> Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world at 0.9 births per woman on average.
This data, while making Korea seem like the most rapidly growing population disaster on earth, is actually better than the latest data. Korea is now at 0.78 and falling. [1] I really have to wonder what the lower limit is and when (or if) it’ll ever trend up within our lifetimes.
There's a Korean influencer who became huge in Mexico. She was a Korean teacher at a Mexican university, but became famous sharing funny videos about cultural shock. She has also openly talked about how she moved there to heal after suffering from acute burnout in Korea, to the point of wishing death [1].
Through her and some Korean friends, I've got a glimpse at the level of stress around all aspects of life in Korea. Education and work are obvious ones, but there seems to be a lot of stress about many other aspects of life, like money, prestige, and personal appearance.
Interestingly though, I think it's not difficult to see why this is all the case from a macro-economic and geographic standpoint. Korea is effectively an island surrounded on all three sides by relatively unfriendly countries. It's so small, and quite devoid of important resources.
It's biggest asset is by far its population and what they managed to build and sell abroad; phones, cars, chips, appliances, music, TV— if Korea's economy wasn't super-charged like it is now it's easy to imagine it getting lost in the sphere of influence of China, Japan, or finding more trouble via North Korea.
I can only assume all this stress and pressures in life has to do with the low birth rates. Pushing themselves this hard is not without their consequences, it seems.
Isn’t a low birth rate considered good? It’s one of the defining attributes of a developed nation. Not to mention the ecological footprint of each human, contributing to pollution, climate change, and overpopulation? Humanity should be striving to flatten and eventually reverse population growth, so achieving a low rate like this should be admirable.
Maybe it’s bad for our current economic systems, but as we reduce birth rates we also need to be looking for economic systems that don’t simply rely on an ever-increasing population of worker bees.
It is debatable whether we really have an overpopulation problem or not. Pollution in general is caused by industry not individuals. You could argue big industry is the result of a large population but it's still a systems problem imo.
Reversing population growth means having an ever increasing population of elderly people and increased burden on the young to support those elderly. It's hard to see solutions to this that aren't dystopian and downright cruel.
We do have an overpopulation problem if we expect to increase the quality of life of everyone on Earth.
Wealth-wise, the global bottom 50% emit on average 1.4 tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) per year. The top 10% emits 28.7 tCO2e [1].
We're not talking about billionaires when we mention "the top 10%. This was a 2019 study, so 10% of the population was about 770 million people— that's roughly the population of the whole of Europe [2].
That bottom 50% deserve their living standards to be elevated. They deserve and should get sewage, home appliances, water pipes, electricity, cars, meat, video games, disposable income, etc etc. When that happens, half of the population could be producing one or two orders of magnitude more tCO2e. Someone in that 10% right now is producing 205x more tCO2e than someone in that bottom 50%, and it isn't because they own private jets, it's because they can afford a washer and dryer.
There are fundamental limits to physics, to space and to time. If the next generation wants cars, single family housing, authentic meat and fish and various other amenities, there needs to be less competition for resources.
As it stands now, technology is not catching up and a smaller percentage of them will have access to those amenities.
We can't just create more oil out of thin air. Progress on batteries is too slow and renewables and electric cars are too expensive. We're already over-fishing and over-farming the earth with our current population. We are missing all of our climate targets, and that's on an earth where most don't live in developed countries yet.
We could replace those needs with technology like VR experiences and processed food for example, but I have a hard time seeing how that will be enough.
Bringing in younger migrants from countries still growing in population to help look after our elderly is probably the only realistic one (we already do that pretty heavily in Australia despite population growth). At least there's not a problem of space/infrastructure to solve.
That's a good solution for english/latin speaking countries since there's a large pool of migrants to choose from which already know the language but for a country like Japan with its niche language and specific customs.. it's much tougher unless they wish to change their culture which they probably don't and having migrants assimilate into their culture isn't an easy ask either.
It's also only a viable solution for countries with small/medium populations. As India and China start ageing it's going to be hard for them to find the hundreds of millions of migrants required.
I'd imagine China will indeed start to pull out all stops to attract younger migrants at some point, and I'd guess many may even come from India, and certainly from large countries with high fertility like Nigeria. But sure, it can only help so much if too much of the world's population is living in countries with unbalanced demographics.
Even if India's per capita GDP has largely caught up, there'd still be a substantial underclass of young workers who are likely to be attracted by higher incomes they could get in China, given the differences in income distribution. And migrants nearly always sacrifice a certain amount of democratic franchise just by virtue of not living in a country where they have citizenship - it doesn't seem to be a great deterrent, compared to other cultural/language barriers and having to live far from family etc.
They may eventually. And no, it's not a long term global solution, but it buys enough time to avoid the worst impacts in a real demographic crunch.
You are right though that, for instance, the outflux of healthcare works from countries like the Phillipines to Australia and other nations with greater income potential does cause strain on their own healthcare systems.
It's not just the economy. A large, old population needs care, which needs to be provided by younger people. It's a problem if these younger people do not exist. The population decreasing as a whole is probably good, but a population that has many old people and few young people will be struggling.
considered good by who??? Can you quote some sources? Bloomberg article from above:
> The lack of babies carries long-term risks for the economy by reducing the size of the workforce that underpins its growth and vitality. Welfare spending for an aging population also drains national coffers that could otherwise be utilized to promote businesses, research and other enterprises that are key to prosperity.
