I'm just thinking there might be more solutions to consider than "make more children". Automation, robotic assistance, age reversal etc.
Age reversal is interesting. If that happens and everyone can be in their 20's forever, nothing like it. But automation or robots? Close your eyes and imagine a town where the youngest person is 68yo with only robots to take care of the entire town. That scenario seems fucking dystopian to me. YMMV.
If it is going to enter a state of perpetual decline, then it is doomed, full stop.
> There's only so much planet to go around; there's a finite limit somewhere.
Perhaps, but the existence of an asymptote to growth doesn't imply a need to ever switch to decline.
The normal shape of a resource constrained growth curve is logistic.
There's nothing about the types of decline we are seeing that imply they are perpetual. I think these declines are a positive alternative to having decline roman empire style whenever we get too close to a political stalemate in resource allocation.
The types of decline we are seeing are local and temporary and don't require humanity to figure out how to deal with decline at all, because humanity continues growing.
I’m responding to the suggestion of something meaningfully different than what we are seeing.
Also the collapse occurred in parallel with climate change and plague which were responsible for most of the population decline.
If you do not want to pay for your own army you will be paying for someone else's one.
For random peasants the Roman army was as much (if not less) theirs as the those of the barbarians that settled in their lands.
Also the barbarians were often somewhat less exploitative and most of the tax money stayed in the local area instead off being shipped of to Rome/Constantinople
But what type of people? Are they dependents (old, children, disabled) or independent ones who can support the rest of the society? If the ratio of workers : dependents gets unhealthy, a society is doomed. In spite of all the technological progress, we still need humans for a lot of things - long term care, food, entertainment, security etc. If there are no young people, who is going to do all that?
> The largest dangers to Japanese society lie in the transition period, where many elderly people will need to be supported by relatively fewer working age people.
You answered your own question.
In a lot of countries the working population pays the pensions, more pensioners and less workers = more stress on the workers. In the long run it's good but it's going to suck ass for a few generations
And that's not even talking about the logistic of taking care of elders, it gets either very expensive or very time consuming, or both. For example in France it costs about $3k a month to have a small room in a shitty retirement house that is already overcrowded and understaffed
my grandmother had Alzheimer's and her care, in rural WA, was around $9000/month USD. Reasonably new building but still pretty understaffed.
More than anything else, THIS is what I think will ultimately kick off a housing crash. These “retirement” prices are clearly designed to squeeze the Boomers of their housing equity.
Japan's resource is its people. Engineers, teachers, government officers, train conductors, and so on. When population declines, the Japanese don't have more resources per people. They just have less resources, period.