Empty Planet

A Sunday Times must-read

For half a century, statisticians, pundits and politicians have warned that population growth is spiraling out of control, threatening to overwhelm the earth's resources. They are wrong. Empty Planet shows why exactly the opposite will soon be upon us.

Empty Planet offers a radical, provocative argument that the global population will soon begin to decline, dramatically reshaping the social, political and economic landscape.

For half a century, statisticians, pundits and politicians have warned that a burgeoning planetary population will soon overwhelm the earth's resources. But a growing number of experts are sounding a different kind of alarm. Rather than growing exponentially, they argue, the global population is headed for a steep decline.

Throughout history, depopulation was the product of catastrophe: ice ages, plagues, the collapse of civilizations. This time, however, we're thinning ourselves deliberately, by choosing to have fewer babies than we need to replace ourselves. In much of the developed and developing world, that decline is already underway, as urbanisation, women's empowerment, and waning religiosity lead to smaller and smaller families. In Empty Planet, Ibbitson and Bricker travel from South Florida to Sao Paulo, Seoul to Nairobi, Brussels to Delhi to Beijing, drawing on a wealth of research and firsthand reporting to illustrate the dramatic consequences of this population decline - and to show us why the rest of the developing world will soon join in.

They find that a smaller global population will bring with it a number of benefits: fewer workers will command higher wages; good jobs will prompt innovation; the environment will improve; the risk of famine will wane; and falling birthrates in the developing world will bring greater affluence and autonomy for women. But enormous disruption lies ahead, too. We can already see the effects in Europe and parts of Asia, as aging populations and worker shortages weaken the economy and impose crippling demands on healthcare and vital social services. There may be earth-shaking implications on a geopolitical scale as well.

Empty Planet is a hugely important book for our times. Captivating and persuasive, it is a story about urbanisation, access to education and the empowerment of women to choose their own destinies. It is about the secularisation of societies and the vital role that immigration has to play in our futures. Rigorously researched and deeply compelling, Empty Planet offers a vision of a future that we can no longer prevent - but that we can shape, if we choose to.

About the Authors

Darrell Bricker is CEO of Ipsos Global Public Affairs. He is the author of five books, most recently The Big Shift. While too many believe that numbers are boring, Bricker believes they are incredibly useful and interesting. The problem lies in that people who are good with numbers tend not to be great storytellers. His writing has always focused on telling stories that break down the barrier between numbers and broader public understanding. There's always a story or tragedy and romance in the data. Bricker sees it as his job to find the story and tell it.

In a career spanning three decades, John Ibbitson has worked as a reporter and columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, Southam News, the National Post and, since 1999, the Globe and Mail, where he became Chief Political Writer in 2012 and Writer at Large in 2015. He has written eighteen books, including The Landing which won the 2008 Governer General's Award for Children's Literature. His non-fiction books have been nominated for the National Newspaper Award, the Donnier Prize, the Twillium Book Award and the City of Toronto Book Award.