Japan's population may drop by almost one-third by 2070
www3.nhk.or.jp
www3.nhk.or.jp
https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/2073/
Having said that 2070 is so far out, projecting current trends and sensibilities (say towards immigration or family planning) might not be the best way to understand where Japan lands in 2070.
One of the disgraceful things when traveling abroad is the "ghettoes" where all you see are foreign retirees, ex-pats and other "nomads" where local culture is replaced and a new culture emerges to cater to this new influx in order to extract commercial benefit. So the Spanish Riviera, Thai beaches, Dubai, (also in FL who cater to Spring Break, for example
It's the cultural equivalent to the Strip Mall. In the US and Canada lots of towns have the similar feel because they have the common thread of national and regional chains which mimic national chains. This is something most people lament --but this is what would happen to Japan if they allowed mass migration so supplement their own population targets. It would be a country like many others with nothing distinguishing it apart.
Is Japan of 1950 also Japan of 2050? Its a sort of ship-of-Theseus issue, but when we recognize that cultures evolve, grow, mix, adapt, and continually become something wonderful, it's less of a concern in my mind.
> Tibetans are better off with the lesser dictatorship of the CCP over the theocracy of a Dalai Lama.
Oof, I doubt this is anywhere close to true given the treatment of minority groups under CCP policy. Sovereignty, forcibly taken, is rarely an improvement and is detrimental both to the people whose sovereignty was taken and to the people who took the sovereignty. Much better to engage in economic trade and diplomacy.
Remember monocultures (as in one world monoculture) are not ideal? That we aspire to celebrate differences? Eventually, we'll have a homogenized world culture --that is not something I'd like to see. I prefer there being many different cultures with their OWN idiosyncrasies and ways of life.
Therefore, what?
Is a house the same house if your tear it down and build a factory?
> but when we recognize that cultures evolve, grow, mix, adapt, and continually become something wonderful, it's less of a concern in my mind.
It should be noted that's the opinion of Western liberals, who are pretty culturally imperialistic and expect and demand that other cultures adopt their values and adapt to their preferences.
> The house argument is silly when applied to Japan of all places, which is known for frequently doing demolish-and-rebuild for wooden construction. Even one of the famous castles.
You misunderstood what I said, read it again. Is a factory the same house, if it was built on the same plot of land? It's an entirely different thing, and it's just nonsensical to bring up ship-of-Theseus in a case like that.
No, it's my personal opinion and observation.
Synthesis of external influence is unavoidable -- people being people -- and paradoxically faster when formally made verboten. Else why does China have a Great Firewall (proves external influence is attempted to be avoided) to prevent cultural intrusion and a massive flow of graduate students expatriating (evidence of the paradox)?
A culture can avoid or embrace. It's not a normative "Western Liberal" value called out, it's a positive acknowledgement of human behavior.
Yeah, but that's not what's being discussed here, which is the importation of literal foreign people (immigration) in order to keep declining population numbers up, which is quite different. Immigration is a solution that strongly reflects Western liberal ideas and priorities.
I disagree. Especially in modern times, immigrants moving somewhere else (i.e. exercising their natural right and freedom to move elsewhere) is a difference of degree of external influence, not a difference of kind.
Thus, in scope for discussion.
Where do these states gain these rights? Divine investiture? Might makes right? Inertia? What is is not what could be.
I'm unconcerned with what Lenin thought, personally.
They’re not pulling up any ladder. They made the country for themselves. Others can make their own to their own liking as well.
W/re Japan, it would be overwhelmed by Chinese, if they just let anyone in. China is big and strong enough for them to take care of their own people without needing to colonize Japan.
Which attempts to abrogate the right to free association and movement. "People vote with their feet" is a truism that applies here as well, in my view.
> They made the country for themselves.
When did Japan first incorporate? Long before the lifetime of the current population.
> Others can make their own to their own liking as well.
Where? What if three or four Japanese people want to declare an open border, making their own to their own liking? This principle falls apart.
> W/re Japan, it would be overwhelmed by Chinese, if they just let anyone in. China is big and strong enough for them to take care of their own people without needing to colonize Japan.
Therefore, what?
If it is, you're being too fuzzy about it in a way that makes claims that are simply not true. Specifically, some "synthesis of external influence" may be "unavoidable," but that does not mean immigration, especially legal immigration, is unavoidable. Embracing immigration is a policy choice the Japanese can decide not to make, even if Western liberals really disagree with the choice.
Yes, the current administrators of Japan can set a governance policy on who it attempts to allow to go through "approved" channels. Enforcing it, and especially attempting to enforce it to prevent, what I believe would be fair to summarize your prior comments, cultural contamination, won't work for the cause I've already mentioned: synthesis of external influence.
See the United States and Canada
Xenophobia is both Japan’s strength and weakness
Modernization has similar effects but locals can modernize in their own way rather than import wholesale a new culture (India vs China).
