Limits to growth:
More than 200 years ago, around the year 1800, the important economic theorist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) denied the carrying capacity for a much higher population growth on earth due to the decreasing marginal utility of soil yield. The economic theorist William Godwin (1756-1836), ten years his senior, had initiated the debate by seeing no limits to the growth of the human population.
It should be noted that just around 1800 the world population exceeded the 1 billion mark (even before Malthus, there were mainly Italian economic theorists who held similar theses). Crossing borders is always accompanied by anxiety, as can also be seen in the press of the time. It was not until 1700 that population growth accelerated considerably, and the doubling time of the world population was for the first time in the range of centuries and not millennia. Around 1930, about 130 years later, the world population was about 2 billion and in only 45 years it doubled again in 1975 to 4 billion people. In 2022, another 47 years later, there was another doubling to about 8 billion people. An exploding dynamic that has now managed to double in decades and is not expected to flatten out until about 10 billion people.
Despite the strong increase, a large part of the world’s population was able to be integrated into the globalized economy, so that there were many improvements in many areas.
At the same time, it must be noted that the problems of climate change and environmental pollution are demographically derivable chains of problems that urgently need to be solved. It is of course a hugh difference, if we have 1 or 8 billion people, who are eating, drive cars, etc..
Demographic problem chains:
Not only the absolute growth of the world population, but the strong growth of the consuming stratum in the world population, is the decisive factor and this consuming stratum is getting bigger and bigger, which is initially a progress, because more and more people are getting better living conditions and the world economy is growing.
This results in an exponential increase due to two factors at once: More and more additional millions of people consume an ever-increasing number of times more than before.
Thus, the increase in resource consumption from production and consumption and the associated environmental pollution (CO2, garbage, air, etc.) is a multiplication along the also exponentially increasing population explosion as described above.
In view of the enormous gravity of cultural traditions and previous failures, it is doubtful whether the cultural transformation and orientation towards a world community in which the long-term and common interests of survival sufficiently push back short-term selfish interests will succeed.
The core thesis to be put forward here is: The survival of humanity is not only a question of nature, but essentially one of culture. At present, it is precisely this survival that is hampered by World War III, as the international community does not have enough resources to act as a whole against this threat of climate change in global cooperation. Rather, the culture of an order based on international law is no longer maintained. Russia is breaking with this, and China is supporting Russia.
Perhaps wesee this Third World War perhaps still too one-dimensionally, i.e. not quite correctly in its full dimension:
Is this merger of China and Russia with the invasion of Ukraine and its annexation a complementary strategy from the clear recognition of the impact of climate change? Is it already the struggle for resource scarcity?
In the fight against the democracies of this world, as many resources as possible should be withdrawn.
Is this already the war over the question of who will survive in the world in the future if the climate crisis continues to escalate.
Therefore, not only quantitative factors, but above all the underlying qualitative factors (i.e. the behaviors originating from culture on many different levels and their change) are becoming the influencing variables that also determine the survival of humanity today.
It is without question of dramatic importance that today’s warring parties against the democratic states are put in their place as quickly and decisively as possible and that their plans are curtailed and pushed back, otherwise the extremely urgent solutions for the world will be further delayed to a highly dangerous extent.
However, if China and Russia and their other allies have already agreed that it is not only about the destruction of democracies, but already about a struggle for survival in the distribution of resources and the survival of entire populations and states, it will be even more difficult to carry out the containment of World War III.
The good news is that birth rates are already falling all over the world and are mostly far below the rate of 2.1 children per woman in order to maintain the population.
This does not yet apply to Africa, whose population continues to rise, although birth rates there are also drastically reducing and have already reduced.
The increase in the world population is thus due to the increase in the world’s older population, until with their death the world population then enters into a very considerable shrinkage. This is also the case in China, whose population is aging significantly and has been shrinking at an accelerated pace since 2022. Within one year, the population has decreased by about 850,000 people. According to forecasts, the current number of inhabitants of about 1.4 million (probably already overestimated by 100 million today) could shrink to less than 1.02 billion people by 2050 and even to 310 million by 2100, which would be the lowest estimate at all. Nevertheless, there is a considerable unemployment rate, especially among well-educated young people.
The Chinese real estate market has been misguided in a way that most people cannot even imagine in these dimensions. At least 20% of apartments in China are vacant, which is about 65 million apartments. Other estimates go even higher in these numbers (highest: 90 million, it equals multiplied by 3 to an accommodation of about 270 million people). According to a report of BBC, in 2023 China still accounts for just over half of the world’s total annual 4.1bn tonnes of cement production (52%) – followed by India (6.2%), the EU (5.3%) and the US (1.9%). The extreme sealing of the soil poses enormous dangers from floods, so that in 2021 alone, more than 300 people died in the city of Zhengzhou. In addition, it has now been found that entire cities sink by up to around 4.5 cm per year due to the high weight.
At the same time, China’s real estate market is valued at 4 times gross domestic product (GDP), while the US is valued at about 1.6 times GDP. However, according to a study, the Chinese population has tied up around 70% of private wealth in real estate.
If there is a more than due adjustment here, the Chinese economy will turn into a deflationary spiral and lose massive purchasing power, as the life savings of many Chinese will melt away to a considerable extent.
