A significant reduction in the population leads to better outcomes for the survivors. Mass death events in history, such as both world wars and the various pandemics, are usually (but not always) followed by a period of progress and prosperity.
Humans breed faster than their civilizations can keep up with and in the modern era scarcity is artificially created by arbitrary ownership of natural resources. Fewer people means more resources per person.
However if your hypothetical pandemic were to strike, it would create a problem the world has never encountered before (at least as far as I can find) so predicting what might happen is basically guess work. Given how violent brutes tend to be more successful in scarce environments, the outcome would be very grim.
You may think this means that only 5% of people, 1 in 20, will be able to have kids. But actually, it takes two, and if there’s no way to predict who can and cannot, it becomes closer to 1 in 400. The 1/20 chance of the male partner being fertile is multiplied by the 1/20 chance of the female partner being fertile.
It’s difficult to prove someone infertile, but if someone can conceive a child, that proves their fertility. This is of limited utility in the case of women, but I suppose a man of proven fertility could make a living as a stud, attempting to knock up eligible women. So once you’ve identified a population of fertile males, you knock that half of the equation back down to a 1/1 and the women can go back to the much better 1/20 odds. Of course, you’d need to re-identify potential studs over time from the newer generations as older ones die off. And unless each woman is having twenty daughters you’re still suffering from rapid population decline and the attendant societal collapse.
So, in summary: It’d be real bad, and even if it didn’t kill off humanity in a generation it probably would knock us back to the bronze age within a century. And even if we somehow manage to dodge that it will still change human society permanently in unpredictable ways.
I think that the population would just shrink. People would freak out for a month then it would become the new normal. And we’d handle it. And suddenly everything would be cheaper and lots of nice forests would grow.
the idea that population size is the driving force of ecological collapse is ecofascist. the world is being burned by a few hundred people, not the majority of the population.
This is exactly it. Everything is fucking expensive because of companies, and direct consequences of their control. Food is expensive because of massive conglomerates that control a majority of food sales. Housing is fucking expensive because it has become an investment where investors are incentivised to push it higher. Medical bills are fucking expensive because people will give up EVERYTHING to NOT DIE. Transportation is expensive because car companies force us all to own, maintain and repair cars.
The population is FINE, its just companies that create artificial scarcity to squeeze every last fucking dime out of us. It’s genuinely sickening how little wealth of the elderly will actually be passed on to family members . After nursing home fees, medical bills and inheritance tax theres nearly nothing left, just as the system intended.
I like your moxy and positive attitude
Dw op it’s just a phase. You’ll grow out of it
Con: Fertility value sky rockets resulting in either a society led by the fertile or led to force the fertile to breed. Ala hands maid’s tale. Con: hand maid’s tale
…nope
So brave
Cons - lack of normal workforce replenishment ~18-20 years after plague would cripple economies, social safety nets and essential government spending (state pensions, road upkeep, military). Demographic would skew older and older with each year limiting democratic governments ability to pass any kind of rescue legislation until it’s too late (assuming an increasingly older population votes in their own interest, being unable to work to help fix massive labour shortages, as so defensively protect government programs for elderly that government can no longer afford)
Pros - I mean, what counts as a ‘pro’? Less pollution as the world economy collapses I guess…
A 100% planned economy could handle the labor/production problems.
A 100% planned economy has never worked, ever. And concentrating all that power in one place? Yeah that’ll end well.
100% central planning works for schools, corporations, farms, bicycle repair shops… It works very well.
If you think that an economy is special in this then you might want to check your sources. Consider who’s telling you that
The fact that you’re comparing bicycle repair shops to an entire country economy tells me pretty much all I need to know. Even in corporations, the unexpected successes tend to be the most surprising and profitable ones. Guess what? None of them are ever planned for, and none of them would have existed in a planned economy.
My theory (maybe it’s not a theory maybe it’s obvious) is that students and people in their twenties are more given to “big government” idealism because they were only recently living at home - maybe still are - where, even if they had terrible parents (maybe especially if they had terrible parents) it’s easy to believe “if only the people in charge were good everything would had been so much better”. Of course, there’s very little in even a healthy childhood that properly models the importance of “balance of power”. Parents are good parents or bad parents, but they are always “in charge” just by virtue of the dynamic between adults and children. I can see how young people end up believing it would just take a “good parent” to fix so much that’s wrong about the way things run. Unfortunately no group of adults has ever had “total” control over a country without it in some way going to total shit. Realising the reality of this is I think one of those moments when you actually grow up.
