Bloomberg reports on Ben Wattenberg’s book “Fewer“. This long term trend appears to have the academic rigor of reliable thinking, but the global financial impact is dwarfed by another long-term global population trend toward free markets.
Generational decreases in total population are occurring at a slower rate than the growth rate of the number of people living in free market societies. The number of people who are participating in the global economy has increased by 3 billion since 1990, and the shrinking population effect is negligible relative to trends of that magnitude.
For investors, this probably means that global consumption will continue to increase even if the population as a whole may slowly decline.
