Earth is going to hit “peak population” before the end of this century. Within 25 years, most of the world’s developed nations will be facing sharp population declines, with shrinking pools of young people working to support an ever-aging population.

The reason is not famine, war, or pestilence. We did this to ourselves, by creating a set of draconian solutions to a problem that didn’t even exist. Fear has always been the best tool for social control, and the fear of humanity was deployed by generations of “thinkers” on the control-obsessed left. 

Most starkly, Paul Ehrlich made a remarkably frightening, and entirely false, prediction in 1968, in his book Population Bomb (PDF):

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines —  hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…

We may be able to keep famine from sweeping across India for a few more years. But India can’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980. Nothing can prevent the death of tens of millions of people in India in the 1970s…

And England? If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.

PJ O’Rourke explained what was going on, in his 1994 book All the Trouble in the World:

The bullying of citizens by means of dreads and fights has been going on since paleolithic times. Greenpeace fundraisers on the subject of global warming are not much different than the tribal Wizards on the subject of lunar eclipses. ‘Oh no, Night Wolf is eating the Moon Virgin. Give me silver and I will make him spit her out.

Family Planning and State Intervention

But there is more going here than just gulling the gullible; the overpopulation hysteria of the 1960s and 1970s had world-changing consequences, effects that are just now becoming clear. It’s not fair (though it is fun) to blame Ehrlich; the truth is that the full-blown family-size freakout emerged from a pseudo-science that held growth was a threat to prosperity. Influential organizations were founded by very worried people. The Population Council and the International Planned Parenthood Federation were both created early on, in 1952. Developing nations began promoting aggressive family planning initiatives, often with substantial support, and sometimes with coercive pressures, from Western governments and international agencies.

The United Nations, the World Bank, and bilateral donors, particularly the United States through USAID, increasingly integrated population control into foreign aid programs. High fertility rates, particularly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, were viewed not merely as demographic trends but as Malthusian obstacles to modernization, poverty alleviation, and global security. China implemented its infamous “One-Child Policy” in 1979 with coercive measures, including forced sterilizations and abortions. India conducted mass sterilization campaigns, particularly during the Emergency period (1975–1977), often using force or extreme social pressure, including withholding ration cards. A number of countries in East Asia saw aggressive state-controlled programs, often funded by the World Bank, that sought to use questionable and coercive methods to reduce population growth quickly and permanently.

In more than a few cases, of course, the availability of contraception was actually a means of freeing women to make a choice to have fewer children. But combining this choice with state-sponsored coercion meant that even those who wanted more children, or would have wanted more children if the social pressures had been more sensibly used, were diverted from their private dream of several children.

That would be bad enough, if that were the end of the story. But it is only the beginning, because the sanctimony of scientism has created an actual population crisis, one that will affect the world for decades. Some nations may never recover, at least not in their present form. That crisis is the population bust.

Shrinking Planet: Which Nations Will Peak When?

I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations, using available data. What I was trying to calculate was the year of projected peak population, for the 26 countries where the data are reliable enough to make an educated guess. That projection is based on Total Fertility Rates, and accounting for immigration, and mortality (life expectancy) trends. These estimates are, at best, approximations, because in some cases the data are not strictly comparable. But the data I do have are drawn from the United Nations World Population Prospects, OECD statistical reports, and national demographic data.

Peak population years are based on UN World Population Prospects (PDF) mid‑variant projections, supported by regional reports noting that most European/North American nations will peak in the late 2030s. Japan already peaked around 2008, South Korea around 2025, and Israel — with TFR near 3.0 — may not peak this century.

As is noted in the final row of the table, the replacement rate for total fertility is about 2.10, given trends in life expectancy and assuming no net migration.

This raises a question: if all these countries have TFRs below replacement, what is actually happening to the world’s population? The answer is simple, though it has not been talked about much. The world population is going to peak, and then start to decline. The total number of people on Earth will begin to fall sometime in the near future. The actual date of the peak is a matter of conjecture, since it depends on specific assumptions, but the estimates appear mostly to fall between 2060 (assuming current TFRs are constant) and 2080 (if TFRs increase slightly, and life span increases):

None of this needed to happen, folks. There is plenty of room on Earth, as you know if you have ever flown across Australia, Canada, or for that matter the US, at night. There is a lot of empty space.

