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My concern is that population will shrink after 2100 globally but it will already be shrinking in the rich countries long before that. And all indicators right

My concern is that population will shrink after 2100 globally but it will already be shrinking in the rich countries long before that. And all indicators right now is that shrinkage will speed up. There is something wrong with rich modern secular society here or anywhere (it happens to all societies right now whether they are European, Japanese, Chinese, etc) in that it currently leads to sub replacement reproduction. This is the next global issue as it will lead to instability in modern rich societies in that they are not sustainable. Japan is the future of all other rich societies, rapid shrinkage if you exclude immigration. And if you encourage immigration as the solution to shrinkage you end up with rising racism and other reactionary trends to these changing demographics. Right now the only societies that are growing or even stable are either developing/poor or highly conservative/religious societies. If we do not address this issue then the world's future is likely poor or highly religious (most likely both) as demographics is the future whether we like it or not. Also societies with shrinking populations will tend to have horrid economies and probably negative growth as the pyramid is inverted. Probably again like Japan.

kiliantics 8y ago
It's going to be shrinking much sooner and probably much more in the developing world due to actual next (rather current) global issue: climate change.
koonsolo 8y ago
I'm going to give my not so popular answer for this. Western society is moving away from traditional families. When I ask my son what he wants to become when he's older, he says he wants to be a police officer. When I ask my 2 girls, they both want to become a mom. My social engineered response to this was "maybe you should become a school teacher, that way you can work with kids and be home when your kids are home". Because let's face it, being only a mom as a girl is not socially acceptable. It's a weak position to be in. We are told to push them into engineering, STEM fields, becoming CEO's, world leaders, whatever. That's what we should do. But my girls, at this age, just want to become a mom. Western society is trying to make boys out of girls, and girls out of boys. I have no problem with women working in tech fields, and I worked with many great ones. But the question needs to be asked is if our society will survive such a thing. On one hand it's great that women have all these new rights, are getting more "equal" to men. But if your own culture is unable to produce enough children, and you have to import families and children from regions where womens rights are questionable, you need to ask how sustainable your democratic equal society is. This is still a big question for myself, so any real discussion is welcome, because maybe I'm overlooking something (so please don't just downvote). Maybe if we want our society to survive, we need to accept that although women are equal to men, they are very different. A family is made up of a man and a women, who support each other in their strengths and interests, and raise children together. Maybe our society should steer away from pushing women into a 'male' role that on one hands makes sense, but on the other hand is questionable. Maybe instead of pushing women into 'male' roles, we should support them better in how they benefit our society. I know this comes across as really terrible, because history has shown that stay at home moms are in a really weak position. But on the other hand, modern society is unable to produce enough kids, and so import people from 'stay at home mom' cultures. Any constructive discussion is welcome.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  >But on the other hand, modern society is unable to produce enough kids This is a contentious claim, as there are different measures of “enough kids”. Some examples I can think of are: Enough kids to support the economic 2% growth assumptions? Enough kids to reduce natural resource consumption to prolong the number of years the Earth is habitable? Enough kids to prevent another country or group of countries from walking in and taking over? Enough kids to take care of the older people and the rest of the country’s infrastructure and still make advancements? I don’t know what all the answers are, but it’s super complicated. From what I can tell though in my peer group, the biggest thing stopping people from having kids is lack of funds, job security, lack of parental leave, and an inability to find what they consider suitable partners within child bearing ages. How much of that is due to women entering the workforce versus other things such as declining real wages and job opportunities, I don’t know.
  - Mirioron 8y ago
    The big problem we have is social programs. They redistribute wealth from young people right now to old people right now, but they are sold to young people as though they are investing into their future. As the ratio of young people to old people shrinks our social programs end up in more and more trouble. The fiscal gap is a problem in most developed countries.
    - wtdata 8y ago
      Well, the issue is not taking from young to old, but taking from workers to non workers. The solution is not so complicated and impossible has some people try to put it, you just have to increase the retirement age accordingly. If you live moderately healthy to 95, than it should be perfectly acceptable for you to work until you are 75.
    - logicchains 8y ago
      This program is solvable, with something like Australia's mandatory superannuation or Singapore's Central Provident Fund, where people are forced to save a certain percentage of their income for retirement (and the money is actually saved, they're not just given IOUs for money that will be taken from future young people).
fiblye 8y ago