Even if culture was destroyed, I don’t see it as a bad thing. Different languages and cultures are a barrier to empathy and historically it’s been a leading cause of conflict and violence. It’s too easy to “other” people whom you can’t communicate easily with
Preserving culture at all costs for its own sake is backwards and it prevents progress
I dunno. Lots of groups even within the US lament their culture being overrun by US pop-culture or mainstream culture. Are these people wrong and counter-productive?
Which countries are those? AFAIK, Japan is the one leading the trend in the demographic crisis, followed by some Eastern European countries.
Canada has been unable to naturally replenish their population since 1972. Now they have one of the highest immigration rates in the developed world which has let them stave off Japan’s problems for decades, enabling their entitlement programs to continue functioning
As for the reason for Canada’s birth rate woes since 1972, it was not socioeconomic (it’s likely due to declining male fertility). Abortion was only legalized in 1988 in Canada. Housing was affordable during that time and its economy was strong during the long period of consecutive population declines.
Of course, like many countries a large portion of Canada’s population, including liberals, are now against immigration due to a combination of housing woes and a healthcare system in turmoil. Unfortunately, Canada has no choice unless they want to see their economy further crater and not have the working adult population to pay for socialized programs such as healthcare. According to statscan, Canada’s NIST, even if they drastically increase immigration; it will only slow down the age population bomb and not prevent it i.e. Retired elderly will still eventually outnumber both working adults and children one day too soon. The speed will likely accelerate due to the Canadian public’s growing distaste for immigration.
Citation needed. Male fertility hasn't fallen anywhere near precipitously enough to make a father incapable of having a mere 2.1 children over the course of his entire reproductive lifetime. People aren't having fewer kids because they're incapable of having kids, it's because they're making the choice not to.
https://news.virginia.edu/content/male-fertility-declining-s...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32168194/#:~:text=Summary%3A...
There’s plenty more on the topic with differing opinions on the root cause
> Male fertility hasn't fallen anywhere near precipitously enough to make a father incapable of having a mere 2.1 children over the course of his entire reproductive lifetime
That’s what defines being unable to naturally replenish the population aka the age population bomb. Countries are below the 2.1 reproductive rate. Even the US went below in 2012. Canada has hit it in 1972. None of this is new or a revelation.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/The-new-popu...
The only places not affected are in Central Africa. The theory is that pollution from industrialization results in less male fertility
I have never seen infertility claimed as a leading cause in the scientific literature and there is vast amounts of contradictory data.
The main drivers are lifestyle choices and availability of contraceptives. 1972 does not predate most socioeconomic changes like women entering the workforce and their education levels. Sexual intercourse and marriage rates are also huge factors. you can look at child birth demographics within countries. There are several demographics or groups that have much higher reproductive rates in there are no good reasons to think that they are somehow free from that impacts of pollution.
Not true. The decline in birth rates actually started in the 1950’s before the sexual revolution. It only came to a head in 1972 ie the problems did not start in 1972, that’s the year Canada became unable to replenish its workforce with native births alone. Canada was also behind the US when it comes to the sexual revolution. Abortion wasn’t even legal there until 1988.
The root cause of declining birthrates is NOT socioeconomic
Births per woman in 1950 was 3.503 (so 3-4 kids), with a peak in 1958 of 3.882 children per Canadian woman.[1] Literally the Baby Boom, which started post-WW2 and carried through the '50s.
The decline started at the end of the '50s, with the biggest drops happening in 1963-64 and plunging all of the way through the 60s.
Further more if you track the rates of change you see the upticks at the same time as economic booms, like the mid to late 80s, and the mid-2000s up until ~2009.
It's economic. People are having kids because they can support them.
I bet if you zoomed in on just Alberta and/or Oil & Gas workers you'd see a corresponding bump during the Oil boom and bust cycle in Canada, too. Everyone I know with 4+ kids was in O&G and had them during the oil boom; ditto for everyone who bought a Ford Raptor.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CAN/canada/fertility-r...
That's one factor, but there is also a huge additional psychological component to people feeling like they can support children.
The higher a family income, the fewer children they have. This tracks every more strongly with your family income as a child. People who were raised in poverty have more children, independent of their current income.
In short, more money you have or had as a child, the the fewer children you will have.
The general consensus is that this has to do with feelings of financial readiness. People who grew up with less money are less scared of raising children without everything money can provide.
How exactly does this contradict what I wrote? The birth rate did start its decline in the 1950's, and the sexual revolution started later and progressed slower in Canada. Your link also supports my argument.
There's also a lot more data that backs my argument. For one thing, birthrate declines are happening in places where the sexual revolution didn't happen.
This sounds like mental gymnastics as a futile attempt to preserve an anti-immigration narrative.
Going on a tangent, the only way to make ending Canada's immigration rate would work is if Canada can end its socialist programs like health care and social security. Even a lot of self identifying conservatives will balk at ending those entitlements. You can't have it both ways.