Let’s do a thought experiment: there are 8.1 billion people on Earth now. Suppose all of them lived in the US state of Texas (for those Texans reading this, I know it seems like we are moving in that direction; the traffic in Dallas is remarkable!). Texas has an area of 676,600 square kilometers. So supposing present trends continue, and literally the whole world did move to Texas; what would that look like?

Well, 8.1billion / 676,600 is about 12,000 people per square kilometer. That’s slightly more dense than the five boroughs of New York (about 11,300 per square kilometer), but much less than Paris (20,000), and dramatically less than Manila (nearly 44,000). Now, New York and Paris are pretty crowded, but people do live there, and even go there voluntarily to visit sometimes. Even if the entire current global population had to move into Texas, it’d be only marginally more annoying than Manhattan at rush hour. 

So, here’s the takeaway: there was no good reason for the population hysteria of past decades. As I tried to argue in an earlier piece, those predictions were ridiculous even at the time. And we need not be concerned about reviving the “population bomb,” because there is plenty of room, even if the human population does start to grow again, and even if we all had to move to Texas.

The effects of population decline are already starting to be felt in countries such as South Korea and Japan. As the average age climbs, the absolute number of people under 40 starts to decline. Unless something changes, the world population in general, and many specific countries, will  face circumstances that, until now, have only ever been observed during catastrophic plagues or savage wars: blocks of empty houses, abandoned cities, and hordes of elderly people who lack the ability to provide for themselves. The difference in the present case, however, is that we are not suffering from famine or war. As Antony Davis pointed out, the current collapse of world civilization is a consequence of a striking failure to recognize that human beings are the most valuable resource we have.

 Some Notes on Sources

• TFR data comes from OECD and UN: OECD average TFR was 1.5 in 2022
• OECD Social Indicators 2024
• The Real Reason People Aren’t Having Kids, The Atlantic 
• Fertility Rate, Total for OECD Members, St. Louis Federal Reserve
• List of countries by past fertility rate Wikipedia.org
• Country‑specific TFRs drawn mostly from UN/EU data such as: Total fertility rate Wikipedia.org
• Charted: When Every Continent’s Population Will Peak This Century visualcapitalist.com
• More countries, including China, are grappling with shrinking and aging populations, The Atlantic
• Denmark’s TFR (1.55 in 2022) is from its national statistics
  Korea’s extremely low TFR (0.7 in 2023) is from OECD press releases 

The Great Enrichment refers to substantial improvements in well-being, driven by comparatively permissive, enlightened, and liberal attitudes towards experimentation and entrepreneurship. Such attitudes coalesced in western Europe, fostered innovation, and have increased real incomes by a conservatively estimated 3,000 percent since 1800. Deirdre McCloskey describes it as an era of “human ingenuity emancipated.”

Many factors influenced this enrichment, and some economists note how the introduction of luxury goods like coffee increased well-being and productivity, especially in eighteenth-century Europe. But where did people get such a boon?

Whether you have five cups a day or none at all, we often take such questions and connections for granted. We can order our favorite coffee drinks on the Starbucks app, we can quickly get another k-cup, and there are myriad devices for the more discerning coffee drinker. There are over 38,000 Starbucks and 14,000 Dunkin’ Donuts stores across the globe. Such methods of caffeination are commonplace.

People in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries didn’t have it so easy, but they did have coffeehouses!

Coffee had only recently been discovered — cultivation took off in Ethiopia in the 1400s — but it quickly revolutionized society once introduced. Coffeehouses became an efficient organization to satisfy the desires of myriad coffee producers and consumers, from farmers and merchants to daily drinkers and occasional passersby.

One of the earliest references to coffeehouses in Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), in 1554, notes the origin and relative luxury of these places: 

two private persons called Schems and Hekem, one from Damascus, and the other from Aleppo, set up each of them a coffee-house at Constantinople, in the quarter named Takh-tacalah, and began to sell coffee publickly, receiving the company on very neat couches or sofas.

In London, one of the first coffeehouses opened in the 1650s under the direction of a Levantine merchant and his assistant. Thomas Hodges was the merchant who had learned of coffee during his travels, along with the aid of Pasqua Rosee. Hodges started serving coffee to family and friends at his home in London. As this operation became too much, he encouraged Rosee to open a shop to sell coffee. The shop in St. Michael’s alley in Cornhill became a success and eventually allowed for the purchase of a larger shop nearby. 