>And if you encourage immigration as the solution to shrinkage you end up with rising racism and other reactionary trends to these changing demographics. One of the worst things about using immigration as a solution is that it's merely a bandaid. The worst thing is that people who encourage mass immigration are (likely) unknowingly saying their country is more deserving of the temporary benefits of immigration, and the source country can go to hell. Many countries that are currently sources of large numbers of immigrants are rapidly approaching sub-replacement levels (e.g. Mexico), if they haven't already reached that point (e.g., Vietnam, China). The idea behind mass immigration is that you have a constant supply of workers and tax payers to subsidize the welfare of the retiring natives of a country. The idea of having a class of people subsidize others is troublesome enough, but the real problem is those less wealthy countries that immigrants come from are now lacking in workers and losing their own future. For countries that are still only beginning to develop, such as Vietnam, their future is a hell of a lot more at risk than something like Canada. First world countries relying on immigrants have infrastructure and various frameworks built up that'll last them for quite a while after populations begin to dip. Poor countries do not have that benefit. Shit will hit the fan and hard. Young people who struggle to meet basic daily needs are going to be pissed when they're working for dollars a day and expected to support the social nets given to 3 generations above them while being told there's nothing left for them. Right now, the government is saying we should mass import Vietnamese people to change the diapers of our old and do dirty construction jobs. What's Vietnam going to do in 25 years when its population crisis catches up with it, and every country around it is going through the same problem? Nobody's changing their diapers and their streets are going to crumble from insufficient laborers.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Really I have seen the "unfair to the source country" arguement against immigration several times and it has never failed to look like a bizzare pretext because the true reasons would be unacceptable to say out loud. The source countries already fail to use their potential. States are not people. They have no rights - rights are for people and they have no right to them.
- tabtab 8y ago
  Re: The idea behind mass immigration is that you have a constant supply of workers and tax payers to subsidize the welfare of the retiring natives of a country. Politicians run up deficits and then cover their boo boo via immigration. I'm not making a value judgement on immigration here, but politicians have a bad habit of sacrificing the future for current benefits largely because their political career is a relatively small slice of time. It's why we have debt and pension problems. True, voters play a part by having short memories, voting for instant gratification.
Mirioron 8y ago
My worry is that at some point rich countries will start increasing in population again. In the past we thought that overpopulation is going to be a big global problem. It turned out that rich countries naturally ended up having fewer and fewer children. This stabilized their populations. And now we expect that this trend will continue. But why? What's to say that some shift in society won't trigger another population growth in rich countries? Then what?
- chr1 8y ago
  Why is that a worry? Half of the land on earth is a desert, and 70% of earth is covered by ocean, most of which is also a desert. If we had enough people in rich countries who would want to spend their money on moving to new places, we would already have floating cities and many more desalination plants, and those places simply by growing food for themselves, changing their local climate to a nicer one, and by contributing to science, would solve the climate problems we are going to face.
  - chr1 8y ago
    A couple of years ago, i myself would downvote my comment above, as it is a complete heresy from a standpoint of someone who believes that people are ruining everything they are touching, and the world was so much nicer before technology, and i thought that simply having less people would solve climate change issues. But unfortunately that's a very naive view. Even if all people were removed, arctic have already started melting, and it will continue releasing more and more CO2 and methane from it's huge deposits. Having orders of magnitude less people have been tried already, and that didn't help mammoths and all the other animals that were driven to extinction by small groups of people. Having no people at all have been tried too, and that was not particularly helpful for dinosaurs, that got killed by a meteorite, which can be stopped by a larger civilization than what we currently have. In short I am lucky that i understood, that the belief that it is possible to have too many people, technology is harmful, and that we should go "back to nature", is a harmful and unfounded idea. But i'll be happy to listen to arguments supporting it if you have any:
    - 8y ago
stkdump 8y ago
Who is to say that a smaller world pop is necessarily a bad thing? Many of the ecological problems we face today would be smaller at least. And who is to say that the current trend of shrinking pop in the long term stays the same. Maybe, once we solved the biggest problems we face today and possibly expand beyond earth, people will have more kids again. I can tell you that the families around me who are well off already tend towards 3 kids. That may not be universally true, but I don't see it as black and white.
- wtdata 8y ago
  It's not, it's a good thing (if done naturally by reducing the replacement numbers). But there will be an adaption period and we need to know how to adjust to it.
xienze 8y ago
>And if you encourage immigration as the solution to shrinkage you end up with rising racism and other reactionary trends to these changing demographics. Not to mention the fact that you’re instantly lifting all those people from a third-world carbon footprint to a first-world one. I’m surprised more people in the “the world is overpopulated/global warming will kill us all” camp don’t seem to be too concerned about that.
dfxm12 8y ago
If we do not address this issue then the world's future is likely poor Can you show your work with regards to this statement? With respect to supply & demand, with fewer people around, wouldn't wages have to be higher? Land cheaper?
ardy42 8y ago
