7 ms·

The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population [pdf]

73 points by daviday 7y ago

sien 7y ago
The book Empty Planet is a very interesting read that looks around the world at various countries where population is declining such as Korea and Japan and European countries where this is about to happen as well. The book is mentioned in the paper. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37585564-empty-planet https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37585564-empty-planet This paper on the economic consequences is also interesting. It popped up on various economics blogs when it came out.
- mirthandmadness 7y ago
  What are some of these "good economics blogs" you mentioned? Would like to subscribe.
sadmann1 7y ago
Isn't the underlying assumption that economic growth is tied to an ever growing population being tested in the age of automation?
- Pandabob 7y ago
  Sure, but one would then assume that in the age of automation, our productivity rates would be skyrocketing. It seems that that hasn't been the trend after the great recession [1]. Not to say that it couldn't change, but seems to me like there's some kind of narrative violation going on where "thought leaders" preach about automation, yet we can't see it in the statistics. Edit: Although, there's also a change that we're just measuring productivity incorrectly right now, and not correctly taking into account the way the online economy works. [1]: https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/below-trend-the-us-productivity-slowdown-since-the-great-recession.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/below-trend-the-us-pro...
  - blencdr 7y ago
    Productivity by automation is constrained by the available energy, also economic growth could already be limited by the lack of availale energy. https://energyeconomicgrowth.org/sites/eeg.opml.co.uk/files/2018-02/1.1_Stern_0.pdf https://energyeconomicgrowth.org/sites/eeg.opml.co.uk/files/...
    - siculars 7y ago
      The cost of energy is going towards zero while (and because) available energy is going to infinity.
    - adrianN 7y ago
      Solar panels are pretty cheap. If lack of energy were a problem, I'd expect a lot more of them.
      - ben_w 7y ago
        They are cheap, but production of them is currently growing roughly exponentially, so I don’t think your argument holds.
  - taneq 7y ago
    Hmm. Couple of thoughts on this one: 1) Our standards for products have grown exponentially. It probably does take more labour-hours to produce, say, a mid-range car today than it did in 1980, but that car does unbelievably more than the 1980 model did. Everything in it is controlled and monitored by software. It has navigation and safety and vehicle control and convenience and entertainment features beyond anything you could get even 5 years ago. It'd be astounding if it didn't take more time to build. 2) Wages in real terms haven't grown significantly in a long time. This translates to labour hours being relatively cheap, so companies can spend more hours on their products for the same R&D budget.
    - Pandabob 7y ago
      1) is true, but the gains seem to be eaten up by the fact that, increasingly a larger part of the economy is made up of service sector jobs that are harder to automate [1]. [1]: https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/helland-tabarrok_why-are-the-prices-so-damn-high_v1.pdf https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/helland-tabarrok_why-a...
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  It’s being tested everywhere. Even some of our most basic social programs such as social security assume a steady population growth. Let alone things like basic income.
nordsieck 7y ago
> It is a distinct possibility — highlighted in the recent book, Empty Planet — that global population will decline rather than stabilize in the long run. What happens to economic growth when population growth turns negative? IMO, this is a pretty silly idea. The fundamental problem with this theory is that there are sub-populations that have been able to maintain high fertility despite the decline in broader society. For example, the number of Amish doubles every 20 years. Today, there are 1/3 of a million Amish. At the current rate, it'll only be 200 years until there are more than 300 million Amish in the US. No idea if that will actually happen, but if everyone else dies off, there no reason they wouldn't just take over.
- trevyn 7y ago
  It also implicitly assumes that economic growth is the only way for a society to grow.
- Leary 7y ago
  How do u suppose startups will cater to these 300 million Amish users?
  - nordsieck 7y ago
    > How do u suppose startups will cater to these 300 million Amish users? I know very little about the Amish, except that they eschew certain kinds of technology (sort of - Amish tend to be fragmented over this issue) and somewhat insular. I can confidently say: no one knows what 200 years will do to Amish culture.
- 01100011 7y ago
  This. There's a reason why religions exist. If they didn't increase the fitness of their adherents, they'd die out rather quickly. We may get caught off guard by shifting demographics and a decline in secular value systems. There are many religions which preach the 'fertility gospel' in one form or another. If the religion is effective in keeping the new generations devout, and that is an important question, we're going to have a population explosion.
mrwh 7y ago
Is the idea that technological improvements are tied to _increasing_ population somehow? What's the mechanism there? Being only slightly facetious, but if everyone had no more than one child, that leaves a lot more time in which to invent stuff. And true, over time there will be fewer people doing the inventing, but a world with ~a billion people in it still managed to invent flight, and one with billions fewer than today still got to the Moon.