Then why does the number of children tend to go down with household income?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
I am really very curious which country will emerge in 2084. It will not be an European one for sure.
Edit: Many people don’t like the truth. Please take your time and look at UN demographic forecast: https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...
No-one forces Europe to allow such high immigration...
Frankly the debate has been poisoned by ideology and political agendas to the point people actually believe that there is no choice. But, really it has not been going well at all for the social and cultural fabric of European countries and just stating that means risking being labelled whatever nasty term you can think of.
Regular (even ignoring irregular) immigration contributes for 10% of the GDP in Italy alone.
All stats clearly show how regular (and even irregular) immigration is a high benefit to European countries.
I'm Italian and I can guarantee you that many sectors of our economy would be dead without immigrants, especially our precious food industry.
Immigrants pay taxes here, produce goods here, consume here, but they get little out of it as they are neither schooled nor retire here.
See, e.g. key findings here:
https://ec.europa.eu/migrant-integration/library-document/pr...
The other part of your comment is similarly loaded.
Yes, it happens that immigration may lead to social tensions. That's very true. But the experience differs wildly and real stats have to be taken into account.
E.g. In Germany crime is at all times low after having taken more than 2 million refugees and regular/irregular immigrants in a decade.
They have been absolutely core to German growth and I am hardly pressed to state that taking so many immigrants has been anything but a net positive.
I haven't denied that. But that's not the point, which you are ignoring. In fact your reply illustrate my previous comment that immigration is the easy option for industry, but it is not sustainable.
> I think it is you stating ideologically poisoned opinions
QED. Have a nice day.
and for germany crimes can you break it down into the type of crimes so that we see that your stat doesn't hold? best look at countries that had mass immigration for long like sweden. how is it going crime wise?
has for industries that thrived thanks to immigration. I know the nice NYT story about parmagienno saved thanks to hard working immigrants. Why not? but most of the time industries that struggle to hire native are paying salaries that wouldn't allow natives to raise a family while allowing immigrants to buy a house at home in a few years. this is why they favor mass immigration so that they can keep the salaries low. we saw with covid and the stop of immigration that salaries in UK for truck drivers went up for instance. its offer and demand 101
Those aren't immigrants. Those are "guest workers", or expats. Immigrants are people who move to a new country permanently.
it is obvious that european unelected leaders of the EU are favoring mass immigration vs birth/child policies and the fact that people like you and most of the media is lying about it is the proof that they don't think people would approve. in most of EU countries you don't get money/help/incentives for having children when your income is high or even average. You only get help when you are poor. this obviously tends to make people not to want to have children. South Korea took the opposite direction (too late but still) and now heavily finance child birth at all incomes.
And if you're rich enough to not qualify for direct help, the tax breaks your child provides you is greater than the maximum amount the poorest families get for a child.
Also even using private daycare, if they have reglemented prices, the CAF and muni pay for two third of the real price, at least in my area.
And you also won't pay the real full price of the conservatory/music school. Nor you will pay the real full price of museum, school, sport and youth camp, no matter how rich you are. I've worked with children who lived in a manor in the center of Paris, and in the same camp I had children from the rural Jura (west Virginia Appalachian for the US people) and one child in foster care. The full price was 500 euros for two weeks (with rebates depending on how poor you are). This isn't the true price. You get help even if you're a top10 French business lawyer with a manor with garden in the '6eme' (maybe tmi, but it has been ten years). (BTW, all of what I listed do not come from the 5 billion I talked about in the beginning, the 5 billion is only what the branch 'family' from the CAF get, I think the total budget is close to 12 billion and cover a lot more than just family).
plenty of incentives for couples to have children when you are poor yes. when you are in the middle class you'll get some but not all. for instance a first child would get you 180 euros per month (if your household earns less than 36k otherwise you get 0 and still pay high tax unlike poor people). diapers and milk for a month is already way more than that especially with inflated prices of today.
> And if you're rich enough to not qualify for direct help, the tax breaks your child provides you is greater than the maximum amount the poorest families get for a child
so. let's do france. the tax break is of a maximum of 1500 euros for a child. I don't know if you have children but I guarantee this costs much more than that
so lets take the best example that will fit your narrative: someone who earns 35k household in france. he'll get 2160 euros/year + tax rebate of 700 euros. that will be the government help he would get. I round it to 3k euros a year for a child...
now if your household earns 40k or more you'll get 700 euros rebate a year.
and if you earn much more the max is 1500euros from tax rebate. knowing that rich people send their kids to expensive childcare, schools, buy more expensive goods.
so for lower income families and people in midle class below 35k youll get 3k/year. knowing you need to move to a bigger apartment and seeing the cost of cities like paris your 3k euros are gone. so yeah. it is not worth it financially to have a child in France. EXCEPT if you are really poor and unemployed.
compare that to korea who now gives 755$ per month per child and has a similar economy size/salaries
No, you have the right amount (i actually think it's a bit less for young children, i have to check but 180 should be the money you get for kids over 12 or something like that), but the "tranche 1" is for taxable income under 71k, not 36k. Then, if your taxable income is under 100k (a bit less i think), you get half the anount (so 90), and over 100k you get half again (so 45). But you still get money, even if you are a high earner.
