I used to be a Malthusian.
This was my mental model of the world:
exploding population, small planet;
it's going to lead to ugly things.
But I'm moving past Malthus,
because I think that we just might be about 150 years
from a kind of new enlightenment.
Here's why.
This is the U.N.'s population data,
you may have seen, for the world.
And the world's population expected to top out
at something hopefully a bit less than 10 billion, late this century.
And after that, most likely it's going to begin to decline.
So what then?
Most of the economic models are built around scarcity and growth.
So a lot of economists
look at declining population
and expect to see stagnation, maybe depression.
But a declining population is going to have
at least two very beneficial economic effects.
One: fewer people on a fixed amount of land
make investing in property a bad bet.
In the cities, a lot of the cost of property
is actually wrapped up in its speculative value.
Take away land speculation,
price of land drops.
And that begins to lift a heavy burden
off the world's poor.
Number two: a declining population
means scarce labor.
Scarce labor drives wages.
As wages increase
that also lifts the burden on the poor and the working class.
Now I'm not talking about a radical drop in population like we saw in the Black Death.
But look what happened in Europe
after the plague:
rising wages,
land reform,
technological innovation,
birth of the middle class;
and after that, forward-looking social movements
like the Renaissance,
and later the Enlightenment.
Most of our cultural heritage has tended to look backward,
romanticizing the past.
All of the Western religions begin with the notion of Eden,
and descend through a kind of profligate present
to a very ugly future.
So human history is viewed
as sort of this downhill slide
from the good old days.
But I think we're in for another change,
about two generations after the top of that curve,
once the effects of a declining population
start to settle in.
At that point, we'll start romanticizing the future again,
instead of the nasty, brutish past.
So why does this matter?
Why talk about social-economic movements
that may be more than a century away?
Because transitions are dangerous times.
When land owners start to lose money,
and labor demands more pay,
there are some powerful interests that are going to fear for the future.
Fear for the future leads to some rash decisions.
If we have a positive view about the future
then we may be able to accelerate through that turn,
instead of careening off a cliff.
If we can make it through the next 150 years,
I think that your great great grandchildren
will forget all about Malthus.
And instead, they'll be planning for the future
and starting to build the 22nd Century Enlightenment.
Thank you.
(Applause)