- newyankee 7y ago
  If it was true India and China would've been much more successful ( i know China is now due to the miracle they had) a lot earlier
  - imtringued 7y ago
    They are much more successful than a China or India with only 10 million people.
- htns 7y ago
  Exponential population growth leads into hyperbolic economic growth.
- satyrnein 7y ago
  I think the idea is that progress (at this point, anyway) is the cross pollination of different ideas, so there is a kind of Metcalf's Law in effect. The more people, the many more combinations of ideas.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  I think it is a lesser driver if anything but can help some. If the current demand can be met then there is less of a need to develop anything new. Why farm if there is an abundance of fruit essentially. But if demand grows there is more reason to try something new instead of waiting for the existing to wear out completely. Previously population growth was essentially a prerequisite for specialization in order to but well that has been broken for a while now. Education, research funding, trade, cross pollination of ideas and similiar would have more of an influence but population growty does drive some.
adrianN 7y ago
Why would you care about economic growth in absolute terms instead of productivity per person?
- lostlogin 7y ago
  Because wealth isn’t evenly spread and those that beat this drum are on the wealthy end of the spectrum.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    Those seem like orthogonal problems to me. (People beating the growth-growth-growth drum are also typically on the rich end of the spectrum btw).
    - daxfohl 7y ago
      Seems like we could have some other metrics that could also be relevant to our happiness here on Earth? Nah. Or, I think I've heard it said better, "If the purpose of life isn't 'maximizing shareholder value', we're fucked".
      - Guthur 7y ago
        Do you believe all the countries over the past 2 centuries that have enjoyed amazing economic growth are better or worse for it?
        daxfohl 7y ago
        I said also relevant.
  - lazyier 7y ago
    Wealth spread really doesn't matter so long as everybody is getting wealthier. Which is exactly what is happening. By every metric imaginable the entire population of the planet is gaining in wealth. Some quicker then others. But gains are largely universal. Poverty is at it's lowest point in all of human history. And in a month it'll be even lower. Also when wealth goes up, overall consumption as measured by actual natural resources consumed goes down. People have this misconception that increased wealth equals increased consumption, which is hardly the case. Wealth represents a increase in well being, which more often then not, is a result of increased efficiency. By 'increased efficiency' I mean less human effort is required to produce more with less.
travisoneill1 7y ago
The important part of economic growth is GDP/capita, not total GDP. And if we are to keep growing GDP/capita without destroying the environment, a population decline is absolutely necessary. Increasing population is only economically beneficial in the most short term sense.
- thulecitizen 7y ago
  I don’t think I 100% understand what you mean by population decline? Do you mean planned parenthood/contraception? In other words: what are some of the strategies you are in favor of to make this decline happen?
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    in the west, one strategy would be to do nothing and let the current trend run its course.
    - thulecitizen 7y ago
      What current trends are you talking about here?
      - leetcrew 7y ago
        birthrates in the west are trending down. the US hit a new low recently of 1.8 births per woman, well below the replacement rate. the US currency has a slightly positive (0.5%) population growth, but this is only due to immigration. if we merely do nothing (and don't adjust immigration quotas), we will have negative population growth in the near future.
- xg15 7y ago
  I'm assuming you mean "population decline due to death of old age and more empowerment not to have children". Even then, this would only work until the population has shrunk to a certain point. Then what? Maybe a more useful way forward would be to question if we need perpetual growth at all.
known 7y ago
10% Owns 82% Wealth http://archive.vn/1zpaE http://archive.vn/1zpaE "The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them" --Einstein
pimmen 7y ago
I think this will have unforseen effects on real estate. If the population globally is shrinking, that means the likelihood that any given town will increase in size is also shrinking. At first, this might look like the real estate prices across the board will decrease but I don’t think so. I think that when people factor in that the town they are in currently will not increase in size they look at cities that already have good markets and move there instead, driving up the prices of already established cities. This is basically what is already happening in European countries with falling birth rates.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  this could also cause a vicious cycle for the towns and smaller cities. there's a certain amount of fixed cost to maintain existing infrastructure. if a significant number of properties become vacant, the municipality will have to start hiking taxes to keep the same revenue, making the place even less desirable and causing more tax base to leave.
pdimitar 7y ago