> the tax break is of a maximum of 1500 euros for a child. I don't know if you have children but I guarantee this costs much more than that
Gp said that it was only for the poor, i said it was not. I totally agree it's not enough.
> and if you earn much more the max is 1500euros from tax rebate. knowing that rich people send their kids to expensive childcare, schools, buy more expensive goods.
No, the daycare, even private ones, are "conventionné", and the CAF (and municipality) is paying at least half the cost (in some area it's 90%, but most likely it's 60%). If you're rich enough, ou can pay a baby-sitter, and half their salary is another tax-break. It's the same for the school. Unless you send them to unsanctionned school (and this is your right, but you cannot complain), the state is paying the teachers, the municipailty the sport and probably the 90% of the bus.
If you're poor enough, sport is free, museums are free, music school is free (and obviously school "cost" (200 euros) is taking care of by the CAF). Free meals too (i think it was like 70 euros for 31 * 5 meals until my 14 anniversary). Ah, and Youth camps are mostly free too! (but limited access, and defunded in the past ten years). 100 euros vacations in the Alps, on the azure coast, or kayaking down a river, for two weeks. Good memories.
Anyway, the subject was that EU was against natalist politics, i think we can say France have a natalist politics (less and less funded, true), that my familly benefited from, so GP was wrong. The details do not really matter.
We're only worried about this whole thing for retirement and productivity reasons and their social and financial impacts, which are serious but can be sorted out.
Granted, these things happen in many generations, we'll be long dead before it happens (presuming it does), and as I have no children, nor want, so I couldn't say it interests me aside from an intellectual debate.
Also, Russia has among the lowest fertility rates in Europe, Chinese population has pretty much capped (the growth is 0.3% YoY), both countries are going to face the aging population issue sooner than us.
Ain't so nowadays.
"You can't be neutral on a moving train" -- this isn't the 1600s where they're on the other side of the world speaking a different language and only having an impact indirectly.
Can this be assumed? As the singularity approaches, human resources may become less relevant, e.g. warfare might not be determined by numbers alone, but by training and equipment.
India is set to double in population by 2100. Africa is set to quadruple, with East Africa growing a lot too. Indonesia is already very populous and will grow, but likely not as much as Africa.
Combine AI with (hopefully) new fusion tech, and you've got a recipe for a mega explosion in human potential.
For some good reasons, I watch Kismayo, Somalia with a degree of interest. Twitter is not bad to view the area, as English language newspapers are quite bad. There are many videos of young people going out into the hinterlands near there and visiting with their grandparents for the day. Many of their elders are nomads and live in nomadic bands still. As in, they have no homes and don't intend to get one. The children in these bands are in for a heck of a century as their lives go from near stone-age to a AI-fusion-flying-car-vacation-on-the-moon future well within their lifetime. Buckle up!
Google says that population went from 19.7 million in 2001 (to take a significant date...) to 40.1 million in 2021. So +20 million/doubled in 20 years, which is crazy.
Disputable. And they'll have severe problems because of it in the upcoming decades.
China is fucked.
1) declining population, prodominantly poor, unskilled, and old being aged out. Supported by high home ownership and savings rate because this cohort has little expectation of state support. taps head don't need to worry about onerously high dependency western ratios if people don't expect such dependence. This cohort will just have to settle with mostly taking care of self while being 100x richer than when they were born. It's not 1st world QoL, many stuck with being old before rich, but it's better than most in same circumstances.
2) the high skill demographic divident / second wind of moving from current 15M STEM to 50-100M STEM in next 100 years, while broader workforce going through general upgrading of transitioning from current 25% skilled workforce to 70-80%, comparable to modern JP/DE. This is the largest, concentrated high skilled demographic divident in human history, likely for ever since very few countries (i.e. basically India) has the base population and systemic ability to coordinate and exploit so many bodies up the human capita chain.
Most of west going to be reduced version of itself since already maxed out human capital, maybe can be backfilled by automation. Few immigration heavy anglos will grow at steady pace, assuming their onerous welfare nets hold. PRC is shifting from productive capacity of 2 Japans and 6 Nigerias into 6 Japans over same cycle - that's the most growth headroom and systemic capacity to back it up.
- They weren't somewhat hostile to immigration
- Their working culture wasn't borderline slavery
Slavery means people are not remunerated and have no personal freedom. Japanese are definitely remunerated and definitely have personal freedom.
"お疲れ様でした" (otsukaresamadeshita) = "Thank you for your hard work".