This should be taken as an opportunity to automate/remote more things, so less workers are needed to support the economy. It's a problem that warns decades before its arrival.
Smaller populations isn't a bad thing, but a rapid declining population is. At a stable birthrate of 2.1 there would be a workforce of approx 60% of the population compared to 20% elderly and 20% minors.
( Assuming productive age is 20-80 and all people die at 100 )
Once you enter a low birthrate of 1 that would mean at some point your workforce could be cut in half and your elderly population could be doubled. Now, 40% of the workforce will end up needing to sustain a 50% elderly population and 10% would be minors. If you're not carefull the loss of capital in the workforce could mean less people desire to have kids in a world that cannot sustain their needs. Leading to a feedback loop that is very hard to get out of.
One way of improving the situation is by cutting back on all non-essential programs for decades in order to stabilise the population at the magical 2.1 number.
> we also need to be looking for economic systems that don’t simply rely on an ever-increasing population of worker bees
Apart from a robotic class of workers, forcing older people to produce, or forcing down living standards, this isn’t a problem different economic systems can solve. It’s fundamental to input/output.
Also, stable populations aren’t super problematic. 0.78 is way below replacement, however.
Alternatively, populations fall until the pressures causing suppressed reproduction ease - and people start having more children.
Wouldn’t it be better for a country like the UK to have a population of about 30 million? More space for everyone, self sufficient in food and renewable energy, less pollution and resource depletion, … Why not order society to maximise average quality of life instead of GDP?
Rapidly shrinking populations as a result of low birth rates do the exact opposite of increasing average quality of life. You end up with an entire country full of old people who can't work and an increasingly small number of young people who need to support them, unless you're willing to just throw grandma out on the streets. This concept is known as the dependency ratio, the ratio of dependents to working individuals.
Economic output is a result of work done. In a country with a high dependency ratio, the relatively smaller number of workers need to end up doing much more work to to support the large number of non-working dependents. Essentially, you can either tax your workers to death or let grandma subsist off of cat food. Neither option is really great and the whole situation tends to be stressful and depressing on a societal level.
As a counterexample, an skilled American white collar worker who earns about 200k per year could buy about ten thousand avocado's per month. But does the skilled, say, programmer do more "work" than multiple Avocado farmers? So, economic output is not a result of work done, it's a matter of value created (US industry creates lots of value) and how much of that is captured.
So on the one hand, a shrinking population might reduce purchasing power by producing less work. On the other hand, as long as the value of the produced work increases, the implosion might not be so bad.
today, there are 64 million social security beneficiaries and 164 million working people in the US. Who is going to pay for social security, when these numbers are reversed?
how can a country such as South Korea, when it gets to over 50% retirement-age people, produce "high value", let alone "increasing value"? who will be taking care of their health and doing physical labor?
> long as the value of the produced work increases
Assuming that this is only a problem for "high-value" societies is incorrect - Indonesia, for example, while still not as bad, is almost below replacement rate, so who is going to take care of 273 million non-high-value people there once they get old?
Is this "rapidly shrinking" though, if it's happening at the timescale of human lives? It does seem like something we should be able to plan for, doesn't it?
it's not that simple because after a period of massive decline there are fewer people around to even restart the process, even if they magically so desired.
> populations fall until the pressures causing suppressed reproduction ease
The problem is a falling population exacerbates those stresses. The economy crunches, anti-immigrant and right-wing forces gain power; the older population won’t vote to nix their benefits in favour of younger people, so either the system veers towards collapse or someone takes away their votes.
> Why would anti-immigrant voices gain power with a falling population?
I don’t think it’s a general rule. But the countries in a demographic bind are in one because they’re not getting immigrants. So as the vice tightens, we see those preëxisting tendencies amplified. This is more observational than prescriptive, mine you.
When the economy is crashing and more and more of society destabilizes, a huge amount of people will always look for politicians that will sell them "an easy way out". Being the politician that talks about inconvenient truths, the need for more immigrants, the need to keep high taxes as people are getting poorer and has a message of "hang in there" generally does not win people over.
Right wing anti-immigration parties sell an enemy (immigrants) as cause of all problems (they are stealing all our jobs!). In addition they sell tax breaks which also sound very appealing to people that struggle to get by on their current income. Of course all history shows that these "solutions" are lies, but history tend to repeat itself. The problem in a democracy is that the solutions that political parties present does not always have to be grounded in reality to be popular. Especially in these modern times with disinformation and conspiratorial thinking running rampant online (it's all Soros fault!).
It's bizarre because presumably a very rich, progressive, westernized society that enjoys a very high standard of living suddenly decided to go the way of the dodo bird, while their frequently ridiculed and otherwise shat-upon neighbors are still trying to hang in there. Although they will probably follow as well, just not there yet.
From what i know from south korean society (just from testimonies & movies : I am aware this is limited) : people are pressured at work and consummerism and shallow "westernized" culture is the norm... Not what I would call a paradise.
The world has been in a bit of a weird state for the last 70 years or so, with US allies basically un-attackable. I guess if a country had steep enough population loss by low fertility rates, eventually a neighbor would notice and start grabbing bits before the declining country’s economy totally collapsed or the population just vanished. People become less useful in a sword fight way before retirement age, after all.
Plus, declining population doesn’t inherently provide a big dramatic marker to put in the history books like a natural disaster or battle.
It has to start embracing practical religious protocols surrounding fertility. Thats what they were made for. Underpop is an old problem with relatively easy solutions if your population base is large enough.