I am not an economy expert by any stretch. Just going to share my take. Growth cannot go forever due to these factors I observed: 1. More and more wealth seems to be captured and locked away somewhere while the rest of the populace is left to having to cope with globally dwindling redistributable capital. 2. Population isn't even declining everywhere but I've read several times here in HN that white people in first-world countries procreate less and less. Reasons can be a lot and my anecdotal evidence is that the cost of a basic life and some small extra affordances goes up every year. Families get more and more conservative on their spends and/or jobs. Many people here in Eastern Europe just decide to live on welfare and half-day crappy jobs somewhere but at least these jobs aren't stressful and don't require 2-3 hours in traffic every day. When you do the math such a way of life nets them 70-80% of what they would otherwise make so their choice is really quite logical. In these conditions the economy stagnates and companies get desperate for good staff while the government couldn't care less. 3. The population declines at places because people view raising kids as a huge financial and stress investment and not as the life-fulfilling purpose that raising kids is usually viewed as. This is mostly related to how much time is needed for a young person these days to actually start contributing to their raising (or new) family. Many people are just scared if they are going to be able to be financially stable for 25-30 years in the future. Others like myself are just burned out. 4. The economy gradually seems to be taken over by the very classic breed of venture investors that don't give a hoot about organically growing your customer base or actually taking care of your employees. Even in a presumably more conservative market like Europe, I see this more and more. Can we even discuss growth if, even against all odds, your company becomes hugely successful BUT has to return the investments tenfold? Again, this is a captured wealth going to somebody else's pocket (and they don't seem to be interested in redistributing it). --- I could be gravely mistaken and be a victim of living in a filter bubble. Of course. But it's what I am seeing periodically and it worries me. People just don't care that much for making kids or looking for jobs since it all just guarantees suffering and sacrifices and nothing much else. Many elderly people tell me that they regularly chat with their kids (now 30-45) and are convinced that having a fulfilling life was easier even as back as 20-30 years ago. They might be right.
- digitalengineer 7y ago
  Looks like you’re not too far off. World fertility rates are dropping very sharply: “ The world is undergoing an unprecedented demographic transformation. Between now and 2050,the number of older persons will rise from about 600 million to almost two billion. In less than 50 years from now, for the first time in history, the world will contain more people over 60 than under 15.” https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/the-unprecedented-demographic-boom-and-bust https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/the-unprecedented-demo...
carapace 7y ago
I think it's saying that the "optimal allocation" "of people into workers and researchers" can result in ... uh, something they're calling "expanding cosmos" (as opposed to "Empty Planet") but I couldn't find any mention of space colonization.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
I am in a minority, but I would welcome the economic decline that would come with growth reduction if it were accompanied by using less manufactured goods (like cars), more locally grown food, more craft and art locally produced, more travel done in VR (with addition that local guides would be there to talk with you), etc., etc.
- dx87 7y ago
  I feel the same way as you. It seems like "economic growth" is being used to justify ignoring other societal issues. For example, you can pretty regularly see people on this site saying that retired people should be forced to relocate out of SV because they aren't contributing to economic growth as much as a high density apartment building filled with recent STEM grads would. Having everything focused so much on growing makes it feel like I'm stuck on a runaway train, where I'm forced to either spend most of my life trying to feed the "economic growth" engines, or risk dropping into poverty if I live a simple life how I actually want to.
  - thatfrenchguy 7y ago
    The issues with retired people in the Bay Area that they have prevented any housing construction at all in the last 30 years, while living in gigantic houses for now one ortwo people: that’s why they get so much hate.
    - DataWorker 7y ago
      There are downsides to democracy, one of those is that old people, women and minorities get a say in what happens. If they don’t want to sell out to corporate interests pushing growth at any cost, they can use their votes to favor slower more sustainable growth policies that protect people at the expense of corporate profits.
    - fierarul 7y ago
      The USA has a surface of 9.834.000 km². California is ranked #17 within the US based on population density and has only 97 people / km². The Bay Area seems to have 18,000 km² which at 7.1 million people makes is quite dense already.
Nasrudith 7y ago
Anyway it is a pet peeve of mine about talking about economic growth and ending. Growth isn't just more stuff but also better stuff and how it is used. If there is no growth even in such hypothetical extremes as a fixed population sustainable everything model then society is fundamentally doing things very wrong. Because you have global workforces working at things and nobody is learning to do anything better. A newbie having the exact same productivity as a veteran. In every field. That is deeply contrary to the state of being of everything and implies truly epic levels of mismanagement.
