It is only compatible because we are approaching peak population mid to late century and then we will slowly contract over time until extinction through lack of births... if trends continue.
Perhaps that's part of the reason that 84% of the world's population identifies with a religion.
Now I personally think every religion I've encountered is ridiculous fiction (no offence, just my opinion), but I will admit that there can be some pretty significant advantages in a community. Raising a ton of kids is probably just easier in a close community of similar minded families (a.k.a. the local church/temple/mosque). It's almost like it's intentionally engineered to be this way.
Big if. In a true famine, the poor usually die first.
> Evolution doesn't care for the comfort of anyone.
Evolution cares about sexual desireability and fitness. Rich people usually have more.
In nature we see these two strategies as well. Some species try and have as many babies as possible, where others have fewer but concentrate resources to make sure the few are more likely to survive. Neither strategy is optimal in all situations.
I could also see a social movement developing that campaigned for this on the grounds of equity for women. It could be presented as both essential for the species and empowering for all genders…and that might be true.
Average life expectancy beyond 70 years is also fairly new.
We are also seeing a trend where technology is leading to additional surveillance and control for the population as opposed to a reduction in inequality and rising living standards.
https://www.ipss.go.jp/site-ad/index_english/esuikei/econ2.h...).
Going from 128m in 2010 to 87m in 2060.
The doomsday predictions haven't just started now, and they weren't only about events in 2060. They started decades ago about population growth slowing, population leveling, population dropping. They've been pretty consistently wrong.
They haven't been wrong, they turned out to be right for everyone. People who didn't live through the boom of the 1950s can't imagine what it's like to live in a world where things improve for everyone every year.
Japan didn't start growing like it did before 1980 again, everyone else stopped too.
China has been basically the only driver of world economic growth for the last 40 years. Which is kind of astonishing considering they are communists.
No, they have. I don't know who you're talking about, I'm talking about the sustainable population doomsayers.
Predictions of world domination were equally the same kind of substance-free propaganda and fear mongering. No serious people actually thought a country of ~100 million would economically dominate the world.
Nor was not achieving world domination wasn't the anti-sustainable-population propaganda fearmongering of the 90s and 0s that I'm talking about, so I don't know what part of my comment you're trying to respond to.
That's not what the propagandists claimed though.
> That gave it advantages and opportunities that won't exist for many countries once the developed world at large ages into mass retirement
What unique advantages and opportunities that won't exist for others? This sounds familiar.
With the rest of the developed world (outside of the US and a few others) moving into aging demographics more-or-less all at once, export-driven economies are going to be hard-pressed as global consumption decreases in the developed world. They also won't have time to experiment.
Now sure, theoretically governments could learn from Japan's successes and failures and, being forward looking, could initiate policy 5-10 years in advance to offset the worst of the impacts and... sorry I just laughed into my keyboard. It's going to be a show, people will wake up one morning, stuff will be expensive and broken, no one in power will understand why, problems will be denied for months until things break beyond the point of no return, and the solutions will be rushed, poorly directed and half-assed. See Germany's current energy woes.
Germany, South Korea, and others are going to hit the same problem in a much more hostile global economic environment, as most of the wealthy global consumers are going to simply disappear. At present they're woefully unprepared to deal with any of it.
It's funny, still today it has like 4x the GDP per capita of China and yet hearing it from these propagandists^Weconomists you'd think China is some kind of futuristic wonderland where everything turns to gold and Japan is a crumbling wasteland (or soon will be.... aaaany day now, for the past 30 years).
Japan's got issues, every country does. You think the US or Europe don't face serious economic problems in the next 40 years? As populations around the world peak and resource extraction and primary production peak, cheap fossil fuels are phased out, everybody's chickens will be coming home to roost. That's not a Japan problem, that's everyone's problem. Rich countries like Japan have a lot of room to cut expenditure and raise revenue. They don't because it's not popular, but they can and will (have to).
It does not mean that Japan is doomed, but rather that some policy will have to be implemented and some large change to the structure of the economy will have to happen in due time.
The thing with demographic problems is that they are background noise for a very long time and then suddenly become a much bigger problem. You can verify this yourself by playing around with some simple math such as having a cohort of 100 people at t0, set an average expectancy, and seeing the effects of different birthrates as time goes on.
2022: we need more robots!