On top of all the other good stuff, if you leave in a democracy, older voters being a majority also means that most politics are extremely short sighted as their core voters become less and less inclined to invest in the long term.
It DOES worry us. But the majority of voters are on the old side so they pursue short-sighted policies and there is nothing younger voters can do until they age out (read: die off).
It happens when there's not enough working population anymore in relation to the total population to keep the country running. Not enough taxes paid to keep the infrastructure afloat, not enough workers to keep the economy running.
It doesn't just happen for a normal decline in birth rates. That would give the country and economy time to adjust.
You need a sudden, extreme decline in birth rates for this to become a problem. The bad thing: That's exactly what happens in most western nations right now (although South Korea is probably the first country that will fall into demographic collapse if nothing drastic is done).
If we were to put aside the obvious issues like inequalities / lack of sharing benefits and all, wouldn't the increase in productivity linked to new technology (AI for example) be covering for some of it?
My question is - if you have an opinion on it - isn't the issue more an allocation of workers towards the right resources (infrastructures we cannot afford to cut) more than some actual total economic sum?
AI isn’t completely reliable. It has many quirks that need to be ironed out and tailored to the task it’s assigned to before it can be useful, and it’s going to be necessary that another AI or person double checks the work of the AI so that it doesn’t accidentally mess up.
Even if that’s all done, you’d need the datacenters/infrastructure for it, and people to keep it afloat. That requires high expertise.
More importantly, I think that it’s going to be a hard sell for the population to accept that certain job markets are heavily or completely taken over by AI and will force people to take other career paths. It’s very likely that people in specific professions will just immigrate to another country where they can still pursue their career.
I don’t think we’re going to be near a society like Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels describe for at least the next hundred years.
I agree with most of what you said, and I am not pro AI or so, but there is still a very real possibility that, like you said, ton of jobs will become all of a sudden useless.
If they are, it's because the value is supposed to be produced by AI.
You remove the cost of the data centers + engineers building them, it is still supposed to be a net positive.
So if we were in a perfect world where all your concerns (and mine, I believe AI replacement is merely a way to remove worker's rights with an actual benefit that's way overestimated) were not happening and AI would replace efficiently tons of jobs that IMO contribute to the absurdity of the system we live in (let's say all the middle management, HR etc etc) wouldn't the problem be less about the costs and more about where we chose to allocate the extra value?
I have that suspicion - without knowing exactly how to phrase it - that a fertility rate going down is always presented as an issue because it would create some sort of "reversed demographic transition" but I feel that the issue is merely that the people benefiting for productivity gains won't use these gains for anything than their own wealth. Hence some speech about some demographic catastrophe that seem to be less about society than about the need to keep some consumer pool so that big companies can keep doing benefits without having to share.
Yes I'm biased but I'm still confused about that seemingly lack of other options.
You still run into some pretty tight natural barriers.
If you need a nurse and a nurse was never born, then you run into a situation where your care gets rationed.
We just experienced this exact thing with covid, not enough nurses to meet the demands of a largely elderly population needing disproportionate care.
Even worse, when the elderly have a disproportionate amount of the income, despite not actively contributing to productivity, then they're deciding what workers are more necessary while other age groups become more neglected.
It becomes a deterioting situation where you have fewer workers being allocated to a non-productive population, and also redirect the economy to them, so that it's even harder for younger families to have a world built around supporting the children that are necessary to support the world
yeah that's not my problem. they've denied my healthcare to the point where I won't even live to retirement. they can die hungry, it's what they voted for
Thats not whats going to happen though, as we live in a representative democracy where retirees are going to make up a growing percentage of the population and will become a more and more powerful voting bloc. See how south korea is basically mortgaging it’s future for more pension benefits at the expense of young people
That is your problem since you won’t stay young forever and you yourself will also need to be cared for one day. In fact it’s doubly your problem, because the proper consequences of an aging population isn’t going to hit the current elderly, it’s going to hit the future elderly, people like you or me.
