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Comment by cassieramen | Hacker News Reader

This feels like the beginning of global population flat lining in the coming years. We eventually want the population of the world to level out and decline for environmental reasons. Are there ways to combat the adverse economic effects of a declining population besides trying to raise the birth rate?

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I think that if you ignore classic post war economic orthodoxy[1] there are offsetting economic benefits to a declining population. Such as every year you don't need as much infrastructure. The number of children that need to be educated goes down. The ratio of the countries carrying capacity vs actual population improves pushing you farther away from the Malthusian limit.

Maybe not so good if you're in the drywall business.

[1] The kind that focuses on aggregate money flows and spending to the exclusion of everything actually important.

> Such as every year you don't need as much infrastructure.

Yeah, but every year you have as much infrastructure as you had last year, except some of it degrades or is abandoned and becomes dangerous.

So then you do what many cities around the world have done, and tear out highways to lower opex and create a more pleasant place to live.

> So then you do what many cities around the world have done, and tear out highways to lower opex and create a more pleasant place to live.

Yes, you can do that: that's a capital cost of maintaining quality of life under declining population. I'm not sure how a choice between continued declining quality of life or incurring a significant capital cost is a "benefit", however.

> I think that if you ignore classic post war economic orthodoxy there are offsetting economic benefits to a declining population.

There might be some benefits, but I've yet to see an argument that they are such that the balance is negative for the specific case of Japan.

> Such as every year you don't need as much infrastructure.

Which would be fine, if X infrastructure with Y proportion degradation due to lack of maintenance was equivalent to X*(1-Y) of optimally-structured infrastructure.

The problem is, its not.

Nice equation, makes your argument look more sciency.

Problem with it is that it ignores that physical things don't follow standard accounting depreciation schedules. Like I mentioned, you can't make the assumption that physical resources like energy, labor, and materials flow through the economy like intangible 'money'

The problem with your equation is that real things don't degrade by X percent per year. Or more that the utility tends not to. For maintenance you usually have a fix part that is based on time and a variable part that depends on use. And typically the the cost of depreciation occurs mostly at the end of life when you need to expend real resources to replace it. However if you don't need to replace it then what? Bonus.

I don't buy the argument.

That's like saying, I have a 1TB hard disk.

Now I have less files, so I can save money by not upgrading.

Sure, you might not be forced to upgrade due to space constraints.

But harddisks are mechanical devices - they degrade over time (just like trains, roads, plumbing etc.). If you don't replace your harddisks for 10 years, because you somehow manage to delete a bunch of files, and not replace them ....well, good luck trying to access your data.

Also, technology is constantly evolving - and trite as it may sound, if you're not going forwards, you're going backwards.

Have you tried using, oh, say, a Quantum fireball drive lately, to run a modern operating system or modern applications?

I mean, apart from the incompatibility issues, even if you got it running, and even if you managed to fit it on there, it just wouldn't be able to keep up.

So no, having a falling population doesn't mean you can just sit and let your infrastructure run into the ground.

I'm not sure if those benefits are enough to offset the deflationary effect of rapidly declining population.

However, at some point, all the reasons for not having children will be overcome by survival instinct kicking in. Japan has already reached the inflection point with birthrate going up again.

You do what most countries do. You allow skilled immigrants to enter the country and take the hit on the social costs.

They also have the side effect of, in most case, raising the birth rate for you.

'skilled immigrants'.

That's what they're calling mass population replacement now?

I do't see any nation that has successfully had good luck with skilled immigrants.

The United States?

You consider the US a success?

The US? Australia? Canada? New Zealand? The line between "skilled migrants" and "colonists" is blurred in the earlier part of their histories, but all those countries seem to be doing well in the grand scheme of things.

> The line between "skilled migrants" and "colonists" is a blurred in the earlier part of their histories, but all those countries seem to be doing well in the grand scheme of things.

I think the native peoples of those countries would take issue with the idea that "skilled migrants"/"colonists" were a good thing for their nations.

It seems bizarre to say we're optimizing for the economic success of the landmass and not the people currently living in it.

It is unlikely we will be slaughtered or deported from our nations if we allow immigration and see a gradual demographic shift towards the immigrants like in colonial times.

singapore is the example in asia that is probably most germane to this discussion.