For the fourteenth year running, Japan's population has slumped to a record low. The non-foreign population dropped by nearly 900,000 — an unprecedented fall.
What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?
It makes more sense if you just concentrate on making life more manageable, comfortable and sensible for the population you already have. Once you have a comfortable stable population of people who no longer worry about their future … then they will be more likely to have a family.
What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?
I mean, misery is extremely relative. One of the paradoxes of Japan, thanks to its extremely conservative immigration policy and hyper-competitive economy, is that they’ve made a genuinely beautiful country to live in but one in which foreigners can’t stay and most natives can’t enjoy it. This population of NEETs who failed the cut-throat academic setting lack the resources to live a comfortable middle class existence. Meanwhile, the new guest worker program simply brings foreigners in to crush the wage labor out and dispose of them. Only foreign tourists, wealthy labor aristocrats, and the handful of small business owners who figured out how to survive get to enjoy Japan for what it is.
But, like, it shouldn’t be a miserable place to live. The amenities are world class. The country’s ecology is well-preserved. The education system rivals international peers. They’ve got advanced industry, mass transit, modern health care, spectacular recreation, a population large enough to keep the ball rolling indefinitely without going Easter Island on their own turf, and excellent placement adjacent to other post-industrial powers.
All they need to do is reform their abysmal work culture. But the work culture has become a tulpa they’re convinced creates the beatific conditions, rather than a cancer that’s destroying it.
+1 for correct understanding of “tulpa”. We need to be aware of our ideas and ideals we create and sustain. Not all tulpas are what we envision. They are, otoh, all teaching spirit-guides.
I think they may be referring to the archaeological history of the Easter Island culture … a wealthy productive society that once thrived on Easter Island in the South Pacific but then used up all the resources of the island until nothing was left and it destroyed their society and they disappeared.
On the one hand, yes having a child with a higher quality of life is better than having many children.
However, there’s a good Kurzgesagt video about how the severe decline in birthrate can doom a population. Basically, if a population is not at the very least replacing itself, it will run out of young workers to keep the country going and vastly skew the proportion of elderly people to young workers. Small, rural towns will not survive since young people will flock to cities for work.
Though the video is based on Korea, the same concepts apply for Japan as well.
The logical, healthy approach to natural population growth and maintenance would be to provide social protections and supports for families and young people to grow into a society where they are encouraged and helped to start a family of one or two children in order to supply a healthy steady supply of new people for future generations.
Unfortunately, our world is governed by sociopathic wealthy overlords who demand more from people and want to give less to them. It’s not all their fault because the majority of us all sit around and just passively accept it as just a normal part of society. What that will probably mean is that in the future it will be a strange form of population control where children are no longer born but they will be manufactured and bred in order to provide a steady supply of human resources to keep the profit driven capitalist machine running for wealthy overlords.
From the look of how we managed our society in the past century … we won’t solve this problem sensibly, or with any empathy for society as a whole but rather try to deal with it from an economic and financial point of view. The wealthy owning class don’t see humanity as a whole that should be supported in any kind of healthy way … they see humanity as a source of wealth and a group of thinking individuals that can be taken advantage of to extract wealth for owners rather than for the whole of society.
also, your argument is based on the totally-nonsense assumption that there “has to be a certain number of workers to sustain the elderly” which is bullshit (frankly). it’s not about the number of workers; it’s about the productive output, and as we all know, that has risen tremendously the last few years. So there should be no shortage of workers regardless of how many workers there are. Everything else is bullshit the news (which btw are owned by billionaires) tell you because they want to sack a significant part of productive output for themselves - well ofc if rich take 90% of output it’s not gonna be enough for everyone. but that’s the rich’s fault and has nothing to do with “there not being enough workers”.
You’re not making an argument, there. You’re showing a graph that’s misleading because it starts at fucking 10000 BCE. Look at a graph of Japan if you want to talk about Japan, and of the current generations not prehistory.
it’s about the productive output, and as we all know, that has risen tremendously the last few years.
Ah, yes, because having a machine that can churn out pottery like noone’s business helps a lot with elderly and palliative care.
There is absolutely a limit how few kids a society can have before it collapses. Where that is is currently not particularly clear because the situation is unprecedented, but that there is a limit is crystal clear. 10 young people caring for 100 bed-ridden elderly and one kid, how long is that going to last, even if you automate everything else?
More importantly, you’re not looking at the derivative, that is, the growth rate:
The growth has very much peaked, the last large countries are currently undergoing demographic transition (from having many kids, few survive, over having many kids, many survive (growth spike), to hawing few kids, of which pretty much all survive), e.g. Nigeria will be done by 2100. And societal collapse because people either can’t do anything but care for the elderly, or social cohesion is failing because the elderly aren’t cared for, does not depend on absolute numbers, it depends on the raw growth rate, because young people from 1900 aren’t going to care for the elderly in 2100. And the growth rate it depends on is the local one how many Nigerians do you think fancy caring for Chinese elderly.
Oh and those projections above are with a moderate estimation of future fertility, that is, when the average country turns out like France. Not if the average country turns out like Japan or Korea.
