'The Problem Index' – Which Countries Have the Worst Demographics
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This data, while making Korea seem like the most rapidly growing population disaster on earth, is actually better than the latest data. Korea is now at 0.78 and falling. [1] I really have to wonder what the lower limit is and when (or if) it’ll ever trend up within our lifetimes.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-22/south-kor...
Bizarre that North Korea would be the only Koreans left on the peninsula.
Why? Because they are the "bad" ones?
Living in a brand new mall is not what humans strive for : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
Wouldn’t it be better for a country like the UK to have a population of about 30 million? More space for everyone, self sufficient in food and renewable energy, less pollution and resource depletion, … Why not order society to maximise average quality of life instead of GDP?
The problem is a falling population exacerbates those stresses. The economy crunches, anti-immigrant and right-wing forces gain power; the older population won’t vote to nix their benefits in favour of younger people, so either the system veers towards collapse or someone takes away their votes.
Right wing anti-immigration parties sell an enemy (immigrants) as cause of all problems (they are stealing all our jobs!). In addition they sell tax breaks which also sound very appealing to people that struggle to get by on their current income. Of course all history shows that these "solutions" are lies, but history tend to repeat itself. The problem in a democracy is that the solutions that political parties present does not always have to be grounded in reality to be popular. Especially in these modern times with disinformation and conspiratorial thinking running rampant online (it's all Soros fault!).
I don’t think it’s a general rule. But the countries in a demographic bind are in one because they’re not getting immigrants. So as the vice tightens, we see those preëxisting tendencies amplified. This is more observational than prescriptive, mine you.
As a counterexample, an skilled American white collar worker who earns about 200k per year could buy about ten thousand avocado's per month. But does the skilled, say, programmer do more "work" than multiple Avocado farmers? So, economic output is not a result of work done, it's a matter of value created (US industry creates lots of value) and how much of that is captured.
So on the one hand, a shrinking population might reduce purchasing power by producing less work. On the other hand, as long as the value of the produced work increases, the implosion might not be so bad.
how can a country such as South Korea, when it gets to over 50% retirement-age people, produce "high value", let alone "increasing value"? who will be taking care of their health and doing physical labor?
> long as the value of the produced work increases
Assuming that this is only a problem for "high-value" societies is incorrect - Indonesia, for example, while still not as bad, is almost below replacement rate, so who is going to take care of 273 million non-high-value people there once they get old?
> Bizarre that North Korea would be the only Koreans left on the peninsula.
It is indeed. They seem to be doing slightly better by the numbers but not looking too promising either.
Plus, declining population doesn’t inherently provide a big dramatic marker to put in the history books like a natural disaster or battle.
Asia just isn’t as popular of a destination because of 1) huge language barriers, 2) wages are lower than the west, and 3) visas are contingent upon stable employment, and gaps in employment plus zero tolerance policies towards visa overstays/illegal immigration make that risky to a large proportion of people.
But if you stay at a company or only job hop with offers in-hand, East Asia as a whole is insanely easy to move to, get permanent residence, or even citizenship. Anyone who’s gone through the process, doubly so those who’ve dealt with processes in the west, can readily verify this. The conditions for Japan are literally just: college degree or 10 years experience, job offer, no criminal record. Then stay a few years, don’t have a major criminal record, and you can get citizenship in as little as 5 years with a 95% acceptance rate. Permanent residence is a similar process.
I felt zero obstacles the entire way. It felt like renewing an ID card and nothing more.
There are millions of children of immigrants in Germany who speak German just as natively as anyone else in the country, just to give you one example.
> National identity and culture is heavily influenced by genes.
Citation very much needed.
I'm sure that there are studies but let's be honest. This is just common sense. I'm sure that if you replace Japanese people with Berbers from North Africa, Japan will look very different.
If you're saying the latter: what role is genetics playing in that scenario?
If you're saying the former: no, culture is not a genetic trait. Obviously.