There's no way out of a depopulation spiral other than reversing it or dying out. If they die out some other nation will take over their land, so it's merely a question of whether the ethnically non-Japanese people who will inhabit the land in the future will call themselves Japanese or not. What happens when a nation has its ethnicity completely replaced? Does it lose its national identity or not?
What is a Japanese person, how do you define that? For most people someone born, raised, with citizenship, fluent in the language and culture, regardless of their parents' provenance or skin colour is a a fully fledged person of that nationality and ethnicity.
Well, that the official declaration. But we all know that it is a lie. Even for very similar ethnicities like say Italian, French, German and Swiss you can easily tell the difference.
National identity and culture is heavily influenced by genes.
I know two people of very close Italian descent (parents/grandparents were born in Italy) in France, and they're as French as anyone who can trace their lineage to 15th century Versailles. The only Italian parts remaining are their surnames.
> National identity and culture is heavily influenced by genes.
I'm sure that there are studies but let's be honest. This is just common sense.
I'm sure that if you replace Japanese people with Berbers from North Africa, Japan will look very different.
So you're saying that if you took 50 million Berber babies (for the sake of argument let's suppose that this is possible) and gave them to Japanese families, the next generation in Japan would be significantly more Berberish? Or are you saying that if you took 50 million adult Berbers and deposited them in Japan that Japan would be very different?
If you're saying the latter: what role is genetics playing in that scenario?
If you're saying the former: no, culture is not a genetic trait. Obviously.
I definitely don’t think culture is all that influenced by genetics in any great sense (I mean if everyone is lactose intolerant there won’t be a great milk-based food tradition but that’s sort of incidental). But if you were to drop 50 million foreign babies of visibly different ethnicities into families in any country, they’d of course end up with very different upbringings as visible minorities.
In particular, in the given hypothetical, one might predict a change in the dairy culture in Japan if suddenly the population was significantly more tolerant of lactose.
(I assume the usual example of lactose intolerant is chosen because it appears some people are otherwise religiously opposed to considering the relationship between culture and genetics.)
>one might predict a change in the dairy culture in Japan if suddenly the population was significantly more tolerant of lactose.
It might change or it might not. Just because a dietary option is open to you doesn't mean you're going to take it. Nothing prevents me from eating sushi, and I still don't, and the reason is obvious: I didn't grow up eating it, so it isn't part of my normal diet.
It's one thing to say that culture and genetics are not completely independent. It's another to say that culture is heavily influenced by genetics, to the extent that it's a hereditary trait.
Perhaps but by any objective ranking it's much harder to get a permanent Visa to work in Japan that your average developed nation. I assume south Korea's similar.
I don't see either nation has any choice but to accept more migrants as their native populations age.
It’s incredibly easy to get a permanent residence visa in non-authoritarian East Asian countries, especially compared to anywhere in the west.
Asia just isn’t as popular of a destination because of 1) huge language barriers, 2) wages are lower than the west, and 3) visas are contingent upon stable employment, and gaps in employment plus zero tolerance policies towards visa overstays/illegal immigration make that risky to a large proportion of people.
But if you stay at a company or only job hop with offers in-hand, East Asia as a whole is insanely easy to move to, get permanent residence, or even citizenship. Anyone who’s gone through the process, doubly so those who’ve dealt with processes in the west, can readily verify this. The conditions for Japan are literally just: college degree or 10 years experience, job offer, no criminal record. Then stay a few years, don’t have a major criminal record, and you can get citizenship in as little as 5 years with a 95% acceptance rate. Permanent residence is a similar process.
I felt zero obstacles the entire way. It felt like renewing an ID card and nothing more.
Sure, I was including the language barriers and the challenges of getting job offers and maintaining stable employment. I wouldn't consider Australia a country it's particularly easy to get a PR Visa for but if you have any experience at all in high-demand industries (esp. Health care) I gather it's pretty straightforward. My partner moved from Japan exactly on that basis (she didn't have a college degree that was recognized here, and had to do one while she was here, including learning English to a sufficiently proficient level) and seems to think it was far easier than for someone trying to go the other way.
I'm not sure I follow the argument in general. Of course, I understand the idea that, as people live longer and the median age grows, and the elderly aren't working, the younger people in a society have to work more to also care for the elderly.
But that feels like it's mostly a theoretical/money-issue (at least in the industrialized nations), because as people age, their consumption also changes. I live in an area with plenty of old people who slowly die off and get replaced by young families. The old folks are low-activity, have at most one car, and even that seems mostly stationary except for the occasional grocery shopping.
At the same time, productivity has risen so sharply that it's absolutely not a problem to provide the basics (food, shelter, energy) because we're far away from 20% of the population working in agriculture. Healthcare and elderly care in general becomes an issue, but that feels like it's much more manageable, e.g. we could cut cost and not give hip replacements to 80year-olds.
So this feels less like a "omg this can't work, just look at the numbers"-issue and more like a renegotiation of the intergenerational contract. Granted, that's not an easy task either given that the elderly get a vote too, but it's no longer "how would we ever accomplish this" and instead becomes a political issue. Since many elderly are also at the wealthiest stage in their life, I feel like that's not an unsolvable riddle.
You’re missing the bit where you can’t not give the 80 year old a hip replacement.
Or look after them in their twilight years in a respectable standard of living.