> There is something wrong with rich modern secular society here or anywhere (it happens to all societies right now whether they are European, Japanese, Chinese, etc) in that it currently leads to sub replacement reproduction. This is the next global issue as it will lead to instability in modern rich societies in that they are not sustainable. It turns out it's not very rational to live, and if you do choose to live, it's not very rational to have kids (and spend a huge chunk of your money on them) when you already have a retirement program to take care of you in your old age.
gumby 8y ago
There will still be a huge unemployed cohort "moving through the snake" (the diagram in the article is not as clear as the usual "Christmas tree" diagram" that shows a snapshot in time) world wide which can be deployed to equilibrate the labor imbalance. And that doesn't inherently have to lead to racism. For example the US bracero program in the 40s and 50s didn't exacerbate these issues in through the 1970s, nor did the gastarbeiter program in West Germany though the 80s. Automation and longer extent of healthy life will also mitigate many of these issues. Japan may be the demographic future but need not be the cultural one. An economic system not based on an age-based pyramid scheme and a move away from zero-sum scarcity mindsets will make addressing these issues much simpler.
- jniedrauer 8y ago
  > An economic system not based on an age-based pyramid scheme and a move away from zero-sum scarcity mindsets will make addressing these issues much simpler. I hope this is our future. But I am afraid that you are overestimating our society's capacity to change course without some supply shock. We'll keep doing what we're doing until something breaks and then there will be a very uncomfortable few decades and many will struggle to survive or die.
  - gumby 8y ago
    Things are breaking both in the OECD and developing world. The transition is messy but there's really little alternative.
chr1 8y ago
If we are lucky a good solution to this problem could be significant increase in life expectancy and development of artificial womb that will allow people to have children later in life when they finally want to have children. But if the technological solution doesn't come soon enough the world will have to go through a much harder transition, trying to develop new culture that would combine aspects of secular societies that allow development of science and commerce, with a reasonable desire of growth.
- irrational 8y ago
  Isn’t a future secular society unlikely when the people that are having large numbers of children are highly religious? It would seem that as the secular world keeps having fewer children that eventually the vast majority of people will be highly religious.
  - chr1 8y ago
    Religiousness is not genetic, many children from highly religious families become atheists or are moderately religious people who can bend or ignore religious rules when needed.
    - irrational 8y ago
      True, but I know highly religious families that are having up to 13 children. If even 50% of those kids stay religious they are out birthing probably 3-4 secular families (who tend to have 0-2 children). And, of course, it also goes the other way, sometimes children of secular families become religious.
Anka33 8y ago
"if you encourage immigration" Bringing low IQ population into high societies will only end in tears.
- govg 8y ago
  I'm sure all the Hungarian / German scientists who powered the Manhattan project (and were fundamental in making USA the scientific superpower they are now), and the current grad school population of Asians are all causing American society to end in tears.
terryschiavo22 8y ago
We don't live in a rich modern secular society. Perhaps 10% of the US population does, but much of it lives at a low-middle class level where having kids is more of a luxury than a choice.
cco 8y ago
This is weird to read because I celebrate shrinking countries, they represent a path forward towards high quality of life and lower ecological impact. Why would it be an issue, assuming we weren't fighting a way, for a country to shrink? There will of course be some economic hurdles to over come as constant and unsustainable growth is done away with, but after that what is the issue?
- all2 8y ago
  > ... they represent a path forward towards high quality of life and lower ecological impact. Could you expand on "high quality of life"? I'm not sure how that follows from decreased population.
  - rosege 8y ago
    As someone living in a city that has over the last 20 years had a massive increase in population I believe the previous poster is referencing less competition for limited resources. In day to day life this could be less traffic jams or less competition to use shared resources such as parks or even just lower property prices.
    - ajeet_dhaliwal 8y ago
      Understood but lower population could also mean less people trading and that would impact quality of life quite badly. Steve Jobs living in a world of 10,000 would have been living in abject poverty no matter how good his entrepreneurial skills. A larger population can do more things, and with trading increase quality of life in important ways (medicine, technology, arts) that may be better off than ghost towns with cheap property. My point is your parent commenter is right to ask whether lower population really means higher quality of life, I don’t think it necessarily does.
      - rosege 8y ago
        I think it depends a on where you live. If you are living in a smaller city/town then you can benefit from the advantages that you mention without the externalities that I talk about.
pascalxus 8y ago
A shrinking population can be better than a growing population. Currently, we're experience a drop in material quality of life, due to limited resources, limited land, cities not having enough space for people, etc. A shrinking population can solve a lot of problems at once. Also, it's not particularly kind to expect future generations to carry all the burdens we've created.
screye 8y ago
Immigration is the obvious solution to this problem. (not claiming its the best, mind you) If the fertility rate is around 1.7, then the country should accept around 20% of their population in immigration over a generation to achieve a stable number. Assuming a generation is ~30 years, that's around 60 million new immigrants in the US. Assuming the immigrants are from underdeveloped nations, it will lead to changes to entire demographics of nations over 2 generations or so.

