Der Wendepunkt: Was passiert, wenn die Zahl der Todesfälle die Zahl der Geburten übersteigt?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/may/02/what-happens-when-deaths-outnumber-births?referring_host=Reddit&utm_campaign=guardianacct
Der Wendepunkt: Was passiert, wenn die Zahl der Todesfälle die Zahl der Geburten übersteigt?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/may/02/what-happens-when-deaths-outnumber-births?referring_host=Reddit&utm_campaign=guardianacct
37 Kommentare
Population starts decreasing. It will oscillate around carrying capacity and then, hopefully, stabilize.
The fallacy of unrestrained economic growth is laid bare for all to see
**Submission statement:**
Hi r/Futurology, this is Lucy from The Guardian. We wanted to share yesterday’s long read exploring the potential future implications of the UK’s new population forecasts. It was revealed last week that the latest projections from the Office for National Statistics suggest that UK [deaths will outnumber births](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/28/deaths-projected-to-outnumber-births-in-uk-every-year-from-2026) every year from 2026 onwards, driven by falling fertility and the large, postwar “baby boom” generation living longer than previous generations, but now reaching later life. The population is still expected to grow, but more slowly than previously forecast.
This analysis begs the question, what will happen when deaths eventually outnumber births? How will this demographic shift change the fabric of British society, and how will governments and communities adapt?
*From our story:*
Many developed nations face similar pressures. What is striking, however, is how these trends have spread beyond the richest economies. In many middle- and lower-income countries, fertility is falling despite more limited economic development. Parts of Latin America, as well as countries such as Jamaica and Thailand, and states in India including Tamil Nadu and Kerala, have fertility rates comparable with – or lower than – those in Britain.
“There are countries that will grow old before they grow rich,” says Dr Paul Morland, a demographer and author of *No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children.*
All this marks a shift in how demographic change unfolds. Historically, falling birthrates followed rising incomes, urbanisation and education – the so-called demographic transition. But now fertility is declining more rapidly than economic development, driven in part by changing aspirations and social norms.
[You can read the full story for free here.](https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/may/02/what-happens-when-deaths-outnumber-births?referring_host=Reddit&utm_campaign=guardianacct)
People think you can just ‘fix’ it by telling people to have more kids, but no country has actually managed to reverse low birth rates once they drop this far. Not even places throwing serious money at it.
It cannot just reverse it Fertility decline is not like flipping a switch. Its tied to urbanization, education, cost of living, delayed marriage and changing values. Every developed country that went below replacement level has stayed there.
I always hear that the argument about population decline is super complicated, filled with nuance, and has a huge number of factors that add to the situation. But literally 100% of the couples that I know who want to have more kids all say the exact same thing: they aren’t financially stable enough.
I feel like it’s a psyop. Somehow, the rich think can convince people that stability is never going to happen, so they just have more kids anyway. Because that type of mentality lets the people who benefit from population growth the most get a chance to double dip. It sounds ridiculous, but do you know any couples who feel stable and content with how many kids they have?
When population decrease:
Earth raw materals per person increase.
More food and fresh water availabe per person.
Less global warming.
Less space needed, more nature.
Less trafic jams.
Less unemployment.
Less migration.
More AI and robots needed to support elderly people.
Other tax system needed.
Overpopulation is the mother of most big problems of humanity.
Any system that depends on unceasing growth is unsustainable. At some point the population has to decrease if we want the planet to remain hospitable. And better we don’t try to test the limits so we still have many beautiful natural places to enjoy.
There’s going to be adjustments and adaptions to declining populations, though is that really a bad thing?
The human population went through tremendous growth the past one hundred years, growing from two billion to over eight billion.
To put that into context, it took hundreds of thousands of years for the human population to reach one billion in 1804, a little over one hundreds years to reach two billion in the 1920s. In the past one hundred years, we have multiplied that by four times.
A lower birthrate that doesn’t „*maintain*“ the current world’s population doesn’t mean our species is dying or will disappear, it just means that the population will return to gradual levels instead of trying to maintain or increase that exponential growth.