Also, just to make this clear: There’s nothing wrong with the population shrinking again. Or growing, the earth is far from its carrying capacity if we’re doing it right. The trouble is shrinking too quickly, or for that matter growing too quickly. We should pine for two kids per woman, ±0.5, thereabouts: Don’t veer too far off replacement levels. And all that can be done by proper social policy, parental leave, good schools, work/life/family balance, sex ed, etc.
Also, just to make this clear: There’s nothing wrong with the population shrinking again. Or growing, the earth is far from its carrying capacity if we’re doing it right. The trouble is shrinking too quickly, or for that matter growing too quickly. We should pine for two kids per woman, ±0.5, thereabouts: Don’t veer too far off replacement levels. And all that can be done by proper social policy, parental leave, good schools, work/life/family balance, sex ed, etc.
Yeah, i agree. Decline should be at an acceptable rate. Just that i think an acceptable rate for me is 0.66 children/woman. That would lead to an annual decline in birth rate of 3.6% (formula is: 1-(0.66÷2)^(1÷30)) assuming women give birth at 30 y/o.
Just to contrast this: The US’ population (excluding Native Americans) grew steadily by approximately 3% annually from 1680 till 1880. Source:
I don’t think citing the US supports your case. You’re talking about a country where the only time everyone is on one page, is interested in the same thing, a moment of cohesion, is the ads during superbowl. American culture may technically exist but it has close to zero depth. Regional identities are deeper, largely because immigrants clustered together, one source nation here, another one there.
It’s also not really comparable because much of that increase was due to immigration, often whole families, also I think you meant more like 30%, not 3%. Niger has a growth rate of 3.66, a median age of about 15. Fifteen. Half are younger, half older than that. Politically, it’s a complete shitshow that makes the Trump regime look sane. There’s such a thing as too much teen spirit.
But you’re missing the point that the population of Japan specifically is on the decline and has been for decades.
Even if we take out the cost of pensions for the elderly out of the equation, if people aren’t having kids to replace themselves, there won’t be enough working age people to fill every job needed.
The easiest and most immediate solution for Japan (and South Korea which is also having the same problem) would be to ease immigration so that more people can come in to work. But that doesn’t help in the long run nor does it address the cultural and societal factors that have lead to this point. And even then, since both countries are so homogenous, it would be hard for natives to accept a huge influx of immigrants.
What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?
There’s an overall negative correlation between wealth and fertility, so it’s not like the rich are having a ton of kids, either. Or even the societies with decent metrics on wealth or income equality, still tend to be low birth rate countries.
It’s a difficult problem, with no one solution (because it’s not one cause). Some of it is cultural. Some of it is economic. There are a lot of feedback effects and peer effects, too. And each society has its own mix of cultural and economic issues.
And I’m not actually disagreeing with you. I think there’s probably something to be said for cheap cost of living allowing for people to be more comfortable having more children (or at a younger age, which also mathematically grows populations faster than having the same number of children at an older age).
It makes more sense if you just concentrate on making life more manageable, comfortable and sensible for the population you already have.
And working age people are necessary to make (and keep) life manageable, comfortable and sensible. This isn’t a hypothetical; they’re suffering the effects already. We’d need to lean a lot more into automation before society can function as an inverse pyramid.
Japan is notorious for unnecessarily complicated supply chains to bolster employment. And for unnecessarily ripping up perfectly fine pavement and concreting hillsides that don’t need it. Again, to bolster employment.
Things like medical billing where the vast majority of the profession exists because we’ve created a labyrinth to be navigated that doesn’t need to exist.
The market. This is why I’m really not too concerned about falling birthrates. There’s a lot of bullshit jobs out there. Consider the typical office. It’s damning that despite all the increases in efficiencies of computer technology we’ve had over the last several decades, work hours haven’t changed at all. If anything, they’ve increased. And the number of people working in offices hasn’t declined. The efficiencies of digital technologies didn’t decrease work hours, the work simply expanded to fill the available space. Items that in generations past would have been resolved with a one page memo written on a typewriter have been replaced with 50 page reports full of charts and graphs. We have huge numbers of people preparing documents that no one ever reads. There is an absolutely absurd amount of fat and inefficiency in the modern workplace.
Or consider corporate vanity projects like RTO. Workers are on average more productive at home. But executives tend to be sociopathic narcissists who simply need people to constantly praise and validate them in person. They just don’t get the same narcissistic supply from remote work, so they demand thousands of people waste colossal amounts of resources to come into an inefficient office just to appeal to their depraved egos. Oh, and for many executives, the ability to coerce sex from their employees is a primary job benefit, and that goes away with remote work.
Oh, and don’t forget credential inflation. We demand people have bachelors and masters degrees for positions that 50 years ago would have been handled by someone with just a high school diploma. I’m all for education for those who want it, but the fact that you need a bachelors for anything other than food service and retail is a massive drain on our society’s productivity.
As birth rates decline and the population ages, the market value for the labor of the workers that remain will soar. They will be able to demand higher wages. Think the equivalent of a $100k salary for someone with a high school diploma. This will force companies to either adapt or die. Those that insist on inefficient workflows, require excessive credentials, or demand employees come into the office for the sake of executive egos will simply go bankrupt. They will be replaced by companies that are run more rationally.
Anyone who has ever worked in an office can tell you just how stupidly inefficient corporate America is. And Japan’s business culture is even worse.