kiliantics 8y ago

It's going to be shrinking much sooner and probably much more in the developing world due to actual next (rather current) global issue: climate change.

koonsolo 8y ago

I'm going to give my not so popular answer for this. Western society is moving away from traditional families. When I ask my son what he wants to become when he's older, he says he wants to be a police officer. When I ask my 2 girls, they both want to become a mom. My social engineered response to this was "maybe you should become a school teacher, that way you can work with kids and be home when your kids are home". Because let's face it, being only a mom as a girl is not socially acceptable. It's a weak position to be in. We are told to push them into engineering, STEM fields, becoming CEO's, world leaders, whatever. That's what we should do. But my girls, at this age, just want to become a mom. Western society is trying to make boys out of girls, and girls out of boys. I have no problem with women working in tech fields, and I worked with many great ones. But the question needs to be asked is if our society will survive such a thing. On one hand it's great that women have all these new rights, are getting more "equal" to men. But if your own culture is unable to produce enough children, and you have to import families and children from regions where womens rights are questionable, you need to ask how sustainable your democratic equal society is. This is still a big question for myself, so any real discussion is welcome, because maybe I'm overlooking something (so please don't just downvote). Maybe if we want our society to survive, we need to accept that although women are equal to men, they are very different. A family is made up of a man and a women, who support each other in their strengths and interests, and raise children together. Maybe our society should steer away from pushing women into a 'male' role that on one hands makes sense, but on the other hand is questionable. Maybe instead of pushing women into 'male' roles, we should support them better in how they benefit our society. I know this comes across as really terrible, because history has shown that stay at home moms are in a really weak position. But on the other hand, modern society is unable to produce enough kids, and so import people from 'stay at home mom' cultures. Any constructive discussion is welcome.

