Both Italy and Japan are in the worst possible position, in terms of aging population, than any other "non-small" developed nation.
Some projections from the national statistic institute (ISTAT), which I cannot find online right now, project ~50M people by 2050, down ~10M from current levels.
And your taxes and your version of IRS are just insane. We have a relative, a single mother, who is making 15K EUR a year, and they are going after her because her accountant used a wrong category when she paid taxes 5 years ago, so now she has to pay 10K eur fine for that year and 5K for the next (basically a whole year of income).
Another relative is a medical professional making 88K EUR in private practice, but he pays 55% in income taxes.
Another friend was making 14K EUR per year coding C#. He moved to the US since, now making 10x of that.
It's absolutely insane. I have zero surprise young people are fleeing.
If you talk about tech, maybe. But I don't think the salary situation in Italy is that bleak if we look at the whole economy and account for purchasing power parity. Using OECD's number for 2019, household disposable income incl. social transfers in kind, in US dollars/capita at current prices and PPPs for the countries you mentioned are:
Italy: 31.7k
Norway: 40.1k
Germany: 41.0k
Switzerland: 41.1k
United States: 54.9k
https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm?co...
I am talking about young professionals, they make a lot more money than that in Norway, Switzerland, USA. We know a Yoga teacher in Switzerland who makes 150 eur/hr, for example.
When using it, it doesn't matter if the person makes 150 euros an hour if it costs them that much for a meal but the person in Italy only has to work half as long for a meal.
If a person in Italy makes just enough to live comfortably, you can compare that to a person in Norway who makes just enough to live comfortably. But if a person wants a new iPhone on top of that, they're gonna be paying around $1250 whether they're in Norway or in Italy ($1295 in Norway, $1253 in Italy).
So it seems to me that the calculation is a bit more complex than just some purchasing power parity factor. Even if $1 in Italy was $2 in Norway adjusted for PPP, I would much rather be making $8000/month in Norway than $4000/month in Italy because the price of luxury goods don't vary as wildly as the price of cost-of-living stuff.
Or is my understanding wrong?
Switzerland can be a nice place for people to work hard when they are young and then move back home to start a family (or business.)
Also note that the difference between the US and Germany is also about 30%. Again, nothing to scoff at, but at the same time not remotely high enough to depopulate Germany.
Possibly they were receiving 45% net, which is plausible but that is because you are paying for pension and social security, not income taxes.
It is true anyway that IT is vastly underpaid in Italy compared to the rest of the world, and that the agenzia delle entrate is insanely harsh.
Less people => less economic opportunity => weaker economy => lower wages. Aging population => greater healthcare need, less people => taxes raised to make up the program revenue shortfall.
In Canada the Atlantic provinces through the 90s-00s emptied out for various economic reasons with young people going elsewhere for economic opportunity. It's remarkable to see that their sales taxes and income taxes in the area are much higher than BC, one of the economic powerhouses of Canadian federation.
Very hard to get out of this. I think the only solution really is to open up the taps for immigration. Eventually the relative affordability of the declining area can help this. Nova Scotia just pushed past the $1M mark. The relative affordability of the area, growing acceptance of WFH policies and absurdly stupid expensive real estate everywhere else likely helped.
The old William Gibson quote about "the future is here its just not evenly distributed yet."
It's easy to design a tax system, it's hard to predict its long-term effects.
But ultimately this is good news. Population cannot keep increasing and evidence is that it is unsustainably high now. So Less pressure on the environment, more space, hopefully increased productivity and wealth per capital (by harnessing automation).
Japan specifically is overcrowded (coubtry is not that big and most of it is actually montains with people crowded in coastal plains), so this is an opportunity to increase individuals' quality of life.
Less people is good for a strained planet, and this sort of population decline is the least harmful option for realizing a more steady state world (versus unsustainable growth).
I do agree with the general sentiment on this, but it's unfortunately kind of ignoring the huge, short and medium term social problems this population decline will bring about.
Specifically, in many places, much of infrastructure (social and otherwise) was designed on assumptions of growth.
Re-engineering entire countries infrastructure to meet these new demographics deals is going to be costly. Even to the "blood in the streets" level in some cases, I believe.
Moreover, if you accept that population cannot increase infinitely in a finite world, the transition will have to happen one day. So the sooner the better and rich, developed countries are equipped to deal with it.
Of course we didn't starve to death and this fear was completely unfounded.
The problems we face today of course have nothing to do with that. They stem rather from excessive CO2 emissions, and these emissions are dominated by rich nations with relatively small populations. This could have been limited and prevented in the 1970s but people made other choices.
It's possible that there is some point where over population is a real problem, but that is not now, and we can solve our most pressing problems in other ways.
