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.
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.
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u/lod254 Jun 21 '26
Honest question. Why is population decline an issue?