Empty playgrounds. Schools without enough students to stay open. Small towns, deserted and abandoned. This is not some dystopian vision of the future. Demographers say this is our future.

Global population growth is leveling off, and as early as the second half of this century could begin to shrink for the first time since the Black Death struck the world almost 700 years ago.

“Everything that we understand that functions in our societies today, that depends on people, which is almost everything, is going to change,” says Stephen J. Shaw, a data scientist, demographer and producer of the film Birthgap.

Shaw spoke to us from his home in Japan, a nation at the forefront of this globa