4 ms·

Are there any studies of the effect of falling population on the capitalistic model? It seems that much of our assumptions about the incentives of inflation, i

• polskibus 9y ago
  I'm also interested in this topic. Most European countries, esp. the new EU members have very bad demographic outlook. I'm really interested in what may happen next.
• nugget 9y ago
  As another comment points out, GDP can increase even as population declines, thanks to robotics and automation which make each worker more efficient. Demand for real estate (housing) is the wild card -- does it fall broadly (as one would expect) or does it bifurcate into desirable urban areas (where prices continue to rise) and undesirable rural areas (where prices continue to fall)? In other words, even as absolute population shrinks and there is theoretically more room, do the remaining people spend all their resources trying to crowd into the same dense urban areas? So many other industries key off of housing that this, to me, seems like the cornerstone question to answer when predicting what the future economy looks like.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• autokad 9y ago
  i have always theorized that a population decline first yields a boom, and then a strangling almost impossible to end bust to follow. I imagine it like this, say everyone but you died. you'd have all sorts of crap, you would virtually have anything you wanted. but with no people to make food, stuff, medicine, keep things running, eventually you have virtually nothing. I have always believed the great depression was the result of a population decline from ww1 and Spanish flue that lead to the roaring 20s, followed by a bust that was only put to a close by the end of ww2
  • jdmichal 9y ago
    That's an interesting idea. Basically, availability lags production. Which makes sense when you consider things like stock distributed in stores and warehouses. So when you have a large, relatively sudden population drop, there's a glut of availability before the production drop hits.
  • pishpash 9y ago
    No. "You" would just make the things you need, slowly. Why would you have virtually nothing?
    • Robotbeat 9y ago
      Because after everything starts rusting and decaying, you're left with just what you're able to maintain as an individual. Which is to say, you'd be approaching iron age technology after, say, 70-80 years. There'd be plenty of metals all around, but, without a technological society to maintain them, almost all machines will have decayed beyond usefulness by that point. There's a strong benefit from division of labor and economies of scale that would bite you HARD if you're all by yourself. Anti-globalism and population decline together would slice and dice up useful populations to the point where you'd get strong negative productivity curves as time went on. Slight population decline combined with increasing globalism and automation isn't too bad. Until you get to the point where you have an incredibly aged population. That starts to bite hard as it still takes people to take care of the elderly. So either productive people have to spend their time primarily taking care of the elderly (instead of inventing things and building things and growing the economy) or the elderly go without care. Neither are very good. If we get increasing and arbitrarily good automation and AI, it's not so much a problem. The robots take care of the elderly, and human beings gradually decline in population to be replaced by sentient AI. But I guess that's still a problem if you don't want humans to become extinct.
      • pishpash 9y ago
        You may not have experienced overpopulation. There is a point beyond which negatives outweigh the positives. Many people in the Old World feel they would like to live with more space between people. One person left is not a useful extremum to consider, but population declining to early 20th century levels is arguably good for everybody.