- 269comments
- 42comments
- 119comments
- 124comments
- 35comments
- 41comments
- 186comments
- 20comments
- 13comments
- 35comments
- 10comments
- 10comments
- 103comments
- 26comments
- 259comments
- 312comments
- 259comments
- 29comments
- 42comments
- —discuss
- 78comments
- 9comments
- 1comments
- 176comments
- 22comments
- 46comments
- 10comments
- 87comments
- —discuss
- 9comments
This is a tough one to adapt to, and I think important aspects will be to boost productivity of working-age people as much as possible and to go all in on automation. But on the other hand this is the best thing that can happen for long term sustainability and against the environment and climate crises.
Does sustainability or climate change matter if humanity goes extinct?
How does a population drop equal extinction?
I think they’re implying the opposite. The world would be destroyed if the total population continues to grow. As of right now, we would need 5 Earths to sustain everyone’s current lifestyle, keeping in mind that more than half the world lives in poverty.
Individually, we all go extinct.
Japan could lose 90% of its population and still have more people just in Japan than existed worldwide ~10,000 years ago. I don't know what the "ideal" number of humans is, but I know we could survive just fine with quite a bit fewer than 8 billion.
How many rockets were they launching 10k years ago?
More people is more good
Everything exists within the boundary conditions of its environment. Humans, just like any other organism, can strip their environment of resources faster than they can figure out how to escape the environment or build a new one or whatever.
It's also worth pointing out that, so far, this is not the case. It may be prudent to be, well, prudent, but we're at an all time high in population and an all time low in absolute poverty. It's possible that more people is a factor in this, not less, and that those boundary conditions are never met.
Nonsense.
We went to the moon in 1969. The last moon landing was 1973.
The world population in 1969 was 3,625,680,627 [0]
The world population in 2020 was 2020 7,794,798,739 [0]
Today's world population is 8,029,731,569 [1]
We've more than doubled the world population in the 50 years since the last moon landing and no country has ever yet made it back.
Using your argument, I can unequivocally say that more people is bad.
In 1969, there were 324.23 ppm carbon in the atmosphere. Today, there are 416.43 ppm carbon in the atmosphere. [1] This does not even count species mass extinction, other pollution, etc. Even in 1969, there were sufficiently massive real environmental damage concerns to create the EPA within the same presidential administration.
This also does not even mention the massive resource constraints and conflicts that inevitably arise with overpopulation. this includes oil, water, lithium, rare-earth minerals, and possibly most important, phosphorus, which is rapidly running out, and when it does, the entire agriculture industry that feeds the current overpopulation will crash, along with the human population.
Humans would thrive with something like 1/8 of the population, especially with the level of technology, and will continue to advance.
Just consider that a miniscule 6.7% of people have a college degree [2]. That provides something resembling an upper limit on the set of people actively contributing to technological advancement. Interestingly enough, double that is about 1/8 of the population.
The view that "some is good, more is better" is just... to be kind, massively simplistic and wrong.
[0] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat...
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
[2] https://educateinspirechange.org/how-many-people-of-the-worl...
Isn't that a bit like wanting to only take in high skilled immigrants without wondering where they're going to get their favourite food from home (which as a high skilled immigrant, I can tell you, food is immensely important to us).
We don't do this stuff alone, we need haircuts, streets cleaned, trains to run, people to make and deliver food etc. We all contribute.
Yes, I understand all types of people create valuable things, and I absolutely do not mean to imply that just because someone is not highly educated,they cannot provide something amazingly worthwhile. I also very much enjoy food from other cultures, and would not want it to disappear.
So, let's take a look at food - and some data.
Only 150 years ago, it required over 70% of the population to produce enough food for 100% of the population. Today, it is under 5% in rich countries, and about 65% in poor countries [0].
Obviously, given the uneven distribution of technology and knowledge, those people are today contributing to society.
But it is also true that fully distributing modern agricultural technology will make entirely redundant (to the maintenance of a technologically advanced society) something like half of the world's population.
And that is just an example from one industry.
The point is that declining replacement population does NOT automatically mean that the technological level of society will decline.
Correlation is not causation.
If anything, population increased as a result of technological advance — ability to generate more food, better shelter, better medicine — technology was not the result of greater population. Once we have the technology, evenly distributing it will require far fewer people to build and maintain it.
Let's take it a step further, and say we want to avoid using massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticides common in modern agriculture. That will STILL not require the same amount of people slaving in the fields. The technology that will enable scaled-up organic farming is also massively labor-saving — agricultural robotics, not only planting and picking, but most critically monitoring for and eliminating weeds and pests [1,2].
Yes, there will be a greater need for people fabricating and maintaining agricultural robots, but that will be dwarfed by the number today's slaving-in-the-fields-jobs that will disappear in a near future decade. If they do not reproduce at full replacement rates, we will still have a society that has both technological workers, and others who contribute much more to the culture, including authentic cuisine.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/five-roles-robots-...
[2] https://www.ieee-ras.org/agricultural-robotics-automation
We would also have to revert to that level of technology because there wouldn’t be enough people to operate at each level in the supply chain to turn raw earth into wiz-bang computers etc.
I was just using that as an example, though I'm not sure 14 million would actually be too few to have that kind of separation of responsibilities. Assuming no genocide or catastrophe, by the time human population gradually dwindled back down to that level, we'd have hopefully settled on a fairly sustainable and automated existence.
The rise of AI seems to suggest otherwise.
This is still a very shaky ticket to bet on. Yes, the new crop of AI tools promises a lot of productivity gains, but for now they also need well-educated folks to operate them and integrate their output, and we don't quite know what the reliance of AI will do to peoples' educational interest/drive, etc. There might well be an overall downward spiral and loss of operating knowledge lurking there.
It would mean we reached peak capability as a civilization, and then we would be forced to rely on an artifact that can pull from that subset of knowledge to help patch together machines that broke down until we lost all the hardware to run the AI itself.
Far too many people in this thread are extrapolating a downwards line forwards for fifty years in the assumption that nothing will change and that nobody will decide to do things differently. Some of the Japanese people being born today - and there are people being born today, the number is not zero - will be alive in 2070.
What unites both questions of sustainability of the environment and of population is the question "what, other than money and its getting and spending, are we for?"
Nothing will change. It will only get worse. There's also people leaving the country. Short of a miracle nothing can fix Japan's issues. It's deep in its culture.
It's not a merit based society. Even if someone wants to do things differently it's almost impossible to push for it.
Humanity goes extinct if sustainability and climate change don't matter. And so does a lot else. We've already ensured through our actions to date that what remains of our time on this earth will be miserable, but we might still stand some chance of not completely ruining the place.
A 33% reduction in the population of one country is a tiny step in the right direction, but still far short of making a significant difference.
Humanity still goes extinct if climate change mattered due to the lifetime of earth/sun.
That is not at all necessarily true. We have another 5 billion years or so before the sun exhausts it's hydrogen and starts substantially changing.
Applying even current levels of intelligence and knowledge (nevermind projecting even hints of the growth rates over the last ~10K years since agriculture, writing, etc. started), that is more than sufficient to develop resources for interplanetary and interstellar travel.