It’s easy to make hand wavy statements from where you are (maybe 20s?) - wait a little bit or see what happens as your parents age. You can’t not give the 80 year old the hip replacement because their quality of life will be significantly better for the next 10 (or -2, if they’re in the US)
My father has been dead for 10 years and my mother is in her late 70ies, I'm in my forties (and feel like 60, but that's besides the point).
I'm not sure we can't do that. I believe I read something about cuts in non-essential operations for the elderly in Germany's public healthcare system, but I can't find it any more because Google sucks. Still, I don't believe that's taboo if the other option is to have the system crash.
What you're talking about is not some ideal state that we currently exist in where demographic trends aren't resulting in impairment of healthcare delivery (which is a fundamental human right). What you are talking about is the first part of the death by a thousand cuts which is demographic decline and failed service delivery which will only be exacerbated over the coming years as the impact of an ageing and reduced taxpayer, below-subsistence population replacement kicks in.
The fact is, and remains, that the 'right' thing to do is to ensure adequate service provision and that the 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 year old who needs a hip replacement, or aortic valve replacement, or high level care nursing home, actually receives it. But the powers that be, even now, are able to reduce the current impact to healthcare budgets (and thus government expenditure) by pushing waiting lists out to such an extent that people are rendered basically invalid by the wait times, and die on them.
It's not just europe, it's basically the rule in the US (unless you are independently wealthy or have a decent healthcare plan), and it will only get worse unless people unzip their trousers and make the beast that has two backs.
Or, we decide collectively that the attempt at death by a thousand cuts is not in any way acceptable. Which is hard because the insidious nature of death by a thousand cuts is (to absolutely mix metaphors) that you don't notice the temperature rising until you are parboiled.
What? No, that's not what I'm talking about at all. What I'm talking about is sensible healthcare provisioning, under the honest observation that just because some medical intervention is technically possible, it's necessarily a good idea (from both quality of life as well as financial points of view).
So no, just because it's technically possible to replace an 80 year old's hip, doesn't mean we should. There is nothing wrong with some cutoff where we say 'as a society, the maximum we want to pay for a daly is x' (or qaly or any other measure you want to take). There is nothing wrong with being honest about resources being finite, and that not every potentially possible medical intervention needs to be paid for by society. And this is what is happening in 'Europe' (although it isn't admitted as bluntly as I put it here...), and what I was referring to.
As the working population shrinks, so does the tax base. So you get an unsustainable equation of having fewer and fewer economically productive people needing to pay to support more and more retirees, and since the tax base is also shrinking in absolute numbers, it's increasingly difficult to fund other things like infrastructure.
Do the elderly have similar infrastructure requirements though? Like, generic infrastructure like highways or rail lines is a requirement and doesn't really change much as it's required for transporting of goods etc, but lots of local infrastructure seems to be something you're leaning on a lot when you're younger. It's an exaggeration of course, but if you keep the groceries coming and the TV program changing, the elderly will be somewhat content.
But even then, don't we have infrastructure productivity improvements, too? Building something these days requires more skilled workers, but much fewer.
Bridges, highways, sewers etc all still need maintenance even if there are less people using them. This is an increasingly large problem in Japan, which built lots of hugely unprofitable infrastructure during the Bubble years (bullet trains to the prime minister's rural home town etc) and is still addicted to grandiose projects as a form of rural subsidy/kickback.
Don't infrastructure projects scale well with regards to costs? I assumed that e.g. building a three lane highway isn't 50% more expensive than building two lanes, but maybe it even complicates things more as you run into more issues the more space you take up (can't squeeze through gaps, more attack surface for Godzilla and whatnot).
Isn't infrastructure profiting from automation as much? Health & elderly care has severe limits there until we get to very advanced robots in a few generations, but infrastructure feels easier.
Scaling only gets you so far. The maglev Chuo Shinkansen currently under construction between Tokyo and Nagoya involves around 250 km of tunnels punched through Japan's mountainous backbone and has a price tag of US$64 billion (and continually climbing).
Still, the real problem is not building new things, but maintaining old ones.
You're missing that some people are obsessed with 20th century ideas of boundless economic growth and existential anxiety over falling behind other countries, and genuinely can't fathom that down cycles are necessary and manageable part of any sustainable system.
Healthcare is proving hyperinflationary nearly everywhere in the long run. Revealed preference shows people love spending money on healthcare. People will allocate to healthcare over almost anything else. I don’t think a no hip replacements policy will be very popular.
Supporting your aging parents is easier when you have brothers and sisters, and harder when you are alone. This is the same effect, but on larger scale. The children of bigger families will now have to provide for those that could not or decided not to have kids. At least thats the way I look at it.
By deliberately preventing or de-prioritising access, perhaps not. But at some point if you have more grandmothers needing hip replacements than they are health care workers able to perform the procedure and provide post-operative care, something's gotta give.
Unless of course we find much cheaper/easier ways of or substitutes to performing such replacements, which isn't so unlikely (nanotech to rebuild existing weakened bones?).
What you're missing is understanding that our societies are currently run by rentier capitalists. The metrics they use to value their portfolio's. And that they're all leveraged.
The panic is that a falling population and lower consumption will wipe out their assets.
I don't think it has anything to do with cost or hopelessness. Throughout history people have kept having kids in the worst of situations.
Today, people in wealthy secure nations, choose not to have kids (I think) because they just don't want them, and because its easy to not have them.
Is there any reason people would start choosing to have more kids once they have the option not to?
I think the often unstated issue is that westernizing societies have been in a subtle, implicit race to extend childhood and adolescence.