lotsofpulp 8y ago
>But on the other hand, modern society is unable to produce enough kids This is a contentious claim, as there are different measures of “enough kids”. Some examples I can think of are: Enough kids to support the economic 2% growth assumptions? Enough kids to reduce natural resource consumption to prolong the number of years the Earth is habitable? Enough kids to prevent another country or group of countries from walking in and taking over? Enough kids to take care of the older people and the rest of the country’s infrastructure and still make advancements? I don’t know what all the answers are, but it’s super complicated. From what I can tell though in my peer group, the biggest thing stopping people from having kids is lack of funds, job security, lack of parental leave, and an inability to find what they consider suitable partners within child bearing ages. How much of that is due to women entering the workforce versus other things such as declining real wages and job opportunities, I don’t know.
- Mirioron 8y ago
  The big problem we have is social programs. They redistribute wealth from young people right now to old people right now, but they are sold to young people as though they are investing into their future. As the ratio of young people to old people shrinks our social programs end up in more and more trouble. The fiscal gap is a problem in most developed countries.
  - wtdata 8y ago
    Well, the issue is not taking from young to old, but taking from workers to non workers. The solution is not so complicated and impossible has some people try to put it, you just have to increase the retirement age accordingly. If you live moderately healthy to 95, than it should be perfectly acceptable for you to work until you are 75.
  - logicchains 8y ago
    This program is solvable, with something like Australia's mandatory superannuation or Singapore's Central Provident Fund, where people are forced to save a certain percentage of their income for retirement (and the money is actually saved, they're not just given IOUs for money that will be taken from future young people).

fiblye 8y ago

>And if you encourage immigration as the solution to shrinkage you end up with rising racism and other reactionary trends to these changing demographics. One of the worst things about using immigration as a solution is that it's merely a bandaid. The worst thing is that people who encourage mass immigration are (likely) unknowingly saying their country is more deserving of the temporary benefits of immigration, and the source country can go to hell. Many countries that are currently sources of large numbers of immigrants are rapidly approaching sub-replacement levels (e.g. Mexico), if they haven't already reached that point (e.g., Vietnam, China). The idea behind mass immigration is that you have a constant supply of workers and tax payers to subsidize the welfare of the retiring natives of a country. The idea of having a class of people subsidize others is troublesome enough, but the real problem is those less wealthy countries that immigrants come from are now lacking in workers and losing their own future. For countries that are still only beginning to develop, such as Vietnam, their future is a hell of a lot more at risk than something like Canada. First world countries relying on immigrants have infrastructure and various frameworks built up that'll last them for quite a while after populations begin to dip. Poor countries do not have that benefit. Shit will hit the fan and hard. Young people who struggle to meet basic daily needs are going to be pissed when they're working for dollars a day and expected to support the social nets given to 3 generations above them while being told there's nothing left for them. Right now, the government is saying we should mass import Vietnamese people to change the diapers of our old and do dirty construction jobs. What's Vietnam going to do in 25 years when its population crisis catches up with it, and every country around it is going through the same problem? Nobody's changing their diapers and their streets are going to crumble from insufficient laborers.

Nasrudith 8y ago
Really I have seen the "unfair to the source country" arguement against immigration several times and it has never failed to look like a bizzare pretext because the true reasons would be unacceptable to say out loud. The source countries already fail to use their potential. States are not people. They have no rights - rights are for people and they have no right to them.
tabtab 8y ago
Re: The idea behind mass immigration is that you have a constant supply of workers and tax payers to subsidize the welfare of the retiring natives of a country. Politicians run up deficits and then cover their boo boo via immigration. I'm not making a value judgement on immigration here, but politicians have a bad habit of sacrificing the future for current benefits largely because their political career is a relatively small slice of time. It's why we have debt and pension problems. True, voters play a part by having short memories, voting for instant gratification.