These can be linked, though. I have a lot of young people around me who are hesitant to have kids because of climate change and the period of instability their offspring would be born into. If we manage to address climate change, people may well enjoy the prospect more again.
How will you know when you have addressed climate change? Will there be different climate models from today's, showing everything is now OK?
According to what I read in the IPCC reports, we already have those; it's how goals like ones under the Paris Agreement get derived. I'd imagine it's a mix of footprint monitoring to see if we are hitting targets, and updating models based on new knowledge.
The bottom line is that a lot of people have a sense of "we're doomed" these days that's at odds with having the energy to make plans for a long-term future, or to look forward to it. If we improve I'd hope the collective zeitgeist would shift accordingly, and give those people a better outlook.
My own point of view is ... tricky. I'm relatively wealthy and well-educated. Privileged, really. My kids would be among the most likely to be in a position to contribute to a better world, so maybe having kids is the best ticket to keep the world going. I feel like I should invest the resources I have been lucky to get into family and children. I'm nervous if they'd grow up to agree, however, because this is easy to think while living in relative peace and comfort.
Same (or slightly improved) models, different data from the records of the next N years.
IMO humanity going completely extinct has always been an unlikely outcome, at least from direct climate change causes like food shortages, rising seas, etc. Those are too solvable by just having less people around and/or in different places. Even secondary causes like war are unlikely because eventually one or both sides will lose the ability to fight across the Pacific and Atlantic, kill enough people the resource crisis is alleviated, or humanity and rationality kicks in eventually and agreements are reached to stop fighting.
The much more likely is life just gets really bad for a while or at the outside possibility things fall apart enough we slide back a few centuries in some industries. If we go too far back power becomes an interesting issue because we've exploited most of the cheap easily accessible power sources so successor civilizations won't have the easy coal deposits to power a second industrial revolution.
People voluntarily choosing to have fewer children is not going to cause the extinction of humanity. Consider that there are tons of people still having children, and that whatever genes they may have that predispose them to reproduce will, over time, tend to be passed on. Natural selection is a relentless machine of reproductive incentivization.
It also means less people doing innovation and markets that start getting smaller so that will create zero sum mentality.
Not necessarily. Only a small proportion of the general population "does innovation". In fact, automation and boosting productivity may mean (even should mean) more people doing high-value, innovative work.
It does not matter if a market gets smaller by number of consumers if total population also reduces and individuals are better off.
For instance, smaller population means smaller construction industry but also likely fewer builders. Does that imply that a builder will be individually worse off than now? No. They could even be better off if productivity increases drastically.
In the 19th century the USA had plenty of innovation and a widespread growth mindset even though the population was much smaller and less dense.
Most countries use immigration to mitigate this problem. For example, Canada has been unable to naturally replenish their population since 1972. Now they have one of the highest immigration rates in the developed world. Japan as a whole is too xenophobic and racist. They would use robotics & AI rather than allow foreigners to settle and assimilate on a mass scale unlike nearly every developed Western country. South Korea has a similar problem, but I’m less familiar with it
As for the reason for Canada’s birth rate woes since 1972, it was not socioeconomic (it’s likely due to declining male fertility). Abortion was only legalized in 1988 in Canada. Housing was affordable during that time and its economy was strong during the long period of consecutive population declines.
Of course, like many countries a large portion of Canada’s population, including liberals, are now against immigration due to a combination of housing woes and a healthcare system in turmoil. Unfortunately, Canada has no choice unless they want to see their economy further crater and not have the working adult population to pay for socialized programs such as healthcare. According to statscan, Canada’s NIST, even if they drastically increase immigration; it will only slow down the age population bomb and not prevent it i.e. Retired elderly will still eventually outnumber both working adults and children one day too soon. The speed will likely accelerate due to the Canadian public’s growing distaste for immigration.
I think the "growth ideology" becomes almost a religion. Economic growth, and subserviently population growth, is very important to the super rich. Sure. But should we then all believe that without growth we are going down?
Japan will probably lead the way, but I'm confident we can create societies that thrive and shrink.
And if not, I need to see some real hard proof why shrinking has to hurt actual people, instead of using "economic growth" as a goal by itself.
Well there is nothing inherently bad about shrinking or smaller populations, they do pose significant challenges to the current social and economic models, which are based on growth and large working age populations.
Lower Workforce participation means people working more For Less personal reward. It also requires a transition away from using that too fund governmental function. Most governments use GDP growth and a higher future tax base to negate the fact that spend more than they receive.
In terms of impact to real people, this means adjusting to life with less material wealth. This doesn't just mean fewer trinkets, but also cuts to social Healthcare and welfare spending
So shrinking absolutely leads to austerity measures?
I find that hard to believe.
Nothing is absolute or predetermined, and in fact it is incredibly complicated and uncertain.
That said, with all things being equal I would expect austerity simply because you have a smaller and smaller percent of the population working.
This means fewer working people to provide services and build things per capita and there is no way around that. Even if you managed to fix income inequality, you still have fewer people to fix your toilet. You also have more elderly that cannot do things for themselves and need assistance so the labor market is hit from both directions
There wont be enough people to repair the automation lines. Society needs certain baseline levels of populations to enable the existence of certain technologies.
Maybe like Climate, we set a baseline. Countries agree to a target year (like 1850, or 1960 or whatever and they all agree to take steps to stabilize at those levels with the proviso that there is no forced abortions like the CCP but instead the approach of education, birth control and in places like Japan subsidies to promote stability of population level.
Japan has the second oldest population in the world, averaging at 48. I was surprised to learn europe's average is 44 while both china and the US average 38 years old. If I had been asked to guess I would have assumed china averaged much younger than US, and US and europe would be closer
Young population means high birthrate/population growth and/or low life expectancy. Neither is the case for China. Young populations are in Africa mostly.
I was astounded to learn that in Afghanistan about half the population is under 15.
iirc, Afghanistan is currently the country with the world's fastest population growth.
Google says that population went from 19.7 million in 2001 (to take a significant date...) to 40.1 million in 2021. So +20 million/doubled in 20 years, which is crazy.
China carefully controlled population growth for a lot of years. The result was very asymmetrical due to misogyny, but there was surely some addition to Chinese quality of life over the long term.
Disputable. And they'll have severe problems because of it in the upcoming decades.
It’s definitely easy to argue that there are ‘some’ benefits to the one child policy. But it’s probably like a sugar rush, where an addict has the benefit of experiencing a short term high for a long term decline in health.
China is fucked.
PRC family planning is like one of the few "state has 100 year plan" memes that's worked out relatively well in real life. Reduce kids, increase parent mobility + productivity to build wealth, concentrate said resources to the 1-2 kids, move up industrial/skill/value chain, done at PRC population scale maybe chance get rich before old. Like this is basic demography planning / projection 101 for some reason useful idiots in west thinks PRC demographers didn't do obvious due diligence. Sure, policies over corrected on males/birthrate, as CCP hammering policies tend to do, but PRC demographic development is essentially on track - India now trending towards the shitshow that PRC was trying to avoid, 1B+ "low quality" people stuck in shit/informal economy, i.e. more bodies than what the system can handle. Now PRC has one of the greatest demographic trend in next 100 years with respect to sustainable human capita relative to geopolitics:
1) declining population, prodominantly poor, unskilled, and old being aged out. Supported by high home ownership and savings rate because this cohort has little expectation of state support. taps head don't need to worry about onerously high dependency western ratios if people don't expect such dependence. This cohort will just have to settle with mostly taking care of self while being 100x richer than when they were born. It's not 1st world QoL, many stuck with being old before rich, but it's better than most in same circumstances.