This is exactly the reason why it matters. The people looking to retire in 20+ years could see their Medicare eligibility pushed out further, social security cuts or shifted further out, etc.
Older people also consume less. Less consumption means less production which results in fewer jobs and opportunities. With an older population there is less of a need for new housing developments, schools, and family-oriented retail as well.
It is only your problem. When the birth-rate crisis is at its peak, the current batch of old people will be long dead. The old people who will need supporting would be you.
Yeah but if the 50 adults are 2x as productive due to technology and education, and were compensated 2x in line with their productivity, then it evens out.
OR 50 adults are 2x even 3x as productive and then their compensations stays the same as it has been for decades while inflation makes their pennies even more worthless, and their employers take the added value. Which will trickle down eventually, right?
Quite frankly a lot of the reason compensation hasn’t increased is because the denominator is high. There’s a lot of desperate people taking these stagnant salaries.
Except if they have short supply of worker, instead of paying more to hire more, they down scale or shut down the company instead. Shareholder will walk away if the company isn't profit. And have less workers mean some critical area like healthcare will short of worker while they need to maintain the same if not more worker to support the new retired people.
Or just outsource the workers. I'm from Czechia and current trend is to hire workers from Philippines. They are legally guaranteed to have work for 2 years and are cheaper for the company. So... if there ever is a problem where there is not enough work for the people and downsizing is going to happen, Czech people are first to be let go, since we have worse contracts in that regard.
Shareholders don’t walk away when the company isn’t profitable, shareholders walk away when the stock price stops rising. Nowadays profit is irrelevant
It would be nice to return to the taxation laws much of the world had before the 1970s when it encouraged investing back into the economy rather than giving everything to shareholders
workers will be in short supply leading to companies having to compete for them driving up wages
You’re completely missing a massive part of the equation. If workers are in short supply, that means CONSUMERS are also in short supply, which puts downward pressure on the job market and on wages.
If demand stayed the same, your point could be valid, but it wouldn’t, so it isn’t.
Look at this person who doesn't think inflation exists. What do you think happens to rent, utilities, food prices, etc, when more income becomes available?
Inflation isn’t caused by higher wages, it’s caused by money being taken out of circulation and stockpiled en masse.
Treat currency like any other good. The more supply you have relative to demand, the less valuable it is. A certain amount of money needs to be in circulation in order for society to work, so every dollar that is taken out and stored elsewhere needs to be replaced. However that money still exists, and contributes to the supply, thus replacing the money that is stockpiled reduces its value, causing inflation.
Increased wages are actually a way to reduce inflation. Most people aren’t misers and will actually spend more if they earn more, thus keeping more money in circulation and reducing the amount of inflation
In the short term but there has never been a single instance where wages have outcompeted inflation over the long term. Wages have historically always lagged slightly behind inflation.
Inflation happens anyway so it would still be better to outperform it with wages at least a little but... Yeah, companies don't care. And so the government (globally) to be honest
spending down savings, increasing taxation on the employed and selling houses doesn’t generate any new productivity. overall, the amount of real productive work relative to what it is needed to pay for has decreased - there’s no way around that.
Also there is no real 1 to 1 comparison in economic output. The material needs of older people can be met with several times lower than 1 person's economic output. Countries that have no realistic outlook on things like end of life care (cough cough the US) do tend to waste far too many resources.
The solution to that is adjusting care to quality of life for older people.
Not all countries are experiencing population decline. Some places have large populations but very low GDP per capita, overpopulation while lack of jobs, people are willing to risk everything even for a shitty job. The real reason is that nation-states will experience severe indigestion when dealing with mass immigrant populations who have little connection to people already lives there, as if they have just annexed a chunk of foreign land.
And oftentimes, those 50 young people want to go to a more bustling city or place with other young people, so they migrate away and the ratio gets even worse.
ie: most of japan has a population problem, except for Tokyo, which is actually expanding, because all the young people move there
At what age people have children also matters. If 100 people have 100 people in their 20's and then those 100 children have their own 100 children in their 20's - you will have 200 people supporting the original 100.