In particular, in the given hypothetical, one might predict a change in the dairy culture in Japan if suddenly the population was significantly more tolerant of lactose.
(I assume the usual example of lactose intolerant is chosen because it appears some people are otherwise religiously opposed to considering the relationship between culture and genetics.)
It might change or it might not. Just because a dietary option is open to you doesn't mean you're going to take it. Nothing prevents me from eating sushi, and I still don't, and the reason is obvious: I didn't grow up eating it, so it isn't part of my normal diet.
It's one thing to say that culture and genetics are not completely independent. It's another to say that culture is heavily influenced by genetics, to the extent that it's a hereditary trait.
Maybe it’s bad for our current economic systems, but as we reduce birth rates we also need to be looking for economic systems that don’t simply rely on an ever-increasing population of worker bees.
Apart from a robotic class of workers, forcing older people to produce, or forcing down living standards, this isn’t a problem different economic systems can solve. It’s fundamental to input/output.
Also, stable populations aren’t super problematic. 0.78 is way below replacement, however.
Reversing population growth means having an ever increasing population of elderly people and increased burden on the young to support those elderly. It's hard to see solutions to this that aren't dystopian and downright cruel.
Wealth-wise, the global bottom 50% emit on average 1.4 tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) per year. The top 10% emits 28.7 tCO2e [1].
We're not talking about billionaires when we mention "the top 10%. This was a 2019 study, so 10% of the population was about 770 million people— that's roughly the population of the whole of Europe [2].
That bottom 50% deserve their living standards to be elevated. They deserve and should get sewage, home appliances, water pipes, electricity, cars, meat, video games, disposable income, etc etc. When that happens, half of the population could be producing one or two orders of magnitude more tCO2e. Someone in that 10% right now is producing 205x more tCO2e than someone in that bottom 50%, and it isn't because they own private jets, it's because they can afford a washer and dryer.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-022-00955-z#:~:text=G...).
This assumes that technology remains constant.
As it stands now, technology is not catching up and a smaller percentage of them will have access to those amenities.
We can't just create more oil out of thin air. Progress on batteries is too slow and renewables and electric cars are too expensive. We're already over-fishing and over-farming the earth with our current population. We are missing all of our climate targets, and that's on an earth where most don't live in developed countries yet.
We could replace those needs with technology like VR experiences and processed food for example, but I have a hard time seeing how that will be enough.
Industry that serves a number of individuals, so the relationship is direct.
considered good by who??? Can you quote some sources? Bloomberg article from above:
> The lack of babies carries long-term risks for the economy by reducing the size of the workforce that underpins its growth and vitality. Welfare spending for an aging population also drains national coffers that could otherwise be utilized to promote businesses, research and other enterprises that are key to prosperity.
( Assuming productive age is 20-80 and all people die at 100 )
Once you enter a low birthrate of 1 that would mean at some point your workforce could be cut in half and your elderly population could be doubled. Now, 40% of the workforce will end up needing to sustain a 50% elderly population and 10% would be minors. If you're not carefull the loss of capital in the workforce could mean less people desire to have kids in a world that cannot sustain their needs. Leading to a feedback loop that is very hard to get out of.
One way of improving the situation is by cutting back on all non-essential programs for decades in order to stabilise the population at the magical 2.1 number.
There government should be in full on emergency road. Anyone that has more than 1 kid should get a reverse tax rate, the government gives them money.
They should get a 10% discount on all things. Cars. Houses. Hotel rates. Anything.
In seriousness though what are the economic incentives (I assume) that could be done as a carrot to encourage the rate to go up?
Don't quote me on this but I'm pretty sure there is no way to increase fertility. Cash and better care only work so far.
Through her and some Korean friends, I've got a glimpse at the level of stress around all aspects of life in Korea. Education and work are obvious ones, but there seems to be a lot of stress about many other aspects of life, like money, prestige, and personal appearance.