2) the high skill demographic divident / second wind of moving from current 15M STEM to 50-100M STEM in next 100 years, while broader workforce going through general upgrading of transitioning from current 25% skilled workforce to 70-80%, comparable to modern JP/DE. This is the largest, concentrated high skilled demographic divident in human history, likely for ever since very few countries (i.e. basically India) has the base population and systemic ability to coordinate and exploit so many bodies up the human capita chain.
Most of west going to be reduced version of itself since already maxed out human capital, maybe can be backfilled by automation. Few immigration heavy anglos will grow at steady pace, assuming their onerous welfare nets hold. PRC is shifting from productive capacity of 2 Japans and 6 Nigerias into 6 Japans over same cycle - that's the most growth headroom and systemic capacity to back it up.
Are you aware of the one child policy that was enacted in China for many years?
The world should follow suit, 8 billions people it's just a ridiculous amount of people given the fast-paced damage we are doing such as climate change and many others born from consumerism and mindless growth.
The world is following suit, and quite rapidly at that: China, Korea, virtually all of Europe, the US (excluding immigration), etc. Even parts of southern India are now below replacement level.
The world population is still going up steadily and will continue to do so for a good while led by Africa no?
I think Africa's population growth is predicted to plateau around 2100
Yup, it's by no means equally distributed, but fertility is dropping fast in Africa too.
I think it'll plateau well before that though because they'll see so much pressure on food and water resources. Africa doesn't feed itself now and if the rest of the world needs to direct more food production locally due to lower yield caused by climate change then Africa is positioned to suffer the most.
But yields continue increasing at a relatively fast pace overal?
It's projected to peak at a bit over 10B before the end of the century and then steadily decline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow... (see solid red median line).
Please do not downvote this. At least present your side of view and educate us. Many of us feel that productivity/ money are not the goals of life. That humans are putting too much pressure on the planet by consuming resources and in the end it’s going to be detrimental for our own existence.
Please let us know why we are wrong.
People need to prioritize people over materials.
Yet right now they are prioritizing heavy materialistic living over a bigger population. It is why the world "can't take the pressure of a huge population" argument surfaces.
https://youtube.com/shorts/mnYRqE1lC0E?feature=share
Because having disproportionally more old than young people in a society is extremely unlikely to result in a higher QoL. The opposite is much more likely..
In the short term yes but in the very long term, the old people will die out.
These are a few of my previous comments on the matter:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35357326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35362526
Can you explain your claims please?
More people require more food and more energy, both of which need to be produced, This can only happen through economic growth and efficiency gains.
More people could live with much less energy if they didn't all drive around in 3-ton fossil-fuel-burning metal boxes and live in huge, separate houses with HVAC.
Thank you for most entitled comment in this thread so far.
People in developing or newly industrialized countries typically don't drive SUVs or live in individual houses with HVAC.
This idea that we could solve the climate change problem entirely by restricting the amount of energy people are allowed to consume in the Western world is a misguided and quaintly privileged point of view.
For most of the rest of the world limiting growth would come down to population control and demanding people remain in abject poverty.
8 billion people is just fine. The problem is that wealthier nation just consume more and waste more. We literally feed perfectly good farmlands to cows, for example.
What does just fine mean? Certainly if we all ate prescribed vegetarian diets and lived like quakers we could sustain 8 billion people for a long time. But that isn't fine for me, nor is it fine for me that we obliterate almost all natural wildlife and wild areas to feed and house ourselves and power our grid.
Its already not fine from many of our perspectives.
Unless you do a full analysis, there's no use doing a partial one. Much of tech design and manufacture happens in "wealthier nation" for example, that in turn is distributed worldwide e.g. even poor countries possess mobile phones, and electronics in general.
Trading crops for western currency is a generally neutral exchange, but at least it gives you access to things you cannot otherwise produce - and technology generally can break the zero-sum/geo-arbitrage of trade.
Where does the wasted energy go?
It's not wealthier nations, everyone is consuming more.
The farmlands is a perfect example you make because everyone eats more meat. Meat consumption per capita in Europe increased an average 10% just in the last 7 years.
But Turkey, Vietnam, pretty much the entire middle east and Africa increased per capita consumption by more than 60% in less than two decades.
And on top of that it's even more environmentally toxic as beef keeps taking more and more of the share of the meat consumption.
And it doesn't stop at meat, India didn't even figure in top 10 car sales globally just 10 years ago, now it's the third market in the world after China and US and sells around the same cars as Germany and UK (which are all in the top 8 world markets) combined.
Japan will become extinct at some point in the future. No girls growing up in Japan think to themselves "I want 2.1 children someday". But they'd all have to think this for population decline to plateau.
Since not all girls will think this, the few that think such will have to have an even higher number. You won't see 1 in 5 think to themselves "I want 10.5 children".
That you want this to happen everywhere is bizarrely misanthropic. It's an Erlichean death cult.
No, that is silly. Their population is on the decline because there are too many people. Later when it declines and there is not enough people, people will want to reproduce. This problem solves itself, I don't know why you growth fascists get in such a twist about it. Growth can't go on forever, you have to give up on it sometime.
It's not silly. Children growing up in Japan today learn from the environment they are in... they learn what "normal" is from the adults around them. They internalize the idea of having 1 or 0 children.
The population never recovers. Extinction is, at some point, inevitable.
Your comment amounts to "you're wrong, things magically change and it's all good". Do you know nothing of their culture, or psychology in general? Conformists aren't well-known for bucking the trends their parents set and doing something wildly different than they.
Your reasoning about "learning from environment" isn't much better than "magically change" as it's very speculative.
Do you? Japan has proven highly adaptable in the past.
You're extrapolating a trend in an unrealistic way. I don't think they will go "extinct" as you put it. I think it is more likely their population will only decline to a certain level.
If their population began declining twice as fast as now (1% per year) it would take around 105 years for the Japanese population to reach the level it was at back in 1900.
It would take 500-1000 years for it to actually go "extinct" (depending on what do you mean by that).
A lot of things can happen in this time frame. So claims like:
Seem pretty absurd...
As the population declines, the rate will pick up. A nearly extinct Japan will give rise to an even more profound nihilism.
Tell us the science fiction story where the Japanese learn to love life and want even more Japanese people to exist to revel in it.
Nothing happens in that time. It's extinction. Their culture isn't nearly malleable enough for anything significant to change.
Why?
Could someone just 60 years ago easily predicted the current situation? Possibly but it would have been a contrarian opinion.
What about 100 years ago? 150? 200? Almost impossible.
See the pattern?