salawat 7y ago
This paper really annoyed me last night. The assumptions made don't even render a world that looks remotely similar to what we have, and that abstracting away of messy complexity actually makes the central characteristics of the problem harder to wrap your head around, even if it does make it easier to reframe into a paper that'd look good in an academic journal. Case in point: You don't need higher math to understand that human beings are fundamentally lossy in nature. Perfect replication of the information required to sustain the current cumulative knowledge level doesn't happen because there is no guarantee that any one person that knows a thing can successfully communicate it to someone else in a way that can be understood, and that in the process of doing so, that that information isn't mutated in such a manner that something important isn't lost. Children amuse themselves with this phenomena all the time. It's called a game of "Telephone". Given an acknowledgement of this, the tendency for population decline to result in problems for a world that has been architected around the guarantee of population and economic growth is immediately intuitive. As death removes older generations, the knowledge they had and failed to clearly replicate dies with them. Each new member of the population birthed in is a new crank on the slot machine of information propagation. Their life circumstances might allow them to understand that bit of arcane knowledge that no one else was able to do anything with because it didn't make sense to them because the constellation of shared lived experience between communicator and communicated necessary for comprehension wasn't there. New idea formulation, or old idea reformulation and propagation becomes reliable and less likely to snowball out of control to irrevocable loss as long as you keep throwing new blood at it. If there is no new blood though, the numbers quickly begin to favor the life experiences required to underpin all the minutiae to sustain the corpus of knowledge as is not reoccurring in total across the entire breadth of the population, and you start to find your smaller remaining population further and further isolated from the practical experiences that made the linguistic representations of knowledge written down understandable. The knowledge then becomes useless, a dependency in the infrastructure that enables efficient physical completion of labor is lost, thus your population's output of tasks done per unit time drops, thus more work must be done just to keep things running, and so on and so forth until basic principles are again reformulated, and efficiencies from a chance rediscovery of the necessary experience underpinning a lynchpin technology can be realized again. Just as information transfer is lossy, so is physical labor. If you have 1 million tasks that must be done in a day to maintain a stable level of output, and you decrease the number of agents available to do the tasks, the math simply works out that more work has to be done per agent to maintain output in a steady state, and we all know that the work output of a human being isn't trivially scaled up without ballooning the prerequisite knowledge required to do the task (I.e. skills at using tools, skills to teach the skills to use the tools, the tools to make the tools, the skills to operate the tools to make the tools, etc...) all of which themselves become tasks added on to the overall workload of your dwindling population who are working harder and harder to maintain the highest level of output possible. The other issue not even touched on is the desirability of continued high growth regimes in the presence of a near tipping-point constraint violation to which a remediary measure has not been formulated. I.e. Excess carbon footprint. If you stay in your high growth regime in a wager to get that innovation faster from a new member, you're still templating your current footprint of resource use, and accelerating reaching your tipping point, with no guarantee you'll find it in time. Decline is a natural outcome in an organism facing this type of environmental dynamic constraint to buy time for other (in this paper, unrepresented, but which one can represent as decreased demand to output more of the destabilizing factor by your population, or natural processes operating to free up buffer space by things like carbon recapture and sequestration) processes time to shift the dynamics back in favor of supporting a new high growth regime. I have the utmost respect for those that can trivially converse in the higher maths; I'll admit I had to crack open some books to understand what the heck they were getting at and whether it even made sense. I draw the line though where doing your analysis as they did takes you right out of reality into the atrophied realm of post-facto narrativization. Those equations are meaningless to most readers, whereas putting things in terms of tasks to be completed, and characterizing overall knowledge level management as what it is, a bunch of overhead tasks draws the same Senate picture that it took them mucking around in control theory to even tangentially articulate. It started a conversation yes, but by constraining it to the realm of finance and economics, and leaving out the rest of the world you run afoul of that great aphorism that "problems cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that created them in the first place", which is exactly what this paper appears to be an example of doing. Gah!
naveen99 7y ago
Real estate is currently the largest asset class. Maybe it will lose some of its importance when most people inherit housing. Home ownership rates are already over 60% in the us, and over 80% in india.