I don’t think we’re going to have any problem getting by with a declining population. We can maintain our standard of living quite well just by squeezing the fat and inefficiencies out of our existing systems. There won’t be some grand government bureau deciding what jobs are “made up.” Companies that insist on hiring people for bullshit jobs will simply be driven into insolvency. And the world will be better for it. Working a pointless bullshit job is not good for anyone’s mental health. People need a sense of purpose in their lives.
And while apoplectic doomsayers might say, “where does this end, won’t the population eventually collapse to zero?” This isn’t a realistic scenario. Cultures are not a monolith. Different groups have different birth rates. Over time, those groups and cultural practices that encourage higher birthrates will be selected for through natural selection.
For example, in many countries, the general misogyny of the population is a major reason young women don’t want to get married and have children. They don’t want to lose their careers and end up the stay at home wife to a salary man who arrives home drunk every night at midnight. They want a more equitable sharing of parental responsibilities. Some men are better at providing this equitable arrangement to their partners than others. Those that are will be more successful at finding wives. And those couples will pass their egalitarian values onto their children. Misogyny will be evolutionarily maladaptive and will be removed from the cultural gene pool. Those that insist on their wives doing all the child rearing will not find partners and will not be able to pass on their outdated beliefs to the next generation. In time, the birth rates will recover.
Or, alternatively, countries will move more back towards multi-generational households instead of the atomistic couple+kids that has become the norm today. Multi-generational housing was the historical norm, and it may be again in the future. It could be selected for through similar cultural evolution. Regardless, below replacement birth rates will not be maintained indefinitely. Eventually things will stabilize. If nothing else, eventually your population gets so disperse that you can’t mass produce effective birth control anymore, and well things take care of themselves at that point.
TL:DR: how I learned to stop worrying and love the declining birth rate.
i would upvote twice if i could, but i only have one account.
also: people have been worried about birth rate being too high in the past (around 1800) and population count going to infinity, consuming more resources than the planet can give and provoking a famine.
And the population count stabilized eventually in every country that they were worried about.
And now people are worried that the birth rate is too low and population count will go to zero.
I dare predict it’s bullshit and the population size will stabilize at some point.
Yeah, people forget that there are some real hard limits on how far population can fall. What people fail to realize is that our level of technology is actually a function of our population. Mass production and industrial society requires a certain minimum population level and population density. If things fell so far that there were only 100 million humans on Earth, that would have profound implications on the level of technology we able to deploy and maintain. Past certain points, you by necessity start regressing technologically. At a population of 100 million, we would probably end up with a technology level more like the early to mid 19th century. You just can’t maintain complex supply chains with so few people. Economies simplify, and you end up back in an agrarian state. At that point, most of the population is working on farms again. Suddenly children become an economic boon for a family farm, a source of labor as they were historically. Then the birth rate soars again. And of course at some point you can’t maintain factories that turn out millions of birth control pills.
I don’t think we will actually hit these kind of hard limits. I think cultural factors will cause the birth rate to recover long before we start seriously regressing technologically. But it shows that we’re not at any risk of extinction here. Even if cultural factors never cause the birth rate to recover, eventually technological regression will serve as a hard limit.
I can’t predict what exactly those numbers are where these limits kick in, but it’s pretty intuitive they exist. If your population density falls so far that you’re back at hunter-gatherer population levels, well you’re going to be living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
With utmost respect friend, that’s what you chose to read into it. The comment was neutral and didn’t imply you, specifically, nor any particular group. It’s just noticing that some people do, for whatever their reasons. If a neutral, observation triggered a strong reaction in you, it could be worth your time to explore that.
One of the most overcrowded, expensive, energy- and arable land-poor nations on earth with an unemployment crisis and comical economic inefficiency is facing a population decline.
It is not an inverse pyramid though. The older humans are the more likely they die. So you always and up with a pyramide at the top, at least somewhat. With low birth rates a society has to care for fewer children. That results in an actually fairly stable ratio of working age population to dependents.
A shrinking population also means build infrastructure is already built. They just have to keep things running.
Let’s assume for a second that in society X every couple has one child at the age of 30 on average, and that child mortality doesn’t exist. In that case the average couple has to care for one child and four grandparents for a total of 2.5 dependents per working adult. That’s an inverse pyramid; there are more old people than young people. The older humans are the more likely they are to die, but also when they die new old people come to take their place so it cancels out. Anyway for comparison let’s consider society Y where every couple has two children on average. In that case two sets of grandparents will give birth to four children who will then have four children in total, producing a cuboid and a ratio of 2 dependents per working adult. More than 2 and you get a pyramid at the bottom.
People are always born with the same age namely 0, but they do not all die at the same age. In fact getting older increases chances of death. Hence 2 babies per mother ends up in a pyramid too.
Even if you presume people all die at the same age, things will be stable. If say people all get childten at 30 and only work between 30-60 and then all die at 90. If we then assume 1 child per couple and everybody has a child at 30, we would get a stable dependency ratio of 2.5 dependents per worker. Obviously those numbers are not realistic. Btw that also is not a pyramid, but a trapezoid.
But this idea that more people leads to lower quality of life… that’s 1980s overpopulation panic talking.
Japan’s quality of life is suffering because they don’t have enough working age people to support their society.
