It’s no wonder that as the world population exploded, so too did our resources. All of the resources that make our modern, comfortable lives possible, from energy to transportation to communication to refrigeration to climate control to pharmaceuticals, are the results of human ingenuity. As the economist Julian Simon pointed out four decades ago, humans are the ultimate resource, because they create resources where none existed before.

While this may come as good news to those who fear overpopulation, theory and evidence indicate that we have far more to fear from declining populations. For most of the developed world and the major population centers, population growth has largely stopped. Hong Kong, Finland, Taiwan, France, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Denmark, and the United States, among another thirty-three countries, will see their populations grow by less than one-half of one-percent. Japan, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Germany, Spain, South Korea, and China, along with thirty other developed countries, are projected to see their populations decline in 2023.

Much of the developed world has recently moved into a new era that historians likely won’t name, and the general public won’t notice for a decade or so: the Age of Decline.

The broken mud brick walls of the archaeological site of Babylon (Photo by Nik Wheeler/Corbis via Getty Images)

Another word for option we need to