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Comment by alephnan | Hacker News Reader

> but after faltering a few decades, it's good to see them publicly redouble their efforts into science and technology

If the faltering you're referring to is deflation and economic stagnation over the past three decades, the biggest issue now is population decline ( due also in part to the decades of deflation, and 1.5 generations developing a habit / culture of saving ). Science and Technology is good, and maybe both issues should be addressed, but I'm curious whether a push for STEM is a distraction from these potentially even harder problem

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They may no have reached population equilibrium yet. Does Japan have to exist at 115MM people? Maybe it's viable at 50MM. Same for everyone else. Does the US have to have 330MM, or can we be okay with 250MM, or China at 750MM, etc.

Declining pops diminish the need for expansionism and internal unrest. Less fighting over limited resources.

The issue with Japan is not specifically the decline nor absolute level of overall population. It's rather the demographic makeup which is shifting older. The next few decades will be increasingly difficult for them as their economy will need to support a larger level of retirees. https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/2019/

China has a similar issue coming down the line. https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2019/

For reference, the U.S. population pyramid looks a bit "healthier" (more balanced), though the retirement of the boomer generation will still pose a challenge. https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...

That's the usual specter; however, before modern times, populations grew and shrank for many reasons. Once people were out of the weeds from childhood disease, people lived reasonably long lives.

One big difference now is people expect to "retire". That's a modern construct. Sure, people used to add less and less to society as they aged and ultimately would need some subsidy, but much less than today.

They expect it because it's been the norm for a couple of generations. And we're paying a lot for it (in Europe, at least).

But yeah, it looks like we'll go back to no retirement soon enough, the current systems are not sustainable. Lots of people will be pissed off.

> The next few decades will be increasingly difficult for them as their economy will need to support a larger level of retirees.

How do you come up with this stupid idea? Japan has deflation and slow growth because of demographics, meaning the economic problem is the exact opposite. Old people spend very little money, meaning they need very little support to take care of them. The economy is dying because those old people don't spend their money, resulting in surplus workers that can't find well paying jobs who then subsequently drop out of the labor market. If old people somehow spent all their life savings on medical bills to stay alive for one more year then a lot of young people would end up getting that money.

Those young people have a whole life time of earning money ahead of them. It's only when you deny them the ability to earn that money that they suffer. Full employment will just create more demand for increases in productivity which then results in greater increases in productivity than one would expect if there wasn't urgency.

Where are you seeing that there is a labor surplus in Japan in recent years?

https://www.npr.org/2018/12/07/674548447/facing-critical-lab...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-economy-workculture...

> As of 2019 Japan's unemployment rate was the lowest in the G7.

> Japan is now facing a shortage of labor caused by two major demographic problems: shrinking population because of a low fertility rate, which was 1.4 per woman in 2009, and replacement of the postwar generation which is the biggest population range who are now around retirement age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_market_of_Japan

We’ll be better off as a species if we find a natural stable state, but that doesn’t mean that getting there will be a good experience for everyone.

Shrinking populations in particular puts a lot of strain on workers to support a larger elderly population. The more rapid the decline, the worse the strain is.

We would be much better off as a species if we were able to handle the transition to a stable state. On the other hand, population growth is what allows us the enormous specialization that lets us achieve unbelievable technological feats while also wasting time during work on HN.

There are enormous amounts of people who don't add to innovation. Very few people are needed for innovation. Most people even on HN are doing routine things. Not discovery or in support of discovery. Most people's minds are not being taxed -and that's okay. That's to say, having millions of idle minds to produce one very productive mind isn't a requirement. I think this initiative could be part of this solution where we need fewer raw numbers but more productive percentages.

Two things: first, without having a recipe for very productive people, our best option is fostering fertile environments for development and then seeing who comes out, and that's very much a numbers game of getting as many entrants as possible.

Second, the trail of supporting cast for any technological development is enormous, and we're making a huge mistake when we forget that. Not just the people who clean the streets and the buildings, but the people who build them, design them, maintain them, create the organizational and financial structures that keep them operating, and so on. And a few of those roles aren't very low end, just to keep the static pieces of the built environment from falling apart, just so you can get to the point where there's somewhere to live for the people fixing bugs and writing documentation for the the libraries you want to use multiple times a day, quite likely for free, without asking anyone for them or even giving a second thought. And it's not like those were written for you: there are dozens of implementations in as many languages, just waiting to be picked up. Things get massively more difficult for you if those tools are being produced for you specifically (that's what military procurement projects tend to have.)

That obviously does nowhere near justice to even a simple software project. Now take that x1000 for any hardware project, where the raw materials, processing, and logistics circle the globe several times on their way to you.

> Two things: first, without having a recipe for very productive people, our best option is fostering fertile environments for development and then seeing who comes out, and that's very much a numbers game of getting as many entrants as possible.