An educational arms race demands that young "adults" stay non-productive and dependent for longer and longer, home affordability stretches further out from early career professionals, and parent-child relationships have become increasingly about the parent generously supporting the child as long as they can rather than just seeing them out of the nest safely. These are all cultural shifts that mimic aristocratic lifestyles, but ultimately engender inadequacy and helplessness in young adults who aspire to middle class life and make it a very reasonable choice for them to narrow the window in which they start building a secure family.
This ultimately leads to an increase in the pregnancy age in women, and that unlocks additional second-order effects. Having a first baby at 35 makes it more unlikely that the woman will want and be able to bear a second one. Attention to aging parents may also compete with the possibility for more children. The single child will be given more attention and will grow in a “dust-free” environment. This completes the whole cycle of the cultural shift towards egocentrism.
The several years, sometimes up to a decade of higher education is not necessary for a lot of professions. I myself could have become a good electrical engineer in half the time I did, because half my classes were absolute bullshit. I learned more about sociology and politics from friends than by the two-semester mandatory classes I had on it. And I certainly learned WAY more about entrepreneurship from HN than from my shitty "Entrepreneurship" classes, which were also mandatory.
Also notice that while I graduated in electrical engineering, I'm a software engineer now. So about 80% or 90% of what I studied is completely unrelated (unless I have to redo the electrical wiring of the office). However, after interviews I still sometimes have to show my bullshit diploma (which is ironically in a language they don't understand) to work in certain companies or to immigrate to certain countries.
I got a CS degree and literally two of my classes were relevant to software engineering. Fortunately I recognized that and focused on paid work while still in school.
I think people here are oversimplifying the issue. It's not about individual choice, it's about social structures. Our societies are by and large not designed to encourage people to have kids. Neighbors don't know and support each other, childcare is expensive, schedules are inflexible, not to mention the incredible financial burden of a child for anyone in a financially restricted situation.
Median wages simply don't let you afford children anymore. It used to.
We as a society simply don't care about people's ability to have kids.
Even within the US, there is a negative correlation between income and fertility rate. Poor families just make things work. I tutored a student who lived with 7 siblings in a NYC apartment.
That correlation turns around at the lowest income levels; you get paid per kid. Yes it's not really enough, generally, but if you feed them nothing but gruel and get public benefits for everything then it's actually more profitable to pop out more, especially if you can get 20% from each father if they're plugged in enough to the system that most of the fathers are paying most of the time.
It doesn't turn around, it stays the same (except for different reasons on different levels of income ladder). Poor people have the most kids, worker class, fewer, middle class, even fewer, and high middle class, fewer still.
It might not be the case for the very rich (top 0.01%), because they literally don't care about expenses, and can afford trophy wives 30 years them younger so fertility isn't an issue either.
How could it possibly stay the same when those at the lowest rung are getting additional benefits for having kids? Starting at income '0' they can only go up from there.
I readily admit the benefits are shit and only profitable if you're basically feeding them gruel and giving them little else, although sadly there are people who do this. If those at '$0' are the most fertile then they're (what initially could be described as paradoxically) going to have more income on average at 1+ kids due to increase in benefits, which necessarily turns things around at the lower end.
That's a misconception. This correlation exists even in places that don't have this kind of social security. It even happens between countries, or even historically.
Well that sounds rather absurd. Why would everywhere - in every single country save for (maybe!) Israel - INCREASE of real incomes and improvement in both economic performance and economic stability, make having kids less affordable, rather than more affordable? Why isn't this the case with every other kind of spending - cars, housing, travel, education, even healthcare?
4 day work week? Work from home on every possible situation? Flexible hours on every company? Free and good schools like in Finland? Free childcare for the little ones? Good public transportation so kids can move freely?
I think companies and governments will hemorrhage money if we ever do something like this. Oh no. Anyway.
It's funny how people mention Finland every single time and then you go look at their TFR and it is still below 2 for the last 50 years and has crashed from 1.8 to 1.4 within the last 15 years.
And that's ignoring the fact that Finland has a population of 5.5 million and that there is no evidence that their "solutions" scale to bigger countries.
Finland doesn't only have education, it also has the childcare system and the public transportation. Remote first work and 4 days are not there yet, but Finland is also one of the first countries that started the 4 day work trials. Finland is AFAIK one of the furthest along in reducing the financial burdens of having children, which doesn't really seem to help.
As to why it wouldn't work in federated countries, simply put: federation does not solve bureaucracy, and bureaucracy is the biggest enemy of scaling public solutions.
Speaking for myself: ever-rising cost of living in western countries makes it scary to have kids. I’m only starting to contemplate becoming a home owner at 34, and it will take 2-3 more years until my wife and I can confidently go for it. By the time we have a solid ground under our feet, it will likely be too late (my wife is older).
I think this is very common analysis, and yet, there is likely never a point where having a kid becomes a financially sensible decision, hence we keep putting them off. The ground is never solid, my recommendation is go ahead and reproduce!
yes, indeed that is a different matter, however the poster I was responding to made the point of financial stability / security being the deciding factor so I was addressing that point
> Is there any reason people would start choosing to have more kids once they have the option not to?
Easy. In the past, kids are basically free labor for the family business, e.g. you own a farm, more kids == more productivity.
Today, most kids from inherits nearly nothing from parent's job. They have their own life and objectives, but to get good jobs, kids need good education, and good education costs money. So kids == burden.