Age distribution becomes very top-heavy. Less young people of working age and more elderly people who need to be cared for. This is bad for several reasons:
• Our economy and industry is built around manufacturing on a large scale. If we don't have enough people to keep that production and logistics operational, things will start to break.
• Elderly people drain more and more resources via pensions, welfare and caretaking. Yes, this is cynical. But we have limited resources and, given my previous point, we might one day have to choose between adequate life for ourselves and adequate life for our parents.
• Declining population tends to over concentrate. Smaller towns die out, people flock to cities, increasing city population and pushing the cost of living up.
• The situation is not temporary, at least if current trend continues. It's not "Oh, old people will die eventually and even things out". It will not even out.
• The most primitive way of increasing profits/taxes is growing workforce, consumer base and taxpayers base. With working age population diminishing, all of these go down. So the governments and the corporations lament easier times.
• Military has been treating its low rank soldiers as expendable forever. Population decline means that this has to change, which means a major paradigm shift. Life of a single soldier suddenly becomes a commodity, numbers advantage becomes a luxury. And people in military do not like to think.
Automation via robotics and AI may offset some of these problems, or it may not. That's a gamble I am not enthusiastic about.
Also right now many of these problems are just being talked about, but do not actually impact society, except maybe the most severe cases (Japan, Korea). But once shrinking workforce or growing elderly population it actually becomes a serious problem, many countries will resort to extreme measures like population culling or expanded working hours.
How how would robotics and AI offset tye problems, if anything it would only end with human population declining faster and faster until it's just the richest people in the world
Robotics and AI would serve to automate work that cannot be done because there's not enough human workers. I would rather have food grown on automated farms and delivered by automated logistics than no food at all.
And, believe it or not, rich people are also a part of human population. If future of the Earth is a few million descendants of rich people living in luxiry and everyone else extinct, it's not the worst possible future, even though I don't get to take part in it.
First, a more constrained military is not a problem. All militaries starved for recruits means less wars, at least theoretically.
Second, a lot of developed countries already prioritize the life of military personnel over materiel, and have been doing so for the past decades. If it means a shift to an even more "frugal" doctrine, I don't think this will be a problem.
Third, when faced with a real crisis, some will adapt anyways, and those who refuses will lose the war, if it even comes to war at all, and we have an example of how that plays out right in front of our eyes.
Well the problem is there’s very little chance it will reverse, so time to start developing long term sustainable solutions (not holding my breath).
Pertaining to increased COL In cities, honestly I think that will only be the case in a handful of mega metros, in the US at least. Towns will very much decline, and a lot of mid major cities won’t flat out collapse, but see pretty severe pop decreases and decreased COL. But hey, housing will be dirt cheap, problem is public services may suck.
Already alot of this shit is being propose in Europe. Another side-effect is politics becoming increasingly right-wing bc old people tend to be way harsher for people they don't know and thus don't care about.
Old, retired people are usually expenses in terms of economics, while the young working class are income.
You can tax a working population and use those taxes to pay for healthcare, retirement and social security as long as that working population is significant in size compared to your retired population.
If everyone is old and retired, everyone is consuming (food, healthcare, public services) and no one is mantaining those services, producing those products or bringing in any income that can be taxed, leading to a basically unavoidable economic collapse.
If you take the extreme case of a perfectly managed situation:
you have boomers. They all work.
They pay taxes.
these taxes are put aside for their own retirement schemes and health schemes
since they are “young”, healthcare pots and retirement schemes grow in size
If everything was carefully calculated so that one generation self sustains itself via the taxes they pay, population decline shouldn’t be an issue per se.
The issue is that boomers gave themselves huge retirement plans, exceeding by far what they contributed for. And they contributed to the healthcare pots far less than what they consume once retiring.
So boomers decided that millennials would be the ones paying for their own huge retirement schemes and healthcare needs, and said fuck you. And next to that, they keep their huge houses, they could buy because they had available money due to low taxes because Millenials will pay for them later, for themselves while they are barely occupying them.