I don't see the connection. Why do you need to get many entrants as possible? Why not do the obvious thing and create those fertile environments instead of letting random chance decide everything? All I am seeing here is the argument that given a high enough population fertile environments don't matter. No matter how difficult you make it for fertile environments to exist a higher population will always cancel it out.

> All I am seeing here is the argument that given a high enough population fertile environments don't matter.

This is the exact opposite of what I read GP to say. They were making the point that for every “genius” driving innovation, there is a long trail of people necessary to support and foster such innovation. This is not an “innovation by numbers” argument.

You need as many entrants in those fertile environments as possible because humans and societies are complex, leading to unpredictable outcomes as results of factors that anyone raising kids may have discounted, not known about, or been unable to measure. You can't just make a perfect path and then get exactly the super-offspring you want. Thinking you can is literally the founding story of Buddhism (not discounting the significance of Buddhism, but his father was shooting for a perfect ruler, not an enlightened-but-impoverished visionary.)

Edit to add: A side effect of all those people just barely going astray is that you get improvements in thought and technology across a span of many fields, which in turn brings future great achievements nearer to our reach.

Considering the current state of the economy there is a huge surplus of people that aren't needed for anything. It's clearly not a numbers thing. You could probably beat population growth by much faster allocation growth.

This argument always makes me nervous, as it implies that someone somewhere will decide which people “aren’t needed” and therefore shouldn’t get resources. Nothing good lies down that road.

These are the people for whom the $600/wk covid unemployment in the US has been disastrous.

I visited my rural hometown last week, and the normally-occupied (though I wouldn't call it busy) downtown was empty. Of the 4 worthwhile restaurants, 1 was open, 2 kept narrow operating hours because of staffing problems, and the 4th was unexpectedly closed because of staffing problems that day. The prices at all the restaurants was quite out of character with the area, even accounting for the general inflation that has been pervasive this year.

It's apparent to me that the town has been largely priced out of having local restaurants by expanded unemployment benefits. Those that remain serve dinner 4 times a week. And it's unclear to me how people who were working for low wages are better off having any clear way to serve their community.

All that to say, "not needed for anything" needs many qualifiers.

>Shrinking populations in particular puts a lot of strain on workers to support a larger elderly population. The more rapid the decline, the worse the strain is.

It's the exact opposite. There will be a strain on the large elderly population that dies alone while workers get large salaries paid by all the wealthy old people.

My understanding is that the issue with declining population is that typically that also means an aging population. Younger people are not having children which causes a whole slew of issues.

What you've described is the best-cast scenario of an aging population.

Far worse is the modern reality in most places, which is systems that take growth and a certain demographic shape as base assumptions, and then make promises to people decades in advance based on those promises. That's what we do in the United States (and probably most places, but I won't speculate.)

I think this switch from supporting an always-growing economy to one that one whose population numbers are in relative stasis will be the biggest challenge of this century. It's something we've never encountered as a global civilization. And I think it could break said civilization.

The "always growing" part, I think has a lot to do with the stock markets and public companies. Private companies can go up and down, expand and contract (it's not painless of course). But a lot of this is due to expectations.

Society can adjust if it's allowed. Before the 1900s old people didn't retire (unless they were wealthy and never actually did hard work). Maybe we need to rid ourselves of the idea of living idly with golfcourses and driving an RV all over the country and instead to add to the household, if in diminishing amounts as one ages.

It’ll be rough no doubt, but the Black Death didn’t break civilization, and it was a much more drastic population reduction.

I do wonder how we will accomplish really big projects, such as properly decommissioning nuclear power facilities, with a reduced population. All of the models for licensing and re-licensing reactors assume population growth, and doing it wrong or neglecting it could lead to some really fucked up situations.

> It's something we've never encountered as a global civilization

I'm not sure what that means. There have been periods of population stagnation in continent-size swaths of land before.

Culturally speaking, stagnation has effectively been "official policy" in Europe for centuries, before the XIX/XX century changes. It ended simply because technological advance by growing societies made it culturally unsustainable to pursue ideals of eternal stagnation. If you don't grow, somebody else will and eventually they will show up at your door. This is also the case of Japan, btw. They were effectively forced to grow and progress by foreigners demonstrating military power and tech that they could not match. If they stagnate too much, they are at serious risk of somebody else (China) doing it to them again.

If you think a global policy of stagnation would not have such drawbacks, you're effectively stating that no interplanetary species will ever show up at our door with big guns, ever. That's kind of a big gamble.

>This is also the case of Japan, btw. They were effectively forced to grow and progress by foreigners demonstrating military power and tech that they could not match.

Yes, war gets rid of the surplus population and wealth, forcing a rebuilding of society in terms of economics and population. Of course it would be smarter to just give the surplus population something to do even if it is not the most effective use of the surplus population. After all, that is still better than having no surplus at all.