So entrepreneurship was key, but so were institutions that encouraged trade in coffee, the formation of coffeehouses, and the use of coffeehouses in other entrepreneurial plans.

In a recent article, “From Beans to Houses: the Entrepreneurship and Institutions of Coffeehouses,” in The Review of Austrian Economics, I expand upon these connections. The article reexamines the history of coffeehouses, how entrepreneurs helped bring coffee to our lives, and how institutions shaped that history. The main takeaway is not just that entrepreneurs served coffee to earn profits, it is that institutions — humanly devised formal and informal rules—influence whether innovation continues or becomes stifled. 

Coffeehouses in sixteenth-century Istanbul and seventeenth-century London were similar in many respects, but they flourished in London. They became a source of social, political, technological, and financial innovation. Istanbul, the larger Ottoman Empire, and their coffeehouses remained stagnant. 

British institutions that generally protected private property rights and limited governmental abuses encouraged innovation. Such institutions, perhaps along with changes in social norms about commerce, bourgeois dignity, or the regard people held for entrepreneurs, encouraged coffee entrepreneurs to make a go of it, to develop coffeehouses, and to find ways to better serve and attract customers. Such innovations include coffeehouses as sources of news from incoming ships, coffeehouses as places to gather, and coffeehouses as marketplaces. 

Coffeehouses throughout the Ottoman Empire, however, rarely helped to spur the same kinds of innovations; their institutions discouraged such developments. Such institutions include the Ottoman fiscal system that left many facing uncertain taxes, Islamic charitable organizations known as awqaf, and the Janissary military corps, among others. These institutions generally encouraged entrepreneurs to serve the interests of elites, religious leaders, and Ottoman rulers, rather than customers.

These insights help us better understand these complex histories. Moreover, they help us navigate modern coffee markets and whether our institutions foster similar kinds of innovations. For example, a recent National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper shows that areas with more Starbucks also have more startup businesses. Recent tariffs over imported coffee beans (say, a 50 percent tariff on all Brazilian goods) and the uncertainties surrounding tariff schedules, however, serve to discourage such effects.

In the extreme, recent tariffs might gut local coffee shops. One story from Jessica Simmons, owner of Bethany’s Coffee Shop in Lincoln, Nebraska, indicates how. She estimates her prices have increased 18-25 percent since January, and that, “We are at a point where we don’t have a choice but to raise prices. Our margins are thin. Small businesses are struggling with the rising costs of tariffs.” Similar stories can be told in many other places too, from New York to New Mexico. These are the predictable effects when tariffs are raised, especially when there are few domestic substitutes, like for coffee beans.

Coffeehouses can bring us coffee, facilitate additional interaction, and continue the great enrichment, but only if our institutions reward entrepreneurship and innovation.

In a TikTok video that went viral this week (newsworthy, I know), a barefaced young woman sits in her car, in the middle of what we Gen Zers call “a crash out.”

Alyssa Jeacoma, you see, has been making student loan payments of $1500/month (the cost of a one-bedroom apartment or the mortgage on a starter house) for two years.

In tears and disbelief, she explains that she spent two years thinking she was paying down her debt, and was shocked when she discovered that, thanks to a 17-percent interest rate, her total balance had gone up.

The comments section is full of commiseration: “Yep. Used $31k in student loans. I graduated 10 years ago and I now owe $59k…”

The video went viral, with millions of views, and for good reason. It hits a nerve for many young Americans who — 15 years after Obama’s drastic federal takeover of the student loan program — are drowning in debt, unable to sustain the upward trajectory of living that they were told was the American dream.

If a young person with no credit history and no collateral assets tried to take out a $50,000 loan to start a business, few if any banks would take the risk. Ms. Jeacoma, who now owes $90,000, seems to agree that’s questionable: “How does this even make sense? I signed up for this…when I was 17. This should not be legal, bro.” A college education was once thought such a safe investment that no one blinked at the idea of giving tens of thousands of dollars to a teenager with only the barest understanding of the contract she was signing.

This woman’s student debt has an interest rate close to that of a credit card (the great no-no of financial advice – whatever you do, don’t take on credit card debt, or you may never climb back out of the abyss again). We’re giving away crushing student loans like candy. The entire university system is riding on the shoulders of broke twenty-somethings, mortgaging their futures to pay for football stadiums and presidential salaries, asking them to be small Atlases holding up a whole world while they slowly suffocate under the weight.