Right.. I'm sure there were people who were saying this in the 1860s or 1940s. Turns out the Japanese society was one of the most malleable ones that ever existed. Of course there is no guarantee that might happen again. Who knows... I'm not the one pretending I know everything.
Because the fertility that they see expressed around them by adults acts as the ceiling, not the floor for their own future fertility. If grandpa had 3 and mom had 3, you might only have 1 or 2, you'll very rarely ever have 4 of your own.
This is just the nature of those numbers... a person with 2 kids is, theoretically, working on a third. Until they get too old, and then it's an "oops".
So, it ratchets downward. When someone waits too long and has fewer, then they become the normal that children around them see, those children internalize the new number (or at least some sort of fuzzy average of those adults around them).
One would expect that to decline ever faster. And that's in fact what we see so far... instead of a fertility rate of 1.4 that just holds steady for centuries until extinction, it drops year to year and decade to decade, and will take far less than a millennium.
Probably, if they somehow could have shed their 1960s biases. The trend had already started.
It's not malleable at all. Adaptable is one thing. Adaptation is an active verb, each person individually and all collectively will themselves to change, so to speak, to overcome challenges. They do that occasionally.
Malleability suggests that some outside force can come along and change them against their will, or at least without them noticing... and they are less malleable than many other cultures. If they were malleable, then we'd expect far more results from the various programs that the government puts in place to alter their culture. And those programs have fallen flat on their faces. They don't make a dent in Japanese work culture, they won't make a dent in Japanese fertility.
We're probably only 25 years or less away from 0.3 fertility rate. By about that time, it won't be so easy to argue against those who say what I'm saying... so those who did will have moved on to "this is a good thing". Some are already hinting it in the other replies. They hate humans, they wish they never existed, and they are secretly cheering this on. (Yet, I'm the fascist somehow.)
This would make me sad, except that it's difficult to be too upset about people who wish they never existed making themselves extinct.
This is magical thinking. It like imagining that if someone diets long enough, they'll disappear. Turns out that the vast majority of people reach a comfortable weight, and stop dieting.
It's experimentally validated. Calhoun ran it multiple times. Animals don't bounce back. This isn't moose populations crashing because of overfeeding and starvation.
Which is where the analogy diverges from reality. Cultured populations don't reach a comfortable weight... they become "depressed from the hunger", and decide to go for broke.
No, this is silly. Why would young people try to produce more when their income are mostly taken for someone else's pension? Why would you try to raise more children, when there are already 4 or more elders on your shoulder?
An attempt to justify their own decisions while still being judgemental about the decisions of others. Meat-eaters get enraged, too, when you talk about pollution and disease; and constant tourists try to minimize their individual burning of huge amounts of jet fuel by using collective statistics that elide the fact that 90% of people in the world rarely or never fly.
A lot of us are conservative about everything in the world except things that affect our own lifestyle or our loved ones, when we suddenly become permissive. Others of us are very liberal about how the world should be run, but very strict and demanding when it comes to their own things and their own families.
You broke the site guidelines badly here with name-calling and personal attack.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points without any of that in the future, we'd appreciate it.
It is very strange to me to have the thought "man, the current bee population cant support the human population much farther" then on the heels of that, "the human population is about to experience a significant decline"
Population growth is already <1% and trending down YoY. It's scheduled to plateau in 2086, 43 years from now. Most of the growth at this point is attributed to prior high birth rates and increased longevity.
The elephant-in-the-room is this: religion aka super-virulent-neuro-memes generally promote having many children. How will the world reduce human growth on that basis.
Religiosity down in most of the developed world even the US is falling pretty fast after holding out for a long time.
I'm wary of this kind of reasoning. You could say the same about communism/central-control and totalitarianism but China is still doing fine as a superpower without having to become more open or more democratic.
Religiosity is down, but how long does it take to adapt? Scientology (new strain) is up.
Scientology is up according to what? Their own numbers are pretty suspect.
And when I say religiosity I mean the portion of the population that has no or limited religious affiliation is up as a whole not just one particular denomination or religion, it's down as a whole across all religions.
Me.
100 years ago: 0 scientologists now: conservatively, at least 100 scientologists
As for the portion of the population that has no or limited religious affiliation, I'm not sure that mean it will keep going down, versus comes into some kind of equilibrium.
Finally a sane and reasonable answer.
Multiply population times consumption to get footprint. There is no question we are over the carrying capacity of the planet for humans with a lifestyle of mindless consumption and reproduction.
The insects are mostly gone. Half the animal species are gone. The oceans are filled with plastic garbage. The reefs are dead.
Humans have no capacity to limit our own numbers. Trends in Japan and projections for a few other places ignore the numbers for China and India with over 1.5 billion each and monstrous ecological collapse in both places.
And still the company I work for, like every capitalist organization, harps on the insane Pozi scheme of perpetual growth at every meeting. Why can't we just produce something of quality that will last and provide it to a stable market? Greed and insanity.
The only reason you don't believe that we are in a catastrophe of overpopulation is that the degradation of the environment is not immediately evident if you live in a city.
Don't worry. The last to starve will be the first to suffocate.
No, they don't: the birthrates of Japan and China are actually very similar. (India is different.) China is of course much larger, but it's a geographically larger country anyway, and always has been. It's facing the same demographic problems, if not worse.
Are you talking about frying pans, or computers? Do you really want to be stuck with a high-quality computer from 1975? Or a television from the same era? Modern electronics use far less energy than stuff from a few decades ago. With clothing, you have a good point though, but here again, who wants to dress like it's 1975?
Wouldn't a shrinking population make housing more affordable, which makes it easier to start a family
Yes, there are many Japanese properties that can be purchased for a song. Many of these homes are located in rural areas though and may need extensive renovations or repairs.
By that metric so do Europe and the US. It's "property near where the decent jobs and society are" that's expensive.
I watched a program about a couple that bought a "1€" house in Italy. Long story short, by the time the house was in a liveable state they'd spent around 100k, and the village they were living in had virtually nothing to offer in the way of shops or services and everything was a 45 minute drive away. They eventually put the house on the marker for less than they'd spent on it.
Outside of central Tokyo housing is already quite affordable.
Ok but a third of the population lives in tokyo and that number is only going up
Japan already has a lot of semi-abandoned older properties that you can buy comparatively cheaply but the cost of bringing them up to modern standards is prohibitive due to regulation as I understand it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/realestate/japan-empty-ho...
In Japan a property is not seen as an investment so it cost almost nothing compared to US/Europe.
Japan has a public pension program, and having fewer young workers paying into this will definitely pose a challenge.
Only if you believe in the supply-demand theory of housing bubbles. Japan hasn't yet made it easy enough to use housing costs to transfer wealth from the working class to the landlord class, whereas the US, Canada, UK, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand have made continual increases in house prices their only consistent domestic priority.
A depressing realisation. Western governments can't seem to plan for a long-term, multi-decade strategy anymore. But they are consistent in policies of inflating asset prices by any tools available.
Wouldn’t say it’s governments, but unfortunately homeowners (which is the majority of the population in some of these, like Canada) can’t afford their house price to go down. Quite a significant amount of them rely on it as their retirement plan (sell, downsize, retire). These people will perpetually vote for people who won’t allow house prices to go down (which, kinda makes sense — “voting for your own good”).
