Its a good thing and we should stop wringing hands over declining population. This is the singular way in which we can mantain a habitable planet for humans, is to have fewer humans.
Pass sensible immigration policies and it becomes a non-issue.
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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The main problem is that most countries don't have their economic system set up for it. The retirement system also in many cases is not sustainable with a shrinking population. This is going to cause a lot of pain and probably countries will start out with policies aiming to increase birth rates to attempt to maintain the status quo.
You're going to face a lot of resistance trying to actually adapt economic policies to a shrinking population. Especially from older people.
Japan and Italy are both going through this right now. I'm not sure its going particularly well, so I think you are generally correct. We should be putting much more effort into figuring out how to manage this transition, because its both completely necessary, and inevitable.
Can't speak for Japan but for Italy an easy way to deal with shrinking population is by allowing more immigration. The one thing the current government is against, and the populace has been conditioned to believe is the main problem causing all sort of issues. Particularly by facilitating an influx of skilled workers, you have from day one taxpayers that can fund your pensions, and that didn't cost you a euro for the first 18 years orbso of their lives (education, health care etc). Of course it's not that trivial as first they should create an attractive job market that makes skilled workers want to go there in the first place but other countries have successfully done that. I'm not counting on this to happen, just saying that it's an option
As we continue to replace workers with machines it will be easier… but that’s a slow process.
Japan is like being in the year 2000.
I think if you talk to people in the west they would say the year 2000 is better than now.
They have cheap housing/ rent, the country is safe, plenty of jobs. Sounds great. The only issue japan is having is that gdp isn't increasing but from an individual person point of view things seem better.
Sounds great. The only issue japan is having is that gdp isn’t increasing but from an individual person point of view things seem better.
So if you rely on a narrow view of what success looks like (for example, only considering GDP growth), it would be considered not good, but from a lived experience, its fine.
It makes sense that an economy that overshot what its population growth rate can support, it needs to contract.
Now if India would follow suit.
This is such a dumb myth. The problem is that we refuse to embrace green energy, not that there's too many people.
If the oil lobby didn't block all progress this would have been solved long ago.
Energy isn't our only limited resource.
A few top% people in the world (mostly western countries) are responsible for the majority of emissions
We throw away a billion more times food than we really consume too. And we just dump everything we don't like into the ocean
Everything is a distribution problem, not an availability problem.
The problem is that the amount of population doesn't match the way we live. You could create any ideal society and say that overpopulation isn't the issue, or create an underpopulated society and say the way we live isn't the issue.
You're saying "we just need to fix the biggest issues of our society in in order for overpopulation to be a non-issue, easy!"
I'm saying we would screw up the earth even if we literally had 1/2 the people. By just dumping even more in the ocean and being even less responsible.
We have an absolute abundance of resources and energy and somehow (oil lobby) we manage to be so inefficient that we will never improve that efficiency unless absolutely needed.
If we had half the humans we would waste twice as much.
Exactly. Natural attrition is the nicest way to restore balance.
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Anyone projecting 75 years into the future is just making things up and doesn't need to be covered as a news story.
Do you deny climate change on the same basis?
No, they just need to be kept in that context. We trusted science on chlorofluorocarbons impacting the ozone layer, and chose to fix it rather than let it keep going. Was the projection "wrong" because CFCs were regulated, or did we just interact with it in a practical way?
The same applies here. There's a population issue that (as you mentioned in another comment) without other factors, will come into effect. China can fix it, or let things play out and see if the "unknowns" can fix it for them.
Except birth rates aren't physics that will progress if left alone, they're dominated by cultural choices that are impacted by economics and governmental policy. There's no such thing as "without other factors", because they're unable to predict fundamental inputs. What's China's economy going to be like in 75 years? How about their food supply under climate change? Is modern day "China" even going to exist? The CCP itself is only 75 years old.
They can't predict the inputs for 75 years, let alone their feedback into birth choices. It's just a highly simplified math sim with arbitrary coefficients for the few things they try to model. Pull a different number from your ass to plug into the economy growth box or add a new function to represent widescale automation and you get whatever number you want. You can look at macro birth rate trends for a single country and think "yeah, I could fit a pretty good exponential decay line to that", except then you look at another country that had the same birth rate in 1950 and the coefficients change. And since it's exponential those little coefficient tweaks make a big difference 75 years later. In 1950 did anyone have any reason to think that Mongolia's 75 year birth rate would be twice that of China? Or South Korea's would be 60 percent?
The thing about long-term predictions (at least ones that get publicity) is that usually the goal is to change them, so few have been "proven". No one is printing stories about how an isolated set of rocks is going to be decayed by X% due to weather, because no one cares.
Except birth rates aren't physics that will progress if left alone, they're dominated by cultural choices that are impacted by economics and governmental policy.
Exactly. Those are the factors that are being considered when making these predictions. If economic factors and policies are making it harder to have kids, then birth rates drop, which is what we're seeing now. What else is going to have as much of an effect?
These predictions don't exist to take bets on. They're not scrying into the future. They're just binoculars that point to where we're going.
