Population Decline: The Latest Doom That Won’t Kill Us

1960s bestseller The Population Bomb, which insisted we’d all starve because there were too many babies

Every generation gets told the world is ending. For your grandparents it was nuclear war, for your parents it was climate catastrophe, and for you it’s population decline — too few babies, too many oldies, and dire warnings that Britain will collapse into one giant care home. But history suggests these crises are rarely what they seem. Population decline may look like a looming apocalypse on a demographer’s graph, but in everyday life it is more likely to mean fewer rivals for jobs, cheaper houses, and people living longer, healthier, sharper lives