Literally, we are going to have some difficulties in the coming decades because we don’t have enough people.
I’m not saying more people is always better, or that we have no limits. But when there are more old people than young people, that’s a bad situation, plain and simple.
Nah, tax the billionaires to bring money back to the working class and to fund the nursing homes. There are enough resources to support an elderly population, it’s all just being hoarded by assholes.
Society will just reorganize to provide. There are a ton of bullshit jobs out there that don’t need to be filled. The higher pay (specifically designed to be high to attract workers) will attract people to work the homes.
By what means will society be completely reorganized to fit this need? You’re waving this away but it’s wreaking actual devastation across Japan right now, and more countries are trending this direction soon, notably China.
Once you have a comfortable stable population of people who no longer worry about their future … then they will be more likely to have a family.
Somehow India is an exception to this. People worry about the future and still have kids. Nearly every married couple I know has at least one child or planning for one.
Because all forms of poverty are not the same. It’s only confusing if you insist on measuring things in dollars instead of stability. If they own their own land, a subsistence farmer in rural India has a much more secure and stable life than a precarious retail worker in the US. Yes, the precarious retail worker might have more trinkets and consumer goods than the Indian farmer, but the Indian farmer owns their own livelihood.
Having a child is ultimately an act of selflessness and generosity. People have children when they are fairly confident that they will be able to ensure those children will enjoy a quality of life that they find acceptable. And “acceptable” is context dependent. If they own their own land, a subsistence farmer in rural India can have a couple kids and guarantee that their children will have a secure future. If nothing else, they can pass the farm onto their children. At the worst, the farmer’s children will have the same standard of living as the farmer. Most such farmers would hope their children would get an education and do even better than they did. But if nothing else they can always just take over the farm. The same isn’t true for a wage slave working for Walmart. The Walmart worker knows their existence is incredibly precarious. If rents spike again and wages don’t keep up, they will be living on the street. Their existence is precarious, and few people want to bring children into such a precarious life.
Stability is the key to birth rates. It has nothing to do with dollars earned. A US retail worker makes far more dollars in wages than the market value of the Indian subsistence farmer’s crops. But the US retail worker has to live in a much, much more expensive country. And the Indian subsistence farmer owns their own land, a plot that’s been in the family for generations. They don’t have to pay rent. They don’t have to worry about getting fired. The only thing they have to worry about is crop failures. But farmers have had to worry about those since the dawn of time.
Hence my comment about poorly aware people and outmoded ideas. It’s shocking how we allowed our educational system to become so gutted, basic inferential logic has suffered so much, and how poor and stressed we’ve allowed ourselves to become that neutral and ambiguous comments are triggering visceral emotions rather than curiosity and exploration. I was busy and am decreasing screen time in general, so I didn’t take time to type all that out. Instead I returned to my work, had a nap, went for a walk, had lunch, finished my work for the day and am relaxing. And have decided to spend screentime learning something exciting and interesting - re-creating. Thank you for taking the time to type it up. Enjoy your day/afternoon/evening.
It’s because it’s not quite true. Reproductive rates are inversely correlated with wealth and education. If you’re poor, you need more kids to help the family (and, morbidly, even more kids in case some die due to lack of healthcare), especially once you yourself become elderly. When you’re secure, you end up not doing that.
But if you’re secure, but the world sucks, you say “why would I want to bring a child into this?”
If you want to maintain a population, you need to create the conditions for people to want to have kids, and give them the opportunity. Separately, you should also want to give your citizens a high standard of living.
But if you’re secure, but the world sucks, you say “why would I want to bring a child into this?”
Then the people around me must be oblivious af cause they’re pretty secure, lifestyle wise. I’m not talking about farmers or daily wage workers. The people I’m referring to have stable jobs and monthly income.
Having kids is a lot more expensive when you’re wealthy/middle class than when you’re poor (most of the costs like food, education, etc directly vary with your already existent quality of life), so to poor people it’s a lot easier to make the decision to have another kid. Also I don’t know about India but for example in my (third world) country daycare isn’t a necessity in the same way it is in the West so that’s part of the equation too.
offer me eternity,
and I’ll trade a cup of coffee and a dime looking for a handout
on behalf of those who have so little time
but who wants to live on just 70 cents a day? padding your pockets doesn’t make this a better place
“cereal and water” is a feast for some you
say
your price-tag on existence can’t cover your double face
quality or quantity: a choice you have to make
dipping in the icing
bringing home the largest turkey from the field
breaking all the piggy banks, scooping up the booty
licking all the right holes, bolstering the payroll
why reduce life to a dollar amount per day?
and why let the world think this is the American way?
your uneaten greens are a feast for some you say
survival and living are concepts you can’t equate
quality or quantity: don’t tell me they’re the same
I keep saying it all the time
It isn’t about the QUANTITY of life
It’s about the QUALITY of life
What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?
It makes more sense if you just concentrate on making life more manageable, comfortable and sensible for the population you already have. Once you have a comfortable stable population of people who no longer worry about their future … then they will be more likely to have a family.
