Empty playgrounds. Schools without enough students to stay open. Small towns, deserted and abandoned. This is not some dystopian vision of the future. Demographers say this is our future.
Global population growth is leveling off, and as early as the 2050s could begin to shrink for the first time since the Black Death struck the world almost 700 years ago.
“Everything that we understand that functions in our societies today, that depends on people, which is almost everything, is going to change,” says Stephen J. Shaw, a data scientist, demographer and producer of the film Birthgap.
Shaw spoke to us from his home in Japan, a nation at the forefront of this global demographic collapse. Shaw told us he made the documentary mostly out of fear. “…Fear of the future that we’re, as a planet, completely unprepared for and mostly unaware of,” Shaw says.
The population crisis could be the most important story of our time, mainly due to all the changes and serious economic, social, and political problems it could bring to our world.
Taxes could soar as economies shrink; the many elderly could cause retirement and medical systems to collapse; businesses will struggle to find employees, and there won’t
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