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Can we stop pretending birth rate decline couldn't self-stabilize? I don't see populations organically shrinking to 0 as a realistic scenario.
I for one am tired of extremely misguided and unjustified attempts at engineering everything on the planet.
There are social conditions in other species that can result in extinction of a population group, despite ample resource availability. That's what Calhoun's rat population sink experiments were about.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264/pdf/pro...
I don't disagree that the number of human beings on this planet is unsustainable, but I also wonder if there are underlying social pathologies that immigration is only temporarily masking. If we can generalize social behavior (and maybe we can't - but if so, "humans have reason" is not why) in mammals at all, Calhoun's experiments are certainly very alarming.
Japan has 126 million people, while in 1910 it had 50 million. Populations are at similar historic, unprecedented heights throughout most of the world, developed and developing.
We are nowhere near having to worry about extinction due to not enough people.
Please read the PDF I linked. The whole point is that even massive populations can be subject to permanent declines resulting in extinction under the right social conditions.
One might as well say the two thousand rats in the article had nothing to worry about because there were so many of them - but the peak is exactly where the social collapse was irreversible.
Again, I agree that seven billion is not a sustainable number of humans. In terms of resources and environmental damage, seven billion is a catastrophe. What I’m saying is that population declines may be heralding a different kind of disaster.
The troubles associated with declining citizen working population lies not with pseudo-extinction. There are two big concerns with countries facing this.
One is the fact that there is going to be greater immigrant representation, and immigrants will have/need to have a separate voice. If a society is not well-equipped to handle this, it can face problems from that.
The other is that typically, the ratio of dependents to workers tend to get further skewed, with more dependents being supported by a single worker. This makes for hardship for the population, if not adequately addressed.
How do you propose to sustainably support 7.5 Billion people on this "tiny" planet without engineering?
Perhaps there is a middle ground between "engineering everything" and "without engineering".
He said without engineering everything.
The way your comment is written it is technically a straw man fallacy.
I see this as a good thing. We need less people in the world, it will be better for the planet, and civilization will be more sustainable. Better to have a highly automated more empty world than a hot crowded one with too many mouths to feed and not enough food to go around.
Having more people in developed countries wouldn't hurt.
EXACTLY ^^. If population worldwide were to drop 90%, global warming and mass extinctions would end. In the 1970s we all worried about world overpopulation. ZPG - Zero Population Growth was desirable. Today that disaster is here! 90% of the world's population is not changing anything about mankind's future they are just hanging out ... we should focus on a smaller world by population and more productivity for the future of humanity...
I'll tell you why you see these alarmist articles! Greedy business interests! They are programming our minds to think this is a crisis! To these misers it is a crisis because 1% of business growth every year in places like the USA comes from business sitting on its ass - just from population growth!
I honestly cannot tell if Poe's law is applicable here or not.
Your response is testament to how thoroughly your thoughts are programmed to serve the needs of others...
To clarify, fully 1% of GDP growth which is 16% of real (inflation adjusted) business growth, is from population growth. This is why our business-owned media wants us to think this is a crisis ...
If automation is the future, isn’t a decline in the working population a good thing? The robots can just take over the vacant jobs. What am I missing?
A nugget of cycling wisdom says when you get fitter, cycling doesn't become any easier, you just go faster.
Similarly with automation, we are just ending up with more efficient means of production but not less work overall.
In my opinion that's an unfortunate turn - automation doesn't liberate us, we just become more and more extensions of automated processes. Why were classical economists such as Marx and Kenyes so wrong on this point? I think they underestimated the power of capital's ideology.
>but not less work overall
I think we do have less work overall and need to accept the liberation.
A lot of jobs have popped up through things like regulatory capture or monopolistic competition(1) which have debatable benefit to society.
1-https://www.athenahealth.com/insight/expert-forum-rise-and-r...
> A lot of jobs have popped up through things like regulatory capture or monopolistic competition(1) which have debatable benefit to society.
A more concise term is 'parasites'.
Most vacant jobs in Japan are the kind of thing that's quite difficult to automate: farm worker, health care, construction, sole person running a convenience store, etc. The comparatively easy stuff like repetitive factory work has generally been automated already.
I can vouch for this statement. My first job in Japan was in construction. Most of the foreigners I know/see are nurses, care givers, construction workers or convenience store employees.
Aren’t these jobs going to be less and less needed as population decline ?
I know there is the wave of elderly people who will be SOL, but to put on my cynical hat, I think the current government has already given up on them, so I see no help on the way for them anyway.
Robots don't pay taxes, and, therefore, don't help to support the elderly safety net (which is one the biggest problems with a declining population, supporting this system).
One way around this is to increase taxes (either directly or indirectly somehow) on companies that successfully implement automation, but that opens up a whole other can of worms.
If people don't have incomes, they won't buy the things the robots make.
Is a world where we build n+1 billion tv's for n+1 billion people better than a world with n billion people and tv's?
This involves a faith in automation having near-magical powers, with no downsides whatsoever. Automation is expensive, limited to specific tasks that can be broken down into an unchanging list of steps, requires constant maintenance and updating, and is very vulnerable in ways humans are not. We already are very vulnerable as a computerized society to events like typhoons-a society with less people and more reliance on automation could suffer critical effects, since it often increases fragility as a trade off for efficiency.
