(meta-comment: someone keeps posting population doomerism to HN. Why do you think this is relevant, or that a trend dipping negative for a while will inevitably continue that way?)
In 1927 world population was 2 billion - now, less than a century later it is 8 billion. In the 1960s world population grew by 2.1%. For most of history until about 1700 or so that rate was about 0.04%.
The world population growth rate right now is much higher than it was in 1900 (and 1900 was higher than 1899, which was higher than 1898 etc.)
There's not really that much to population doomerism if you look at the historical trends. The only thing to it is that the growth rate in the 1960s was probably the highest in recorded history, and we are not still at that peak - but the world population is still growing faster than it has from 4000 BCE to 1940.
The other thing is it varies from place to place. Uganda's population is growing faster than the world rate, whereas Latvia's population is currently shrinking.
(Of course these things are all estimated, no one knows exactly when human population hits exactly 8 billion people etc.)
> someone keeps posting population doomerism to HN. Why do you think this is relevant
While a lopsided population pyramid does cause issues, it's not the end of the world for a lot of countries.
A lot of the population doomerism I'm noticing started off as a Zeihan or Perun trope that was repeated ad nauseum on certain subreddits and percolated into HN because of readership overlap.
If you want to see a country that has been old before it truly became rich, just take a look at Thailand.
They are a large country with a very low TFR, a high median age, and a low median household income ($7k/yr) yet they have not collapsed.
Most of this is because of social welfare - most high revenue industries are very highly skilled and this require a small skilled or semi-skilled population.
Think industries like Automotive, Semiconductors, ONG Refining, Finance, etc - this is the Thai economy (tourism is actually a relatively small portion compared to those).
Deploying tax money generated from those industries into social welfare such as expanded healthcare, expanded social services, etc helps minimize a lot of the issues at hand.
Japan's population has also been shrinking, for decades now, and it's the same story, as has Italy's.
Countries like Japan, Italy, Korea, and Thailand do supplement their unskilled sector with migrant workers - they just don't get counted as immigrants (eg. Most "Work Trainees" and "Interns" in Japan and Korea are actually Indonesian and Vietnamese migrant workers who are doing low prestige jobs like gutting fish, working at a below minimum wage factory, cleaning toilets, working at nail salons, etc)
And workers will always chase a higher salary - the same Thai people who wouldn't clean toilets in Khon Kaen (and thus depend on Cambodians, Laotians, and Burmese to do it) would clean toilets in Korea or Italy, and then Koreans and Italians themselves try to emigrate abroad to the US or Canada because of better salaries and easier work culture, etc.
Realistically, Korea will leverage the Vietnamese population pipeline (it already has) and maybe NK down the line if relations start to warm up again.
(meta-comment: someone keeps posting population doomerism to HN. Why do you think this is relevant, or that a trend dipping negative for a while will inevitably continue that way?)
Probably because it's presented as a problem to solve (we don't know how we're economically going to deal with it) and engineers love a challenge, even when they're not experts in the field. So same reason why urban planning issues, etc often show up.
Also because it’s essential to the older capitalist mindset of continual growth which drives the valuation of most tech companies. The idea of stabilizing on a smaller level has really fallen out of favor over the past few decades, but it’s an existential threat for companies whose shareholders are accustomed to double-digit growth.
something like over half the population of korea lives in the seoul metro area so it's not surprising that it's dense there. it's like if NYC was suffering from this and you posted a pic of a crowded subway at rush hour claiming otherwise lol...
Not how good... how fast and how cost effective. If they become good and cheap in 2250, that's not going to be much of a consolation for these countries.
Not sure why a link to a deadly crowd crush and responses.
> population doomerism to HN. Why do you think this is relevant
Because as we age society will 'somewhat' collapse. There will not be enough people to do the work. The idea young workers will be imported from other countries doesn't add up. Nursing homes are currently disgusting places and lacking skilled workers.
Nursing homes need to be 'disrupted' so they can handle the incoming load (and the current load) is one obvious reason it's relevant to HN.
> or that a trend dipping negative for a while will inevitably continue that way?
Of course it will. Unless you claim this is Covid deaths. South Koreas birth rate is .7 the lowest in the world, that is what one assumes is at play.
As far as the birth rate or population rising again it will take a significant technological event. AGI will do it for instance or longevity drugs. But there can be large pain points before we get there which is how the graph is heading.
Gift of life quite often turns out to be the curse of life. If I was given the opportunity to respawn again I would politely decline than risk being born in North Korea or Sudan.
If you want to see a country that has been old before it truly became rich, just take a look at Thailand.