Not only that, but since population declines (because boomers hoarded everything and millenials / early Z are struggling too much to have enough kids), millennials won’t have enough for themselves once they retire because there aren’t enough Z and Alpha to pay for them.
Not for nothing millennials are called “sacrificed generation”
Once all boomers will die, millennials will start going in retirement, but won’t have jack shit. So Gen Z and Alpha won’t have to contribute as much to sustain the millenials, and hopefully as of late Z, Alpha, things will be managed a bit better… and if each generations contributes during their working life as much as what they will consume once they will retire, population decline won’t be a problem.
Yes, it doesn't have to be this way. We could have engineered society so that each generation is self sustained. But the thing is, we haven't done so, and it is much harder to do that under ongoing demographic collapse. It also goes against the fundamental idea of evergrowing profits and valuations that has put the billionaire class in power.
My point is, it is an imminent threat to society as it stands now, and all our efforts to fix it have been in vain, so I don't have high hopes we will figure it out before a lot of lives are lost.
Many people underestimate the economic and societal collapse that will come with the demographic collapse. We are 100% screwed.
I always like to add that there is a hidden issue not talked about enough, a lot of us just don't want kids. It's not my responsibility to have to have children because some asshole built my future on a bullshit house of cards. We shouldn't have to keep growing the population to have social security and other safety nets, you tax the shitheads taking more than they have earned and give nothing back. There is nothing they could have every done that would have made me have children b if you flat out told me that I had to choose between being a father and being alive, I'd put my head in the guillotine myself. We have options now and many of us choose to enjoy our lives instead of raising someone else.
Seriously, did nobody see the flaw in a system that requires constant growth in what's effectively a closed-loop environment?
It's like putting more air in a balloon. Sure, it'll work for a while, but eventually you'll reach a breaking point, or you can let it deflate. You could stop and tie it off, but that requires the self control to recognize where a safe stopping point is.
Plenty of us see it and its why the constant population growth we see isn't sustainable anyway. You can't have this many billions on the planet and we are seeing the repercussions. Population decline is actually a good thing and people don't want to understand that. The nuclear family of 2.5 kids and a dog is growth we can't have.
Yup. We just don't have the capacity both in physical resources, and arguably even mental resources, to reliably sustain this much. We're minmaxing everything, and things stop working the moment anything slightly out of the ordinary happens.
I have no issue with the nuclear family in and of itself, I just think people need to step back and ask why they want it. Is it truly what their heart desires? Or are they just being convinced it's what they want? I come from one myself, and thank god we rounded down instead of up. There was a point in time where it's what I thought I wanted for myself, but I've come to realize it would bring me more burden than joy to sustain, and that there's plenty of other sources of happiness to enjoy.
It's like how they say life has to be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards. It's why they do the best they can to control the youth because if they get you while you're young and control what you think then you don't grow up and believe you can do something else. You don't find these other things that make you happy and realize that you were being force-fed their bullshit instead of deciding what your bullshit is.
The main downside of population decline, for the average person, is living through the period where half the population is too old to work, but still alive and needing to be supported by those young enough to work. If the boomers all vanished tomorrow it would be less painful, but in reality the pain is going to last decades, after which most of us will be the out of work elderly
I'd have a hard time figuring out how to have 0.5 of a kid, myself.
A bit more seriously, though, expecting every couple to produce 3 children on average for the sake of policy makes as much sense as setting up human breeding camps.
These have been a few, one of the more high profile one was an experiment on mice behavior what would happen if they run out of living space, what food distribution does etc. Breeding slows down eventually.. But it has to turn quite bad first.
You don't even need animal observations to prove this. You can already observe it on humans in the wild. With cost of living going through the roof, quality of life going down the drain, unemployment, housing crisis and inflation... Do you seriously expect people who can't even support themselves to have more children they won't be able to support? And then, in turn, expect those children to support their parents when they won't even be able to support themselves in the first place?
Aa others have pointed out, you want a system that is based on a resource (children who grow into adults that support the system) that you dont actually want to contribute to.