Interestingly though, I think it's not difficult to see why this is all the case from a macro-economic and geographic standpoint. Korea is effectively an island surrounded on all three sides by relatively unfriendly countries. It's so small, and quite devoid of important resources.
It's biggest asset is by far its population and what they managed to build and sell abroad; phones, cars, chips, appliances, music, TV— if Korea's economy wasn't super-charged like it is now it's easy to imagine it getting lost in the sphere of influence of China, Japan, or finding more trouble via North Korea.
I can only assume all this stress and pressures in life has to do with the low birth rates. Pushing themselves this hard is not without their consequences, it seems.
But that feels like it's mostly a theoretical/money-issue (at least in the industrialized nations), because as people age, their consumption also changes. I live in an area with plenty of old people who slowly die off and get replaced by young families. The old folks are low-activity, have at most one car, and even that seems mostly stationary except for the occasional grocery shopping.
At the same time, productivity has risen so sharply that it's absolutely not a problem to provide the basics (food, shelter, energy) because we're far away from 20% of the population working in agriculture. Healthcare and elderly care in general becomes an issue, but that feels like it's much more manageable, e.g. we could cut cost and not give hip replacements to 80year-olds.
So this feels less like a "omg this can't work, just look at the numbers"-issue and more like a renegotiation of the intergenerational contract. Granted, that's not an easy task either given that the elderly get a vote too, but it's no longer "how would we ever accomplish this" and instead becomes a political issue. Since many elderly are also at the wealthiest stage in their life, I feel like that's not an unsolvable riddle.
What am I missing?
But even then, don't we have infrastructure productivity improvements, too? Building something these days requires more skilled workers, but much fewer.
Isn't infrastructure profiting from automation as much? Health & elderly care has severe limits there until we get to very advanced robots in a few generations, but infrastructure feels easier.
Still, the real problem is not building new things, but maintaining old ones.
I'm not sure we can't do that. I believe I read something about cuts in non-essential operations for the elderly in Germany's public healthcare system, but I can't find it any more because Google sucks. Still, I don't believe that's taboo if the other option is to have the system crash.
Why not? It happens a lot in 'Europe'. (yes I know that 'Europe' isn't one single thing)
The fact is, and remains, that the 'right' thing to do is to ensure adequate service provision and that the 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 year old who needs a hip replacement, or aortic valve replacement, or high level care nursing home, actually receives it. But the powers that be, even now, are able to reduce the current impact to healthcare budgets (and thus government expenditure) by pushing waiting lists out to such an extent that people are rendered basically invalid by the wait times, and die on them.
It's not just europe, it's basically the rule in the US (unless you are independently wealthy or have a decent healthcare plan), and it will only get worse unless people unzip their trousers and make the beast that has two backs.
Or, we decide collectively that the attempt at death by a thousand cuts is not in any way acceptable. Which is hard because the insidious nature of death by a thousand cuts is (to absolutely mix metaphors) that you don't notice the temperature rising until you are parboiled.
So no, just because it's technically possible to replace an 80 year old's hip, doesn't mean we should. There is nothing wrong with some cutoff where we say 'as a society, the maximum we want to pay for a daly is x' (or qaly or any other measure you want to take). There is nothing wrong with being honest about resources being finite, and that not every potentially possible medical intervention needs to be paid for by society. And this is what is happening in 'Europe' (although it isn't admitted as bluntly as I put it here...), and what I was referring to.
Or to quote The Great Cuomo:
And we're not going to put a dollar figure on human life.
If your math doesn't account for the fact that we'll hamstring the youth to serve the old, it is simply incomplete.
The panic is that a falling population and lower consumption will wipe out their assets.
