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Comment by LaserDiscMan | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how countries will attempt to deal with declining populations. Immigration isn't really a solution, as the countries with positive fertility rates (falling fast) are not producing enough children to balance the decline. I find the geopolitical implications fascinating to think about. If a country is declining and cannot tempt migrants, does it perhaps become a tax haven? Is it absorbed by a larger country (either willingly or by force)? Does it join a union of other countries to form the start of a global government?

Economically, could the deflationary pressures of a declining population lead to low/negative interest rates and hyper QE?

It's going to be interesting to see.

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More importantly, the countries with high birth rates do not have enough human capital to replace aging Westerners.

Their kids aren't equipped to take the millions of vacant Western jobs, because they won't have the necessary education, especially when it comes to language.

Israel has a higher than replacement birth-rate and has western-ish ideals. If the US cared to increase births it could simply issue free daycare, or increase the child tax deduction.

That needs to be disaggregated. Israel has a huge religious contingent, and a substantial segment of it is supported by wholesale welfare - not just child care and rebates. If subsidized early years child care were enough, you'd expect the Nordic countries with their amazing social safety net to have a population boom. They don't. There's something more subtle going on with the cultural attitudes about women as homemakers.

> free daycare

France has free daycare and yet has had a below-replacement level birth rate since the late 70s.

Many countries in Africa have English or French as their official languages. In South Africa, the number of native English speakers has increased at a faster rate than would be expected given the country's ethnic breakdown. We're likely to see the same thing happen in the rest of Africa: People will speak English or French to their children because being a native speaker of those languages would be an easy way to give your child an advantage.

Immigration may be a solution for richer countries but only if the people there accept it (currently there seems to be a trend against immigration in many developed countries). Other ideas may be reducing the need for people (e.g. more automation, but then what do you do about various welfare-for-the-old programs like state pensions, Medicare, social security?) or policies to improve fertility (random ideas I’ve seen: required paternity leave so that women won’t suffer an unequal career disadvantage from maternity which can discourage having children; relaxing booster seat requirements because they require a larger car for more than two kids which can be unaffordable and offer rules don’t seem to be based on when they are beneficial; reducing other regulations that make larger families more difficult, e.g. rules about leaving children unsupervised; reducing the cost of housing as this can be a large burden preventing people from having families; reducing the cost of college as parents may consider it when choosing to have children; somehow having people being better paid so they can have a parent stay at home with children; reducing the cost of childcare so that parents can afford more kids; forcing employers to give reasonable consideration to requests for flexible working conditions (part time, etc) for parents). Currently in rich countries when people are polled on how many children they would like, they often would like more than they end up having, so if immigration is not to be an option, reducing demographic problems may be doable by removing some of the barriers to people having children. A policy I didn’t mention is paying people for having children as many governments already do it one way or another. One issue is that the payment is often meagre and not worth it for wealthier parents (where the payments won’t come close to the opportunity cost from the career hit of taking leave from work). The kind of policies that seem particularly effective to me are ones that make marginally larger families easier — that is, it seems easier to get more children by causing some families of 2 children to become families of 3 rather than families of 0 to families of 1 — and housing/school affordability matters there as well as silly things like the booster seat thing.

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