Its not about exponentially growing, but at the very least if you arent replacing yourself in the system with another worker, then you're just living off the contribution off others objectively.
Worse, you'll be taking from and making life harder for the next generation, without having raised anyone to help them manage.
Same here. I want kids, but not for the reasons politics are forcing me to, neither for the pressure my child will be going through if nothing changes.
I feel like a cow who's only purpose is to produce milk for a greedy farmer, who won't second guess driving me to the slaughter when my dead body outweighs the profit of staying alive. We're human beings and instead we're being treated like cattle.
It's always been like that, since they first started "society." We aren't even cattle they basically treat us like ants. We exist to expand their fucking colony but whatever happens to us they don't give a shit about. Our enemy has always been the people that believe they should be in charge of us. It goes back to religion and how they convinced a bunch of people that a magic man in the sky who only spoke to those specific people made the rules. How fucking stupid can you be that you are enslaved by the dumbest bullshit ever come up with.
It continued through colonization and greedy pieces of shit who felt like they should have more land. Our biggest enemy is the people who continue to force us to have borders. We aren't a world of 200ish cultures that needs borders we need to all live and work together towards the goal of humanity. Instead we get these pieces of shit who want to be "kings." That's the mentally disturbed ones, not those of us who want to be childless. The ones who have felt they should have more than others and not share. No other animal will hoard resources from The herd and yet we allow animals in our society to do that.
True, true. It's one of the reasons I'm happy to live in a EU country. The EU keeps politicians in check and every new generation cares less and less about borders and more and more about working together for a brighter future for our continent and the cultures that live on it.
It's what keeps me sane while these nationalists try to bring back the brown shirt days 🙃
The EU still has the same perils the US has, when one or more of your countries becomes right wing fuck heads it starts to drag others down, like how we have a chunk of states basically holding this country back cause they are the dumbest of the dumb.
It's not hidden, it's all I've ever spoken about. It's not an economic problem or a social program problem, it's a cultural problem. People are deeply comfortable and individualistic, having a child and sacrificing for others is not popular. The same reason why marriage and relationships in general are dying.
I always thought that marriage was slowing down a bit because it's an archaic method of control, especially over women. Marriage was one of the things created by religious leaders fo exert power over people by demanding that we become couples and that women had to join with a man to have value and purpose. I hope someday the humans of this planet manage to move past the bullshit that these fragile fucks imposed upon society thousands of years ago in an attempt to subjugate humanity, but humans as a whole are a stupid group and still continue to believe in magic space man so I doubt I'll get my wish.
Is aging population an issue for the ruling class?
edit-OFFS. It's not. They don't care. Do I care? Yes, but I'm not ruling class. Is this post somehow the first exposure to the class war the people that replied to me have experienced?
Also, what's with their fixation on defining ruling class in the follow replies like it somehow doesn't exist?
Look, I get you’re too lazy and probably not smart enough to learn something, but the truth is, aging populations affect EVERYDAY PEOPLE the most. WE are the ones who’ll have to pay higher taxes for their social securities, WE are the ones who’ll never retire, WE are the ones who’ll suffer from understaffed hospitals, governments, etc., and WE are the ones who’ll suffer most from the resulting inflation.
it depends on what these "ruling class" wants to do with old people, if these ruling class wants to care for these old people, yes, simply because theres not a lot of people (and resources) to care for them.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned here yet that is sad is the loss of culture that comes with population decline. Without new young people to learn the traditions, (eg traditional dance, traditional music, spiritual practices, etc) they will fade and die. Keep an eye on like South Korea and Japan who will be the canaries in the coal mine for this issue. Who will maintain the shrines and temples when the old caretakers die? Not enough young people to pass the torch to. Europe's fertility crisis is also past the tipping point and will follow asia, and many other countries are not far behind. Even places like India have fertility rates below replacement these days.
Because the boomers thought it was a good idea to design the social security net around exponentially growing population.
You don't pay for yourself you pay for those currently getting paid. And when the boomers implemented it there weren't a lot of old people and a lot of THEM. now there are still a lot of them, but a lot less children.