>Declining pops diminish the need for expansionism and internal unrest. Less fighting over limited resources.

This is probably true, but the problem is that its logical conclusion is the literal death of everyone. Stop anywhere short of that, and people will return to the point where they're no longer too preoccupied with avoiding imminent death to compete for resources. At that point, the less fighting is unlikely to be less per capita, and the only good thing to say will be that technology will have regressed so far that we won't be able to fight and kill very efficiently.

Sure the US could probably exist with 250MM people, in the sense that there are certainly countries which are smaller than that which are doing well. But the path to get there would be shockingly painful and result in a huge decrease to the average quality of life. The path to get to 500MM or 1B people on the other hand would bring about a huge increase to the average quality of life. You have it backwards thinking that life is better if the population shrinks.

This is getting into a whole other can of worms but I firmly believe the most moral path for the US to aim for is the latter.

Could we? Maybe. I don't think we want to. Not the way we consume our resources. We already have water issues in much of the country when there is a drought.

We do not need that many people. The planet does not need it. We need to learn to live with less and without never ending growth.

Just as we target the 1990s or some other period for C02 production, we should do the same for population stabilization. A couple of droughts here and there (as we used to suffer from in the past) and we'll have massive hunger and famine problems.

We need slack in the system for safety. We cannot operate at the limits and not expect catastrophes.

Peak water use in the US was decades ago and isn't related to population growth, nor does economic growth require increased resource use. It requires efficiency.

Degrowth is just killing people, in which case the people proposing it rarely want to go first.

Population decline is not killing people. Japan and S Korea aren't killing anyone.

Economic stagnation, caused by population decline in the absence of robust productivity growth, leads to social problems and the so-called "deaths of despair" in the US. Haven't seen statistics on elsewhere.

It does because the people left alive will be old and need medical care, and you won't have any healthcare workers.

That and you'll increase inequality which will cause people to kick you out and elect fascists.

(One reason for the California housing crisis is that 70s degrowth/pastoralist environmentalists thought it would encourage population decline if no-one could afford to buy a house and have children.)

> We do not need that many people. The planet does not need it. We need to learn to live with less and without never ending growth.

This is where I really think it gets into the grounds of a moral or philosophical argument. Life without this neverending economic growth is nasty, brutish, and short. We would never have advanced modern medicine, increased lifespans, or invented any of the conveniences we all use every day without it. There are no systems other than broad economic/productivity growth that have ever worked on a large scale for improving the living conditions for humanity. And we still have a long way to go to make life better for the poorest communities around the world. Denying this type of progress to future generations of humans, for a purely aesthetic reason such as we're comfortable enough today in our upper middle class lifestyles and we just kind of feel like we don't need more people around, is unconscionable.

There is plenty of water on the earth, and capacity for clean energy production, it's just a question of how do we harness it effectively while mitigating the downsides. I'm all for making some short term sacrifices and paying some costs now to avoid the worst of climate change, but that does not mean accepting that the future for humanity should be degrowth.

> If the faltering you're referring to is deflation and economic stagnation over the past three decades

And yet they have a high standard of living, some of the top health metric on the planet, and low unemployment. If you look at GDP per working-age adult, they've grow at the same rate of the US:

* https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1215628645869420545

A lot of places would be very happy to have that kind of "faltering".

> high standard of living

And that's why I took a 60% salary cut to live in Japan.

> low unemployment

I don't think Japan having lower unemployment than other developed countries is an indicator that other countries are worst off. A part of the employment rate is due to cultural reasons. There are people who can afford not to work, but choose to work anyways.

> some of the top health metric on the planet

The Japanese eat less processed food, eat moderate portions, use public transportation which involves a fair amount of walking, and just take more sanitary measures such as wearing a mask and washing hands.

After a certain economic level, this is also a cultural phenomenon.

> A lot of places would be very happy to have that kind of "faltering"

It doesn't change the fact that Japan was going to be the global superpower, until it didn't. Deflation is a fact. A lot of places would be very happy to have the American standard of living even during 07-08 recession, but that doesn't change the fact that it was a setback.

> washing hands

…without soap and without drying them after.

STEM could solve this problem if you could automate all the low value stuff and use the humans for higher economic value tasks, but it is uncertain whether you can educationally get all people up to that level.

> it is uncertain whether you can educationally get all people up to that level.

Japan has one of the most educated populace.

> use the humans for higher economic value tasks

People are under-employed.

There is also the social expectation that people work hard, so it's not obvious to me if universal basic income would be well received, even by the people who would benefit from it.

> STEM could solve this problem if you could automate all the low value stuff

Japan has access to cheap labor in neighboring southeast asian countries. Many of the workers at the convenient store are from Vietnam, Philippines, Turkey.

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