Yes, this creates issues, such as a population that will be heavily older (until they die off) and an economic system that ~~relies~~ relied on a larger younger workforce to support the older population but we’ll be able to adjust to that, as we’ve done throughout history.
While the planet is able to sustain a much larger population. Plenty of natural resources, as well. The problem we have is our current system to support that large population. We’re a system based on mass consumerism and we create the artificial scarcity regarding meeting the basic needs for everyone.
Maybe this will usher in a new age where consumerism and working all the damn time isn’t our focus anymore and we move beyond that as a society.
The fake economy collapses as soon as we stop having future slaves to exploit the labour off without them even having to hit the work force.
I can’t even consider having kids, even earning a good salary the cost of living is so high that having a child would immediately put us below the poverty line.
Actually a good thing – however, it throws a wrench into our system of economics, which only thrives with ever increasing growth.
Who would have thought that uncontrolled housing costs and ever increasing costs to rasing a child will deter people from having big families
Ultra rich don’t need 8b people at their service once they have AI servants.
It will lead to eventual population collapse. The media/academia/elite is pushing this in the form of gender wars, anti-marriage and childfree messaging – They want everyone to think only about themselves, so that massive corporations can divide and conquer. Already, this plague is gravely affecting Western and East Asian countries. It is time to end the gender wars, end promiscuity, and bring back the stable family unit.
Why is everyone discussing this hypothetical scenario while world population keeps growing?
I expect a „technical“ answer, if the decline continues to a critical tipping point that affects the wealthy, they will put a huge amount of money in developing artificial wombs.
Industrial scale birthing factories with large government run „orphanages“ to raise replacement population.
It does not necessarily HAVE to be distopian … but will take a lot of monitoring from concerned people to keep from going bad.
When (in my mind not IF) this starts to happen, be prepared to fight for the industrial raised kids rights.
There’s far too many of us now. We’re ruining this planet with everything we do. Cutting our number down a few billion would be a good thing. If it occurs this way instead of some disastrous event, so much the better.
Predicting future demographics is a funny thing, because population groups who have higher birth rates grow in numbers and at some point this begins to affect the total. Not sure to what extent these models take this into account.
If deaths outnumber births, how can the population still be expected to grow, albeit more slowly? That doesn’t make logical sense to me.
The unsustainable system of globalised Hyper-Capitalism will begin to be negatively effected, and governments are throwing immigration at the issue despite they aren’t having enough second Gen children either.
The decreasing birth rates, primarily due to economic reasons, must be the wake-up call the elites need as a form of protest, that they need to overhaul our society for the better or continue allowing it to decline and be out-competed by other societies that are still growing in population.
Why do we need more people? Seems like overpopulation is killing the planet would t slowing down be better?
We can afford free daycare. We can afford maternity leave. As a society we are doing this to ourselves.
38% of the UK population is over 50 – scary stat there. I say that as an over 50! There will for a long time be more people dying than being born if we don’t do something to help young people.
My daily cut and paste for this, literally, daily post.
Women have agency and education and will NEVER again breed even at replacement level to sate this defunct, 250 year old, economic ponzi scheme of endless growth in a finite planet. The world is too interesting and offers too much for us to simply live in the burbs, squirt out kids to prop up your shareholder value- sorry.
These millionaire blokes in C-suites are starting to panic and it’s hilarious that their only solution is to yell at women to „Have more kidS FOR the NatioNaL intErEST!“
Here’s a thought – that’s not gonna work- so your only chance is to think of a new economic structure that distributes wealth, utlises the insane productivity increases of automation (since the early 1900s) to sustain the wider community, instead of creating billionaires, address a UBI, shorter work weeks, whatever. But the hilarious thing is they won’t because they want to keep being our overlords.
„People can imagine the end of the world, more readily than they can the end of capitalism“
This will not fix inequality or help us in anyway. This is really just an indicator of how bad the economic reality is.
We were torn about having a child, the world is such a shitshow and who knows what they were go through. Probably fighting billionaire robot armies.
The .0001% of wealth holders will be very very happy. Right now the big goal for these ten dudes that control basicially everything is to get to $1 Trillion each. Once they get that they will want to race to $10 Trillion each. Ai and robotics is the new fastest vehicle to get there. We are talking 3rd derivative increases in growth require 3rd derivative increases in resources. They are getting faster at getting bigger and getting bigger makes them faster at getting bigger.