The Chinese economy thus has problems that will lead to massive distortions of the economy, but these will last for a very long time
It cannot be assumed that such economic upheavals, which are only partially described here, will not remain without a reflection in political and social life.
It is very clear that huge overcapacities have been built up in China in a number of sectors of the economy with enormous debt. These exist not only in the real estate sector, but also in car production and the photovoltaic industry, for example.
These enormous overproductions are now encountering multiple problems at home and, above all, worldwide, namely that
- Worldwide populations are already shrinking and those that are still growing a little (e.g. Africa) do not have sufficient purchasing power.
- the shrinking populations in the main buyer countries have largely saturated markets and increasingly older groups of people do not form an attractive group of buyers
- the compulsion to export after the overly clear declaration of war, mainly to the main customers, who are increasingly reacting with defensive tariffs, which is already the case with the EU from 1.11.2024 with over 30% on vehicles from China.
- China’s idea of decoupling from democracies with far-reaching self-sufficiency from them, which was planned far earlier than the idea even existed in the democracies, will not work so easily. A flooding of the markets, as in photovoltaics over a decade ago, and the destruction of competitors in order to take over the market completely and create high dependencies, will meet with much more resistance in view of the world situation.
- Of the approximately USD 3.38 trillion that China earned from exports in 2023, the EU alone accounts for USD 501.7 billion and the USA USD 500.3 billion, or about 30%. In addition, there are Japan, South Korea, Canada, Australia and Great Britain with about 600 billion USD. In total, China takes about USD 1.6 trillion from the world’s major democracies, almost half of its export revenues.
China will not be able to decouple itself from the markets of democracies fast enough with new markets. Therefore, democracies can also generate considerable economic counterpressure.
It is therefore dramatically important that the democracies come together in a very strong alliance and friendship and do not allow themselves to be driven further apart – as happened with Brexit – which Russia and China in particular are working intensively on.
Trump is therefore completely wrong economically and politically with his completely absurd program and fails to recognize how much the US needs its partners and vice versa. Trade relations must therefore be divided into quality categories and thus trade between democracies must be preferred. Harris has already hinted at this, in contrast to Trump’s primitive approach.
It is therefore abundantly clear that the previous global demand growth has probably already largely reached its peak and will decline significantly in another few years due to the new global demographic changes and then turn negative.
This means that the global economy should already be preparing for very long-lasting, global deflationary tendencies, as we have seen in a similar way in Japan.
China will continue to play strength to democracies, while the debt-financed, highly deficit economy in many key industries is collapsing more and more.
How indescribably stupid and blind the markets can sometimes be, has been seen in many financial crises, most recently in 2008/2009. China has now launched a largely debt-financed economic stimulus program, and the stock markets are already jumping. In China, as in the last financial crisis and the stock markets, it is probably a matter of preserving the hollow façade for as long as possible.
However, demography and the structures discussed here are such a long-term heavyweight that no one can escape.
Over the next few decades, perhaps from the second half of the millennium onwards, this will somewhat reduce the pressure on the environment regarding the climate crisis and the destructive overexploitation of resources, provided that above all the qualitative and quantitative factors from culture and nature can be brought into a global decision-making and responsibility community with a largely identical will.
The decline in birth rates can be observed worldwide and has many reasons. Here is an example:
Example: The birth rate decreases along with liberalization, the emancipation of women and an increasing prosperity of a people, which can also be attributed to the biographical opportunity costs (computer scientist: annual earnings approx. 60,000 € *30 years = 1.8 million – approx. 390,000 € for 3 children with a university degree in exchange for the renunciation of professional practice and an existence as a housewife a considerable difference).
Opportunity costs are the comparative juxtaposition of two possibilities in their economic impact. Likewise, a woman in Africa with a small agricultural self-sufficiency without income in the hope of support has an economic interest in children. The global trend towards urbanization of the world’s population is driving a significant share here.
In the countryside, children are more likely to be free labor than in the city, where they are more likely to incur costs. Of course, this consideration cannot be limited to purely economic factors, but they offer a good analytical approach to a complex issue. Fertility combined with the oppression of women and the expansion of power is a theme in all world religions and totalitarian systems that originates from a time when there was a lack of people for war and work. Example: Hitler’s program to special honor women from 7 children or e.g. Erdogan promises in 2014 every working woman who has at least 3 children exemption from income tax; Syria’s ruler is driving the population from about 4.5 million in 1960 to 23 million in 2012 (beginning of the crisis) through the most aggressive, pronatalist policy with the international peak of 7.6 children per woman, until (as before the French Revolution) crop failures and drought result in rural exodus to cities (1.5 million in the 2 years before the civil war). It is then in these cities that the revolutionary potential unfolds, etc…
Conclusion: The change of culture and the technological attempt (nature) to make the growth of rising world populations “sustainable” must complement each other in order to get the world in a positive direction.
Trump has already accompanied a ruinous decline for Great Britain in a more than negative way through his political support for a hard Brexit. He also has great admiration for the EU’s least economically successful state, Hungary under the most corrupt leadership in all of Europe, and also spreads the word that Orban enjoys a high international reputation (which may be true of Russia and China as preferred partners).
With his one-dimensional approach and the political catastrophe in Afghanistan, which he ultimately ruined, as exemplified here, it is abundantly clear that he will not achieve anything sensible that could positively promote America’s position in the world. He simply poses an enormous danger to the US and its allies.