I mean, misery is extremely relative. One of the paradoxes of Japan, thanks to its extremely conservative immigration policy and hyper-competitive economy, is that they’ve made a genuinely beautiful country to live in but one in which foreigners can’t stay and most natives can’t enjoy it. This population of NEETs who failed the cut-throat academic setting lack the resources to live a comfortable middle class existence. Meanwhile, the new guest worker program simply brings foreigners in to crush the wage labor out and dispose of them. Only foreign tourists, wealthy labor aristocrats, and the handful of small business owners who figured out how to survive get to enjoy Japan for what it is.
But, like, it shouldn’t be a miserable place to live. The amenities are world class. The country’s ecology is well-preserved. The education system rivals international peers. They’ve got advanced industry, mass transit, modern health care, spectacular recreation, a population large enough to keep the ball rolling indefinitely without going Easter Island on their own turf, and excellent placement adjacent to other post-industrial powers.
All they need to do is reform their abysmal work culture. But the work culture has become a tulpa they’re convinced creates the beatific conditions, rather than a cancer that’s destroying it.
+1 for correct understanding of “tulpa”. We need to be aware of our ideas and ideals we create and sustain. Not all tulpas are what we envision. They are, otoh, all teaching spirit-guides.
Beautifully articulated!
what does this mean
I think they may be referring to the archaeological history of the Easter Island culture … a wealthy productive society that once thrived on Easter Island in the South Pacific but then used up all the resources of the island until nothing was left and it destroyed their society and they disappeared.
oh the debunked ecocide hypothesis
Oh, what actually happened sounds way more like where the US is headed.
Almost all true except this part. The Japanese education system is actually pretty bad compared to most Western countries.
On the one hand, yes having a child with a higher quality of life is better than having many children.
However, there’s a good Kurzgesagt video about how the severe decline in birthrate can doom a population. Basically, if a population is not at the very least replacing itself, it will run out of young workers to keep the country going and vastly skew the proportion of elderly people to young workers. Small, rural towns will not survive since young people will flock to cities for work.
Though the video is based on Korea, the same concepts apply for Japan as well.
The logical, healthy approach to natural population growth and maintenance would be to provide social protections and supports for families and young people to grow into a society where they are encouraged and helped to start a family of one or two children in order to supply a healthy steady supply of new people for future generations.
Unfortunately, our world is governed by sociopathic wealthy overlords who demand more from people and want to give less to them. It’s not all their fault because the majority of us all sit around and just passively accept it as just a normal part of society. What that will probably mean is that in the future it will be a strange form of population control where children are no longer born but they will be manufactured and bred in order to provide a steady supply of human resources to keep the profit driven capitalist machine running for wealthy overlords.
From the look of how we managed our society in the past century … we won’t solve this problem sensibly, or with any empathy for society as a whole but rather try to deal with it from an economic and financial point of view. The wealthy owning class don’t see humanity as a whole that should be supported in any kind of healthy way … they see humanity as a source of wealth and a group of thinking individuals that can be taken advantage of to extract wealth for owners rather than for the whole of society.
“fear of decline”
also, your argument is based on the totally-nonsense assumption that there “has to be a certain number of workers to sustain the elderly” which is bullshit (frankly). it’s not about the number of workers; it’s about the productive output, and as we all know, that has risen tremendously the last few years. So there should be no shortage of workers regardless of how many workers there are. Everything else is bullshit the news (which btw are owned by billionaires) tell you because they want to sack a significant part of productive output for themselves - well ofc if rich take 90% of output it’s not gonna be enough for everyone. but that’s the rich’s fault and has nothing to do with “there not being enough workers”.
You’re not making an argument, there. You’re showing a graph that’s misleading because it starts at fucking 10000 BCE. Look at a graph of Japan if you want to talk about Japan, and of the current generations not prehistory.
Ah, yes, because having a machine that can churn out pottery like noone’s business helps a lot with elderly and palliative care.
There is absolutely a limit how few kids a society can have before it collapses. Where that is is currently not particularly clear because the situation is unprecedented, but that there is a limit is crystal clear. 10 young people caring for 100 bed-ridden elderly and one kid, how long is that going to last, even if you automate everything else?
His graph is still valid, as the exponential growth doesn’t really matter if we start from 0 BCE or 10000 BCE.
Here’s
Even if we would loose 60% of the population now, we would still be 1.5 times the population of 1900 (9miljard x 0.4=3.6 >2)
That’s still not a graph of Japan.
More importantly, you’re not looking at the derivative, that is, the growth rate:
The growth has very much peaked, the last large countries are currently undergoing demographic transition (from having many kids, few survive, over having many kids, many survive (growth spike), to hawing few kids, of which pretty much all survive), e.g. Nigeria will be done by 2100. And societal collapse because people either can’t do anything but care for the elderly, or social cohesion is failing because the elderly aren’t cared for, does not depend on absolute numbers, it depends on the raw growth rate, because young people from 1900 aren’t going to care for the elderly in 2100. And the growth rate it depends on is the local one how many Nigerians do you think fancy caring for Chinese elderly.
Oh and those projections above are with a moderate estimation of future fertility, that is, when the average country turns out like France. Not if the average country turns out like Japan or Korea.
Also, just to make this clear: There’s nothing wrong with the population shrinking again. Or growing, the earth is far from its carrying capacity if we’re doing it right. The trouble is shrinking too quickly, or for that matter growing too quickly. We should pine for two kids per woman, ±0.5, thereabouts: Don’t veer too far off replacement levels. And all that can be done by proper social policy, parental leave, good schools, work/life/family balance, sex ed, etc.
