The release of toxic, health harming, fertility reducing chemicals continue to accelerate, as all “red tape” is removed, and as mining operations expand to cover the economy’s renewed appetite for minerals.
The much vaunted return to economic growth fails to materialize, though. Oil production — indispensable for mining, feeding and moving the world — plateaus and begins to decline. The energy and material investment needed to increase production and to fight depletion has become so high that drilling more wells become wholly uneconomic. Since the people no longer have the cash to buy stuff (made with oil) after paying their ever higher mortgage and credit card fees, the increased cost of groceries and ever pricier tuition, demand for oil begins to slump as well. The result: stubbornly low oil prices (in real terms), which are still too high for consumers, but already too low for producers. Real economic output continues to decline, and the service economy, too, begins to feel the pain.
On the geopolitical front the retrenchment continues. The world has, once again, become a playground for great powers, with spheres of interest and fleeting alliances. Proxy wars are continued to be waged around the rims of these empires, and a larger clash begins to look almost inevitable. In the meantime, and as part of the economic war, tariffs, embargoes, sanctions and other trade barriers make everything even more expensive and even harder to get. Governments around the world begin to print stimulus checks, and companies begin to pay their workers with coupons, but all what these measures achieve is higher prices. Inflation, together with public discontent grows and the risk of a major financial crisis looms ever larger.
Public utilities, sold off to private investors, stop investing in expansion and cut maintenance budget, even as they charge more than ever to their customers. The number of black outs, water shortages and problems with sewage continues to grow and repairs take ever longer to execute — especially in poor neighborhoods. Sacrifice zones emerge as a result, where infrastructure is never fully repaired and where outages increasingly become the norm, rather than the exception. Meanwhile wealthy gated communities continue to enjoy all the benefits this civilization has to offer, including electricity 24/7, drinking water flowing from the tap, sanitation, high speed internet… and vehicles with bullet-proof windows.
Young people aspiring for a better life begin to move into large cities en masse looking for jobs, which are increasingly scarce and pay ever less. Rents go up in response to increasing demand, eating up what little youngsters earn as extra. Seeing their worsening socioeconomic status young people think less and less of having children, and find it harder and harder to find a match. Loneliness becomes endemic. Thanks to the ever worsening economic situation well-paying jobs become scarcer still, leaving many with college degrees forced to join the precariat or left permanently unemployed. A much larger cohort of older people, however, find themselves staying in work much longer than planned, as rising inflation wipes out their retirement savings almost entirely. Fraudsters and scammers mushroom, offering gullible people a quick way to higher social status.
Economic inequality increases further still, with a small, entrenched billionaire class and their kin at the top, and the remaining 99% of people living in the danger of falling into permanent poverty. Half of the population in former developed countries, experiences hunger at least once a week, and the rest is living paycheck to paycheck with no savings left. Demonstrations become increasingly frequent, even as the militarization of police continues. Social media manipulation, digital surveillance and social credit scores based on a digital identity becomes commonplace, together with AI driven drones and law-enforcement bots. Utopia through science and reason under the rule of an enlightened leadership class seems further than ever.
Meanwhile the climate gets really busy reorganizing itself into a messy hothouse, leaving a relatively stable Holocene behind. Ocean currents shift dramatically, freezing northern Europe and accelerating the melting of the Antarctic. Rainfall patterns change unrecognizably around the globe, making agriculture trickier and trickier with every passing year. Crop yields fall, despite the generous application of herbicides and pesticides. That leaves low quality, chemically contaminated junk food for the poor, and somewhat higher quality (but not entirely contamination free) food for the rich. Calorie wise most people are still well fed, but nutritionally speaking everyone but the richest starve.
Governments around the globe give up on climate spending, upending the delusion that switching to an unreliable, materials intensive, low energy density power source was a good idea. Every other spending, except for military purposes, get axed, too. The economy — wrecked by the combined effect of resource depletion (especially that of oil), wars, trade barriers, climate change, a slow motion infrastructure collapse, corporate greed, inflation etc. — simply can no longer produce the surplus needed to maintain social programs.
