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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 woul

• 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.
• Bartweiss 8y ago
  > There will of course be some economic hurdles to over come as constant and unsustainable growth is done away with For a long time, I've been hoping to see better theories of "managed decline". (Or perhaps "managed contraction", to avoid nastier implications.) There's room to bicker about what economics says will happen to per-capita income as population rises and falls - does lost comparative advantage outweigh decreased marginal costs of goods? But it's pretty obvious that none of this theoretical stuff is sufficient to drive what we actually see, where even modest shrinkage leads to economic and often social collapse. The history of the American Rust Belt is a clear demonstration of why we need better approaches to infrastructure and administration in the absence of population growth. Depopulation there has been a scattershot process that creates empty houses and half-empty neighborhoods, so the tax base has fallen far faster than the cost of providing services like garbage collection and street repair. What's more, the emptying houses are often foreclosed or simply abandoned, leaving them the responsibility of the city. They go unmaintained, driving down property values, and eventually decay until they're uninhabitable liabilities. In places like Detroit, the abandonment rate grew so high that the city couldn't even afford to tear down unsafe properties, creating attractive nuisances and environmental problems. Worse still, many of those cities had debt-financed expansion based on projected population growth, so they immediately and inescapably went broke when it stopped. Very broadly, shrinking to a given population is far more expensive and damaging than rising to the same population. That doesn't mean shrinkage is inherently bad, I don't think. But we're still terrible at accommodating it, and I haven't seen many good plans for how to do better. Most cities in the US are functionally insolvent with flat population and modest tax hikes, much less shrinking population. For a lot of first-world countries, putting together viable financial and logistical approaches to shrinking populations is going to be a key challenge for the next 50 years.