They are a large country with a below replacement TFR for decades, a high median age, and a relatively low median household income ($7k/yr) yet they have not collapsed.
Most of this is because of social welfare - most high revenue industries are very highly skilled and this require a small skilled or semi-skilled workforce.
Think industries like Automotive, Semiconductors, ONG Refining, Finance, etc - this is the Thai economy (tourism is actually a relatively small portion compared to those).
Deploying tax money generated from those industries into social welfare such as expanded healthcare, expanded social services, etc helps minimize a lot of the issues at hand.
China has been concentrating on building some form of a social safety net as well in a manner similar to TH, but it's at an earlier stage, but tbf, TH hit the same issues China did today in the early 2000s.
Low median income likely makes things easier to handle and not worse. Sustaining lower standard of living of dependants is more reasonable than very expensive one. And there is still quite a bit room to move up in value chain.
If Xi decides to "cement his legacy" by trying to annex Taiwan, the consequences of that, together with this demographic bomb, will be absolutely devastating for China.
Inflation caused by a retired work force tends to correct itself - those retirees on a fixed income are incentivized to return to work.
Whether those retirees can successfully return to some form of work will often hinge on their country's health care system - not for the retirees, but for the middle-aged generated that will become retirees. That is where the United States is already running into issues.
China health care system is based on their single offsprings, that will be forced to shift hours from working/consuming to taking care of their elderly + offsprings.
8 Grandparents, 4 parents to take care on 2 working adults + 1 or more childrens. UnSustainable
Can that be assumed? A lot of people retiring may not be very productive in those last years, and if they're replaced by automation it could very well be that total productivity goes up when they retire. I wouldn't assume that either, my point is that I don't think either of these scenarios is a given.
Because the cost of goods out of China will increase as they are required to compete and raise salaries for the shrinking labor pool.
This is happening with the service sector in the United States right now where getting manual labor done on houses has increased nearly 50% in a few years due to the lower population of workers.
Yeah it’s very odd to me that people are so shocked that there’s a labor shortage when the whole boomer generation is retiring at the same time. I did a high school report on it in 1998; this is not a surprise. We all knew it was coming (or should have known.) Too much money chasing too little labor production equals inflation.
Here’s an interesting thought experiment: let’s say you work hard your whole life, you pile up a million dollars in cash, which you hope to retire on.
However, tragedy strikes and your pile of cash catches fire and it all burns.
But, your government is very accommodating, and they don’t worry- we know you really saved it, we’ll just print you some more.
But in that case, why store it at all? Why not save the money you spent storing it, burn it now and get some printed later?
What if the whole economy does that? What is the actual value of stored wealth? And does it make any sense for the government to have a “social security trust fund”? (No! It’s meaningless. Might as well just print the money later)
Well, you hope to exchange it for goods and services.
Goods and services performed and created by your children. So you’re laying claim to their labor.
But what if there aren’t enough of them or they don’t really like this deal? What happens then?
Well, we know really- the answer is inflation. Too many dollars chasing too little labor power. That’s why blaming inflation on Biden is absurdly silly. It’s a demographic effect that we’ve known was coming for decades. It’s not a surprise.
One thing to bear in mind is that we may have a partial or total cure for aging within a couple decades, and that’s going to change the calculus here significantly.
1. we dont have a couple of decades of runaway decline for most if not all countries. Even USA Social Security will be bankrupt by 2030s
2. People dont want to keep working till death while their parents enjoyed "UBI" in their golden years. Over 45s being the voting block of most countries will continue the Pension scheme bonanza till collapse
You're not going to get good statistical information out of NK; it may not even exist. And it also matters what the death rates and child mortality rates are in a country which apparently has famines. Almost certainly the NK birth rate is higher to compensate.
most recent data is from 2008 and still you can't be sure data was not faked since it's a dictatorship (it is considered credible, but there's no way to check)
- culture that prioritizes "status" heavily. this manifests as a consumerist/materialist society. everybody wanting designer clothes, live in a nice apt complex, go to the best colleges, drive a nice car, kids go to the best schools and after school programs, etc. this is present elsewhere but it's amped up to another level here.
- housing prices are crazy. huge increases over the last decade (and it was already running hot before that). failed gov't policy and covid pushed this to the extreme. at one point you needed something like 60% down (purpose was to reduce speculation) but all this did was empower the cash buyers to snatch up everything. salaries are not keeping pace at all.
- women feeling more empowered in the work place, not having to follow the typical path of getting married and stay at home and take care of your kids.
basically all the pressure of even making it here WITHOUT kids... OFC nobody is going to prioritize it. people have had enough.