Japan takes great pride in work. Just because you don't understand the culture doesn't give you the right to call it slavery.
If you want to invoke a discussion on slavery in East Asia, do it in the right context.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2020/04/04/the-fat...
It is what is binding women to work in Japan because living cost is high.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
There is absolutely nothing controversial about stating that work conditions in Japan are appalling. Calm down.
If your entire waking hours have to be dedicated to working, what's the point of having a wage at all?
I already know that Japanese culture takes great pride in work. I wasn't being literal with the word "slavery" (that's why I added "borderline" next to it). That pride doesn't make the day magically last longer than 24 hours.
Being passionate with your work is great and all. But time is finite, and life passes by. If I'm left with no time to cultivate any hobbies or even spend quality time with my family and/or friends, then I don't see the point at all.
Is American "crunch culture" any better? Does that crunch culture in America represent America as a whole?
"The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development does annual research into the amount of work done by the average citizen in a given country over the course of the year. According to these statistics, these countries rank higher than Japan in terms of average working time in a year: Mexico, South Korea, Greece, Chile, Russia, Poland, Latvia, Israel, Iceland, Ireland, Estonia, Portugal, and the United States. Even New Zealand ranks higher than Japan on documented hours worked."
It is a matter of fact that the working conditions of the average salaryman are not well suited towards building families. There are more than enough statistics to support this fact, however, you need to be careful about the target demographics of the workers. Additionally, the social and cultural pressure to spend time with your coworkers and your boss after work means further time spent away from your (possible) family.
I don't really understand why it is so difficult for you to accept the fact that Japanese working culture is not suitable for the 21st century. Automation and effiency is increasing accross nearly all white-collar industries and Japanese traditions still see it fit to mandate "arrive before your boss, leave after (sic!) him".
I bet this explains a lot of why people are not interested in having children anymore. Why to have children, if you will not be able to even afford a house for them, and working your ass off will preclude enjoying their company.
and im not praising that im just showing the good side of it and not only the bad side "working too hard". no model is perfect
I don't want to come off as critiquing you, but this is an important point if you want to understand other people and their value systems
i honestly don't want to see countries import large swaths of people who don't agree with their culture and values the way europe has, its sad to see it happen
the americas are much better at handling immigration, but eurasian countries should probably not try to copy it too hard. a better solution is to fix the culture and encourage women to have children
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/realestate/japan-empty-ho...
A depressing realisation. Western governments can't seem to plan for a long-term, multi-decade strategy anymore. But they are consistent in policies of inflating asset prices by any tools available.
its nice to have more people participating in the economy but why should their most fertile years be spent getting bureaucratic requirements just so they can struggle to find a job that gives them maternity leave? if that's what they want that's one thing, but they aren't really offered any other choice
i want a serious quality of life study on women who chose to have kids at 20 vs having no kids at 30, we're doing things wrong and its only going to be a more painful realization because population collapse is exponential, not linear
I was with you until here… how is it they are not given a choice? If a woman wants to have children instead of entering the workforce, what exactly is stopping her from doing that?
Economics. If all the other women are part of two-income households, they will inflate the cost of certain essential goods (like housing) out of reach from a single-income family.
Ultimately, the shift to dual incomes will probably pay out as well as deciding to eat your seed corn instead of planting--a wonderful time of plenty followed by starvation and collapse.
Of course, there's a ready made solution to the problem of eating your seed corn that everyone should be happy with: dump your starved, dead body on the street and have someone else move into your home.
plus you might need time and a place to find a decent husband
none if this simple imo, it would take either a loan or a subsidy, or someone whose family structure is fine with them living with their parents
Please read the context of what I said before the unnecessary name calling.
The OP was trying to cast the issue as a cultural problem, not an economic one, saying that women only work because our culture pressures them to do so (instead of, you know, economic reality.)
My point is that you can’t frame this as an effect of feminism in culture, then also in the same breath say “they have no choice in the matter”. It’s not feminism’s fault that median wage isn’t even close to enough to raise a family comfortably, and that raising kids needs two incomes.
As for OP I actually get the point he is trying to make even if he did did so imperfectly. Often the cultural is mixed with the economic and others. In fact I would suspect that feminism/culture has overall had a bigger effect, probably resulting inadvertently the economic one. Woman overall today probably have a worse deal while actually they _think_ that they have a better deal. They are their own own collective worst enemies.
I should add that the government has made the lives of both men and women very difficult through excessive taxation etc, so that the luxury of a single spouse working no longer exists.
I think Africa's population growth is predicted to plateau around 2100
Please let us know why we are wrong.
Yet right now they are prioritizing heavy materialistic living over a bigger population. It is why the world "can't take the pressure of a huge population" argument surfaces.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35357326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35362526
>Even the current number of humans alive - let alone people yet to be born - can't be maintained without continued growth, innovation, and the paradigm shifts resulting from that innovation and growth.