Yeah, i agree. Decline should be at an acceptable rate. Just that i think an acceptable rate for me is 0.66 children/woman. That would lead to an annual decline in birth rate of 3.6% (formula is:
1-(0.66÷2)^(1÷30)) assuming women give birth at 30 y/o.Just to contrast this: The US’ population (excluding Native Americans) grew steadily by approximately 3% annually from 1680 till 1880. Source:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_United_States
I don’t think citing the US supports your case. You’re talking about a country where the only time everyone is on one page, is interested in the same thing, a moment of cohesion, is the ads during superbowl. American culture may technically exist but it has close to zero depth. Regional identities are deeper, largely because immigrants clustered together, one source nation here, another one there.
It’s also not really comparable because much of that increase was due to immigration, often whole families, also I think you meant more like 30%, not 3%. Niger has a growth rate of 3.66, a median age of about 15. Fifteen. Half are younger, half older than that. Politically, it’s a complete shitshow that makes the Trump regime look sane. There’s such a thing as too much teen spirit.
But you’re missing the point that the population of Japan specifically is on the decline and has been for decades.
Even if we take out the cost of pensions for the elderly out of the equation, if people aren’t having kids to replace themselves, there won’t be enough working age people to fill every job needed.
For reference, the Japanese birth rate as of June 2024 was only 1.2. If that trend continues, in say 20-30 years, there will be about 1/2 of adults then as there are now.
The easiest and most immediate solution for Japan (and South Korea which is also having the same problem) would be to ease immigration so that more people can come in to work. But that doesn’t help in the long run nor does it address the cultural and societal factors that have lead to this point. And even then, since both countries are so homogenous, it would be hard for natives to accept a huge influx of immigrants.
There’s an overall negative correlation between wealth and fertility, so it’s not like the rich are having a ton of kids, either. Or even the societies with decent metrics on wealth or income equality, still tend to be low birth rate countries.
It’s a difficult problem, with no one solution (because it’s not one cause). Some of it is cultural. Some of it is economic. There are a lot of feedback effects and peer effects, too. And each society has its own mix of cultural and economic issues.
And I’m not actually disagreeing with you. I think there’s probably something to be said for cheap cost of living allowing for people to be more comfortable having more children (or at a younger age, which also mathematically grows populations faster than having the same number of children at an older age).
And working age people are necessary to make (and keep) life manageable, comfortable and sensible. This isn’t a hypothetical; they’re suffering the effects already. We’d need to lean a lot more into automation before society can function as an inverse pyramid.
Or, we could transition away from people doing made up jobs that don’t need to exist to doing things that actually need to get done
I’d be interested to hear what you think a made up job is
Japan is notorious for unnecessarily complicated supply chains to bolster employment. And for unnecessarily ripping up perfectly fine pavement and concreting hillsides that don’t need it. Again, to bolster employment.
There are many, many, BS jobs in Japan.
And they still struggle with youth unemployment.
Fewer people would be a godsend.
Very reminiscent of USA.
If only. US productivity is soaring but workers’ share of GDP isn’t. And we have chronic underemployment.
Things like medical billing where the vast majority of the profession exists because we’ve created a labyrinth to be navigated that doesn’t need to exist.
And who decides which jobs are made up?
The market. This is why I’m really not too concerned about falling birthrates. There’s a lot of bullshit jobs out there. Consider the typical office. It’s damning that despite all the increases in efficiencies of computer technology we’ve had over the last several decades, work hours haven’t changed at all. If anything, they’ve increased. And the number of people working in offices hasn’t declined. The efficiencies of digital technologies didn’t decrease work hours, the work simply expanded to fill the available space. Items that in generations past would have been resolved with a one page memo written on a typewriter have been replaced with 50 page reports full of charts and graphs. We have huge numbers of people preparing documents that no one ever reads. There is an absolutely absurd amount of fat and inefficiency in the modern workplace.
Or consider corporate vanity projects like RTO. Workers are on average more productive at home. But executives tend to be sociopathic narcissists who simply need people to constantly praise and validate them in person. They just don’t get the same narcissistic supply from remote work, so they demand thousands of people waste colossal amounts of resources to come into an inefficient office just to appeal to their depraved egos. Oh, and for many executives, the ability to coerce sex from their employees is a primary job benefit, and that goes away with remote work.
Oh, and don’t forget credential inflation. We demand people have bachelors and masters degrees for positions that 50 years ago would have been handled by someone with just a high school diploma. I’m all for education for those who want it, but the fact that you need a bachelors for anything other than food service and retail is a massive drain on our society’s productivity.
As birth rates decline and the population ages, the market value for the labor of the workers that remain will soar. They will be able to demand higher wages. Think the equivalent of a $100k salary for someone with a high school diploma. This will force companies to either adapt or die. Those that insist on inefficient workflows, require excessive credentials, or demand employees come into the office for the sake of executive egos will simply go bankrupt. They will be replaced by companies that are run more rationally.
Anyone who has ever worked in an office can tell you just how stupidly inefficient corporate America is. And Japan’s business culture is even worse.