"Hey, here's a possible future. Not the most likely or even the most accurate to some imagined neutral policy position, just one potential future. Or maybe even not a potential future if we're missing a key impact." It's all bullshit man, with practically zero prescriptive value. One of the broadly assumed core components of birthing decisions, economics, is almost unpredictable even 20 years out, let alone 75. The simulation-based social "sciences" are just prettied-up hunches and guesswork in anything but the shortest of terms.
But I agree that they aren't meant to be proven, because that's a very convenient space to work in when your methodology is "I made a guess about the coefficient" combined with "what if complicated things were actually simple". Garbage in, garbage out.
You sound really sure about your understanding of statistics and probability, and I don't think anything I can say can impact that. I'm going to defer to the experts, but you do you I guess.
Time series forecasting is a pretty well-established statistical method though.
It's not a matter of doing math well, it's that your unknowns destroy any prediction you're making. If you're doing it correctly you're expanding your error bars as you get further into the future. By 75 years out you're all error.
Its simple demographics. China hasn’t run out of kids, they did that 20 years ago after 1 child policy had been in effect for over 20 years. China is running out of adults on their 20s and 30s. They don’t have the enough people in the right age range to replace their numbers even if they could get young adults to have more kids (hint they are not convincing anyone.)
China is currently one of the fastest aging nations on the planet and it’s only going to get worse.
That's going to be an issue in 10-20 years. Who the fuck knows what it's going to be like 75 years from now. We're talking about a span of time as long as Communist China has existed. 75 years ago computers barely existed.
Science, science can predict it. We have models that were created over 40 years ago that predicted current global warming trends.
We have models that accurately predict population trends as well. But it’s pretty simple, when you have an agrarian based economy people tend to have many children because they are helpful around the farm. When a society urbanizes having a dozen kids is now a burden and birth rates plummet.
China urbanized within a generation. Stack on the effects of the one child policy and they are no longer reproducing at a rate to replace their current population.
Social sciences and hard sciences are not the same thing. Social "sciences" are largely unfalsifiable and dominated by the "unless modified by human action" caveat that breaks predictions. You can predict very general trends like "fewer births", but in 1949 you couldn't look at the populations of Mongolia, China, and South Korea and know that they would have vastly different birth rates 75 years later.
good, now do India!
India needs prosperity like China had from 1996 until 2018 to get close. This is the Chinese century and a lower headcount helps fight long term inflation so all that wealth generated in the beginning will retain its value going into the late this century. Xi should be seeing this as good news.
We're all losing more than 60 by then
Japan is having a demographic crash and China is getting jealous... China, you're a cool kid when you're being you - you don't always need to ape Japan.
Hardly the only two countries. In the US it's only masked by immigrants. Fertility is even coming down in most parts of the third world.
It's mainly attributable to women's improved education, career prospects, and access to contraception, plus declining infant mortality. Every single one of these factors is a good thing, but the combination of them will lead to a global demographic crunch over the next century.
I disagree with your statement that it's "masked" by immigrants - I think immigration is a legitimate solution... but I don't disagree with your causes - especially wealth inequality/declining career prospects for everyone.
This must come as a surprise to "pro-family" conservatives but being ground into dust by your employer doesn't really get the mojo flowing.
When all the countries go below replacement levels, where are we going to get the immigrants from then? Outer space?
If all countries go below replacement levels we'll be in a wonderful position because we'll be able to feed and provide for everyone. That's a looong way off though.
Not necessarily. Pension systems will be strained, many economies of scale might break down, infrastructure might become too expensive to maintain with reduced taxpayer funding. Most young people will work to support old people leaving little leftover economic potential for anything else.
A lot of people think that we can solve it with automation, but initial investment required to do that might become too expensive before it becomes necessary.
China‘s crash is much worse. And as uplifting as some people make this headline to be, hundreds of millions of Chinese will suffer greatly from this crash. And no, immigration won‘t solve this. Who wants to move to a crumbling communist China decades from now when their LED skylines stopped light polluting the night sky? I mean I already would never want to live there and it won‘t get better from here.
All they have to do is give people more days off
And a child allowance. Problem fixed.
This is why America has the advantage of immigration. If our population declines, our culture is more adaptable and able to integrate people from different backgrounds than a place like China.
Edit: This is apparently controversial, but I don’t see how it isn’t true. Lemmians love to downvote the truth.
Nah I'm sure they'll run out of ethnic minorities eventually.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
By 2100, the world's second-largest population could number just 525 million, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS) has predicted.
The report came on the heels of Chinese statistics bureau data showing that more people died than were born in China for the second consecutive year in 2023.
"It amazes me how everyone seems to agree that the planet already has too many people whose demands for even the basics of existence like food, water and shelter are placing intolerable demands on the ecosystem—yet as soon as the population of a country begins to decline, its government reacts with near panic," the Associated Press quoted June Teufel Dreyer, Chinese politics specialist at the University of Miami, as saying.
This can lead to a shortage of skilled workers, decreased labor supply, and increased pressure on a country's medical and social welfare systems.
To this end, both the central and local governments have in recent years introduced measures to entice couples to have larger families.
However, these have so far had a limited overall impact in the face of changing preferences among young urbanites, China's slowing economy, and the higher cost of living in first-tier cities.
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