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Comment by nwienert | Hacker News Reader

There’s no problem with low birth rates, this is a meme that is told by a few economists and yet a very slight depopulation is not only survivable but has upsides as well and so far both South Korea and Japan (for going on three decades) have maintained incredibly competitive across nearly all metrics, certainly far better off than the US in so many ways. I got in an extensive debate over this with statistics a few months back on HN and have yet to see convincing evidence: lots of news articles that are inconclusive, and charts that show them doing as well or better than any European country or most any country in the world.

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There is no problem with low birth rates in the long term. There are, however, massive problems during the many decades when the population pyramid is inverted and there are 4 or 5 retirees for every child, a ratio which Japan is about to hit and where South Korea will be in a couple of decades as well.

As for why this is a problem, Japan's pension system is already insolvent and the country is starting to experience massive manpower shortages in sectors like nursing, agriculture and construction. Sometime last year Japan passed the point where the amount of money & effort needed to maintain existing infrastructure exceeded the country's capability to build it, and the depopulation and dilapidation of Japan's second/third tier cities and the countryside is already striking and poised to accelerate rapidly as villages, towns and cities can no longer fund their basic obligations.

> Sometime last year Japan passed the point where the amount of money & effort needed to maintain existing infrastructure exceeded the country's capability to build it

Can you share where you found that? I'd like to read more about it

> and the depopulation and dilapidation of Japan's second/third tier cities and the countryside is already striking and poised to accelerate rapidly as villages, towns and cities can no longer fund their basic obligations.

Isn't that a worldwide phenomenon though? Podunk towns can't keep their young people around because there is nothing for them to do and within in a generation or two they fade away. It's sad, but is there even a reason to save those towns?

I mean, you could almost make the same argument for Canada & the US.

It's mostly due to political gridlock here, but look at all the crumbling bridges and dams -- the transit that never got built, and the feeling that somehow we are wealthy yet we never have any money for important issues.

Japan's GDP per capita still keeps growing. And the average Japanese still has an excellent quality of life.

Japan also has so many pointless infrastructure projects; things like laying concrete into river beds to control their flows, or retention systems to stop mudslides that only started because they clear-cut forests and replaced them with sugi as a make-work project... The workers are there, if they got rid of the make-work projects.

It's another offshoot of the "growth at all costs!" mentality you see in Wall Street and governments.

What do you think pays for your healthcare, public pensions, infrastructure as your population ages out of the workforce?

The Grenadier Guards?

We've seen an immense growth of productivity since the 1970s in the US, with stagnant wages. Perhaps it's time some of that goes into the issues you mentioned instead of wealthy pockets?

But with a declining population that’s declining GDP and with an aging population fewer working so less taxes.

How does it work again?

Increased per-worker productivity, automation, and a realignment of goals from lining pockets to contributing to society.

As long as gov spending per capita is not near or above income (ie, responsible fiscal policy) and you don't over-inflate, there's no reason you can't support all this with declining population.

Yes it is possible to manage ... when you have almost no government run retirement system. In country where the workforce pay for the retired, like France and a lot of European country, having your workforce shrink is a huge issue.

This is correct. There is no logical reason or empirical evidence that opening country to mass immigration will help fixing native birth rates. Problems such as housing will just increase as there's more competition for a 5 square meter flat.

Let's take that at face value.

If shrinking populations are okay, what is the desired population level? Right now no country seems to be able to stop this decrease in the modern/developed world. We are just currently shrinking.

> If shrinking populations are okay, what is the desired population level?

The answer might simply be "we don't know" here.

> Right now no country seems to be able to stop this decrease in the modern/developed world. We are just currently shrinking.

Why is that being treated as inherently bad, though?

> Why is that being treated as inherently bad, though?

We are not making this decision completely willingly, it is more just happening and it is out of the governments control. To me this means it is risky, and can we pull out of it? How do we pull out of this shrinkage?

I guess the good thing is that the developed world is all in this together, rather than only parts of it. That reduces the chance of massive disparities as a result of the changes it causes.

If would feel much more comfortable that we completely understood it, and how to control it.

There will be a lot of changes that will occur. For example conservatives are less effected by population shrinkage than liberals in the US -- probably just because conservatives are less likely to be city dwellers? Or maybe it is conservatives have different values... or a combination of values that effect whether they live in the cities.

Atheists have lower reproduction rates than those who are religious as well. (which probably correlates with liberalism/conservatism as well.)

I wonder if there are any genetic contributions to conservatism/religiousness? If so this may be a period of rapid genetic evolution...

> We are not making this decision completely willingly, it is more just happening and it is out of the governments control. To me this means it is risky, and can we pull out of it? How do we pull out of this shrinkage?

Isn't all this equally true of population growth as well as shrinkage?

No. Major population growth has been happening since the times of the new world migration.

The only major time i can think of where there were major depopulation events are in the times of the Fertile Crescent civilizations and perhaps in Asia in Angkor Wat. In both of the scenarios this massive depopulation led to the extinction of those civilizations.

> No. Major population growth has been happening since the times of the new world migration.

Nah, at least not of this magnitude. The world's population only hit a billion at about 1800, two billion around WWII. We're now at nearly eight. The idea that we understand all the consequences of that is silly; we're only just recently starting to understand the climate change aspect of it.

I’m not sure with the numbers but but bc were dealing with populations/exponential growth it’s possible the rate of pop growth (doubling time) hasn’t changed much for a longer time period.

However the childhood mortality rates have gone down so raw # of children per household could be lower and still have a higher growth rate.

Should there necessarily be one? If you have fewer people, you also have fewer needs to satisfy. I suppose at some point it breaks down just because you need that many people to run some industries... but, given all the small countries out there doing fine, we're talking about several orders of magnitude here.

Very interesting. I would like to listen more to this side of the debate. Everywhere I read is "demographic bomb" or "chaos", which seems to be a bubble. Would you be able to point some references for different arguments?

Can you link to your previous thread?

I’m just curious if you considered military concerns since war is a young man’s game as they say.

I think robotized war changes the equation a bit here. At least with regards to non-adjacent conflicts. But for adjacent conflicts between non-superpowers, if one area is depopulated, it may be much easier to walk in and keep that territory.

I'm no military strategist I just play one on the internet aka I'm about to talk some shit haha so take it with a grain of salt.

Robotic war is interesting and specifically drone warefare in my mind is similar to the role carriers played in World War 2 which is having a great cost benefit ratio along with great flexibility on damaging enemy ships and allowing longer range bombing runs. I agree that killer robots would definitely alter the battlefield equation but over the long run I think youth should still get the edge.

Having said all of that based on WW2 technological advantages eventually get countered or erode in a war of attrition with the largest industrial base eventually winning by simple over production and/or reducing the enemy's industrial capacity through strategic bombing of factories / input resources.

Either way in a total war scenario where attrition crowns the eventual winner devising counter measures and other cognitive work in general is easier when workers are <50 since there's measurable cognitive decline after that at least productivity wise. The average age of the Manhattan project scientists was ~24-25.

Additionally, a country needs to be able to simply replace it's productive experienced workers with new workers after it's factories get bombed and having a fatter more numerous population pyramid would definitely help. It's also entirely possible that robotic workers / automated factories get degraded over time due to missing parts when the enemy blows up supply chains or other resources required to get the to full robo productivity.

To sum up my entire argument/assumption youth + more population is robust to the chaos of war.

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