A new social contract
In the meantime, population begins its almost invisible, but nonetheless permanent decline worldwide. Rural landscapes empty out. Once thriving small towns and villages become abandoned. People visiting home after a long period of time ask themselves: where is everyone? As older people live out their lives and die peacefully, many homes become derelict and their value drops steeply. Thanks to the ever present (and still growing) pollution load from plastics, pesticides and herbicides cancer rates and heart disease soars, lowering average life expectancy by a decade or two everywhere; further accelerating the depopulation of the most polluted neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, much to the same reason, the fertility crisis hits epic proportions. Children become a rare sight, schools close en masse and universities are left without students. Governments and companies alike try everything: offering a year’s salary for a child, tax relief for life, a free in vitro fertilization, but nothing works. The ruling class, in the meantime, funds programs to clone their best and brightest (3). The trends do not lie, though: fertility rate falls well below 2.1 globally, with some places reaching zero by as early as 2040. No matter how we slice it: such low replacement levels means an eventually complete depopulation.
By the middle of this century many countries experience a 20-30% decrease in their populace, even without wars or a major pandemic. With the older, less productive quarter of the population (baby boomers and gen X-ers, your humble blogger included) gone, and barely any children to take care of, a relative abundance of resources returns for a much smaller group of follow up generations. After the major economic depression of the 2030’s and 2040’s economic growth finally returns — at least on a per capita basis. A vibrant scavenger economy, recycling the millions of abandoned machines, vehicles, houses and just about everything left behind by industrial civilization emerges from the ashes of financial capitalism.
With the population pressure gone, and with former elites dying off en masse due to aging, the risk of war recedes greatly. Just like at the end of the plague in the Middle Ages, which has seen a similar decrease in the workforce, a new consensus with the surviving elites is reached, and the last generations of Homo sapiens live out their remaining days on this planet in peace. Then, as the last of us leaves to meet their ancestors in the Great Beyond sometime in the early twenty-second century, Earth begins its long recovery from its bruising encounter with human “intelligence”.
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
Epilogue
This is a work of fiction, describing one of the many possible outcomes to the polycrisis taking shape as we speak. Unlike H.G. Wells, and the many other utopists, though, I feel less convinced that all we need is a well-informed intelligent ruling class, who could then pull us out of the many predicaments we have navigated ourselves into. No matter how we would like to believe, this world is not driven by a linear chain of causes and effects, nor by a Machiavellian secret cabal of elites. Instead, it is subject to seemingly random events emerging from a chaotic soup of unintended consequences coming out of our former actions, and often arriving with decades of delay. This feature of emergence is constantly changing the world we live in, making it virtually impossible to predict what comes next, and putting the possibility of making an informed decision close to zero. So while general trends remain easy to discern — such as rising temperatures over time, or the steady depletion of rich mineral deposits — the exact effect these will take through the activation of tipping points is almost impossible to tell. This writing is thus by no means a prediction, rather a thought experiment intended to look at things from a much wider perspective than what mainstream media and our overly human-centered culture has to offer.
Until next time,
B
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Notes:
(1) As I was listening to Peter Turchin’s talk with Nate I was stunned by the level of ignorance put on display as the discussion arrived at the topic of energy and resources. Social scientists definitely need a Reality 101 on physics, ecology and geology… Who knows? They might find it useful and perhaps incorporate it in their models.
(2) China is still early in the process of becoming a rich country. Besides that, its existing elite is actively getting rid of newcomers to the elite class — both on the governance side (based on corruption charges) and in the private businesses (see: the case of Jack Ma and Alibaba). However, with the number of university graduates still rising fast, and with rapid automation and AI gaining ground, China, too, will end up in an elite overproduction scenario later this century.
(3) Cloning, or rather: genetically modifying our species, leads us to an interesting tangent. What if we succeed at imbuing humans (and perhaps other species) with genes that help them better tolerate PFAS and other forever chemicals? Since we don’t have much time left till industrial civilization meets its demise, we could only “create” a small handful of such next-gen humans. Will they be able to survive amidst an ongoing ecological collapse, wild climate swings, and lack of resources?