Pundits decry that Millennials and Gen Z “stuck in their parents’ basements.” Headlines lament that we aren’t growing up fast enough, aren’t buying houses fast enough, aren’t getting out of debt fast enough. The average age of buying a first house in America is now 38, the highest on record. And no wonder, when so many are still trying to pay down their student loans.

But, the argument goes, you have to go to college to be successful in life. If you don’t go to college you’ll end up working at Burger King and living at your parents’ house and never making it on your own.

Unfortunately, if that was once true, the data show it isn’t anymore. Yes, young people are working at Burger King and Starbucks, living at their parents’ houses, and failing to strike out on their own. But a lot of them also have college degrees, and those college degrees aren’t saving them. Pundits and guidance counselors alike are selling college degrees as a life raft in the rising waters of an unhappy economy. But said college degrees are proving to be oxygen masks that don’t work, life rafts that fail to expand when they hit the water. Even students with the coveted sheepskins are discovering, too late, that parchment doesn’t float.

52 percent of college graduates are underemployed a year after graduating (52 percent of the class of 2023 were working jobs that didn’t require degrees at all). At the ten-year mark, 45 percent are still underemployed. The New York Fed estimates that 33 percent of all college graduates are underemployed – of all ages, in the entire economy.

As Cassandra (and entrepreneurs like Isaac Morehouse, writers like Ryan Craig, political players like Robert Reich, and countless others) have been saying for well over a decade, college does not make you employable.

College doesn’t even guarantee you an education. The great redeeming value of college has always been its educational value. Even if you aren’t going to use the degree in a specific field, a liberal arts degree will still help make you a well-rounded person.

But again, the statistics say otherwise.

Only 46 percent of American adults can read above a sixth-grade level, but 47 percent of American adults have at least an associate’s degree (another 15 percent attended college but didn’t graduate). That means more adults have college degrees than are literate at a high-school level. We send young people to college who shouldn’t have graduated high school, and even after they’ve graduated college they still have an elementary-level literacy capability. How does that even happen?

And if all these statistics are true, then why on earth are we consigning kids to a debt rat race?

The cultural fear runs deep: if you can’t get a job that requires a college degree, you’re not going to make it in life (fundamentally not true). A blue-collar job can pay well into the six figures. Even a moderate hourly rate (say $20/hr) can be enough to establish a foundation in life. A young person living at home and saving for the first couple years of their career can have an enormous advantage over their college-educated peers.

What’s actually shackling young people is the debt, an anchor around their neck they can’t untie fast enough, while sinking at an alarming rate (to the tune of 17 percent a year interest rates). It’s almost impossible to tread water fast enough to keep above the surface. 

And debt for what? Not for the benefit of the students, clearly, if some are graduating still unable to even read at a high school level.

Of course, some make it inside the system and thrive. According to the stats, most don’t. Fewer than half who start finish in four years. Every industry is filled with stories — doctors who hate their careers but are so shackled by crippling med school debt they have no choice but to carry on.

The cost-benefit analysis doesn’t check out. But high schoolers aren’t taught how to do a cost-benefit analysis, so they don’t know how to analyze the life-altering decision that comes at them often before they’re even legally adults. Most high schools don’t require an economics class as a prerequisite for graduation. Classrooms don’t cover personal finance – just interpreting Shakespeare and prepping for the SAT and putting a condom on a banana. Everyone is taught how to get good grades, how to ace a test, and how to impress a college admissions officer.

Which they do, to a tune of 62.8 percent (the number of 18-24 year olds enrolled in college in October of 2024). High schools are really, really good at producing students that can get into college.

But they’re really bad at preparing kids to make financial decisions that won’t weigh them down for decades to come. Students sign up for loans (the average graduate owes $33,150) with a 17-percent interest rate without knowing what that means, then are shocked when they see their balances rising.

The solution isn’t free college — because clearly college isn’t solving anyone’s employment problems.

The solution is to stop the cycle. Do a cost-benefit analysis on what you’re buying before you make the purchase. Assess: is the career path I’m on really going to work for me? Or is the liberal-arts-to-Starbucks-pipeline not the well-worn highway I want to traverse?

Teaching kids how to run cost-benefit analyses and understand finance might cripple our opulent, bloated, debt-fueled higher education system. It depends on our young people’s naïveté to pad its budgets and the pockets of its administrators. But it might just save the next generation of young people, who are far more important.