Mirioron 8y ago

My worry is that at some point rich countries will start increasing in population again. In the past we thought that overpopulation is going to be a big global problem. It turned out that rich countries naturally ended up having fewer and fewer children. This stabilized their populations. And now we expect that this trend will continue. But why? What's to say that some shift in society won't trigger another population growth in rich countries? Then what?

chr1 8y ago
Why is that a worry? Half of the land on earth is a desert, and 70% of earth is covered by ocean, most of which is also a desert. If we had enough people in rich countries who would want to spend their money on moving to new places, we would already have floating cities and many more desalination plants, and those places simply by growing food for themselves, changing their local climate to a nicer one, and by contributing to science, would solve the climate problems we are going to face.
- chr1 8y ago
  A couple of years ago, i myself would downvote my comment above, as it is a complete heresy from a standpoint of someone who believes that people are ruining everything they are touching, and the world was so much nicer before technology, and i thought that simply having less people would solve climate change issues. But unfortunately that's a very naive view. Even if all people were removed, arctic have already started melting, and it will continue releasing more and more CO2 and methane from it's huge deposits. Having orders of magnitude less people have been tried already, and that didn't help mammoths and all the other animals that were driven to extinction by small groups of people. Having no people at all have been tried too, and that was not particularly helpful for dinosaurs, that got killed by a meteorite, which can be stopped by a larger civilization than what we currently have. In short I am lucky that i understood, that the belief that it is possible to have too many people, technology is harmful, and that we should go "back to nature", is a harmful and unfounded idea. But i'll be happy to listen to arguments supporting it if you have any:
  - 8y ago

stkdump 8y ago

Who is to say that a smaller world pop is necessarily a bad thing? Many of the ecological problems we face today would be smaller at least. And who is to say that the current trend of shrinking pop in the long term stays the same. Maybe, once we solved the biggest problems we face today and possibly expand beyond earth, people will have more kids again. I can tell you that the families around me who are well off already tend towards 3 kids. That may not be universally true, but I don't see it as black and white.

wtdata 8y ago
It's not, it's a good thing (if done naturally by reducing the replacement numbers). But there will be an adaption period and we need to know how to adjust to it.

xienze 8y ago

>And if you encourage immigration as the solution to shrinkage you end up with rising racism and other reactionary trends to these changing demographics. Not to mention the fact that you’re instantly lifting all those people from a third-world carbon footprint to a first-world one. I’m surprised more people in the “the world is overpopulated/global warming will kill us all” camp don’t seem to be too concerned about that.

dfxm12 8y ago

If we do not address this issue then the world's future is likely poor Can you show your work with regards to this statement? With respect to supply & demand, with fewer people around, wouldn't wages have to be higher? Land cheaper?

ardy42 8y ago

> There is something wrong with rich modern secular society here or anywhere (it happens to all societies right now whether they are European, Japanese, Chinese, etc) in that it currently leads to sub replacement reproduction. This is the next global issue as it will lead to instability in modern rich societies in that they are not sustainable. It turns out it's not very rational to live, and if you do choose to live, it's not very rational to have kids (and spend a huge chunk of your money on them) when you already have a retirement program to take care of you in your old age.

gumby 8y ago

There will still be a huge unemployed cohort "moving through the snake" (the diagram in the article is not as clear as the usual "Christmas tree" diagram" that shows a snapshot in time) world wide which can be deployed to equilibrate the labor imbalance. And that doesn't inherently have to lead to racism. For example the US bracero program in the 40s and 50s didn't exacerbate these issues in through the 1970s, nor did the gastarbeiter program in West Germany though the 80s. Automation and longer extent of healthy life will also mitigate many of these issues. Japan may be the demographic future but need not be the cultural one. An economic system not based on an age-based pyramid scheme and a move away from zero-sum scarcity mindsets will make addressing these issues much simpler.