People in developing or newly industrialized countries typically don't drive SUVs or live in individual houses with HVAC.
This idea that we could solve the climate change problem entirely by restricting the amount of energy people are allowed to consume in the Western world is a misguided and quaintly privileged point of view.
For most of the rest of the world limiting growth would come down to population control and demanding people remain in abject poverty.
Its already not fine from many of our perspectives.
Trading crops for western currency is a generally neutral exchange, but at least it gives you access to things you cannot otherwise produce - and technology generally can break the zero-sum/geo-arbitrage of trade.
> We literally feed perfectly good farmlands to cows
Where does the wasted energy go?
The farmlands is a perfect example you make because everyone eats more meat. Meat consumption per capita in Europe increased an average 10% just in the last 7 years.
But Turkey, Vietnam, pretty much the entire middle east and Africa increased per capita consumption by more than 60% in less than two decades.
And on top of that it's even more environmentally toxic as beef keeps taking more and more of the share of the meat consumption.
And it doesn't stop at meat, India didn't even figure in top 10 car sales globally just 10 years ago, now it's the third market in the world after China and US and sells around the same cars as Germany and UK (which are all in the top 8 world markets) combined.
Since not all girls will think this, the few that think such will have to have an even higher number. You won't see 1 in 5 think to themselves "I want 10.5 children".
That you want this to happen everywhere is bizarrely misanthropic. It's an Erlichean death cult.
The population never recovers. Extinction is, at some point, inevitable.
Your comment amounts to "you're wrong, things magically change and it's all good". Do you know nothing of their culture, or psychology in general? Conformists aren't well-known for bucking the trends their parents set and doing something wildly different than they.
> Do you know nothing of their culture, or psychology in general? Conformists..
Do you? Japan has proven highly adaptable in the past.
It would take 500-1000 years for it to actually go "extinct" (depending on what do you mean by that).
A lot of things can happen in this time frame. So claims like:
> The population never recovers. Extinction is, at some point, inevitable.
Seem pretty absurd...
As the population declines, the rate will pick up. A nearly extinct Japan will give rise to an even more profound nihilism.
> A lot of things can happen in this time frame.
Tell us the science fiction story where the Japanese learn to love life and want even more Japanese people to exist to revel in it.
Nothing happens in that time. It's extinction. Their culture isn't nearly malleable enough for anything significant to change.
Why?
> Tell us the science fiction story where the Japanese learn to love life and want even more Japanese people to exist to revel in it.
Could someone just 60 years ago easily predicted the current situation? Possibly but it would have been a contrarian opinion.
What about 100 years ago? 150? 200? Almost impossible.
See the pattern?
> Their culture isn't nearly malleable enough for anything significant to change.
Right.. I'm sure there were people who were saying this in the 1860s or 1940s. Turns out the Japanese society was one of the most malleable ones that ever existed. Of course there is no guarantee that might happen again. Who knows... I'm not the one pretending I know everything.
Because the fertility that they see expressed around them by adults acts as the ceiling, not the floor for their own future fertility. If grandpa had 3 and mom had 3, you might only have 1 or 2, you'll very rarely ever have 4 of your own.
This is just the nature of those numbers... a person with 2 kids is, theoretically, working on a third. Until they get too old, and then it's an "oops".
So, it ratchets downward. When someone waits too long and has fewer, then they become the normal that children around them see, those children internalize the new number (or at least some sort of fuzzy average of those adults around them).
One would expect that to decline ever faster. And that's in fact what we see so far... instead of a fertility rate of 1.4 that just holds steady for centuries until extinction, it drops year to year and decade to decade, and will take far less than a millennium.
> Could someone just 60 years ago easily predicted the current situation?
Probably, if they somehow could have shed their 1960s biases. The trend had already started.
> Turns out the Japanese society was one of the most malleable ones that ever existed.
It's not malleable at all. Adaptable is one thing. Adaptation is an active verb, each person individually and all collectively will themselves to change, so to speak, to overcome challenges. They do that occasionally.
Malleability suggests that some outside force can come along and change them against their will, or at least without them noticing... and they are less malleable than many other cultures. If they were malleable, then we'd expect far more results from the various programs that the government puts in place to alter their culture. And those programs have fallen flat on their faces. They don't make a dent in Japanese work culture, they won't make a dent in Japanese fertility.
We're probably only 25 years or less away from 0.3 fertility rate. By about that time, it won't be so easy to argue against those who say what I'm saying... so those who did will have moved on to "this is a good thing". Some are already hinting it in the other replies. They hate humans, they wish they never existed, and they are secretly cheering this on. (Yet, I'm the fascist somehow.)
This would make me sad, except that it's difficult to be too upset about people who wish they never existed making themselves extinct.
This is magical thinking. It like imagining that if someone diets long enough, they'll disappear. Turns out that the vast majority of people reach a comfortable weight, and stop dieting.