You don’t want a house, that wasn’t maintained 2-3 decades. Because old people do not care anymore and don’t have resources for optional maintenance. There must be a choice made: starting a family or starting long and expensive construction.
the main constraint isn't the walls but the land it's built on.
Probably only if more properties are left vacant due to people dying from old age than those that are wrecked in coastal areas by rising seas due to climate change.
If you have fewer people to pay pensions for the elderly, you will have to raise taxes. No ?
Or lower pensions
Or borrow more or cut pensions or sell off public assets. Lots of options, although all have some drawbacks.
The young will be too busy taking care of the old once it reaches a 1:1 ratio of worker:retiree.
There's a lot of working, intelligent people who would happily emigrate to Japan if:
- They weren't somewhat hostile to immigration
- Their working culture wasn't borderline slavery
Who's "they"?
Slavery means people are not remunerated and have no personal freedom. Japanese are definitely remunerated and definitely have personal freedom.
"お疲れ様でした" (otsukaresamadeshita) = "Thank you for your hard work".
Japan takes great pride in work. Just because you don't understand the culture doesn't give you the right to call it slavery.
If you want to invoke a discussion on slavery in East Asia, do it in the right context.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2020/04/04/the-fat...
The Japanese
Fuck me. That's a horrible broad stroke.
That Japanese work culture is exploitative? You might as well say it's a broad stroke to say Americans like hamburgers.
We will have to accept a newer modern form of slavery. Where workers must work. And their options to move to a different job are little to none.
It is what is binding women to work in Japan because living cost is high.
Where's the difference to the USA or UK with people taking second and third jobs just to make ends meet due to the cost of living?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
It's the holy grail of capitalistic and socialistic work cultures.
borderline slavery =/= slavery
There is absolutely nothing controversial about stating that work conditions in Japan are appalling. Calm down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
I don't see the need to bring China to the conversation.
If your entire waking hours have to be dedicated to working, what's the point of having a wage at all?
I already know that Japanese culture takes great pride in work. I wasn't being literal with the word "slavery" (that's why I added "borderline" next to it). That pride doesn't make the day magically last longer than 24 hours.
Being passionate with your work is great and all. But time is finite, and life passes by. If I'm left with no time to cultivate any hobbies or even spend quality time with my family and/or friends, then I don't see the point at all.
The need is because your comment diminishes actual modern slaving in East Asia and is an incredibly disrespectful stereotype of a "salaryman".
Is American "crunch culture" any better? Does that crunch culture in America represent America as a whole?
"The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development does annual research into the amount of work done by the average citizen in a given country over the course of the year. According to these statistics, these countries rank higher than Japan in terms of average working time in a year: Mexico, South Korea, Greece, Chile, Russia, Poland, Latvia, Israel, Iceland, Ireland, Estonia, Portugal, and the United States. Even New Zealand ranks higher than Japan on documented hours worked."
Whataboutism at it's finest. Instead of trying to engage with the original commentee you try to steer the discussion towards "hey, but what about these places". Of course the working hours of the average American "paycheck-to-paycheck-working-three-jobs citizen" are insane but that is a direct consequence of hyper-capitalism.
It is a matter of fact that the working conditions of the average salaryman are not well suited towards building families. There are more than enough statistics to support this fact, however, you need to be careful about the target demographics of the workers. Additionally, the social and cultural pressure to spend time with your coworkers and your boss after work means further time spent away from your (possible) family.
I don't really understand why it is so difficult for you to accept the fact that Japanese working culture is not suitable for the 21st century. Automation and effiency is increasing accross nearly all white-collar industries and Japanese traditions still see it fit to mandate "arrive before your boss, leave after (sic!) him".
The savior mentality is strong here
I bet this explains a lot of why people are not interested in having children anymore. Why to have children, if you will not be able to even afford a house for them, and working your ass off will preclude enjoying their company.
your job can be your hobby. that is what many japanese feel like. not everyone loves american way of life of buying every electronic with credit card debt and then having to do shitty jobs to pay back. also the definition of shitty varies. some japanese find great pleasures in simple jobs as long as they feel they are learning and moving toward being better. we can definitly see that americans do not work like the japanese are. the service culture, the experience at any kind of starbucks or macdonalds, the infrastructure and the state of roads. why do you think everything is pristine in japan? because they pride themselves into achieving something greater at the end of every day of work. Its obviously a generalization but as a whole it shows very well. the biggest culture shock u can have is fly from JFK to HANEDA and go to a starbuck in both of those. time is finite so better make every moment aiming to serve something bigger than "i hate my job and want to finish at 5 and whatever in between is an obstacle".
and im not praising that im just showing the good side of it and not only the bad side "working too hard". no model is perfect
Sounds like a bad cultural fit for you then. Values are subjective. One could easily turn it around and say that a life spent in the pursuit of happiness is a waste. Hedonism is not a universally accepted value. One could equally say that Duty or hard work is the measure of a life well lived.
I don't want to come off as critiquing you, but this is an important point if you want to understand other people and their value systems
Not slavery, but https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan...
I think language is a much bigger barrier than any purported hostility to immigration. Japanese visa laws are actually relatively open.
immigration is a bandaid, not a solution, to population collapse
i honestly don't want to see countries import large swaths of people who don't agree with their culture and values the way europe has, its sad to see it happen
the americas are much better at handling immigration, but eurasian countries should probably not try to copy it too hard. a better solution is to fix the culture and encourage women to have children
Japan is not alone. Whole western world will shrink signify in this century. There is only single family with 2 kids in 9 houses in close neighborhood. In other 8 houses live retirees between 70 and 90 years old. That’s west Germany close to Munich. Other places do not really look younger.
I am really very curious which country will emerge in 2084. It will not be an European one for sure.
Edit: Many people don’t like the truth. Please take your time and look at UN demographic forecast: https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...
No-one forces Europe to allow such high immigration...
Actually immigration is what is saving our economy and why we're not struggling yet at a social/financial level with the whole retirees issue like Japan is.
No, it's not. Immigration is 'easy' as it avoids making the changes to adapt to stagnant/decreasing population, but those changes will have to made one day because population cannot keep growing indefinitely, so it's just kicking the can down the road. On the other hand, high immigration creates many social issues.
Frankly the debate has been poisoned by ideology and political agendas to the point people actually believe that there is no choice. But, really it has not been going well at all for the social and cultural fabric of European countries and just stating that means risking being labelled whatever nasty term you can think of.
I think it is you stating ideologically poisoned opinions.
Regular (even ignoring irregular) immigration contributes for 10% of the GDP in Italy alone.
All stats clearly show how regular (and even irregular) immigration is a high benefit to European countries.
I'm Italian and I can guarantee you that many sectors of our economy would be dead without immigrants, especially our precious food industry.
Immigrants pay taxes here, produce goods here, consume here, but they get little out of it as they are neither schooled nor retire here.
See, e.g. key findings here:
https://ec.europa.eu/migrant-integration/library-document/pr...
The other part of your comment is similarly loaded.