This crisi is caused by excessive exploitation of resources, which is still increasing because of a compounded effect: we're rightly eradicating poverty and we're more and more.
So yes we are feeding everyone, among other improvements, but we are destroying the planet in the process.
Even we're the efforts we're making in rich the consumption of resources is not really decreasing while it is increasing in developing countries.
Population is the root cause of the problem.
I don't see why this is controversial. Less people enjoying a better life in a better environment sounds like an ideal world.
And while I personally don’t share the more optimistic side of the argument, I’m definitely sympathetic to the second part, specially when I see the moralistic arguments against poor nations trying to create wealth, by those who already depleted their own, and are also mostly enjoying the fruits of poor nations resources in form of cheap goods.
But it's the wealthy nations that are the ones undergoing population decline. And instead of being praised for their responsible family planning, they are told "No! You must grow! And by 'grow' we mean import people from abroad."
The expanionists that recognize some of the ponzi qualities of how a lot of the modern welfare states are stacked. That those systems will begin to fail if populations don't perpetually increase enough. They dread that population decline is going to wreck how the welfare state functions (lie to voters, over promise on entitlements, pray population keeps expanding forever so new workers can pay for retiring workers, kick the can down the road; Japan has done this for two decades for example, the US is actively doing it, and lots of affluent European nations are doing it).
It forces a reckoning with very poor decisions from the past, the bill comes due, and almost nobody likes that.
Predictable population expansion helps politicians paper over a lot of various fiscal mistakes (they rely heavily on fiscal lies to function, telling people things that are irrational fiscally but popular). Britain, France, Japan, the US - four of the world's largest economies, and they all function by using the same scam (pull future potential output forward, eat it / distribute it today, fake the present standard of living for re-election at the cost of the future context). These are things for example Macron has wrestled with frequently in France, and absolutely no politician in the US wants to go anywhere near talking about how the trajectory on entitlements is going to bankrupt the US Government de facto (requiring forever low rates from the Fed, $50t in new debt over the next 30 years, and leading to a raft of bad follow-on things economically).
Older people are, on average, much less healthy and need more medical attention. IDK if this can be solved by medical/nursing robots, but we almost certainly do not have enough living medical professionals to care for countries whose average age climbs over 50.
My hypothesis is that population growth is so embedded in the common psyche, from economics to culture and religion, that suggesting otherwise is anathema and rejected by Pavlovian reflex.
You declare that we have “too many people” and “need fewer humans” — but don’t demonstrate that’s true. It seems more like an article of faith among a certain crowd.
But to people who don’t think that’s true, saying we need fewer people and enacting policies to achieve that seems dangerous: you’re trying to destroy other people’s families for no reason but your religious beliefs.
> saying we need fewer people and enacting policies to achieve that seems dangerous: you’re trying to destroy other people’s families for no reason but your religious beliefs
Trying to conflate a natural (or at least unintended [1]) population drop with some deliberate policy of "family destruction" is the height of dishonesty.
[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/10/18/national/social... Japan’s total fertility rate [..] stood at 1.36 [..] The government aims to raise the rate to 1.8.
Your sibling comments (including the one you support) are arguing that we should continue policies which abuse the young to the point they are too distressed to breed because we have “too many people”. That would be animal abuse if I did it to cows: intentionally abusing a herd so they were too distressed to procreate.
I think you not admitting that I’m responding to sentiments expressed in this very thread is dishonest.
Fertility rate: Finland 1.35, Austria 1.46, Switzerland 1.48, Norway 1.53, Kenya 3.4, Nigeria 5.3, Somalia 5.98: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
Quality of life rank: Finland 11/80, Austria 13/80, Switzerland 1/80, Norway 3/80, Kenya 79/80, Nigeria 80/80, Somalia unranked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index
Quality of life and fertility seem to be very strongly anti-correlated. It does not seem like any sort of "policies which abuse the young" are needed to reduce population - education, gender equality, and some baseline material security suffice.
That the countries least desirable to live in have the highest fertility, and that there is a global ecological catastrophe slowly unfolding, are both well-documented common knowledge, that you became instantly ignorant of when they became inconvenient to your argument.
I would ask you to explain why you think "policies which abuse the young" are what people have in mind, or why they are needed, when obviously what has been shown to work and is popular is raising living standards. But I won't, because given the above, I already know the answer: it's much easier to argue for perpetual population growth if you can pretend the only alternative is "abuse the young to the point they are too distressed to breed".
I find it strange you can’t show me actual support for that then, after my repeated requests — are you sure it’s not a widely held dogmatic belief?
> I would ask you to explain why you think "policies which abuse the young" are what people have in mind, or why they are needed, when obviously what has been shown to work and is popular is raising living standards.