I do still wonder how much military service plays into this. I imagine a strong ressentment from men towards woman for that; and the hierarchical structure endured there and abuse can't help too.
It's multifactorial, fertility is tied to a looooot of things, including but not limited to quality of life, religion, economic prosperity, personal wealth, education, access to contraception, view on having kids,...
Online you'll find many accounts of people not wanting kids because it's too painful/will ruin your body, it's too expensive, it won't let you live your lifestyle, the future will be shit anyways, &c.
Global warming will play a role later but for now it's probably more about our modern lifestyle and individualism. Obesity &co are mechanically reducing fertility but it's a drop in the ocean compared to the fact that people don't want (as many) kids anymore
no, most important factors are wealth(lack of it), cheap housing in ok areas that can accommodate 1-2 children (lack of it, good social security (parental leave(adapted just recently to be better), free/cheap healthcare for mothers during pregnancy + for children, etc...) and proper infrastructure (walkable neighborhoods, play fields, cheap childcare, etc...).
Some say that it's not possible and it's just what happens in developed nations, but if you look closely to the stats, you'll find out that for eg. in sweeden, the birthrates increase to >=2 when families reach certain income lvl.
Others say that we must become poor again to increase brates, but I don't think it's that simple, if we look closely at different countries, basically brates are high when having more children increases the wealth/quality of life (v poor countries) or where having more children doesn't impact current lifestyle that much (if you have money you can afford nannies/childcare/school/bigger apt). Where it drops is when ppl achieved some lvl of wealth/good qol but it will be heavily impacted by having a child, aka the middle class.
Or are they wealthy because they don't have kids....
But in general poor people have more kids, and as unpopular it will be to say, they can have more kids because the government subsidizes it. One parent doesn't work and gets all the benefits, so: no daycare costs, free medical care, welfare income, and food stamps/WIC.
Not saying we shouldn't have those things, but when only poor people get the government assistance when it comes to having kids, they'll be the ones who have the most kids.
Working class and above it costs a fortune to raise kids, not so for the non-working class. Now people will probably come say how wrong I am, but I live in a poor area and see this play out on a daily basis.
Economic development seems to be the only thing I know of that correlates with the birth rate in good times (as in not severe depressions or times of disease of famine) and that correlation is negative.
I think you're right about the global warming thing, it would be a bigger factor than people would like admit.
But really I'm sure it's choice. Having a child is like having a pet now. You can either choose to have one or not. You don't need kids for survival and contraception is cheap and effective at preventing pregnancy.
What aged care will look like when most people are old is a different story, I guess they'll except my kids to wipe their ass but that's a deferred problem for young people with money and a bunch of entertainment and no incentive to have kids.
It is perversely true that being bored in an incredible economy will bring more mental health problems than almost-starving in a Communist one.
Things like gratitude are really tough - I'm unhappy that a shop doesn't have the exact thing I like, whereas undernourished comrades in Communist Russia had to queue for bread for hours, and might feel gratitude if on one day they only have to queue for one hour. What you're used to radically changes how you feel about a situation.
Commie states don't report mental healh issues. They sweep the problem under the rug, institutionalize the patients and then the caretakers make sure to abuse them and steal their food.
Read your text again, skip all the whataboutism about communism and tell me whats left.
The cognitive ability to reason about large scale problems is also in decline, in a society that sees no alternative, like whatabout socialism. Could you tell?
If tou cannot adress the problem, maybe you are part of it!
Also, "perversly true to be bored in an imcredible economy"? Sounds like GDP is more important than happiness to you. Maybe take your time and rethink that in the light of sociatal contracts and mortality too.
Work Alienation is the byproduct of a mass-society and standardization/ commodification of goods & Services. Nobody gives a damn about your personal injections in your work bcs your work is fungible by design. Its mostly about being cheap and fast. On other ways very few would pay at scale premiums for "personalized" work.
Such things are even more pronuncied in communist societies where efficiency, political ortodoxy, collective needs are placed well above personal social needs.
I should have clarified that alienation is not the only source of unhappines, having no perpesctive in robotic labour is another important part, which i just scratched by mentioning low wage workers. There are very repetitive tasks that can still fullfill you, eg. simply by having contact to customers.
Raising wages, lowering work hours or extending worker protections would help the depressed workforce but these things threaten capital income and so, have somehow less political momemtum until it explodes in a revolution.
(meta-comment: someone keeps posting population doomerism to HN. Why do you think this is relevant, or that a trend dipping negative for a while will inevitably continue that way?)