In addition to the other noted reasons, I'd like to point out social security changes the dynamic significantly.
In modern day, society says it's selfish and bad to have kids for your own retirement. Your kids are supposed to be the tax-stock for everybody else to use up for their retirement. So you take on the lions shares of the losses to raise the kid and then society sucks up the tax money and distributes it to anyone on social security including those who didn't have kids.
This creates a massive "free-rider effect" where the incentive is not to have kids yourself, while enjoying the benefits of their labor and distribution payments in your own retirement. Why have kids when others can do the lions share of the investment and you still get your full share of social security money.
I don’t really think this is true. Both Korea and Japan have poor elder social security (and elder poverty rates to match) yet are some of the lowest fertility countries. China is in a similar position.
Can you explain how I can tease out this multivariate issue to rule out these economic incentives are at play?
I think looking at a two dimension "elder social security" and "fertility rate" you are going to see a correlation, but it is confounded by lots of other things including "cost vs personal benefit of raising child", access to contraceptives, education level, etc. I think it would be absolutely wild if you could just look at the numbers for Korea and Japan and just nope out on this one.
If you want to do deep data analysis, it helps that the OECD collects a lot of data from Japan, South Korea, the US, and the member countries which are all generally developed.
I just don't think, that if it is a factor, that it has much impact, given that the worst countries do not have this factor; the child(ren) is still pretty much the extent of the social safety net. Japan is also notable in that they actually give significantly lower social security payments to women, especially unmarried or divorcees.
It’s mainly driven by gender equality I would have thought. The more educated and autonomous women are, the less they tend to have kids. The most fertile years are spent (quite rightly) enjoying life, getting an education and engaging in productive economic activity. It is the clash of culture with biological reality.
I do enjoy it, but you can see how it compares poorly to other alternatives for the very youthful. Particularly for women.
But this is not the point - it isn't even a conscious decision for the most part to have kids late. Modern life is just set up that way. None of my peers were having their first kid at 20. None of my peers were even in a serious relationship at 20. Most weren't in any sort of relationship.
In some countries there is also a lot of regulation actually not helping, e.g., pregnant women not allowed to work/work in certain ways - and I am not talking about super high risk jobs here.
And once the kid pops out it's "You better watch them for 10 years straight and if you even lose concentration for a second you're going to jail." You almost need your own house and yard because children caught in public nowadays results in criminal charges and CPS visits, and it's entirely impractical to have supervision on children at all times for a decade straight.
> You almost need your own house and yard because children caught in public nowadays results in criminal charges and CPS visits, and it's entirely impractical to have supervision on children at all times for a decade straight.
That's not a general thing, it's very specific to the US (and I'd guess even not generalised in the US as a whole).
Here in Sweden kids are free to roam, go meet their friends, take the public transit, etc. without parents having to be anxious and scared.
The paranoia in the USA is extremely exhausting though, I really feel for all of you.
I know we're not supposed to complain about this, but this page is a prime example of why you shouldn't disable viewport zoom for mobile browsers. The graphs are too small to read by default.
It's noteworthy that Russia is one of the worst in terms of demographics, yet they're busily slaughtering their youth in Ukraine and driving their remaining talent overseas.
I suspect Russia’s demographic crisis was a factor in Putin’s invasion. He’s an old-fashioned imperialist and hates to reign over a shrinking, aging population.
Annexing Ukraine would have increased Russia’s population from 144M to 188M overnight. A great legacy for Vladimir the Cunning, in his dreams.
They are definitely attempting for a demographic darwin award.
Putin keeps talking about an existential crisis for Russia. He's right. Except the crisis is at home. Even before the war, Russian population was shrinking in size. Now with the war, he's basically losing a generation and massively speeding up the process. I've heard some comments stating that from a demographic point of view, this is the last generation even capable of pulling together an army the size that Russia is currently deploying. Next generations will be too small in numbers. As the older generations die out, Russia will have a much smaller population than it used to.
Despite abortions going down, population decreased by 1M people last year. The average age has dropped a few years. Population size basically peaked right after the wall came down and has trended down ever since. With the exception of a few years, growth rate was negative every year since.
well, the absolute grimmest, darkest and shittiest time, demography-wise or any other aspect really, was 1999 with fertility rate of 1.16, which somehow coincided with the peak of the official mad euphoria for the West and Yeltsin's drunken man-crush on his "friend Bill".
Currently, the fertility rate is on par with the US and most of the other urbanized world, life expectancy is up by whopping 8 years since then (not counting the Covid). That one million of lives lost is due to Covid and it seems like the country is pretty much in the same boat as everyone else now, slowly withering away.
I'd argue about the "are still fine" part.
My country was under soviet occupation. We were so behind that it's beyond scary. A plastic bag with Bruce Willis or Stallone's face printed on it was something out of this word. I'd argue that by the time the whole darn thing collapsed, we were 20-30 years behind the western world.
Is Russia "fine"? They still haven't managed to catch up economically or in development levels to the developed Western countries (and the fact that former Eastern bloc and even Soviet countries have shows that the gap wasn't impossible to overcome). They're also in a war they cannot win losing tens of thousands of men they can ill afford to lose, and only because they're stuck in the past politically and geopolitically.
> Enter the Old Age Dependency Ratio: the ratio of economically inactive elderly people to the working age population. Calling this a loaded proxy understates things – at what point do we define an elderly population to be inactive, and how do we think about the working age population?