It's experimentally validated. Calhoun ran it multiple times. Animals don't bounce back. This isn't moose populations crashing because of overfeeding and starvation.
> Turns out that the vast majority of people reach a comfortable weight, and stop dieting.
Which is where the analogy diverges from reality. Cultured populations don't reach a comfortable weight... they become "depressed from the hunger", and decide to go for broke.
An attempt to justify their own decisions while still being judgemental about the decisions of others. Meat-eaters get enraged, too, when you talk about pollution and disease; and constant tourists try to minimize their individual burning of huge amounts of jet fuel by using collective statistics that elide the fact that 90% of people in the world rarely or never fly.
A lot of us are conservative about everything in the world except things that affect our own lifestyle or our loved ones, when we suddenly become permissive. Others of us are very liberal about how the world should be run, but very strict and demanding when it comes to their own things and their own families.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points without any of that in the future, we'd appreciate it.
Religiosity is down, but how long does it take to adapt? Scientology (new strain) is up.
And when I say religiosity I mean the portion of the population that has no or limited religious affiliation is up as a whole not just one particular denomination or religion, it's down as a whole across all religions.
100 years ago: 0 scientologists now: conservatively, at least 100 scientologists
As for the portion of the population that has no or limited religious affiliation, I'm not sure that mean it will keep going down, versus comes into some kind of equilibrium.
Multiply population times consumption to get footprint. There is no question we are over the carrying capacity of the planet for humans with a lifestyle of mindless consumption and reproduction.
The insects are mostly gone. Half the animal species are gone. The oceans are filled with plastic garbage. The reefs are dead.
Humans have no capacity to limit our own numbers. Trends in Japan and projections for a few other places ignore the numbers for China and India with over 1.5 billion each and monstrous ecological collapse in both places.
And still the company I work for, like every capitalist organization, harps on the insane Pozi scheme of perpetual growth at every meeting. Why can't we just produce something of quality that will last and provide it to a stable market? Greed and insanity.
The only reason you don't believe that we are in a catastrophe of overpopulation is that the degradation of the environment is not immediately evident if you live in a city.
No, they don't: the birthrates of Japan and China are actually very similar. (India is different.) China is of course much larger, but it's a geographically larger country anyway, and always has been. It's facing the same demographic problems, if not worse.
>Why can't we just produce something of quality that will last and provide it to a stable market? Greed and insanity.
Are you talking about frying pans, or computers? Do you really want to be stuck with a high-quality computer from 1975? Or a television from the same era? Modern electronics use far less energy than stuff from a few decades ago. With clothing, you have a good point though, but here again, who wants to dress like it's 1975?
More people is more good
Everything exists within the boundary conditions of its environment. Humans, just like any other organism, can strip their environment of resources faster than they can figure out how to escape the environment or build a new one or whatever.
We went to the moon in 1969. The last moon landing was 1973.
The world population in 1969 was 3,625,680,627 [0]
The world population in 2020 was 2020 7,794,798,739 [0]
Today's world population is 8,029,731,569 [1]
We've more than doubled the world population in the 50 years since the last moon landing and no country has ever yet made it back.
Using your argument, I can unequivocally say that more people is bad.
In 1969, there were 324.23 ppm carbon in the atmosphere. Today, there are 416.43 ppm carbon in the atmosphere. [1] This does not even count species mass extinction, other pollution, etc. Even in 1969, there were sufficiently massive real environmental damage concerns to create the EPA within the same presidential administration.
This also does not even mention the massive resource constraints and conflicts that inevitably arise with overpopulation. this includes oil, water, lithium, rare-earth minerals, and possibly most important, phosphorus, which is rapidly running out, and when it does, the entire agriculture industry that feeds the current overpopulation will crash, along with the human population.
Humans would thrive with something like 1/8 of the population, especially with the level of technology, and will continue to advance.
Just consider that a miniscule 6.7% of people have a college degree [2]. That provides something resembling an upper limit on the set of people actively contributing to technological advancement. Interestingly enough, double that is about 1/8 of the population.
The view that "some is good, more is better" is just... to be kind, massively simplistic and wrong.
[0] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat...
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
[2] https://educateinspirechange.org/how-many-people-of-the-worl...
Isn't that a bit like wanting to only take in high skilled immigrants without wondering where they're going to get their favourite food from home (which as a high skilled immigrant, I can tell you, food is immensely important to us).
We don't do this stuff alone, we need haircuts, streets cleaned, trains to run, people to make and deliver food etc. We all contribute.
So, let's take a look at food - and some data.
Only 150 years ago, it required over 70% of the population to produce enough food for 100% of the population. Today, it is under 5% in rich countries, and about 65% in poor countries [0].
Obviously, given the uneven distribution of technology and knowledge, those people are today contributing to society.
But it is also true that fully distributing modern agricultural technology will make entirely redundant (to the maintenance of a technologically advanced society) something like half of the world's population.
And that is just an example from one industry.