An educational arms race demands that young "adults" stay non-productive and dependent for longer and longer, home affordability stretches further out from early career professionals, and parent-child relationships have become increasingly about the parent generously supporting the child as long as they can rather than just seeing them out of the nest safely. These are all cultural shifts that mimic aristocratic lifestyles, but ultimately engender inadequacy and helplessness in young adults who aspire to middle class life and make it a very reasonable choice for them to narrow the window in which they start building a secure family.
The several years, sometimes up to a decade of higher education is not necessary for a lot of professions. I myself could have become a good electrical engineer in half the time I did, because half my classes were absolute bullshit. I learned more about sociology and politics from friends than by the two-semester mandatory classes I had on it. And I certainly learned WAY more about entrepreneurship from HN than from my shitty "Entrepreneurship" classes, which were also mandatory.
Also notice that while I graduated in electrical engineering, I'm a software engineer now. So about 80% or 90% of what I studied is completely unrelated (unless I have to redo the electrical wiring of the office). However, after interviews I still sometimes have to show my bullshit diploma (which is ironically in a language they don't understand) to work in certain companies or to immigrate to certain countries.
Children can be farm labour from a pretty young age.
Median wages simply don't let you afford children anymore. It used to.
We as a society simply don't care about people's ability to have kids.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
I readily admit the benefits are shit and only profitable if you're basically feeding them gruel and giving them little else, although sadly there are people who do this. If those at '$0' are the most fertile then they're (what initially could be described as paradoxically) going to have more income on average at 1+ kids due to increase in benefits, which necessarily turns things around at the lower end.
4 day work week? Work from home on every possible situation? Flexible hours on every company? Free and good schools like in Finland? Free childcare for the little ones? Good public transportation so kids can move freely?
I think companies and governments will hemorrhage money if we ever do something like this. Oh no. Anyway.
I'm in!
And that's ignoring the fact that Finland has a population of 5.5 million and that there is no evidence that their "solutions" scale to bigger countries.
What it does help with is the the "incredible financial burden of a child" as mentioned by the GP. That's what my answer is all about.
EDIT: Deleted my second point as I don't care. I don't see this discussion going anywhere interesting.
As to why it wouldn't work in federated countries, simply put: federation does not solve bureaucracy, and bureaucracy is the biggest enemy of scaling public solutions.
In modern day, society says it's selfish and bad to have kids for your own retirement. Your kids are supposed to be the tax-stock for everybody else to use up for their retirement. So you take on the lions shares of the losses to raise the kid and then society sucks up the tax money and distributes it to anyone on social security including those who didn't have kids.
This creates a massive "free-rider effect" where the incentive is not to have kids yourself, while enjoying the benefits of their labor and distribution payments in your own retirement. Why have kids when others can do the lions share of the investment and you still get your full share of social security money.
I think looking at a two dimension "elder social security" and "fertility rate" you are going to see a correlation, but it is confounded by lots of other things including "cost vs personal benefit of raising child", access to contraceptives, education level, etc. I think it would be absolutely wild if you could just look at the numbers for Korea and Japan and just nope out on this one.
I just don't think, that if it is a factor, that it has much impact, given that the worst countries do not have this factor; the child(ren) is still pretty much the extent of the social safety net. Japan is also notable in that they actually give significantly lower social security payments to women, especially unmarried or divorcees.
That's not a general thing, it's very specific to the US (and I'd guess even not generalised in the US as a whole).
Here in Sweden kids are free to roam, go meet their friends, take the public transit, etc. without parents having to be anxious and scared.
The paranoia in the USA is extremely exhausting though, I really feel for all of you.
Easy. In the past, kids are basically free labor for the family business, e.g. you own a farm, more kids == more productivity.
Today, most kids from inherits nearly nothing from parent's job. They have their own life and objectives, but to get good jobs, kids need good education, and good education costs money. So kids == burden.
You don't think you could enjoy raising offspring of your own?
Grass is always greener on the other side I guess.
Settings > Accessibility > Force Enable Zoom
overrides this (h/t someone HN when I complained about this too).