The real bottleneck is resources, specifically the resources we need to survive. Exponential demand for land, water, energy, minerals, plastics… consumption of these needs to be prioritized over human life to reach the next level of wealth consolidation.
As robotics and AI scales and becomes able to do the jobs that they need us to do, it will be beneficial for the people who control the robots and AI to have less of us to share with. Once the robots can farm, fight wars, clean stuff, build stuff… a Large working class population becomes a hindrance to progress. Those who control the robots and the computer power will need A much smaller group of lower ststus humans for entertainment, genetic diversity, and the occasional odd project that can’t be done by robots.
Is this going to happen overnight? No. But in the world of infinite capitalism and infinite growth- the ubercapitalists will have to eventually solve for finite resources and the way to do that is to reduce demand across the board.
Culling the oldest, sickest, and weakest 10% of the population by restricting healthcare, raising the suicide rate, increasing the spread of preventable disease, etc is way easier than getting fission up and running.
A decreased population will be good for the environment. Robots and Ai will reduce the number of people needed in the workforce.
Let it. Let the population collapse, let the economy collapse, let the prices collapse. Stop resisting, and accept the new natural equilibrium. It always stabilizes.
Planet earth + other species can breath again?
Is that what happens?
You can check Hungary for instance. The last year we recorded more births than deaths was in 1980, for 46 years our population has decreased constantly. We went from 10.5 million citizens to 9.5 million on paper but most likely even that is an overstatement, immigration to other European countries is a formidable force here.
Consequences of population decline can be studied here easily. In the last decade we were in the spotlight for our insane government, I attribute their excessive policies partly to the pressure of population decline.
Well lets remind ourselves that the Earth has officially hit the 8.3 billion mark, but a growing number of scientists are sounding the alarm that we have massively overshot our „ecological budget.“
The core argument revolves around the concept of carrying capacity: the maximum number of people the planet can support indefinitely without permanent environmental ruin. According to these researchers, if we want every person to enjoy a comfortable, modern standard of living while actually preserving biodiversity, the sustainable population is likely closer to 2.5 billion. We are currently living on environmental credit by consuming resources faster than the Earth can regenerate them, which is the primary driver behind the current climate crisis and the ongoing mass extinction event
The math gets even more sobering when you look at consumption patterns. If the entire global population lived like the average person in a high-income nation, we would need the resources of several Earths to stay afloat. The scientists suggest that the only way to avoid a total systemic collapse is to move toward a „degrowth“ model. This involves stabilizing and then gradually reducing the global population through non-coercive means, such as improving global education and reproductive healthcare. It is a controversial take because it directly challenges the „infinite growth“ economic model that most of our modern world is built upon. Basically, the study suggests we have a choice: we can either manage a slow, intentional decline or wait for nature to force a much more chaotic correction.
What will happen when deaths outnumber births? The total population will shrink. Why are we so convinced that this is a bad thing? The world is having problems with sufficient energy production, sufficient food for everyone, medical care, etc. A total world population of 5 billion is not necessarily worse than a total population of 8 billion. More, more, more!!! is not the way ahead.
We will of course go through a period where there are more funerals than births, more deaths than birthday parties. That’s kind of depressing. It’s just a phase we need to go through to get things more harmonized. Having a total population of 8 billion is not necessarily *good* when we have problems with energy production, sufficient clean water, and sufficient food for everyone. We have billions living in abject poverty. A smaller population would not be a bad thing.
Maybe we can stop worrying about over populating the Earth!?
I’ll be forced to reconsider my position that prayer doesn’t solve anything.
World population went from 1.6b in 1900 to 8.2b in 2025.
That is an insane explosion.
We need to return much lower numbers
The population will finally start to go down so we can eventually stabilize at sustainable levels. In an optimistic scenario, it will help us transition to a needs-based economic system and replace the insane current infinite growth model. In the pessimistic scenario, we will all be made redundant and left to starve / put in camps by the new fascist tech elite.