7 Billion Humans | Empty Nests | January 2011 National Geographic Magazine

Empty Nests: Europe, Russia and Japan are aging and producing many more empty nests than offspring. Every child in Russia is precious and valuable. The government is paying women up to $14,000 USD to have a second child. $14,000 is two years average salary outside Moscow and one year inside Moscow. There were 1.8 million babies born in Russia last year, 27,000 more than deaths that year. The Fem Bots are coming for lonely men in Japan - obviously not propelling the population forward. The...
more »

Empty Nests: Europe, Russia and Japan are aging and producing many more empty nests than offspring. Every child in Russia is precious and valuable. The government is paying women up to $14,000 USD to have a second child. $14,000 is two years average salary outside Moscow and one year inside Moscow. There were 1.8 million babies born in Russia last year, 27,000 more than deaths that year. The Fem Bots are coming for lonely men in Japan - obviously not propelling the population forward. The elderly-bots are coming as well since there is not enough human support for the elderly in Japan, robots are being built to take over, not just to carry them around the nursing home, but primarily as companions to combat Kodokushi (lonely death). Nineteen percent of Japanese women die with no one around them. China is also aging with many draconian policies still in place which no longer need to be enforced. The economic reality of having even one child is too much for some couples.

According to the UN, the world's population reached 7 billion on October 31, 2011.. Two hundred years ago, there were only 1 billion people on the planet. In the past fifty years, the world's population has more than doubled.

The realization that this story was about population shift and how that affects the planet, we came up with four subcategories within which to concentrate the field photography: Urbanization, Immigration, Empty Pockets (the very fertile undeveloped world) and Empty Nests (the depopulation of aging, rich countries).

These four concepts are interrelated. As the empty pockets in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere produce a huge population of young workers, the empty nests in Japan are building robots to take care of their elderly because they can't import enough Filipinos. The obvious solution is immigration.
« less