This would probably not matter as much if we leveraged improved technology and productivity to reduce the need for human labor. Rather it seems industrial (technological) revolutions have increased the number of hours people need to work to survive: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_... This has been coming back down in places like the USA since the late 1800s, but still, why do we all have to work so much to the point that we're starting to worry about "supporting an ageing, nonworking population?"
Why is immigration the only proposed solution and raising birth rate is not considered? Part of it are pragmatic obstacles, such as lack of stable middle class jobs in areas with affordable cost of living. But most of it is bad values among people who can afford to raise 2-3 kids with good living standards already. Current assumptions are that a. 40 is the new 20, meaning that adults continue to party like college kids rather than deriving life meaning from more mature pursuits, b. career success is the only measure of a person's success, c. A child would rather not be born than live a life where not everything is provided on a silver plate.
Humanity is not going to die out, but future will belong to cultures that are passed on to another generation. How would folks not willing to budge on these ideals feel if they time traveled to year 2100 and the world was dominated by theocracies that managed to keep their birth rates up?
We could think about ways to make it easier to have kids. But it will likely be costly and difficult — having kid means you sign up for at 18 years of drastically altered lifestyle at least! So if we are to try and incentivize people to have kids, we’ll have to convince that there’ll be some stability in the incentives there.
It seems much easier to have a kid if one parent is able to stay at home. But that’ll require restructuring the economy for lower labor participation rates. And I guess we’re not going to accept a massive gender imbalance in who stays home nowadays. So as a first step I guess we’ll have to massively rethink men’s role in society, so that we can get up from the paltry 16% of stay at home parents being fathers to more like 50%.
All possible but it requires sustained effort.
Accepting more immigrants is quite a bit more flexible. And they even show up as adults mostly, so we don’t have to raise them! It is sort of mooching off the rest of the world, but if people want to join, I say let ‘em.
More like at most 2 years of drastically altered lifestyle, after that you just send them to a daycare and go to work and then at home they are able to walk, talk and eat by themselves and you can get a babysitter and go on a date. For these 2 years we have to be grown up about existence of reproductive dimorphism, most obviously breastfeeding but also fathers and their children learning parenting relationship as an acquired skill rather than instinct. Rather than demanding that there is no statistical difference between life paths of men and women, how about respecting both equally? Why is being a cog in corporate machine inherently more worthy of respect or life meaning than taking care of your own family? If this is considered equally desirable, more fathers will also be interested. Plus there is now remote work and robots/AI are taking our jobs, so why is this even a big deal?
My country is essentially paying all the expenses of parents who have children and we're still not having enough children to keep our population stable. When people were living on farms, more children were an asset. Most people live in cities now, so children are a liability.
What do you suggest would encourage people to have more children?
If living in cities is so horrible for human reproductive health that city dwellers are dying out, we should rethink living in cities. Imagine the reaction if pollutant in drinking water did that.
This is super interesting.. it's doesn't drill into specific fields of "brain drain" although it definitely highlights some problems that need to be addressed. Big surprises from Europe though. But I think it's an easier solve than Asia given the freedom of movement between members.
The problem with the Old Age Dependency Ratio - it doesn’t take into account life expectancy. It can make things look good simply because people die before they reach “retirement age”. For example, in Russia, male life expectancy is 66 years. The ratio in the article starts the old age at 65.
A workforce that dies younger presumably is a less healthy workforce with fewer useful years of work per person. So, it's not necessarily economically desirable.
There's a middle between the two. Boomers that live lavishly and consume high amount of resources in retirement, going on global golf trips every other week, compared to a retiree who mostly stays in his house and takes forest walks and reading books have very different economic marks.
Also most healthcare is spent in the last 1-2 years in the life of the individual. I saw the system spend so much resources to keep my miserable demented grandma alive for 2 cruel years after she lost her mind. What was the point? She was just in constant pain, emotional and physical. As a culture it should be honorable to chose when we die, go off on our own accord instead of grudgingly push it to the very end. Its unbecoming.
Now the system expects my generation, millennials, to bear the boomer retirement economics on our working backs while we cant even afford our own houses. In Sweden, not only retirees but also the 7% (700 000) refugee immigrants that dont work nor contribute. Yea, that's gonna be a no from me pal.
It’s not that simple. We have to consider why in some countries men live 10 years less than the norm for the most of the developed world and how those underlying causes affect the economy.
That's not how the average age works, men in Russia die young and that skews the statistics. If someone lives to be 66, there is a good probability they would live another 10 or so years.
If someone lives to be 66, there is a good probability they would live another 10 or so years.
That’s true, but [1] says men in Russia are expected to live much less than other countries at any age. For example, a 45yo male in Russia is expected to die at 72.4, which is 10 years less than top-10 countries and worse than 138 countries. For 65yo Russia is ranked 109.
As we're on a tech oriented website, I am surprised at the purely "sociological/political" perspectives in the comments.
If no significant upheaval in westernized societies (à la "mad max"), the cultural norms won't be changed, so the decline in population won't be fought through social/societal means.
That's why I am rather intrigued by the future technological consequences of all this :
- accelerated automation : some countries might embrace their demographic declien and go all-in (Japan was the model but seems they are stagnating, now...)
- new (technical) challenges about how to deal with more and more old people and less youth to do so ("Roujin Z" is a take on this)
- where are artificial wombs? Seems sooner or later it might become the de facto standard way of having children, in a (not so?) far enough future...
