Empty Planet

Author Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson
Narrator Robert Petkoff
Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
Run Time 8 hours and 41 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Geopolitics, Human geography, Migration, immigration and emigration, Population and demography.

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What to expect

**A SUNDAY TIMES MUST-READ**

'Riveting and vitally important' - Steven Pinker
'A gripping narrative of a world on the cusp of profound change' - Anjana Ahuja, New Statesman

Empty Planet offers a radical, provocative argument that the global population will soon begin to decline, dramatically reshaping the social, political and economic landscape.

For half a century, statisticians, pundits and politicians have warned that a burgeoning planetary population will soon overwhelm the earth's resources. But a growing number of experts are sounding a different kind of alarm. Rather than growing exponentially, they argue, the global population is headed for a steep decline.

Throughout history, depopulation was the product of catastrophe: ice ages, plagues, the collapse of civilizations. This time, however, we're thinning ourselves deliberately, by choosing to have fewer babies than we need to replace ourselves. In much of the developed and developing world, that decline is already underway, as urbanisation, women's empowerment, and waning religiosity lead to smaller and smaller families. In Empty Planet, Ibbitson and Bricker travel from South Florida to Sao Paulo, Seoul to Nairobi, Brussels to Delhi to Beijing, drawing on a wealth of research and firsthand reporting to illustrate the dramatic consequences of this population decline - and to show us why the rest of the developing world will soon join in.

They find that a smaller global population will bring with it a number of benefits: fewer workers will command higher wages; good jobs will prompt innovation; the environment will improve; the risk of famine will wane; and falling birthrates in the developing world will bring greater affluence and autonomy for women. But enormous disruption lies ahead, too. We can already see the effects in Europe and parts of Asia, as aging populations and worker shortages weaken the economy and impose crippling demands on healthcare and vital social services. There may be earth-shaking implications on a geopolitical scale as well.

Empty Planet is a hugely important book for our times. Captivating and persuasive, it is a story about urbanisation, access to education and the empowerment of women to choose their own destinies. It is about the secularisation of societies and the vital role that immigration has to play in our futures.

Rigorously researched and deeply compelling, Empty Planet offers a vision of a future that we can no longer prevent - but that we can shape, if we choose to.

Critics Review

A fascinating study
Sunday Times
A bold thesis, but the authors are convincing . . . this briskly readable book demands urgent attention
Mail on Sunday
The “everything you know is wrong” genre has become tedious, but this book is riveting and vitally important. With eye-opening data and lively writing, Bricker and Ibbitson show that the world is radically changing in a way that few people appreciate
Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now
[Bricker and Ibbitson] have written a sparkling and enlightening guide to the contemporary world of fertility as small family sizes and plunging rates of child-bearing go global.
Globe and Mail
Bricker and Ibbitson work their way around the globe in pacey, sometimes breathless journalistic prose, although their argument is refreshingly clear and well balanced . . .
Literary Review
The authors combine a mastery of social-science research with enough journalistic flair to convince fair-minded readers of a simple fact: fertility is falling faster than most experts can readily explain, driven by persistent forces . . . Empty Planet succeeds as a long-overdue skewering of population-explosion fearmongers
Wall Street Journal
A highly readable, controversial insight into a world rarely thought about – a world of depopulation under ubiquitous urbanisation
George Magnus, author of The Age of Aging and Red Flags: Why Xi's China is in Jeopardy
While the global population is swelling well over 7.5 billion people today, birth rates have nonetheless already begun dropping around the world. Past population declines have historically been driven by natural disasters or disease – the Toba supervolcano, Black Death or Spanish Flu – but this coming slump will be of our own demographic making. In this fascinating and thought-provoking book, Bricker and Ibbitson compellingly argue why by the end of this century the problem won’t be overpopulation but a rapidly shrinking global populace, and how we might have to adapt
Professor Lewis Dartnell, author of The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch
To get the future right we must challenge our assumptions, and the biggest assumption so many of us make is that populations will keep growing. Bricker and Ibbitson deliver a mind-opening challenge that should be taken seriously by anyone who cares about the long-term future – which, I hope, is all of us
Dan Gardner, author of Risk and co-author of Superforecasting
Thanks to the authors’ painstaking fact-finding and cogent analysis, [Empty Planet] offers ample and persuasive arguments for a re-evaluation of conventional wisdom
Booklist
Warnings of catastrophic world overpopulation have filled the media since the 1960s, so this expert, well-researched explanation that it’s not happening will surprise many readers . . . delightfully stimulating
Kirkus Reviews
Arresting . . . lucid, trenchant and very readable . . . a stimulating challenge to conventional wisdom
Publishers Weekly
A riveting travelogue that covers some of the most interesting places across the world
Business Line
An ambitious reimagining of our demographic future
New York Times

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