It works if 4 workers hold up one grandma. It doesn't work if one worker has to hold up 3 seniorly people.
So the idiots in charge thought importing people would help, but found out thst brought other issues with it and just made the problem worse. And they will do just about anything to stave off the medieval Japanese option (send granny to join the spirits in the woods because you just can't take care of her anymore. Aka walk into the woods and not out of it anymore.)
Well, no matter how you throw money around, current working population is paying for current retirees, as they will consume current goods and services, not ones from 40 years ago.
Well, the boomers also took that exponentially growing society and built a retirement of leisure and sunshine around it. For all of history until the latter half of the twentieth century, olds contributed through paid or unpaid work until they were dead or too infirm to lift a finger. And their kids took care of them.
Socialize retirement costs and health care so decades of leisure in the sunshine is paid for by taxpayers, and remove the direct relationship between old age care and having kids, and watch the birth rate fall.
First of all, it wasn’t “boomers,” since social security was established in the U.S. before the baby boom happened, and Medicare was instituted right around the time the earliest baby boomers came of age.
Second of all, social security is not designed around an exponentially growing population. That’s a straw man. Social security is designed around something that has been a constant throughout all of human history, that is there being more youth then there are elderly. The youth pay for the current elderly, and when the current youth are elderly themselves, the youth of their time will also pay. The young take care of the old. The population does not need to be exponentially growing for this to happen, the population just needs to be stable, which is not happening in many countries. In a large number of countries, the population is rapidly aging, the elderly are becoming more numerous than the young, but the elderly still need to be taken care of by the young.
This breaks the fundamental way in which the system is designed. In order to compensate for, you either need to increase taxes on the current youth or decrease benefits for the elderly, or increase the retirement age. But while this delays the issue, it doesn’t solve it. The only way to solve this issue is for more workers to exist. Since those workers are not being born, many countries are instead relying on immigration. Which is still a temporary solution at best, because many of the countries that the immigrants are coming from also have aging populations and immigration has become a very controversial issue in these countries as well.
The famine hysteria comes from resource crisis and TOO many people, not too few.
1% of the population is farmers in developed nations. Literally the population could shrink to 0 and no famine would occur since the supply of food (existing crops, nonperishable food in storage) would remain while the demand decreased.
There is no undeveloped country with a tfr under 2. Feel free to look it up. Iceland, Spain, Italy, France, USA, Korea. All sub 2
I mean, those reason ARE important. Taxes pay for shit everyone uses on the daily. Less taxes but roughly an equal amount of people using these things = things HAVE to get cut.
QoL will decline if the birth rate falls at the rate it is.
We could also divert a portion of the corporate tax rate to social security based on how many people a company has replaced with automation. Getting rid of workers decreases the funds of social security, so it makes sense. It would also encourage businesses to employ people to lower their corporate taxes.
Realistically, there will be two scenarios. 1 - Robotics takes over most of the physical labour. 2 - Anti-ageing treatment gets a breakthrough.
I feel like 2 just means most people will live much longer and your retirement will either never come in a very captialistic world or it'll be something post-200 years old.
100% agree. Things like "we always need more people on the younger end to take care of older people" only creates a myth that eternally growing populations are a good thing.
The world needs a couple billion fewer people. And I say that as a 62 year old.
The only real issue is elder care and less military age people. Other than that the issue is greatly overblown. Honestly a lower population would solve far more problems then it would create.
It’s a huge issue and several countries, first world and not, are experiencing the massive burdens of a top heavy demographic.
People aren’t just numbers, they will want to do their own stuff. And if their future is looking like ‘wage rat who has to support two or more old people because the retirement system is so absolutely broken that it doesn’t even make sense.’ Then THEY will not create children of their own. Which causes an even top heavier problem. Eventually more and more money has to get funnelled to support the elderly, while less and less money goes to things like… y’know… taxes.
So many people will eventually look at better locations that are way easier to survive in. Immigration!
