Population Collapse: The Greatest Crisis Humanity Faces…

By Peter J. Merrick, TEP®, Co-author with Adrian C. Spitters, CFP® of the international bestseller In It Starts With Gold™ and their upcoming book, Killing Crypto™, to be released in early 2026.

Yesterday morning my smartphone was not working. I left it at home and went for a walk with nothing but the thoughts in my head. The streets were quiet. No children walked to school. No young families played in the parks.

As I walked, a question echoed inside me: where are all the children? If we as a species do not reproduce, how do we survive? It is that simple.

Later that morning, I took my laptop and boarded the 8:10 a.m. ferry over to Coronado Island in San Diego to have coffee. In this busy world I find that as I get older, I take more time to think rather than just do. Thinking is far more productive than reacting. Perhaps the reason we find ourselves in such a state of the world, and why so many live unhappy lives, is because too few of us take the time to stop and ask ourselves the deeper questions.

I am a father of 5. At 56, I see something I never thought about when I was younger. If I had not believed in the future, I doubt I would have chosen to bring children into this world. Without optimism there is no reason to create life. Today, that optimism is fading. That frightens me for my children and for the generations still to come.

Demographics Decide Who Lives and Who Dies

My journey into demographics began in 2004. I read everything I could find… research papers, books, articles. Each year the picture grew darker. By 2010 I was invited to serve as the demographic analyst for an international financial radio program. Others spoke about GDP, stock indexes, and interest rates. My role was different. I looked at whether a nation’s population gave it a future worth investing in. I served as the expert on every episode of that program, bringing a macro view that too many analysts ignored.

It was not complicated. A society with a young and growing population had workers to power industries, taxpayers to support retirees, and consumers to drive demand. It also had energy. Young people are risk takers. They create businesses, art, and ideas. They are the spark that keeps societies alive. A society with shrinking families and an aging population faced the opposite. Collapsing pensions. Housing markets with more sellers than buyers. Fewer innovators. Heavier taxes.

All of it was visible in the shape of the population pyramid. For most of history it looked like a pyramid. Wide at the bottom with many children. Narrow at the top with few elderly. That shape meant renewal. Today in many countries the pyramid is upside down. Too few children. Too many elderly.

The fertility rate is the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. Replacement level fertility is about 2.1. Two replace the parents. The extra 0.1 accounts for children who die young. If fertility stays below this for too long, the population shrinks. The dependency ratio is how many children and elderly must be supported by working-age adults. A healthy society has many workers for every dependent. A collapsing society has too few. South Korea is on track by 2067 to have nearly 2 dependents for every worker. That is a burden no economy can survive. The birth gap is the shortfall between the number of children being born and the number needed to replace retiring workers. Once the gap becomes wide, it cannot be closed in a single generation.

We are told today that the worldwide fertility rate is 2.3, barely above replacement. Yet some demographers warn that this is misleading. They argue that if the data were fully transparent, we would see that global fertility has already fallen below replacement. If that is true, the collapse is not coming. It is already here.

Why I Never Bought the China Myth

This is why I have never feared China overtaking the United States. The same was said of Japan in the 1980s. Both were celebrated as unstoppable. Yet both were aging. Growth cannot last without renewal.

America was different. Baby boomers had children. Japan and China did not. Their populations shrank. Their growth hit a wall. India looked promising, but now it risks becoming old before it becomes rich. Fertility has already fallen below replacement, and millions of young Indians lack opportunity.

For more than 30 years I have worked in finance, often advising families and entrepreneurs on how to protect what they have built. Along the way I wrote textbooks that ended up in classrooms and spoke at conferences when invited. My job has always been to point out risks others preferred to ignore. That training is what led me to demographics. It became clear to me that the greatest risk of all is not found in markets or tax codes, but in shrinking populations. Without people, every system eventually breaks.

I also addressed these issues in my 2019 book, The King of Main Street. In 2025, I co-wrote It Starts With Gold™ with Adrian C. Spitters, CFP®, where we showed how financial systems are built on assumptions of population growth. Without growth, those systems crack. Adrian and I are now working on Killing Crypto, to be released in 2026. Writing these books has not been about building authority. It has been about sounding the alarm.