The author seems to curiously soft-pedal the situation in China. Even if we treat the state statistics at face value, they rocket up the chart over the next ten years, and it'll have major implications for world politics.
If you want to get pedantic, that's de jure the case. There is only one single China recognised internationally, and it contains all of Chinese territorial claims, including the island of Taiwan.
For almost all intents and purposes Taiwan is an independent country, but even they used to claim to be the one and only China until not that long ago. Unfortunately it's unlikely that a declaration of independence will be well received by China proper, so the current weird limbo (no international recognition and thus no embassies, "Chinese Taipei" in the Olympics, etc.) will persist for the foreseeable future.
I remember thinking about this too but there is a higher level of inequality in India which appears to be hampering progress.
> Inequality using the Gini index is 24% higher in India than in China according to income, but 9% higher in China than in India according to consumption. Something similar is found if we compare urban and rural areas across countries
Edit: The reason I mention this is due to access to higher level of education can be correlated to the income inequalities in general. Add to that China's massive social services and pushes for science related education they definitely are showing some advantages.
Yes - lots of people teaching their children Mandarin, but Hindi will be much more useful. Funny thing is that in the UK we have far more people to learn it from, but we don't seem to use the resource. Would be good and fun for social integration too, especially given the fact that Hindi and Urdu are almost the same language.
Nah, Americanly I’ll say: we are happy to give away your language to whoever wants it. Re-spin it for local convenience, cut off bits that are inconvenient, get rid of all those stupid extra “u’s.”
It was wildly over-complicated to start, but soon enough we’ll have morphed it into Earth Business Basic. It is great to learn a language to appreciate the culture that it comes from of course, but for business purposes American is the way to go. :p
The point isn't just about business language - it's about participating in a culture. From a soft power perspective, having a large proportion of your population able to interact with another culture makes a lot of sense. India will continue to become more culturally significant and having a handle on that will be valuable.
For all the words and charts, this is a very superficial analysis that (openly) glosses over cultural and regional differences for the sake of making it easy to make graphs and draw conclusions from them.
> Alas, we must abstract at some point, and in our case the sensible approach suggests taking as conservative an estimate as we can (and which the data permits). We therefore consider the economically inactive population beginning at 65, and the working age population between 16 and 64.
I mean, you do need to "abstract at some point" if you've committed yourself to writing this report, but your report becomes a lot less interesting once you do.
And then when it comes to analyzing "solutions", it presupposes migration as if that would be the only meaningful way to weather a lopsided generation.
It's a very "this is what it looks like around me, so this is how everybody must have to face it" sort of analysis.
> it presupposes migration as if that would be the only meaningful way to weather a lopsided generation.
Given that you need to maintain and grow infrastructure and services etc while a baby-boom might be happening, also during a 'baby-boom' push demand on social services increases meaning there is a higher demand on Tax spending during that period, so there needs to still be a sufficient workforce already contributing. there doesn't seem like many other options than immigration to as the author says : "Plug the gap"
What alternatives would you propose ?
> It's a very "this is what it looks like around me, so this is how everybody must have to face it" sort of analysis.
I'm really not getting this at all, there is data and examples given world wide. Some examples would be nice.
The Chinese put that in the ISO-3166 standard. Many statistics tools aggregte data by the ISO two-letter short country code, and automatically shown the full name in output.
We need governments to have pro-natal policies and to stop attacking those who do have pro-natal policies, (Hungary comes to mind).
The ridiculous (and often artificial) rise in house prices is another problem with real solutions like an end to restrictive zoning laws and the banning of foreign speculators buying accommodation just as a store of funds - some areas of London have huge numbers of empty flats caused by this while at the same time ordinary people are desperate to find somewhere decent to live.
People forced into couch-surfing and tiny bedsits aren't going to start families any time soon.
Is there any discussion of impact of savings rate? I am saving with the assumption of having 0 social security. If all stays well, I'll maintain my lifestyle of upper middle class post retirement. My parents did the same, because we actually had 0 social security at their time. We are continuously increasing the efficiency, with improvements in AI/Robotics ... we should be able to reduce the inflation in cost of living.
The 1 child policy really does not get enough criticism. Just judging it by itself it tiptoes far too close to genocide and at the least is firmly authoritarian. What’s more, it has amplified a massive humanitarian crisis in the making. It is a slow-played massacre of the sparrows. But with people.
Very sad that we all just shrug and grant that it’s some prerogative of government. Oh we can have 3 kids now? What a benevolent government.
yeah it's unfortunate that in their drive to plan and centralize everything they overlooked that the reasons why people have kids are not at all economical or even rational anymore. Unlike some type of steel or concrete, you can't just build a child factory and flip a switch to catch up on the 5-year plan. Although who knows, if they really put their mind to it, maybe some kind of massive propaganda campaign like "if you're not having children you are betraying your country" may work? who knows.
What a fantastic article, it perfectly hints but doesn't go deep into each sub topic.
To state the perfectly obvious but carefully avoided in the media: If you want to have a great healthcare system you'd better have a lot of babies and/or a lot of immigrants.
If you didn't have the required amount of babies you are going to have to have migrants. The quite popular right wing anti-imigration position is actually horrific.
This data, while making Korea seem like the most rapidly growing population disaster on earth, is actually better than the latest data. Korea is now at 0.78 and falling. [1] I really have to wonder what the lower limit is and when (or if) it’ll ever trend up within our lifetimes.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-22/south-kor...