I've come late to a February story in the New Yorker that takes a different, and mostly catastrophizing, approach to the same topic: "The End of Children" by Gideon Lewis-Kraus.
This one is less driven by demographic projections and more inclined to bleak portraits of dying villages in south Korea inhabited only by abandoned grandmothers. Surely that situation is more about the flight from villages than evidence of world depopulation. But Lewis-Kraus can see only gloom and loss in declining populations, and hardly gives a toss about possible benefits for our grimly ever-populated world.
He does have an intriguing thought-experiment: about how communities that grow used to the (relative) absence or scarcity of children will become locked into no-child habits and attitudes and will be unable to change while humanity simply dwindles away. But it's mostly speculative. Cultures do change, even if unpredictably.
Update, May 5: Russ Chamberlayne comments
In your blog entry "History of Population again," you surmise that the world pop might go from 10 billion to two. Proportionately then, Canada's population might go from a future 45 million to 9 million.
I can just hear a 22nd century Trump taunting Canada with becoming, not a state, but a regional municipality.
Whatever future centuries have to face, I do hope Donald Trump will not be one of them! And with the United States' population having dropped just as far, surely they would have more things to deal with.
But indeed, given the large world population drop that demographers are beginning to expect, the fate of every small cultural and linguistic group in the world would be endangered. What of the Icelanders, the Welsh, the Hungarians, the Tlingit, the Tibetans?