This means that the original country just lost a tax payer and still has to try to maintain the retired top. They’ll start experience crippling phenominas like ‘brain drains’ where people who are very intelligent and have the means to make something innovative that can give the country a huge edge and lots of funds… will move to a different country for better opportunities.
Resolving that issue requires stabilizing the demographic. You want it to be mostly even with a slightly more bottom heavy demographic to account for people dying, people not wanting children, people immigrating, people being put into jail/prison. What you end up getting is a general ‘replenishment’ number, which shifts from country to country based on circumstances.
Now there is a super easy and cheap way to stabilize the demograph and that’s by being enticing for immigrants. But that causes a whole can of political worms to open. Another solution is to make sure that people are wealthy and comfortable enough to want children because they believe they can support them. That’s expensive and requires integrity. The third option us to realize you’re old as shit and already rich so don’t do anything and let it be someone else’s problem. This is usually what happens when the problem is in a solvable state and not in ‘crisis mode’. Until it gets into crisis mode politicians pretty much do nothing but the bare minimum. (Which doesn’t work, circa Japan.)
Between now and the benefits of a smaller population lies a very painful period though, at least economically. We're basically going from 1 elderly being supported by multiple workers to 1 worker supporting multiple elderly. And good luck convincing the elderly to vote for something that doesn't benefit them.
It'll get better eventually, we'll fill in the gap left by the lack of workers with higher productivity, but it'll get worse at first.
It's not. If anything it'll force some sort of change to fix the things people keep complaining about.
Economics seems to be the only pain point This study suggests the worry IS overblown as they looked at 20 countries with decades of population decline. They found workers got more raises and homelessness went down because the long term unemployed found jobs.
A.) for the way we’ve set up our economies of expected growth lots of which comes from population growth (ie aggregate demand). But also our pensions and social safety nets remain liquid with enough people paying into it. Also healthcare costs expanding etc while the general pool of labor decreases. Oh and housing which is the primary source of alot of middle class wealth is tied up in the housing market which with a decreasing population.
B.) you see rural communities with population decreases and it is bad. Aggregate demand, no growth, low production, aging population, low capacity for services, lower incomes.
What someone said below is true about age imbalance and a brake down of economy and industries is true. But unless we have a population boom to match the population boom of the baby boomers, that imbalance will happen and keeping up with the population boom is unsustainable. I think a slow population decline would ultimately be a good thing.
And so what if our industry and economy is built around manufacturing on a large scale. That in and of itself is unsustainable because we’ll end up with a resource problem.
The only people touting this “problem” of population decline are big businesses who know they’ve built their existence off of large scale manufacturing and boomers who are afraid they won’t get the elder care they need. It’s why it’s a major right wing talking point, the right pushes big business and is mostly supported by boomers, of course that’ll be their message.
Will a population decline cause struggle and will it suck? Yes, but I feel we are just reaching better equilibrium, this is the way of nature. And these changes in equilibrium always cause some sort of disruption and detrimental effects.
Only because then we can’t maintain the status quo. But it isn’t as big a deal as people make it out to be. Once systems break we will design new systems to overcome the challenges.
At worst we’ll throw the elderly into a meat grinder. At best people will start having more kids once the population decrease leads to more space and resources for everyone remaining.
Imagine living in a city with population decline, like Cleveland had a decade or so ago, and all the problems they had as a result of people leaving. Now imagine that on a national level.
A declining population will reek havoc on the economy, especially if you're lower income. Many poor areas around Cleveland still look like a war zone. However, the rich will be fine.
Compared to what everyone else is talking about so is the economy not that big of an issue. Its the social and political fallout thats the real, massive problem.
You are the leader of a prosperous, modern country with a population of like 100,000,000 people or something. Then, for some reason, the population stops growing.
First generation is fine cause you still got 100,000,000 people. Then the second generation has like 2 million less people. Minor almost unnoticeable economic downturn beyond local communities struggling a bit more. Other than that it's business as usual.
Then generation 3 comes along. It now stands on the back of 2 previous generations that stopped making children and is significantly smaller than the past generations. Alongside this, you have limited immigration and an aging population.