I don’t think we’re going to have any problem getting by with a declining population. We can maintain our standard of living quite well just by squeezing the fat and inefficiencies out of our existing systems. There won’t be some grand government bureau deciding what jobs are “made up.” Companies that insist on hiring people for bullshit jobs will simply be driven into insolvency. And the world will be better for it. Working a pointless bullshit job is not good for anyone’s mental health. People need a sense of purpose in their lives.
And while apoplectic doomsayers might say, “where does this end, won’t the population eventually collapse to zero?” This isn’t a realistic scenario. Cultures are not a monolith. Different groups have different birth rates. Over time, those groups and cultural practices that encourage higher birthrates will be selected for through natural selection.
For example, in many countries, the general misogyny of the population is a major reason young women don’t want to get married and have children. They don’t want to lose their careers and end up the stay at home wife to a salary man who arrives home drunk every night at midnight. They want a more equitable sharing of parental responsibilities. Some men are better at providing this equitable arrangement to their partners than others. Those that are will be more successful at finding wives. And those couples will pass their egalitarian values onto their children. Misogyny will be evolutionarily maladaptive and will be removed from the cultural gene pool. Those that insist on their wives doing all the child rearing will not find partners and will not be able to pass on their outdated beliefs to the next generation. In time, the birth rates will recover.
Or, alternatively, countries will move more back towards multi-generational households instead of the atomistic couple+kids that has become the norm today. Multi-generational housing was the historical norm, and it may be again in the future. It could be selected for through similar cultural evolution. Regardless, below replacement birth rates will not be maintained indefinitely. Eventually things will stabilize. If nothing else, eventually your population gets so disperse that you can’t mass produce effective birth control anymore, and well things take care of themselves at that point.
TL:DR: how I learned to stop worrying and love the declining birth rate.
i would upvote twice if i could, but i only have one account.
also: people have been worried about birth rate being too high in the past (around 1800) and population count going to infinity, consuming more resources than the planet can give and provoking a famine.
And the population count stabilized eventually in every country that they were worried about.
And now people are worried that the birth rate is too low and population count will go to zero.
I dare predict it’s bullshit and the population size will stabilize at some point.
Yeah, people forget that there are some real hard limits on how far population can fall. What people fail to realize is that our level of technology is actually a function of our population. Mass production and industrial society requires a certain minimum population level and population density. If things fell so far that there were only 100 million humans on Earth, that would have profound implications on the level of technology we able to deploy and maintain. Past certain points, you by necessity start regressing technologically. At a population of 100 million, we would probably end up with a technology level more like the early to mid 19th century. You just can’t maintain complex supply chains with so few people. Economies simplify, and you end up back in an agrarian state. At that point, most of the population is working on farms again. Suddenly children become an economic boon for a family farm, a source of labor as they were historically. Then the birth rate soars again. And of course at some point you can’t maintain factories that turn out millions of birth control pills.
I don’t think we will actually hit these kind of hard limits. I think cultural factors will cause the birth rate to recover long before we start seriously regressing technologically. But it shows that we’re not at any risk of extinction here. Even if cultural factors never cause the birth rate to recover, eventually technological regression will serve as a hard limit.
I can’t predict what exactly those numbers are where these limits kick in, but it’s pretty intuitive they exist. If your population density falls so far that you’re back at hunter-gatherer population levels, well you’re going to be living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Wow that actually makes a lot of sense.
Hear me out for a wild idea: businesses could offer living wages, benefits, and work-love balance.
I mean yes, when did I say otherwise?
When did I say you did?
That’s kind of implied by the context.
With utmost respect friend, that’s what you chose to read into it. The comment was neutral and didn’t imply you, specifically, nor any particular group. It’s just noticing that some people do, for whatever their reasons. If a neutral, observation triggered a strong reaction in you, it could be worth your time to explore that.
Do you just post that comment randomly apropos of nothing then?
One of the most overcrowded, expensive, energy- and arable land-poor nations on earth with an unemployment crisis and comical economic inefficiency is facing a population decline.
Oh no.
It is not an inverse pyramid though. The older humans are the more likely they die. So you always and up with a pyramide at the top, at least somewhat. With low birth rates a society has to care for fewer children. That results in an actually fairly stable ratio of working age population to dependents.
A shrinking population also means build infrastructure is already built. They just have to keep things running.
Let’s assume for a second that in society X every couple has one child at the age of 30 on average, and that child mortality doesn’t exist. In that case the average couple has to care for one child and four grandparents for a total of 2.5 dependents per working adult. That’s an inverse pyramid; there are more old people than young people. The older humans are the more likely they are to die, but also when they die new old people come to take their place so it cancels out. Anyway for comparison let’s consider society Y where every couple has two children on average. In that case two sets of grandparents will give birth to four children who will then have four children in total, producing a cuboid and a ratio of 2 dependents per working adult. More than 2 and you get a pyramid at the bottom.
People are always born with the same age namely 0, but they do not all die at the same age. In fact getting older increases chances of death. Hence 2 babies per mother ends up in a pyramid too.
Even if you presume people all die at the same age, things will be stable. If say people all get childten at 30 and only work between 30-60 and then all die at 90. If we then assume 1 child per couple and everybody has a child at 30, we would get a stable dependency ratio of 2.5 dependents per worker. Obviously those numbers are not realistic. Btw that also is not a pyramid, but a trapezoid.