jniedrauer 8y ago
> An economic system not based on an age-based pyramid scheme and a move away from zero-sum scarcity mindsets will make addressing these issues much simpler. I hope this is our future. But I am afraid that you are overestimating our society's capacity to change course without some supply shock. We'll keep doing what we're doing until something breaks and then there will be a very uncomfortable few decades and many will struggle to survive or die.
- gumby 8y ago
  Things are breaking both in the OECD and developing world. The transition is messy but there's really little alternative.

chr1 8y ago

If we are lucky a good solution to this problem could be significant increase in life expectancy and development of artificial womb that will allow people to have children later in life when they finally want to have children. But if the technological solution doesn't come soon enough the world will have to go through a much harder transition, trying to develop new culture that would combine aspects of secular societies that allow development of science and commerce, with a reasonable desire of growth.

irrational 8y ago
Isn’t a future secular society unlikely when the people that are having large numbers of children are highly religious? It would seem that as the secular world keeps having fewer children that eventually the vast majority of people will be highly religious.
- chr1 8y ago
  Religiousness is not genetic, many children from highly religious families become atheists or are moderately religious people who can bend or ignore religious rules when needed.
  - irrational 8y ago
    True, but I know highly religious families that are having up to 13 children. If even 50% of those kids stay religious they are out birthing probably 3-4 secular families (who tend to have 0-2 children). And, of course, it also goes the other way, sometimes children of secular families become religious.

Anka33 8y ago

"if you encourage immigration" Bringing low IQ population into high societies will only end in tears.

govg 8y ago
I'm sure all the Hungarian / German scientists who powered the Manhattan project (and were fundamental in making USA the scientific superpower they are now), and the current grad school population of Asians are all causing American society to end in tears.

terryschiavo22 8y ago

We don't live in a rich modern secular society. Perhaps 10% of the US population does, but much of it lives at a low-middle class level where having kids is more of a luxury than a choice.

cco 8y ago

This is weird to read because I celebrate shrinking countries, they represent a path forward towards high quality of life and lower ecological impact. Why would it be an issue, assuming we weren't fighting a way, for a country to shrink? There will of course be some economic hurdles to over come as constant and unsustainable growth is done away with, but after that what is the issue?

all2 8y ago
> ... they represent a path forward towards high quality of life and lower ecological impact. Could you expand on "high quality of life"? I'm not sure how that follows from decreased population.
- rosege 8y ago
  As someone living in a city that has over the last 20 years had a massive increase in population I believe the previous poster is referencing less competition for limited resources. In day to day life this could be less traffic jams or less competition to use shared resources such as parks or even just lower property prices.
  - ajeet_dhaliwal 8y ago
    Understood but lower population could also mean less people trading and that would impact quality of life quite badly. Steve Jobs living in a world of 10,000 would have been living in abject poverty no matter how good his entrepreneurial skills. A larger population can do more things, and with trading increase quality of life in important ways (medicine, technology, arts) that may be better off than ghost towns with cheap property. My point is your parent commenter is right to ask whether lower population really means higher quality of life, I don’t think it necessarily does.
    - rosege 8y ago
      I think it depends a on where you live. If you are living in a smaller city/town then you can benefit from the advantages that you mention without the externalities that I talk about.

pascalxus 8y ago

A shrinking population can be better than a growing population. Currently, we're experience a drop in material quality of life, due to limited resources, limited land, cities not having enough space for people, etc. A shrinking population can solve a lot of problems at once. Also, it's not particularly kind to expect future generations to carry all the burdens we've created.

screye 8y ago

Immigration is the obvious solution to this problem. (not claiming its the best, mind you) If the fertility rate is around 1.7, then the country should accept around 20% of their population in immigration over a generation to achieve a stable number. Assuming a generation is ~30 years, that's around 60 million new immigrants in the US. Assuming the immigrants are from underdeveloped nations, it will lead to changes to entire demographics of nations over 2 generations or so.