Correct, the problem is the misguided idea of immigration when automation is the future.
As a bit of a side tract, this is happening to all modernized nations, only Japan is one of the few modern countries that isn't allowing enough legal immigrants to make up for the decline. The US also has a negative native population growth, but because the doom and disaster a negative growth rate would cause upon our current economic models we allow shit tons of legal immigration to maintain growth.
Can you cite your sources? It is especially important when you are making potentially provocative claims ("doom and disaster", "shit tons of legal immigration").
In (fiscal year) 2017, the US admitted 1.1 million immigrants, 1.2 million in 2016. [1] US population has been increasing at about 2.3 million per year [2].
[1] https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2017/tab...
[2] https://www.multpl.com/united-states-population/table/by-yea...
Two explanations for that.
1) is life expectancy. Suppose the average life expectancy is 40, and every two people have two children at age 20. Population would be stable. However, suppose nothing changes about fertility rates or replacement rates, but the life expectancy grows to say 60. You'll find that the population for some time will grow, merely because inflow (births) don't change, but outflow (deaths) are lower as they are delayed.
As such, population growth can occur despite a below-replacement rate fertility without any immigration.
2) Immigrants tend to be more fertile. Welcoming immigrants and then chalking up the subsequent population growth from their high-birth rate as being an example of the country having sufficiently high birth rates for population growth without immigration is faulty reasoning. Births in the US would've been a lot lower if it admitted no immigrants, particularly hispanic.
Fact is total fertility rates in the US are around 1.7 children per woman now, and are even lower for people who's families have been in the US for multiple generations (non-recent immigrants). US would be declining in population size this century if it wasn't for migration, ceteris paribus.
Similar story all over Europe. Just look at fertility rates of native-born populations and the necessary replacement rate, the former is typically below the latter. [0] Most OECD countries would be shrinking without immigration.
I think he's being a little sarcastic.
But negative population growth can lead to deflationary systems, and economists are very afraid of those.
In short: if you think you're going to have less customers, you don't invest or hire, and you might layoff, causing further negative data and sentiment, causing further downward pressure on economic activity. 'Death Spiral'. [1]
This is also partly why we keep inflation at 2% target, and not 0%.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deflationary-spiral.asp
Japan just passed a radical (for Japan) change to their immigration rules, to allow in more foreign workers in a number of low-skill categories. It’s also comparatively easy for skilled workers to get visas. (The bigger problem is making Japanese companies treat these workers as equals...but they’re coming around.)
Now, contrast to the current reactionary government of the United States, and their attitude toward immigration. The two countries are clearly moving in opposite directions.
Japan doesn't really need complex or quota-based immigration laws because foreigners are not super happy to live there forever once they've tried it. More so than legal barriers, there are cultural ones. And there are borders in our minds just as much as on maps (e.g. preconceptions that we're stubborn to let go of).
The US is different, of course. People like it here once they've arrived. I can't say why, nor do I buy the stereotype that US culture is more open or individualistic. But the US arguable needs laws quota-based and micro-managey, since they are managing a huge amount of people from more diverse backgrounds. Japan is managing fewer potential immigrants and guests, and most of their immigrants are geographically close to Japan.
Despite the immigration laws being easier to grok and less authoritarian on paper, Japan is pretty strict in its enforcement of those laws. Put all I've said together and I don't know if one country is more reactionary than the other, but I think both countries are moving toward a more balanced, less eccentric immigration system at the moment.
(why you should listen to me: I'm an American and lived in Japan for four years and had to go through the process of getting my wife a spouse visa 2 years into my stay. I dealt with immigration a few times. I went to many different cities and vacations and such, and talked to people that don't speak English and don't have a passport, so I have a representative sample set.)
The US allows around 1 million legal immigrants every year. I don't see how this is moving an in opposite direction from Japan's recent changes.
doesn't NYC have more foreign born immigrants (3 m) than all of Japan (2.23 m)?
It would be nice to see more in-depth root cause analyses of the fertility issues that many nations like Japan are facing. It's obvious there are a lot of causal factors of various weights, but it's difficult to see which ones have the greatest effect as well as which ones we would be able to improve the easiest. Too often all of these issues seem to just be hand-waved as "something that just happens", with few groups actually working to apply the scientific method in order to improve the situation.
I think some of it is economics - having children is more K-strategy, more expenses and attention called for - and people don't need children for social security. Compare to say third world farm families where the marginal cost of children is low and there are more gains.
This is also an example where the larger story is about emptying out the rural areas while the cities grow. Most of Japan's large cities have increased in population (or are flat) over the past 20 years. So, yes a smaller "working age" population but one that is centered around white-collar rather than agricultural work.
There is no stabilization of the Japanese ethnic population in sight. With these trends I wonder how the island will change culturally in 100 or 200 years. I suspect we'll see them continue to open more and more to the west.
The rest of the West isn’t far behind. Only in Africa and a country or two in the Middle East is the birth rate above replacement rate.
Just a cursory Google search shows that countries like Mexico and the Philippines are way above the replacement rate as well so I don't think your comment is accurate.
Don’t forget India and some Asian countries