As populations fall, nations that can tap human potential will succeed

For much of the 20th century, many were accustomed to thinking of people as an ever-expanding resource. As the number of people grew, so did labour markets, consumer markets, scientific communities, production systems and armies. In 1950, the world’s population was about 2.5 billion. In 2026, it is reaching 8.3 billion. In just 75 years, the population has increased more than 3.3 times.

In this sense, the current human population may turn out not to be a permanent norm, but a historical anomaly produced by the demographic surge of the past two centuries. Dean Spears and Michael Geruso have developed a similar logic in their book After the Spike: if low fertility becomes entrenched as a new pattern, the world’s population may begin to decline naturally due to people’s everyday decisions.

People remain the primary source of economic, technological and military development for almost any country. The population growth of the past two centuries coincided with an unprecedented acceleration of science, technology and productivity. A simple probabilistic logic emerged: more people mean more potential ideas and a higher chance of producing the human capital capable of creating breakthrough solutions.

But numbers alone are not enough. What matters is the quality of human capital: a country’s ability to educate engineers, scientists, skilled workers and specialists in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics.

This is becoming a new dimension of international competition. As long as countries still have large working-age generations, they can use this demographic window to make a technological leap.

In the mid-20th century, the total fertility rate was about five children per woman. Today, it is around 2.2. But if global fertility settles at 1.4-1.5, the world’s population will begin to decline steadily after reaching its peak. Some calculations show that the global population could fall to 1 billion in roughly 150-200 years. This is not the most extreme scenario, but rather a continuation of trends already taking shape.