Yes, it happens that immigration may lead to social tensions. That's very true. But the experience differs wildly and real stats have to be taken into account.
E.g. In Germany crime is at all times low after having taken more than 2 million refugees and regular/irregular immigrants in a decade.
They have been absolutely core to German growth and I am hardly pressed to state that taking so many immigrants has been anything but a net positive.
I haven't denied that. But that's not the point, which you are ignoring. In fact your reply illustrate my previous comment that immigration is the easy option for industry, but it is not sustainable.
QED. Have a nice day.
in many european countries 40-50% of this immigration is unemployed. that's not a net positive. immigration was a positive when unemployment wasn't high and cost of life wasnt that crazy high in western europe.it was also a time where western europe had industries and blue collar jobs. those jobs are gone and bringing millions of people from poor countries w/ low education background will only bring false hopes to those people.the past 20 years did not require mass immigration.
and for germany crimes can you break it down into the type of crimes so that we see that your stat doesn't hold? best look at countries that had mass immigration for long like sweden. how is it going crime wise?
has for industries that thrived thanks to immigration. I know the nice NYT story about parmagienno saved thanks to hard working immigrants. Why not? but most of the time industries that struggle to hire native are paying salaries that wouldn't allow natives to raise a family while allowing immigrants to buy a house at home in a few years. this is why they favor mass immigration so that they can keep the salaries low. we saw with covid and the stop of immigration that salaries in UK for truck drivers went up for instance. its offer and demand 101
Those aren't immigrants. Those are "guest workers", or expats. Immigrants are people who move to a new country permanently.
actually yes. european union declared "family policies" not to be part of their work and leave it to individuals to decide whether they want to make or no children. they even punish Hungary for doing it and call Orban a far right activist for being nationalist (like most of the world countries are). at the same time they finance foreign countries so that they can have children policies (https://twitter.com/EUDelegationTur/status/16033126425667829...).
it is obvious that european unelected leaders of the EU are favoring mass immigration vs birth/child policies and the fact that people like you and most of the media is lying about it is the proof that they don't think people would approve. in most of EU countries you don't get money/help/incentives for having children when your income is high or even average. You only get help when you are poor. this obviously tends to make people not to want to have children. South Korea took the opposite direction (too late but still) and now heavily finance child birth at all incomes.
It's obviously false, France give plenty of incentives for couples to have children,I think this year the national budget is more than 5 billion (and truly more than 8 billions, because 3 of the 5 are matched by municipalities), I've never heard of Europe attacking the CAF or anything.
And if you're rich enough to not qualify for direct help, the tax breaks your child provides you is greater than the maximum amount the poorest families get for a child.
Also even using private daycare, if they have reglemented prices, the CAF and muni pay for two third of the real price, at least in my area.
And you also won't pay the real full price of the conservatory/music school. Nor you will pay the real full price of museum, school, sport and youth camp, no matter how rich you are. I've worked with children who lived in a manor in the center of Paris, and in the same camp I had children from the rural Jura (west Virginia Appalachian for the US people) and one child in foster care. The full price was 500 euros for two weeks (with rebates depending on how poor you are). This isn't the true price. You get help even if you're a top10 French business lawyer with a manor with garden in the '6eme' (maybe tmi, but it has been ten years). (BTW, all of what I listed do not come from the 5 billion I talked about in the beginning, the 5 billion is only what the branch 'family' from the CAF get, I think the total budget is close to 12 billion and cover a lot more than just family).
plenty of incentives for couples to have children when you are poor yes. when you are in the middle class you'll get some but not all. for instance a first child would get you 180 euros per month (if your household earns less than 36k otherwise you get 0 and still pay high tax unlike poor people). diapers and milk for a month is already way more than that especially with inflated prices of today.
so. let's do france. the tax break is of a maximum of 1500 euros for a child. I don't know if you have children but I guarantee this costs much more than that
so lets take the best example that will fit your narrative: someone who earns 35k household in france. he'll get 2160 euros/year + tax rebate of 700 euros. that will be the government help he would get. I round it to 3k euros a year for a child...
now if your household earns 40k or more you'll get 700 euros rebate a year.
and if you earn much more the max is 1500euros from tax rebate. knowing that rich people send their kids to expensive childcare, schools, buy more expensive goods.
so for lower income families and people in midle class below 35k youll get 3k/year. knowing you need to move to a bigger apartment and seeing the cost of cities like paris your 3k euros are gone. so yeah. it is not worth it financially to have a child in France. EXCEPT if you are really poor and unemployed.
compare that to korea who now gives 755$ per month per child and has a similar economy size/salaries
No, you have the right amount (i actually think it's a bit less for young children, i have to check but 180 should be the money you get for kids over 12 or something like that), but the "tranche 1" is for taxable income under 71k, not 36k. Then, if your taxable income is under 100k (a bit less i think), you get half the anount (so 90), and over 100k you get half again (so 45). But you still get money, even if you are a high earner.
Gp said that it was only for the poor, i said it was not. I totally agree it's not enough.
No, the daycare, even private ones, are "conventionné", and the CAF (and municipality) is paying at least half the cost (in some area it's 90%, but most likely it's 60%). If you're rich enough, ou can pay a baby-sitter, and half their salary is another tax-break. It's the same for the school. Unless you send them to unsanctionned school (and this is your right, but you cannot complain), the state is paying the teachers, the municipailty the sport and probably the 90% of the bus.
If you're poor enough, sport is free, museums are free, music school is free (and obviously school "cost" (200 euros) is taking care of by the CAF). Free meals too (i think it was like 70 euros for 31 * 5 meals until my 14 anniversary). Ah, and Youth camps are mostly free too! (but limited access, and defunded in the past ten years). 100 euros vacations in the Alps, on the azure coast, or kayaking down a river, for two weeks. Good memories.
Anyway, the subject was that EU was against natalist politics, i think we can say France have a natalist politics (less and less funded, true), that my familly benefited from, so GP was wrong. The details do not really matter.
I think being less of us in the world is a benefit for the human race and the future of the globe. We're already way more than exhausting our resources, we want too much, for as little as possible and there's more and more of us everyday.
We're only worried about this whole thing for retirement and productivity reasons and their social and financial impacts, which are serious but can be sorted out.
There's other things that can not be sorted out. The balance of global powers and culture. Like the western world or not, I prefer it to Russia, China, India. Which are the ones that can slip in the role of dominant global power if the west declines too much in population. Or if it's culture and values get too diluted.
Granted, these things happen in many generations, we'll be long dead before it happens (presuming it does), and as I have no children, nor want, so I couldn't say it interests me aside from an intellectual debate.
Interesting point, but honestly I couldn't care less about global chess power games.
Also, Russia has among the lowest fertility rates in Europe, Chinese population has pretty much capped (the growth is 0.3% YoY), both countries are going to face the aging population issue sooner than us.
Ain't so nowadays.
"You can't be neutral on a moving train" -- this isn't the 1600s where they're on the other side of the world speaking a different language and only having an impact indirectly.
I am not neutral, I hope in a better future.
Can this be assumed? As the singularity approaches, human resources may become less relevant, e.g. warfare might not be determined by numbers alone, but by training and equipment.