The more damaging to Russia is actually the reports that they may soon be mobilising university students [1].
That would wipe out an entire generation of future business leaders, entrepreneurs, professionals etc.
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/russia-prepares-mass-mobilisation-ful...
^ college students included
TIL that 30,000 American draft dodgers went to Canada during the Vietnam War, while 30,000 Canadians joined the US military to fight in the Vietnam War <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6o1b3f/til_th...>
More than 100,000 Russians and counting have died since the war started exactly a year ago. 20 times the casualty rate.
Annexing Ukraine would have increased Russia’s population from 144M to 188M overnight. A great legacy for Vladimir the Cunning, in his dreams.
Russian women er pretty amazing.
similar scary calculation for china and taiwan.
Putin keeps talking about an existential crisis for Russia. He's right. Except the crisis is at home. Even before the war, Russian population was shrinking in size. Now with the war, he's basically losing a generation and massively speeding up the process. I've heard some comments stating that from a demographic point of view, this is the last generation even capable of pulling together an army the size that Russia is currently deploying. Next generations will be too small in numbers. As the older generations die out, Russia will have a much smaller population than it used to.
This makes for a grim reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia
Despite abortions going down, population decreased by 1M people last year. The average age has dropped a few years. Population size basically peaked right after the wall came down and has trended down ever since. With the exception of a few years, growth rate was negative every year since.
Currently, the fertility rate is on par with the US and most of the other urbanized world, life expectancy is up by whopping 8 years since then (not counting the Covid). That one million of lives lost is due to Covid and it seems like the country is pretty much in the same boat as everyone else now, slowly withering away.
This would probably not matter as much if we leveraged improved technology and productivity to reduce the need for human labor. Rather it seems industrial (technological) revolutions have increased the number of hours people need to work to survive: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_... This has been coming back down in places like the USA since the late 1800s, but still, why do we all have to work so much to the point that we're starting to worry about "supporting an ageing, nonworking population?"
Humanity is not going to die out, but future will belong to cultures that are passed on to another generation. How would folks not willing to budge on these ideals feel if they time traveled to year 2100 and the world was dominated by theocracies that managed to keep their birth rates up?
What do you suggest would encourage people to have more children?
It seems much easier to have a kid if one parent is able to stay at home. But that’ll require restructuring the economy for lower labor participation rates. And I guess we’re not going to accept a massive gender imbalance in who stays home nowadays. So as a first step I guess we’ll have to massively rethink men’s role in society, so that we can get up from the paltry 16% of stay at home parents being fathers to more like 50%.
All possible but it requires sustained effort.
Accepting more immigrants is quite a bit more flexible. And they even show up as adults mostly, so we don’t have to raise them! It is sort of mooching off the rest of the world, but if people want to join, I say let ‘em.
Really interesting read.
Like it or not, people who don’t work are a burden on those who do.
I’m not saying kill them as I love my grandparents, but having everyone die soon after retiring would fix a lot of the challenges.
Also most healthcare is spent in the last 1-2 years in the life of the individual. I saw the system spend so much resources to keep my miserable demented grandma alive for 2 cruel years after she lost her mind. What was the point? She was just in constant pain, emotional and physical. As a culture it should be honorable to chose when we die, go off on our own accord instead of grudgingly push it to the very end. Its unbecoming.
Now the system expects my generation, millennials, to bear the boomer retirement economics on our working backs while we cant even afford our own houses. In Sweden, not only retirees but also the 7% (700 000) refugee immigrants that dont work nor contribute. Yea, that's gonna be a no from me pal.
That’s true, but [1] says men in Russia are expected to live much less than other countries at any age. For example, a 45yo male in Russia is expected to die at 72.4, which is 10 years less than top-10 countries and worse than 138 countries. For 65yo Russia is ranked 109.
[1] https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/your-life-expectancy-by-...