The point is that declining replacement population does NOT automatically mean that the technological level of society will decline.
Correlation is not causation.
If anything, population increased as a result of technological advance — ability to generate more food, better shelter, better medicine — technology was not the result of greater population. Once we have the technology, evenly distributing it will require far fewer people to build and maintain it.
Let's take it a step further, and say we want to avoid using massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticides common in modern agriculture. That will STILL not require the same amount of people slaving in the fields. The technology that will enable scaled-up organic farming is also massively labor-saving — agricultural robotics, not only planting and picking, but most critically monitoring for and eliminating weeds and pests [1,2].
Yes, there will be a greater need for people fabricating and maintaining agricultural robots, but that will be dwarfed by the number today's slaving-in-the-fields-jobs that will disappear in a near future decade. If they do not reproduce at full replacement rates, we will still have a society that has both technological workers, and others who contribute much more to the culture, including authentic cuisine.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/five-roles-robots-...
[2] https://www.ieee-ras.org/agricultural-robotics-automation
What unites both questions of sustainability of the environment and of population is the question "what, other than money and its getting and spending, are we for?"
It's not a merit based society. Even if someone wants to do things differently it's almost impossible to push for it.
A 33% reduction in the population of one country is a tiny step in the right direction, but still far short of making a significant difference.
Applying even current levels of intelligence and knowledge (nevermind projecting even hints of the growth rates over the last ~10K years since agriculture, writing, etc. started), that is more than sufficient to develop resources for interplanetary and interstellar travel.
These can be linked, though. I have a lot of young people around me who are hesitant to have kids because of climate change and the period of instability their offspring would be born into. If we manage to address climate change, people may well enjoy the prospect more again.
According to what I read in the IPCC reports, we already have those; it's how goals like ones under the Paris Agreement get derived. I'd imagine it's a mix of footprint monitoring to see if we are hitting targets, and updating models based on new knowledge.
The bottom line is that a lot of people have a sense of "we're doomed" these days that's at odds with having the energy to make plans for a long-term future, or to look forward to it. If we improve I'd hope the collective zeitgeist would shift accordingly, and give those people a better outlook.
My own point of view is ... tricky. I'm relatively wealthy and well-educated. Privileged, really. My kids would be among the most likely to be in a position to contribute to a better world, so maybe having kids is the best ticket to keep the world going. I feel like I should invest the resources I have been lucky to get into family and children. I'm nervous if they'd grow up to agree, however, because this is easy to think while living in relative peace and comfort.
The much more likely is life just gets really bad for a while or at the outside possibility things fall apart enough we slide back a few centuries in some industries. If we go too far back power becomes an interesting issue because we've exploited most of the cheap easily accessible power sources so successor civilizations won't have the easy coal deposits to power a second industrial revolution.
Not necessarily. Only a small proportion of the general population "does innovation". In fact, automation and boosting productivity may mean (even should mean) more people doing high-value, innovative work.
> and markets that start getting smaller
It does not matter if a market gets smaller by number of consumers if total population also reduces and individuals are better off.
For instance, smaller population means smaller construction industry but also likely fewer builders. Does that imply that a builder will be individually worse off than now? No. They could even be better off if productivity increases drastically.
As for the reason for Canada’s birth rate woes since 1972, it was not socioeconomic (it’s likely due to declining male fertility). Abortion was only legalized in 1988 in Canada. Housing was affordable during that time and its economy was strong during the long period of consecutive population declines.
Of course, like many countries a large portion of Canada’s population, including liberals, are now against immigration due to a combination of housing woes and a healthcare system in turmoil. Unfortunately, Canada has no choice unless they want to see their economy further crater and not have the working adult population to pay for socialized programs such as healthcare. According to statscan, Canada’s NIST, even if they drastically increase immigration; it will only slow down the age population bomb and not prevent it i.e. Retired elderly will still eventually outnumber both working adults and children one day too soon. The speed will likely accelerate due to the Canadian public’s growing distaste for immigration.
Japan will probably lead the way, but I'm confident we can create societies that thrive and shrink.
And if not, I need to see some real hard proof why shrinking has to hurt actual people, instead of using "economic growth" as a goal by itself.
Lower Workforce participation means people working more For Less personal reward. It also requires a transition away from using that too fund governmental function. Most governments use GDP growth and a higher future tax base to negate the fact that spend more than they receive.
In terms of impact to real people, this means adjusting to life with less material wealth. This doesn't just mean fewer trinkets, but also cuts to social Healthcare and welfare spending
I find that hard to believe.
That said, with all things being equal I would expect austerity simply because you have a smaller and smaller percent of the population working.
This means fewer working people to provide services and build things per capita and there is no way around that. Even if you managed to fix income inequality, you still have fewer people to fix your toilet. You also have more elderly that cannot do things for themselves and need assistance so the labor market is hit from both directions
Dictators with nukes are much more scary to me