[1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2001/03/muhleise....
It is unclear how a country stabilizes birth rates once they start falling, because no modern country has successfully done it.
Some countries supplement or offset their population losses with immigration, which comes with its own challenges.
> It is unclear how a country stabilizes birth rates once they start falling, because no modern country has successfully done it.
One possibility is that they are continuing to fall because they just haven't reached equilibrium population yet. East Asian countries also seem (from my limited understanding) to have particularly bad social problems that further suppress birth rates, which Western countries don't have.
Genuinely curious what you think these are? (not looking to argue, just wondering because I’m a closet sociologist)
Corporations require continued growth to drive stock prices. How do you have growth when then population is shrinking? There are literally less people to buy gas, food, cars, iPhones, etc. Large investments designed to scale and handle capacity are now losing money, not in use, etc.
You handwave this like it's a simple thing, but it will shock the system and lead to massive problems. Perhaps it's necessary, but in the same way amputating a limb might be necessary -- painful and complicated.
Federal social programs are all pyramids schemes.
They depend on having a large tax base entering the bottom, either immigrants or young people, to constantly keep them funded.
The less people at the bottom, the less funding, and now you have austerity programs that have to take effect to prevent the programs from running out of money.
This framing is important. People think we need austerity because social programs are running out of money. But austerity makes the problem worse. A big pile of money is useless if it can't buy what it needs. In the long run the best way to balance the books is to borrow money and spend it on childcare and child tax credits to encourage having children, spending it on nurse training, et cetera.
I do not know that this is possible without sufficiently high taxes and policies such that a life without kids is seen as undesirable relative to a life with kids. And that is going to be very, very politically unpopular because it is a lot of pain in the short term for long term gains unattributable to the individual.
Quite an interesting problem, and I have no idea how this shakes out for my kids and their potential kids.
This is a hard one to solve. Some modern westerners see child free life as good and fill their lives with other time sinks that children would otherwise fill.
But I don't think you can lay the child free lifestyle blame all at the costs of having children.
Poor people, religious groups (Mormons, Muslims, etc.), and immigrants who come to western countries all seem to have no problems having children.
Even the Koreans mentioned in the article have huge families when moving overseas.
1) will we be secure in our housing, at a certain minimum sq ft per person?
2) will we be secure in our access to healthcare (I guess this is a US concern)?
3) will we be living in an acceptable neighborhood with access to acceptable schools?
4) will we be living in an region experiencing economic growth, or at least not economic decline, so as to reduce the probability of becoming destitute due to job loss, etc?
5) will we have friends/family nearby to help with children in case of emergencies (a problem for many who move away from economically declining areas to economically growing areas)?
All of these are not a concern if you choose to not have children. At least you will be able to spend a coupe hours watching TV or browsing on your phone, but you will not be stressed out trying to make ends meet while also trying to meet the expected quality of life you want for your children.
>Poor people, religious groups (Mormons, Muslims, etc.), and immigrants who come to western countries all seem to have no problems having children.
There are a few tribes that have women who do not believe in (or have access to) birth control or do not worry as much about the future, or they have different expectations of quality of life for their kids. But outside these specific examples, my armchair analysis seems to indicate that most women with independence start thinking about various tradeoffs in life, which can make having children (or as many children) seem not worth it.
>Even the Koreans mentioned in the article have huge families when moving overseas.
I do not see this mentioned in the article.
When pension schemes were invented (or instiutionalised) at the end of the 19th century, the delta between retirement age (65) and expected age of death was small. This is different now, since people tend to retire before 65 and live to their mid to late 80s on average.
The problem is in the short term, as the current population starts to skew older, there will be fewer working-age people supporting the increasing numbers of elderly people who retire and eventually can't support themselves even if they want to. This is both a macroeconomic problem (not enough income/production to pay for everything) and a microeconomic problem (literally not enough qualified caregivers, limiting supply of care even as demand increases, and therefore making it much more expensive).
Thus we need to figure out a way to make it through the transition out of our current high-positive-growth without creating a crisis of poverty and suffering among the soon-to-be elderly.
The answer probably involves nation-state governments creating a shit ton of money to make it all happen. But in the USA at least, we are already very deep in unknown zone of debt-to-GDP ratio above unity, the cost of debt service itself beginning to grow (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S), and an uncertain future around our ability to control inflation with monetary policy. Not to mention the pesky habit of large corporations and wealthy individuals to funnel money out of public expenditure in the form of economic rent.
If we could actually stop being greedy for two seconds and try to plan ahead, I'm sure we could figure it out. But when has that ever happened before?
0.78 YoY is negative growth and fast and one wonders if a country is able to adapt its infrastructure sufficiently quickly to this new reality in the next few decades.
If you look at the projections, SK’s population will peak in 2024 and the drop after that looks quadratic, back to its 1960s population which is right after the Korean War.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/south-korea-popu...
When the proportions of young to old get too skewed, each one ends up paying more and more to support the older generations - which means they can't buy as much either.
It's economically very bad to have an aging population.
Also: It seems in general most economies are centered around indefinite growth. That may sound absurd, but regardless a shrinking population reverses that assumption and causes problems.
This problem is almost certainly solvable with some planning, but humanity as a whole isn't always good at that.
Modern economy systems also function on the assumption of gradual inflation. A chronically deflationary society is one that's at the risk of spiralling into either stagnation or collapse. Post-1990 Japan is the only approximate example of a chronically deflationary society and they have been in almost perpetual QE since 2014 to no avail.
Which leads to violence and protests: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/world/europe/macron-franc...
you still need to balance work needed with work done.
More consuming than producing means there's less to give up top.
But a country’s infrastructure is built for a certain population size assumption, and the numerator has a highly nonlinear relationship with the denominator, and the denominator is further broken down into subpopulations that affect the numerator non linearly. It’s not a simple ratio.
You have to manage population shrinkage almost as carefully as growth, if not more carefully. Shrinkage almost happens in an unpredictable way and instead of ending up like Japan you might end up like Bulgaria. Also a country is not isolated — it’s subject to competitive forces in the world so if the labor force becomes uncompetitive, your economy will tailspin in a way that exceeds your proportional savings from population shrinkage.
Improperly managed shrinkage in the extreme can lead to unemployment due to lack of growth, the rise of a disgruntled class which can in turn lead to lots of internal conflicts. There is a lot of system inertia in countries and lots of unpredictable effects.
With a slowly tapering demography, you can do a lot of neat tricks like using technology to improve productivity and make up the difference that way. When your demography falls off a cliff, there is no recourse - the cost of labor is going to massively increase. This is great for working-age people but retirees end up having to pay most of the cost (or rather - it comes out of their pensions both public and private). So a social problem is baked in with this and possibly an economic problem as well because at some point the working-age cohort is going to have to have its resources redistributed to the retiree class to support them.
Doubly so when you also have several hundred million Chinese that view your continued existence as the result of Western hegemonic oppression.
Plus, it is diminishing returns. More old people will be ill or otherwise unable to work.