As we're on a tech oriented website, I am surprised at the purely "sociological/political" perspectives in the comments. If no significant upheaval in westernized societies (à la "mad max"), the cultural norms won't be changed, so the decline in population won't be fought through social/societal means.
That's why I am rather intrigued by the future technological consequences of all this :
- accelerated automation : some countries might embrace their demographic declien and go all-in (Japan was the model but seems they are stagnating, now...) - new (technical) challenges about how to deal with more and more old people and less youth to do so ("Roujin Z" is a take on this) - where are artificial wombs? Seems sooner or later it might become the de facto standard way of having children, in a (not so?) far enough future...
A country who is rising and will inevitably be a rival of China.
I'm not just talking about the lilt. There are also vowel shifts and word choices.
English not have a common pronunciation...
It was wildly over-complicated to start, but soon enough we’ll have morphed it into Earth Business Basic. It is great to learn a language to appreciate the culture that it comes from of course, but for business purposes American is the way to go. :p
> Inequality using the Gini index is 24% higher in India than in China according to income, but 9% higher in China than in India according to consumption. Something similar is found if we compare urban and rural areas across countries
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043951X2....
Edit: The reason I mention this is due to access to higher level of education can be correlated to the income inequalities in general. Add to that China's massive social services and pushes for science related education they definitely are showing some advantages.
Taiwan is labelled a province of China in the penultimate bar graph, FYI.
For almost all intents and purposes Taiwan is an independent country, but even they used to claim to be the one and only China until not that long ago. Unfortunately it's unlikely that a declaration of independence will be well received by China proper, so the current weird limbo (no international recognition and thus no embassies, "Chinese Taipei" in the Olympics, etc.) will persist for the foreseeable future.
> Alas, we must abstract at some point, and in our case the sensible approach suggests taking as conservative an estimate as we can (and which the data permits). We therefore consider the economically inactive population beginning at 65, and the working age population between 16 and 64.
I mean, you do need to "abstract at some point" if you've committed yourself to writing this report, but your report becomes a lot less interesting once you do.
And then when it comes to analyzing "solutions", it presupposes migration as if that would be the only meaningful way to weather a lopsided generation.
It's a very "this is what it looks like around me, so this is how everybody must have to face it" sort of analysis.
Given that you need to maintain and grow infrastructure and services etc while a baby-boom might be happening, also during a 'baby-boom' push demand on social services increases meaning there is a higher demand on Tax spending during that period, so there needs to still be a sufficient workforce already contributing. there doesn't seem like many other options than immigration to as the author says : "Plug the gap"
What alternatives would you propose ?
> It's a very "this is what it looks like around me, so this is how everybody must have to face it" sort of analysis.
I'm really not getting this at all, there is data and examples given world wide. Some examples would be nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes
So yeah there's that. Unless the author somehow add an extra "political correctness" step in country name processing
The ridiculous (and often artificial) rise in house prices is another problem with real solutions like an end to restrictive zoning laws and the banning of foreign speculators buying accommodation just as a store of funds - some areas of London have huge numbers of empty flats caused by this while at the same time ordinary people are desperate to find somewhere decent to live.
People forced into couch-surfing and tiny bedsits aren't going to start families any time soon.
Author of the article here - really nice thread and we are taking your inputs in!
We will do the next installment in our Demographics series next week - any wishes/issues you would like us to take a look at?
Best, Mikkel Rosenvold
Author of the article here - great to see your inputs and discussions.
We are doing the next installment in our demographics series next week - any wishes/requests for us to look at?
Best, Mikkel Rosenvold
Very sad that we all just shrug and grant that it’s some prerogative of government. Oh we can have 3 kids now? What a benevolent government.
To state the perfectly obvious but carefully avoided in the media: If you want to have a great healthcare system you'd better have a lot of babies and/or a lot of immigrants.
If you didn't have the required amount of babies you are going to have to have migrants. The quite popular right wing anti-imigration position is actually horrific.