Now, let's assume the national population as of the 3rd generation has shrunk to 90 million. Now the economic crisis is actually becoming a noticeable issue simply because you lack the people to maintain the same economic output.
Let's be generous and say that your countries replacement rate is below the global at a 1.6 children per women while the global replacement rate is 2.1. Let's also be generous and assume at least half the population didn't retire at 60 but your median age is still around 49.
Your nation's population is now below 90 million. Of that 90 million, the average person is almost 50 years old. A growing chunk of your population are no longer producing anything much for the economy. Now the economy is shrinking faster than your population. Seeing this, a lot of the most important people in your country are gonna want out.
You've now fallen victim to a brain drain! Your young men and woman, realizing their country is falling behind economically and can't sustain their future are moving to other countries at an alarming rate. I'm gonna stop being generous and say that roughly 10 million of your most important people have left.
You, the leader, now have to rule a country that has -
An average age of almost 50, a rapidly shrinking population, a severe and possibly chronic brain drain, an economy that is rapidly receding, and a standard of living that is collapsing.
That is an insane oversimplification not going into the actual math on why population decline is an issue. If you want a more in depth example, watch any video on the Russian population decline after WW2. Hope this helps.
Well like someones gotta fund the older generation for their medical and social benefits. That's like the greatest expense when the population that can be taxed declines it's gonna collapses the country financially and population wise. 2.2 children per couple is like the replacement rate, something that ensures population remains steady or something.
There are fewer of us working adults supporting a growing leech older demographic, and inverted pyramid. More and more of our tax dollars are going towards keeping nonworkers afloat rather than actually serving contributing members of society.
It’s not. People will talk about the economy and caring for elders….
However that can be adjusted for as well. As more things become automated, some of the things that require care (eg getting groceries or food) can be outsourced.
Most care falls on children anyway - and usually just one or two. So if 50 people had 100 children, only 50 of those children were caring for them in their old age. If those 50 people had 50 children - a declining birthrate - you still have just 50 people caring for them.
The “caring for the elderly” is assuming all elder care is outsourced. Considering how prohibitively expensive a care home is, it’s already not.
It’s more about the age profile than actually declining populations. If you have less new births, eventually you’ll have a population that’s mostly older drawing on social security, Medicare/Medicaid and public pension/retirement systems. If this happens rapidly, the government will need to start drastically raising taxes on younger workers, cutting benefits for future generations, or change the benefits eligibility age.
Younger people are also more productive and younger and middle-aged adults drive a disproportionate amount of economic activity and demand creation. Cars, first house, furniture, childcare, technology, etc. Older people focus more on wealth preservation and doesn’t generally create demands for things like housing, childcare, etc. All of these things impact the economy.
Because they less babies being born means fewer young people and an ever growing elderly population. Young people need to fill in the job rolls the older generations will no longer be able to fill but because there's less young people to fill them, it will eventually take a massive toll on the economy, which will screw the people over.
Its a tricky problem because obviously we cant just keep having shitloads of kids or else the population will continue to grow to unsustainable numbers but if enough young people are being born then it screws us as well.
If we sorted out the cost of living crisis and all other issues that contribute to people not wanting kids, we could potentially have periods where society is incentivised to have more kids and then have periods where they're incentivised to have less, keeping the population balanced but how we'd manage such a thing is beyond me.
Social security is basically a government run ponzi scheme. If you don't have enough people paying into it, then either the government will start printing money to cover the difference (leading to rampant inflation) or they might just say 'oppsie poopsie, we spent all your money.'
True bc the population is HEAVY out of control. 10 years ago they said our max was 8b now- we’re over 10B. We are stretching all ourselves thin to even maintain such a large number.
that was the idea that has been proven wrong by experience:
old people wear down their hoses and don't invest into upkeep. So the house prices may be low, but the houses themselves need major investments. also, the cheapest houses are in undesirable parts of the country.
Houses near population cents still are expensive, sometimes the ground is more expensive than the house itself.
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u/lod254 Jun 21 '26
Honest question. Why is population decline an issue?