There is no poverty on Solaria. On the contrary, everybody lives on a large estate with all the material goods they could possibly desire. With fewer reasons to be jealous there is very little crime. Nor is there much need for work, certainly not of the exploitative kind: People spend their time practising sport or pursuing the arts.
Isaac Asimov’s fictional planet, introduced in his 1957 novel The Naked Sun, achieves this state of plenty and leisure by capping its population at 20,000; work is performed by millions of robots and the goods and services are distributed evenly among the human residents.
Seventy years later, robotics and AI are advanced enough that we can realistically contemplate a world with little need for human labour. At the same time, leaders of developed countries are fretting over plummeting birth rates and shrinking populations. Before reaching for their policy toolboxes, they should read some science fiction and consider whether the demographic change is an opportunity in disguise.
Sci-fi writers have often predicted the future better than policymakers or economists. Aldous Huxley identified in Brave New World that distraction, not fear, was the best way to repress educated people (and was thus a better prophet than Orwell). Iain M Banks observed in the Culture series that no amount of wealth and trade would eliminate war. Asimov created moral laws for his fictional roboticists that have become standard practice in the real world.
Solaria is in fact no paradise; its isolated inhabitants communicate only by videocall and develop a visceral fear of physical interaction (making it an excellent Covid novel). But as automation spreads through the economy, it’s worth thinking about what a less extreme small-population model could look like.
New economic reality
Throughout history, people have been the main component of economic activity. Leaders have therefore always tried to expand their populations though natalism, migration, conquest or enslavement. Manpower was also needed for defence: Small, prosperous societies would be conquered by larger neighbours.
Even the industrial revolution didn’t remove the incentive for human work – we just moved up the value chain, leading to breakneck economic growth and a massive rise in living standards, at least in material terms. No real-world economic model exists where a shrinking population might be a good thing.
Now, though, advances in AI mean that even knowledge work can be done with far fewer humans, and there isn’t an obvious next rung on the economic ladder that humans can graduate to (creative pursuits being primarily of cultural rather than economic value). Meanwhile many physical tasks, from shelf-stacking to soldiering, are being performed by robots.
This leads us to contemplate a future where a smaller population is economically sustainable. But is it desirable? Let’s consider the benefits.
First, a small population would eliminate the political need to create or preserve jobs. Even with today’s technology, many jobs could more productively be automated but are protected by politicians and unions. That trend will only increase. For as long as earned income is needed to live comfortably, mass employment will remain a moral as well as economic imperative for governments.
Not needing to protect jobs would bolster innovation. Outdated industries from coal to combustion engines are artificially protected from competition because politicians can’t hang thousands of workers out to dry. That in turn hampers the development of newer and often cleaner alternatives.
A smaller number of workers would also increase their bargaining power. The current trajectory, of vast swathes of work being automated and people reduced to scrabbling around in the gig economy, is bleak for labour rights. Having less competition for roles where humans remain necessary would translate to better pay and conditions.
As technological unemployment increases, governments will eventually need to redistribute wealth by taxing robots and AI models and using the revenues to fund a universal basic income, or something similar. This is the first step towards a utopian society in which human work is no longer necessary. It’s also much easier to achieve with fewer mouths to feed.
Finally, a smaller population would reduce carbon emissions and help slow climate change. Emissions are driven by consumer demand; supply-side interventions have achieved little. Reducing the demand per consumer is also difficult – nobody likes a lifestyle downgrade. The only other variable is the number of consumers.
Better than the alternatives
All of this assumes that we can survive the process of shrinkage, which will inflate the dependency ratio for one or more generations until the population stabilises (as an age cohort reaches retirement, they must be financially supported by a smaller cohort of productive workers, who must each therefore contribute more). It also assumes that the wealth generated by automated work can be fairly distributed, and that a deflationary spiral can be avoided.
There are some indications that the dependency ratio may be less dire than commonly thought, but these are still major challenges and a transition to a smaller population is likely to be disruptive. Major social unrest is possible, in response both to the generational squeeze and to elites hoarding an ever larger share of productive capacity.
But the status quo will be disrupted either way. The Covid-19 pandemic taught us that sometimes, bad things will happen if you act and different bad things will happen if you fail to act; nevertheless, society may eventually emerge stronger as a result. The technological shift and population shrinkage that we’re currently living through may be another such moment, at much bigger scale.
If you’re not convinced that a smaller population is tolerable, consider the alternatives. There are only three ways to increase population: bolster the birth rate, encourage voluntary migration, or capture people by force. Let’s discount conquest and slave raiding and examine the other two.
Throughout most of history, birth rates have naturally been higher than the replacement rate and often far above it, meaning population growth occurs naturally. That’s no longer the case in most developed countries, and governments have been looking around for ways to increase it, from one-off payments to increasing parental leave.
These nudges have achieved little; the decision to have or not have children is deeply personal. For the same reason, stronger policy interventions would erode our culture of liberalism and especially women’s rights. Reproductive rights are already under threat, particularly in the US, with natalism used as a justification.
That leaves migration. EU data show that people moving within the bloc typically contribute almost as much to the economy of their destination country as a native-born person does. So attracting migrants from other developed countries works – but it’s a zero-sum game. They also have low birth rates and no population to spare.
Developing countries have higher birth rates and often high unemployment, making them a ready source of potential migrants. But the same EU data show that they contribute much less to the destination country’s economy, and may be a net drain even in their most productive years in countries with expansive welfare states.
Europe’s recent experience has shown that it’s very difficult to integrate large numbers of migrants from developing countries, both culturally and economically. The arrival over the past decade of millions of migrants – often conflated unhelpfully with refugees – has generated a backlash among voters, propelling nativist parties into governing coalitions across the continent.
Europeans don’t want to be told to have more children, don’t want the shortfall to be offset by migration, and don’t want to conquer each other’s lands. The only way to increase the birth rate without coercion is to make people want to have more children, which would require at the very least a complete restructuring of the economy.
Populations will shrink whether we want them to or not, bringing huge changes to society. We can only hope that the prophets of science fiction are more insightful than economists.