It’a a bit pear-shaped, then.
But this idea that more people leads to lower quality of life… that’s 1980s overpopulation panic talking.
Japan’s quality of life is suffering because they don’t have enough working age people to support their society.
Literally, we are going to have some difficulties in the coming decades because we don’t have enough people.
I’m not saying more people is always better, or that we have no limits. But when there are more old people than young people, that’s a bad situation, plain and simple.
Nah, tax the billionaires to bring money back to the working class and to fund the nursing homes. There are enough resources to support an elderly population, it’s all just being hoarded by assholes.
Money isn’t a person, though, you still need some people to work in industry, unless autonomous bots are your thing
Society will just reorganize to provide. There are a ton of bullshit jobs out there that don’t need to be filled. The higher pay (specifically designed to be high to attract workers) will attract people to work the homes.
By what means will society be completely reorganized to fit this need? You’re waving this away but it’s wreaking actual devastation across Japan right now, and more countries are trending this direction soon, notably China.
I like the autonomous bot solution. Japan in particular is developing elder care robots.
Totally agree.
It’s nearly impossible in rich areas for young people to afford a family sized house and daycare.
We need to solve those problems if we want young people to have families.
Somehow India is an exception to this. People worry about the future and still have kids. Nearly every married couple I know has at least one child or planning for one.
I don’t get it.
Because all forms of poverty are not the same. It’s only confusing if you insist on measuring things in dollars instead of stability. If they own their own land, a subsistence farmer in rural India has a much more secure and stable life than a precarious retail worker in the US. Yes, the precarious retail worker might have more trinkets and consumer goods than the Indian farmer, but the Indian farmer owns their own livelihood.
Having a child is ultimately an act of selflessness and generosity. People have children when they are fairly confident that they will be able to ensure those children will enjoy a quality of life that they find acceptable. And “acceptable” is context dependent. If they own their own land, a subsistence farmer in rural India can have a couple kids and guarantee that their children will have a secure future. If nothing else, they can pass the farm onto their children. At the worst, the farmer’s children will have the same standard of living as the farmer. Most such farmers would hope their children would get an education and do even better than they did. But if nothing else they can always just take over the farm. The same isn’t true for a wage slave working for Walmart. The Walmart worker knows their existence is incredibly precarious. If rents spike again and wages don’t keep up, they will be living on the street. Their existence is precarious, and few people want to bring children into such a precarious life.
Stability is the key to birth rates. It has nothing to do with dollars earned. A US retail worker makes far more dollars in wages than the market value of the Indian subsistence farmer’s crops. But the US retail worker has to live in a much, much more expensive country. And the Indian subsistence farmer owns their own land, a plot that’s been in the family for generations. They don’t have to pay rent. They don’t have to worry about getting fired. The only thing they have to worry about is crop failures. But farmers have had to worry about those since the dawn of time.
Hence my comment about poorly aware people and outmoded ideas. It’s shocking how we allowed our educational system to become so gutted, basic inferential logic has suffered so much, and how poor and stressed we’ve allowed ourselves to become that neutral and ambiguous comments are triggering visceral emotions rather than curiosity and exploration. I was busy and am decreasing screen time in general, so I didn’t take time to type all that out. Instead I returned to my work, had a nap, went for a walk, had lunch, finished my work for the day and am relaxing. And have decided to spend screentime learning something exciting and interesting - re-creating. Thank you for taking the time to type it up. Enjoy your day/afternoon/evening.
It’s because it’s not quite true. Reproductive rates are inversely correlated with wealth and education. If you’re poor, you need more kids to help the family (and, morbidly, even more kids in case some die due to lack of healthcare), especially once you yourself become elderly. When you’re secure, you end up not doing that.
But if you’re secure, but the world sucks, you say “why would I want to bring a child into this?”
If you want to maintain a population, you need to create the conditions for people to want to have kids, and give them the opportunity. Separately, you should also want to give your citizens a high standard of living.
That’s not really true anymore, but poorly aware people cling to outdated ideas
Then the people around me must be oblivious af cause they’re pretty secure, lifestyle wise. I’m not talking about farmers or daily wage workers. The people I’m referring to have stable jobs and monthly income.
Having kids is a lot more expensive when you’re wealthy/middle class than when you’re poor (most of the costs like food, education, etc directly vary with your already existent quality of life), so to poor people it’s a lot easier to make the decision to have another kid. Also I don’t know about India but for example in my (third world) country daycare isn’t a necessity in the same way it is in the West so that’s part of the equation too.
offer me eternity,
and I’ll trade a cup of coffee and a dime looking for a handout
on behalf of those who have so little time
but who wants to live on just 70 cents a day? padding your pockets doesn’t make this a better place
“cereal and water” is a feast for some you say
your price-tag on existence can’t cover your double face
quality or quantity: a choice you have to make
dipping in the icing
bringing home the largest turkey from the field
breaking all the piggy banks, scooping up the booty
licking all the right holes, bolstering the payroll
why reduce life to a dollar amount per day?
and why let the world think this is the American way?
your uneaten greens are a feast for some you say
survival and living are concepts you can’t equate
quality or quantity: don’t tell me they’re the same