The singularity probably wont happen under the current limitations of power/cost per transistor/latency.
This century will belong to India, they have the large and young population.
China seems much more likely. Their government is far more competent and their institutions are far more solid. India has a lot going for it, english creating a natural alliance with the west is a huge one, but they've got a lot to improve before they can move past china. The demographics in china are an issue, but they'll still have around a billion people and the one child policy reversal is helping fix the issue.
India has a large and young population most of whom will have no prospects. That's a recipe for disaster. India is now trending towards the NIGHTMARE scenario PRC family planning / one child policy was trying to avoid. India has the bodies but not the system to develop and harness/coordinate talent enmass. Even PRC with more competent system couldn't wrangle 1.4B+ people. 100s of millions were left behind. Realistically India is going to have a few 100m being uplifted and 1B+ stuck in informal economy / susbsistent agriculture.
I think that it's not going to be a country as much as a region: The Indian Ocean.
India is set to double in population by 2100. Africa is set to quadruple, with East Africa growing a lot too. Indonesia is already very populous and will grow, but likely not as much as Africa.
Combine AI with (hopefully) new fusion tech, and you've got a recipe for a mega explosion in human potential.
For some good reasons, I watch Kismayo, Somalia with a degree of interest. Twitter is not bad to view the area, as English language newspapers are quite bad. There are many videos of young people going out into the hinterlands near there and visiting with their grandparents for the day. Many of their elders are nomads and live in nomadic bands still. As in, they have no homes and don't intend to get one. The children in these bands are in for a heck of a century as their lives go from near stone-age to a AI-fusion-flying-car-vacation-on-the-moon future well within their lifetime. Buckle up!
The unintended consequences of WWII are mind boggling. 78 years latter we are still seeing the social consequences playing out in demographics. A big Baby Boom, followed by a bust. Economists don't look at demographic models enough.
Don't forget that WW2 itself killed well over 50 million people, between direct casualties, civilians, the Holocaust and other genocides and war crimes, and starvation.
Are there different solutions to pension planning other than controlling the birth rate or reducing pension sizes?
The nastiest one is to reduce period it is paid... Probably not something that is going to happen with current cohort.
A higher savings rate directed toward retirement-savings/pension and increasing immigration are two.
Raise the overall productivity of working-age people, and ensure these productivity gains help finance pensions, instead of getting stuck in billionaires accounts in some tax evasion heaven.
Another L
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/25/1171924186/contact-is-lost-wi...
As bad as the drop might be the population is still reasonably big. The worse part is how the demographic pyramid is predicted to look like, mostly older folks with a small consuming portion.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/2073/
Having said that 2070 is so far out, projecting current trends and sensibilities (say towards immigration or family planning) might not be the best way to understand where Japan lands in 2070.
Other countries have been dealing with Japan’s problem for decades now. Their population projections have been pretty accurate. They’ve been able to stave off the impending disaster facing Japan through immigration
But would Japan be Japan when Japanese culture is replaced by an admixture of foreign cultures? People are attracted to Japan because of the uniqueness of their culture --like Tibet. One of the arguments against the annexation of Tibet by China is that it would dilute Tibetan culture and be replaced by Han culture, else that argument is moot and Tibetans are better off with the lesser dictatorship of the CCP over the theocracy of a Dalai Lama.
One of the disgraceful things when traveling abroad is the "ghettoes" where all you see are foreign retirees, ex-pats and other "nomads" where local culture is replaced and a new culture emerges to cater to this new influx in order to extract commercial benefit. So the Spanish Riviera, Thai beaches, Dubai, (also in FL who cater to Spring Break, for example
It's the cultural equivalent to the Strip Mall. In the US and Canada lots of towns have the similar feel because they have the common thread of national and regional chains which mimic national chains. This is something most people lament --but this is what would happen to Japan if they allowed mass migration so supplement their own population targets. It would be a country like many others with nothing distinguishing it apart.
Is Japan of 1950 also Japan of 2050? Its a sort of ship-of-Theseus issue, but when we recognize that cultures evolve, grow, mix, adapt, and continually become something wonderful, it's less of a concern in my mind.
Oof, I doubt this is anywhere close to true given the treatment of minority groups under CCP policy. Sovereignty, forcibly taken, is rarely an improvement and is detrimental both to the people whose sovereignty was taken and to the people who took the sovereignty. Much better to engage in economic trade and diplomacy.
Right, but this is internal change and evolution rather than externally influenced. Japan is a high trust society. They are cohesive. That would change.
Remember monocultures (as in one world monoculture) are not ideal? That we aspire to celebrate differences? Eventually, we'll have a homogenized world culture --that is not something I'd like to see. I prefer there being many different cultures with their OWN idiosyncrasies and ways of life.
Therefore, what?
Is a house the same house if your tear it down and build a factory?
It should be noted that's the opinion of Western liberals, who are pretty culturally imperialistic and expect and demand that other cultures adopt their values and adapt to their preferences.
The house argument is silly when applied to Japan of all places, which is known for frequently doing demolish-and-rebuild for wooden construction. Even one of the famous castles.
You misunderstood what I said, read it again. Is a factory the same house, if it was built on the same plot of land? It's an entirely different thing, and it's just nonsensical to bring up ship-of-Theseus in a case like that.
No, it's my personal opinion and observation.
Synthesis of external influence is unavoidable -- people being people -- and paradoxically faster when formally made verboten. Else why does China have a Great Firewall (proves external influence is attempted to be avoided) to prevent cultural intrusion and a massive flow of graduate students expatriating (evidence of the paradox)?
A culture can avoid or embrace. It's not a normative "Western Liberal" value called out, it's a positive acknowledgement of human behavior.
Yeah, but that's not what's being discussed here, which is the importation of literal foreign people (immigration) in order to keep declining population numbers up, which is quite different. Immigration is a solution that strongly reflects Western liberal ideas and priorities.
I disagree. Especially in modern times, immigrants moving somewhere else (i.e. exercising their natural right and freedom to move elsewhere) is a difference of degree of external influence, not a difference of kind.
Thus, in scope for discussion.
Exactly. People love uniqueness of cultures etc — but if there’s tons of mixing due to trying to hit “growth” standards of the modern capitalist world… every nation will end up the same mix of random people. Losing culture and replacing it with mono-consumerism.
I don't think culture is "replaced" in any country that we've seen extended immigration too.
See the United States and Canada
Xenophobia is both Japan’s strength and weakness
I don't think Japan "fears" foreigners. They just want to live their own lives without foreign influence. They like doing things their own way at their own pace.
That’s the same thing. They feel that their culture is too weak to assimilate foreigners
That does not make sense. When the Normans took over England over the decades they replaced the local culture and upset the language. It's not that England was "too weak" it's that the numbers meant the local culture would be absorbed. We can say the same about Taiwan after the '49 revolution and how it lost its Austronesian identity now it's mostly a Han culture.
Modernization has similar effects but locals can modernize in their own way rather than import wholesale a new culture (India vs China).