The Liars Who Sold Us Overcrowding

For decades we were told the opposite. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb warned of famine, shortages, and governments jailing families with too many children. He even said there would never be 7 billion people alive by the year 2000. In 2011 the world passed that milestone. His forecasts were not just wrong. They were corrosive. They fueled fear and justified anti-human policies.

The Club of Rome followed in 1972 with The Limits to Growth. Their predictions were simplistic. Yet governments listened. India forced sterilizations. China imposed its one-child policy. The United Nations promoted population control. At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, world leaders declared humanity a threat to the planet. People were treated not as assets, but as liabilities.

When We Stop Believing in the Future

The truth is brutal. India now sits at a Total Fertility Rate of 1.9. South Korea in 2025 has collapsed to 0.72… the lowest ever recorded. Japan sells more adult diapers than baby diapers. Nearly 75% of humanity now lives in nations below replacement. And when the Total Fertility Rate falls, it is not just numbers on a chart. Schools shut their doors. Towns wither into silence. Economies hollow out. Cultures lose their spark. What dies first is vitality, and what follows is everything else.

Young adults are told they have time. Careers first, families later. Yet biology says otherwise. A woman who does not have her first child by age 30 has only a 50 percent chance of ever becoming a mother. Ten percent of childless women are infertile. Ten percent choose not to have children. Eighty percent wanted children but never had the chance. Men are not exempt. In Sweden, 1 in 5 men now reaches 50 without fathering a child. In the United States, nearly 1 in 3 men under 30 report no sex in the past year.

These are not just statistics. They are evidence of a society losing connection, purpose, and meaning. And when meaning is lost, nihilism and hedonism rise in its place.

I am beginning to have those difficult conversations with my own children. I tell them that dating should not be aimless. We have failed to teach young people to date with intention, to think not just about today but about what kind of family and future they want to build. They laugh and ask how they can fight a culture that tells them meaning is found in distraction and self-indulgence. I do not have all the answers. I am a very flawed human being. But I know this: if we do not prepare our children for responsibility, then who will?

This Is Not a Lecture. This Is Survival.

The point of this article is to start asking the right questions. Because if we continue not asking them, and not addressing their causes, where are we going to end up? I do not like the answers.

Scientists tell us that the average species survives for about 1 million years. Humanity as we know it, has been here for only around 300,000. Are we on the same path as those that came before us, now extinct? Or can we chart a different course?

I say this with deep humility. I do not have the answers. I write and speak about this because I want to send up a flare. This is not a lecture. It is a shared mission.

That is why Adrian C. Spitters and I write books. That is why we speak out and raise the alarm. It is why we raise these questions and invite others to wrestle with them beside us. We need you. We cannot do it alone.

I am often attacked for writing and speaking this way. Yet I keep going because I am an optimist. I believe that with the right individuals we can pass on a world that is better than the one we inherited, for our children and for all future generations. I am not here to be small in this life. None of us are. We are meant to live boldly, to ask hard questions, and to fight for a future worth handing on.

So here is the double edge. If you close this article and walk away, nothing changes. The collapse deepens. The silence grows louder. But if you join us, you release the pressure and help carry the search for solutions.

 Peter J. Merrick, TEP 

Just as a nation’s survival depends on renewal through future generations, a family’s financial survival depends on securing its foundation first. At our firm, we help clients structure their wealth by Owning Assets in Order of Asset Security. We start by protecting what is most secure and then safeguarding what is most vulnerable, so that what you have built can endure for your children and for generations to come. 

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Stay informed. Stay prepared. Take action now. The silence of empty schools and quiet streets is not just coincidence. It is the warning sign of collapsing demographics. A society without children has no future. Do not let The Financial Industrial Complex distract you with false choices while the deeper foundation crumbles. Protect what is yours, and fight for a future worth handing on, before ownership, freedom, and sovereignty are reduced to temporary privileges instead of lasting rights.

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