Empty Planet

The Shock of Global Population Decline

By: Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

Narrated by: Robert Petkoff

Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

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 civilisations. 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 health care 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.

©2019 John Ibbitson, Darrell Bricker (P)2019 Hachette Audio

Critic reviews

"Riveting and vitally important." (Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now)

Not really suited to an audio book

Interesting enough and narrated well.

I expected more data and logical reasoning, very often the authors just made assertions like "this is plain wrong" without any argument. Maybe this topic is not suited to an audio book, maybe the printed version has links to data sources, charts etc.

The authors made many assertions without proving or constructing any theory of causation, a number of the assertions run counter to what i have observed and I was hoping this book would explain to me why my conclusions are incorrect. For example the Covid19 lockdowns in my country (borders closed to immigrants) and the Trump inspired reduction in unskilled migrants has caused a surge in the wages of the native unskilled. Yet all the authors could say is "this is plain wrong" without any supporting argument. I could not shake the feeling that a lot of the book was written from the standpoint of economic and social privilege

The authors often strayed from their area of expertise. Being a demographer does not seem to bestow any insights into economics.

In short a bit of a polemic