All of the examples that you’ve cited are just examples of “melting pots”. Culture wasn’t destroyed. It simply evolved. To my knowledge, the English do not speak a dialect of French
Even if culture was destroyed, I don’t see it as a bad thing. Different languages and cultures are a barrier to empathy and historically it’s been a leading cause of conflict and violence. It’s too easy to “other” people whom you can’t communicate easily with
Preserving culture at all costs for its own sake is backwards and it prevents progress
Japan is already heavily "admixed" with US culture as a result of a .. situation that developed not necessarily to their advantage.
Which countries are those? AFAIK, Japan is the one leading the trend in the demographic crisis, followed by some Eastern European countries.
(Copying my other comment)
Canada has been unable to naturally replenish their population since 1972. Now they have one of the highest immigration rates in the developed world which has let them stave off Japan’s problems for decades, enabling their entitlement programs to continue functioning
As for the reason for Canada’s birth rate woes since 1972, it was not socioeconomic (it’s likely due to declining male fertility). Abortion was only legalized in 1988 in Canada. Housing was affordable during that time and its economy was strong during the long period of consecutive population declines.
Of course, like many countries a large portion of Canada’s population, including liberals, are now against immigration due to a combination of housing woes and a healthcare system in turmoil. Unfortunately, Canada has no choice unless they want to see their economy further crater and not have the working adult population to pay for socialized programs such as healthcare. According to statscan, Canada’s NIST, even if they drastically increase immigration; it will only slow down the age population bomb and not prevent it i.e. Retired elderly will still eventually outnumber both working adults and children one day too soon. The speed will likely accelerate due to the Canadian public’s growing distaste for immigration.
Citation needed. Male fertility hasn't fallen anywhere near precipitously enough to make a father incapable of having a mere 2.1 children over the course of his entire reproductive lifetime. People aren't having fewer kids because they're incapable of having kids, it's because they're making the choice not to.
Indeed. It does rather show how much this is a discussion among men with no female voices.
I shouldn’t need to cite anything because it’s not new news, and Canada’s decline in birthdate occurred well before any major socioeconomic changes
https://news.virginia.edu/content/male-fertility-declining-s...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32168194/#:~:text=Summary%3A...
There’s plenty more on the topic with differing opinions on the root cause
That’s what defines being unable to naturally replenish the population aka the age population bomb. Countries are below the 2.1 reproductive rate. Even the US went below in 2012. Canada has hit it in 1972. None of this is new or a revelation.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/The-new-popu...
The only places not affected are in Central Africa. The theory is that pollution from industrialization results in less male fertility
You are making a big jump from biological capacity to have children to population level childbirth outcomes.
I have never seen infertility claimed as a leading cause in the scientific literature and there is vast amounts of contradictory data.
The main drivers are lifestyle choices and availability of contraceptives. 1972 does not predate most socioeconomic changes like women entering the workforce and their education levels. Sexual intercourse and marriage rates are also huge factors. you can look at child birth demographics within countries. There are several demographics or groups that have much higher reproductive rates in there are no good reasons to think that they are somehow free from that impacts of pollution.
Not true. The decline in birth rates actually started in the 1950’s before the sexual revolution. It only came to a head in 1972 ie the problems did not start in 1972, that’s the year Canada became unable to replenish its workforce with native births alone. Canada was also behind the US when it comes to the sexual revolution. Abortion wasn’t even legal there until 1988.
The root cause of declining birthrates is NOT socioeconomic
Japan will be fine. Russia, not so much. https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/03/04/russias-populati...
It may be not as bad as it sounds if we see the advances in age reversal happening. The next 50 years will be nothing like the last 50 years, and the last 50 years were full of changes.
That's a big if. IMO anti-aging could be similar to self-driving, i.e. harder than it seems.
Worse, it's biology so we have to actually work with the messy wet lab system that makes up our bodies instead of a human built system we can at least nominally control and design. At least traffic has a design and intent so we're not fully wedded to whatever worked for a bacterial half a billion years ago with big dreams and a fancy new mutation.
I'm terrified of the consequences of anti-aging in societies that are already gerontocracies. Do you really want 150-year-old Supreme Court judges? Besides which, anti-aging really will kill any political desire to increase birth rates.
If it would mean saving my mom and getting her healthy again, or me getting healthy again (even though I'm not that old), then yes, I can deal with 150 year old supreme court judges.
Dictators with nukes are much more scary to me
Don’t forget that they have one of the highest fertility rates in Asia.
our entire culture revolves around pushing women into the workforce instead of encouraging them to have children
its nice to have more people participating in the economy but why should their most fertile years be spent getting bureaucratic requirements just so they can struggle to find a job that gives them maternity leave? if that's what they want that's one thing, but they aren't really offered any other choice
i want a serious quality of life study on women who chose to have kids at 20 vs having no kids at 30, we're doing things wrong and its only going to be a more painful realization because population collapse is exponential, not linear
I was with you until here… how is it they are not given a choice? If a woman wants to have children instead of entering the workforce, what exactly is stopping her from doing that?
Economics. If all the other women are part of two-income households, they will inflate the cost of certain essential goods (like housing) out of reach from a single-income family.
Ultimately, the shift to dual incomes will probably pay out as well as deciding to eat your seed corn instead of planting--a wonderful time of plenty followed by starvation and collapse.
Of course, there's a ready made solution to the problem of eating your seed corn that everyone should be happy with: dump your starved, dead body on the street and have someone else move into your home.
One of those pays you money and the other one doesn't.
you have to be able to afford to have a kid
plus you might need time and a place to find a decent husband
none if this simple imo, it would take either a loan or a subsidy, or someone whose family structure is fine with them living with their parents
ninkendo - you are either and an idiot or very young (you are can be excused for your view if you are young) . Most women work to earn a living and pay their rent,expenses and survive like everyone else. Do you understand?
Flagged.
Please read the context of what I said before the unnecessary name calling.
The OP was trying to cast the issue as a cultural problem, not an economic one, saying that women only work because our culture pressures them to do so (instead of, you know, economic reality.)
My point is that you can’t frame this as an effect of feminism in culture, then also in the same breath say “they have no choice in the matter”. It’s not feminism’s fault that median wage isn’t even close to enough to raise a family comfortably, and that raising kids needs two incomes.
Then you did not phrase it correctly. You could either say that I have to understand the entire context which is somewhat fair but not entirely.
As for OP I actually get the point he is trying to make even if he did did so imperfectly. Often the cultural is mixed with the economic and others. In fact I would suspect that feminism/culture has overall had a bigger effect, probably resulting inadvertently the economic one. Woman overall today probably have a worse deal while actually they _think_ that they have a better deal. They are their own own collective worst enemies.
I should add that the government has made the lives of both men and women very difficult through excessive taxation etc, so that the luxury of a single spouse working no longer exists.
Strong cultural pressures * 2, because a man is required.
It's ok, the least productive sections of society will face the greatest declines.
I don’t quite see the problem with this. Japan requires innovative solutions because they don’t have space for all their people. In the future they’ll have less people.
There's plenty of space here for people. There isn't enough space for everyone to live like in American suburbs though.
I have yet to hear a cogent answer as to why this is a problem. I see so many alarmist articles that talk about this being the lead up to some sort of financial armageddon but are short on why or how. Can anyone please explain that to me?