[Analysis] The human population is going to fall down to 1% of what it is today.

If you are not fat, you are hotter than your ancestor from a 100 years ago. Yet you are still dying out, because consumerism and capitalism has made reproduction even more competitive than it previously used to be.

We are already expecting global population to shrink by 25% by the end of the century. Assuming that it peaks by 2050.

As developed economies continue to get richer, their fertility rate continues to go down, even long past the replacement fertility level.

Globally, more than half of the world population is now urbanized. Urban populations have been population sinks since time immemorial. On top of that it has never before been more profitable to not have children when it comes to income accumulation.

What this means is that humanity would have to evolve a strain of humans that like to have more than two children even when they are wealthy and packed together like sardines.

For such an evolutionary trait to emerge would take centuries if not millennia. That is the time scale on which we can expect the human population to keep consistently declining over time.

Lithuania's population has been on the decline since 1991. Their fertility rate today is below 1.3. Globally such a trend holds in the majority of the cases, and the exceptions are found in extremely conservative or extremely poor societies.

Humans are not like grass or trees or fish. Humans do not benefit from a planet covered by themselves. The reason for this being that humanity never grew past the federal union state as their highest functional unit.

Human population would decline until only those remain or evolve that can enjoy each others company long term.

As of now, Netherlands is the smallest unit of collective humans that can contribute positively and heavily to the world. Their population is 17.9 million and rising, and they are already a trillion dollar economy that's not slowing down anytime soon.

We can take this as the assumed minimum human population required to keep moving science and human capabilities forward.

That is, if human population over time shrunk to 0.2% of what it is today, before rebounding, humanity would still be fine and dominating this planet.

This fact alone justifies the amount of competition among humans to separate the wheat from the chaff, again and again, generation after generation.

Conclusion:

Developed world fertility rates are not going to go above replacement for centuries. World population is going to move in the order of "poorest countries --> lower middle income countries --> middle income countries --> upper middle income countries --> high income countries --> developed economies --> Richest developed economy --> Richest developed economy state".

If at any point one of these is having negative population growth, that means something is not working correctly and that part of the world is in decline.

The world population is going to move from the global South to the global North even as it keeps shrinking over time. Expect countries stuck in the middle income trap to split from within into multiple countries as all the rich occupy one side of the country while the poor occupy the other.

Humanity would have fallen to 1% of the population that it has today by the time the global human population begins to rise once again.

The global millionaire population of today is the global total population of tomorrow.

John D. Rockefeller, the first billionaire in the US, is believed to have 150 descendants alive today. That's 150 people descended from one billionaire in 180 years time.

Elon Musk already has 12 children and its safe to assume that all of those children together are going to end up with more than 12 grandchildren for Elon Musk.

In the long run, the millionaire class of today, is the average of tomorrow, as humanity continues to evolve upwards.