Surveys of young people point to financial distress as why they don’t have children.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/upshot/americans-are-havi...
The entire system is set up in a way which is crushing the middle class (in the US and likely other developed nations), causing them to choose not to breed. The evidence suggests that people aren’t having as many kids as they would like due to policies which harm them (eg, high taxes) — policies which people support here despite knowing that they’re driving those outcomes.
> I already know the answer: it's much easier to argue for perpetual population growth if you can pretend the only alternative is "abuse the young to the point they are too distressed to breed".
This is you creating a strawman to avoid recognizing the negative impacts of your own policy and the harms it’s causing to humanity.
Modern extinction rates average around 100 E/MSY. This means birds, mammals and amphibians have been going extinct 100 to 1000 times faster than we would expect. - https://ourworldindata.org/extinctions#are-we-heading-for-a-...
Just under 3% of the world's land remains ecologically intact [..] The study paints a gloomier picture than previous analyses of wilderness areas, focused on human impact on habitat, which estimated that 20 to 40% of the earth's terrestrial surface has been little affected by humans. - https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/15/world/intact-ecosystems-repor...
I.e. the overly optimistic studies showed that ~70% of Earth's land has been significantly affected by humans.
> Surveys of young people point to financial distress as why they don’t have children.
Clearly young people in Somalia are financially better off then, and we should emulate their policies.
Okay — why is that a catastrophe to which the solution is reducing human population?
> Clearly young people in Somalia are financially better off then, and we should emulate their policies.
Sarcasm doesn’t detract from my point that policy and cultural choices in developed nations dominate why people aren’t having kids.
I think you lack a reply now that data agreed with me.
We have a global climate and environmental crisis in a world where most human beings are still quite poor and with population still increasing.
We're being told that we should travel less, eat less meat, this, that, when most people on Earth actually still struggle to afford these things (I.e. consumption per capita is increasing as people leave abject poverty worldwide)
Believing that global population level is fine is not even an article of faith, it simply is denial of reality because it is something some people somehow simply refuse to hear.
Lastly, no-one here suggests that we should kill people or whatnot. In Japan and other developed countries population is decreasing naturally, let's just let it instead of panicking.
Your entire argument is “an authority told me so!” and from there you treat it as an article of faith.
You’re also ignoring that more people has led to less poverty and the current world is the richest it has ever been — ie, the data which shows more people is good. Global hunger has precipitously fallen, as we’ve had more people and richer nations capable of more aid.
> In Japan and other developed countries population is decreasing naturally, let's just let it instead of panicking.
It’s decreasing as a result of policies chosen which stress the young and cause them not to breed — saying “well, less people is good, so let’s keep the abuse!” is monstrous.
Only if you consider resources are unlimited, and the environment has no value.
If you put available non-renewable resources and the environment on the balance sheet, the result is different.
Okay — so show me that.
What exactly is different if you account for more people making us the wealthiest, least starving time in history?
How exactly is the outcome negative?
What exactly means that fewer people is the solution to our problems, when historically the opposite has been true?
Again, you’re not showing me that — you’re asserting it as an article of faith you expect me to just believe on your say so.
For instance, in the case of global warming, there will be migration of populations, raise of ocean level, extreme weather events, all of this will have a cost that we'll have to pay eventually.
All of this has to be taken into account if you want to assess the merit and sustainability of our production system and demographic growth.
Putting it another way, we're rich because we were given a huge loan in the form of natural resources and a hospitable environment, but this is ending. Unfortunately, there's no perpetual growth in a finite world. This is a mathematical truth.
Sure — so show me the actual account.
You’re just hand-waving about possible costs without showing they’re unsustainable on reasonable timelines OR that fewer people would help the problem at all.
That’s not a rational basis to want fewer humans.
> this is ending. Unfortunately, there's no perpetual growth in a finite world. This is a mathematical truth.
Discussing abstract concepts like limits without showing that we’re near those limits is merely dogmatic belief — it doesn’t justify anything.
That’s nihilistic fantasy.
There are plenty of references on the topic. You can start with "The limits to growth" which is 50 years old and which is revisited from time to time.
https://mahb.stanford.edu/library-item/the-limits-to-growth-...
Regarding global warming, you can look up "Kaya identity": https://theconversation.com/curb-population-growth-to-tackle...
It's impossible to give exact prediction and timelines, but it's certain that the perpetual growth model isn't sustainable and most likely, limits will materialise within the next decades.
Then arguing we need fewer people now based on that isn’t reasonable.
> it's certain that the perpetual growth model isn't sustainable
In the same sense that heat death of the universe will eventually happen — but isn’t necessarily relevant to us here and now.