The people who could singlehandedly run a country in a good way are the ones that have the least motivation to do so.
Good luck convincing everyone to democratically support the same authoritarianism that would be required to pull that off while everything slowly falls apart. It would be chaos.
democratically support the same authoritarianism
Did you see the US election results yet?
Half of America losing their minds and voting for a trump administration is in fact further proof you’d have civil war before you had a “100% planned economy”. People are provably irrationally selfish. Even in times of national emergency (cf covid etc)
We’d probably go full totalitarian first, plague second.
The world would be filled with old people.
You are thinking it would just be a gentle way to reduce population but even if women did artificial insemination to keep your 1/20 birthrate, the world as you know it needs a lot of people to run it - farmers, network engineers, maintaining all the systems that make your comfortable existence possible requires a baseline population with particular skills, of working age. There is a reason technology increased with population growth.
The natural world would be better off, probably. Humans would be in for a rough ride, and would probably die out.
Pro: less overpopulation in the long term.
Cons:
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more old than young people
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economy collapses
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society collapses
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we’re done for basically
Why would the economy and society collapse?
Because they are both dependent on people who are no longer being born? The scenario is a population collapse, it’s going to have major consequences. The labor shortage alone would destroy the economy and upend society. Our civilization would look completely different within a generation.
We’d do a different economy and society then. Not democratic capitalism of course. Something with total centralized control.
Our present system is vastly inefficient. 99% of our energy is spent in competition and friction. If we got properly organized, supplying the population with everything it needs would be trivial. Doubly so with heavy automation.
No centrally planed economy has managed that before.
I think a big flaw in your thinking is that you aren’t considering that we still have all the people currently living to take into consideration. We wouldn’t be instantly reduced to a tiny population that is easy to restructure and organize, there’s still like 8b people on the planet, and none of the ones in charge are going to just say, “oh, well I guess none of this matters anymore, let’s focus on sustainability”.
It would take a couple years for us to see a significant decrease in population, and all the while, those currently in power would remain in power. We wouldn’t suddenly drop to a few thousand like minded individuals, all ready to work together to rebuild. We’d be a declining population that is scared and clueless how to save itself, making mistake after mistake.
What happens when you centralize control and a Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, etc…is the one at the controls?
I agree with your point of inefficiency, but your estimation is way off. You are very lucky if you can triple efficiency with centralized control.
A 95% loss in workforce would catapult us back to the stone age where 50% of the population has the sole purpose of generating food.
Go watch Children of Men
That’s pretty damn thin reasoning.
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You just see Children of Men or something?
What are the pros and cons of a disease that leaves people sterile? Uh.
Con: it’s a disease.
Pro: Group projects in school drop dramatically.
Define plague?
They did. A sterilizing one.
Need more context
If it’s a one-generation thing, you will see some (or perhaps a lot of) social upheaval and a lot of artificial insemination/stud services, leading to a relatively brief dip in the population. Seriously, look up when Earth reached 1 billion people, and we’re closing in on 9 billion now. If it’s every generation, humanity will go extinct. Each fertile woman would have to have over 40 children to maintain population levels.
Humanity is already seeing the global birth rate drop to replacement rate, we’re expected to hit it within the century and keep dropping. Relatively brief dip? More likely our extinction even if it was only a single generation
There’s good evidence humanity was down to the tens of thousands before, yet here we are. Source. I’m not saying we’re guaranteed to get through it if it happened again, but a drop to half a billion people wouldn’t even necessarily cause a significant reduction of genetic diversity.
Fair. Less the extinction of humanity and more the end of any trace of civilisation
If an event like this happened, we could easily maintain most of the trappings of civilization with a little effort and cooperation. So yeah, you’re probably right.
Cynicism aside, civilisation as it is today requires extremely specialised knowledge. Losing 95% or more of our population would put an end to our capability to support any kind of advanced infrastructure. It’d be akin to the decline of Rome, from the biggest city in the world to having farmers farming in the former city area and mining the old buildings for building material. Humanity would be back to scavenging and farming as core activities within a generation.
This is kind of like saying, “What if only America existed?” There would certainly be some disruption, but it wouldn’t exactly be the end of civilization. Now, randomly distribute those people across the world, and it gets harder. But. The hypothetical plague didn’t kill 95% of the population, it made them infertile. That gives you decades to prepare and recover if you’re aware of the problem.
Assuming overpopulation, food shortages, war, starvation, suffering of billions. Depriving people of the power to reproduce seems the kinder path.
This is literally what the evil aliens who took over the planet did in Half-Life 2.