> most likely, limits will materialise within the next decades
How can you conclude that when you previously said you can’t “ give exact prediction and timelines”?
To me, you seem to be repeating the same “the world is ending!” nihilism that has always permeated society.
Because I read "the limits to growth", the IPCC report summary, and various authors on the topic and that's what they say based on actual data. And I'm yet to find quantified arguments that say otherwise. You're the one whose ideas are based on faith, not me.
> To me, you seem to be repeating the same “the world is ending!” nihilism that has always permeated society.
No, because 1. I don't think the world is ending, just that current growth will stop one way or another, because it's not sustainable and limits are within sight 2. it's not about nihilism but predictions based on numerous data, which are more accurate and comprehensive than what was available in the past
Except both the links you provided and your own comment admits those aren’t terribly accurate predictions and most of them are a ways out — with huge error bars.
They also don’t attempt to address factors we know are going to happen, like increased technical prowess that come with a larger population.
If you have an actual quantitative source and model with that prediction, then post it. But you haven’t.
> I read "the limits to growth", the IPCC report summary, and various authors on the topic and that's what they say based on actual data.
Then you should cite that — because you haven’t so far.
> 1. I don't think the world is ending, just that current growth will stop one way or another, because it's not sustainable and limits are within sight
“The world (as you know it) is ending!”
I’d find you more credible if you owned what you were saying.
Isn’t it dangerous to have large numbers of people we’re going to just let die when resources are further constrained? It seems a lot safer to argue for family planning for all but the most capable and emotionally invested parents and let everyone else age out with a decent quality of life to responsibly transition to a lower human run rate. No one is arguing for eugenics, family destruction, or similar distasteful policies.
You haven’t shown anything like this — merely asserted it based on unrelated facts.
You cited raw numbers, but eg, portion of humanity in starvation conditions has gone down as population went up, because the increased wealth of nations allowed for feeding more people.
Neither unintended pregnancies nor a fraction of children in foster care seems like something that is solved by having fewer people. In fact, that will get worse (like hunger) as society regresses and we are less wealthy as nations.
> No one is arguing for eugenics, family destruction, or similar distasteful policies.
You are: Planned Parenthood was founded by a noted eugenicist; the policies to support your vision require massive taxes that stress the young and prevent them from breeding even if they otherwise would want to; etc.
You’re just denying your role in that destruction through social policy based on some kind of religious apocalyptic fantasy.
I don't see any solid evidence that the planet is "strained" or, if it is, that it has anything to do with population. People have been talking about overpopulation since before I was born. I think people who go for that stuff have a dim view of humanity and that's where their beliefs come from, not from any kind of serious empirical analysis.
> Civilization is humans, who are animals, pretending they are not animals. This pretending is often very hard. — slibhb
Anti-humanism is the wrong characterization. It’s the lack of self awareness and self preservation in aggregate as a species that is repulsive imho.
I don't think it's a serious analysis that predicts that mankind will go extinct due to overpopulation. People who have that view truly are anti-humanists. They view humans as rapacious monsters that inevitably exploit and harm other living things and the planet.
The truth is that we don't know what humans will make of the planet. Maybe the pessimists are right. But it's a higher form of behavior than pessimism to live your life in a way that confirms that mankind is good.
I agree with the sentiment of this comment regarding the end state, but I fear the transition will be a disaster. Demographic changes are of course happening at very different stages around the world. Many 1st world countries are seeing dramatically shrinking populations, but many third world countries are exploding - Nigeria is expected to nearly double their population to 400 million by 2050. The shift and resource wars thèse changes will cause will result in a lot of suffering.
> Japan specifically is overcrowded
Not really. A few of Japan's megacities are overcrowded, but tons of other areas have seen rapid depopulation and demographic collapse where there are hardly any young people.
You can't think of citizenship in the normal way. You have to think of it within the context of the Schengen. Those people even have an easier time moving on out of the Schengen to, say, Canada or the US.
Are they for jobs, or even for shops/businesses?
some examples of no-foreigner signs: from 2014 [1], 2018 [2], COVID [3] [4], New Years Eve 2021 [5]
[0] http://thejapanwanko.sub.jp/?p=3255
[1] https://www.huffingtonpost.jp/2014/03/09/discrimination_n_49...
[2] https://twitter.com/altinsiderfy/status/1014099884348092418
[3] https://twitter.com/345triangle/status/1238776189482754048
[4] https://mobile.twitter.com/sanji_kinchan/status/122956825814...
[5] https://mobile.twitter.com/arudoudebito/status/1477052668963...
But even India is heading for TFR under 2.0.
Subsaharan Africa can, on the other hand, reach up to 4 billion people before the end of the century; almost half of entire humanity.