73 points by daviday 7y ago

sien 7y ago

The book Empty Planet is a very interesting read that looks around the world at various countries where population is declining such as Korea and Japan and European countries where this is about to happen as well. The book is mentioned in the paper. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37585564-empty-planet https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37585564-empty-planet This paper on the economic consequences is also interesting. It popped up on various economics blogs when it came out.

mirthandmadness 7y ago
What are some of these "good economics blogs" you mentioned? Would like to subscribe.

sadmann1 7y ago

Isn't the underlying assumption that economic growth is tied to an ever growing population being tested in the age of automation?

Pandabob 7y ago
Sure, but one would then assume that in the age of automation, our productivity rates would be skyrocketing. It seems that that hasn't been the trend after the great recession [1]. Not to say that it couldn't change, but seems to me like there's some kind of narrative violation going on where "thought leaders" preach about automation, yet we can't see it in the statistics. Edit: Although, there's also a change that we're just measuring productivity incorrectly right now, and not correctly taking into account the way the online economy works. [1]: https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/below-trend-the-us-productivity-slowdown-since-the-great-recession.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/below-trend-the-us-pro...
- blencdr 7y ago
  Productivity by automation is constrained by the available energy, also economic growth could already be limited by the lack of availale energy. https://energyeconomicgrowth.org/sites/eeg.opml.co.uk/files/2018-02/1.1_Stern_0.pdf https://energyeconomicgrowth.org/sites/eeg.opml.co.uk/files/...
  - siculars 7y ago
    The cost of energy is going towards zero while (and because) available energy is going to infinity.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    Solar panels are pretty cheap. If lack of energy were a problem, I'd expect a lot more of them.
    - ben_w 7y ago
      They are cheap, but production of them is currently growing roughly exponentially, so I don’t think your argument holds.
- taneq 7y ago
  Hmm. Couple of thoughts on this one: 1) Our standards for products have grown exponentially. It probably does take more labour-hours to produce, say, a mid-range car today than it did in 1980, but that car does unbelievably more than the 1980 model did. Everything in it is controlled and monitored by software. It has navigation and safety and vehicle control and convenience and entertainment features beyond anything you could get even 5 years ago. It'd be astounding if it didn't take more time to build. 2) Wages in real terms haven't grown significantly in a long time. This translates to labour hours being relatively cheap, so companies can spend more hours on their products for the same R&D budget.
  - Pandabob 7y ago
    1) is true, but the gains seem to be eaten up by the fact that, increasingly a larger part of the economy is made up of service sector jobs that are harder to automate [1]. [1]: https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/helland-tabarrok_why-are-the-prices-so-damn-high_v1.pdf https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/helland-tabarrok_why-a...
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
It’s being tested everywhere. Even some of our most basic social programs such as social security assume a steady population growth. Let alone things like basic income.

nordsieck 7y ago

> It is a distinct possibility — highlighted in the recent book, Empty Planet — that global population will decline rather than stabilize in the long run. What happens to economic growth when population growth turns negative? IMO, this is a pretty silly idea. The fundamental problem with this theory is that there are sub-populations that have been able to maintain high fertility despite the decline in broader society. For example, the number of Amish doubles every 20 years. Today, there are 1/3 of a million Amish. At the current rate, it'll only be 200 years until there are more than 300 million Amish in the US. No idea if that will actually happen, but if everyone else dies off, there no reason they wouldn't just take over.

trevyn 7y ago
It also implicitly assumes that economic growth is the only way for a society to grow.
Leary 7y ago
How do u suppose startups will cater to these 300 million Amish users?
- nordsieck 7y ago
  > How do u suppose startups will cater to these 300 million Amish users? I know very little about the Amish, except that they eschew certain kinds of technology (sort of - Amish tend to be fragmented over this issue) and somewhat insular. I can confidently say: no one knows what 200 years will do to Amish culture.
01100011 7y ago
This. There's a reason why religions exist. If they didn't increase the fitness of their adherents, they'd die out rather quickly. We may get caught off guard by shifting demographics and a decline in secular value systems. There are many religions which preach the 'fertility gospel' in one form or another. If the religion is effective in keeping the new generations devout, and that is an important question, we're going to have a population explosion.

mrwh 7y ago

Is the idea that technological improvements are tied to _increasing_ population somehow? What's the mechanism there? Being only slightly facetious, but if everyone had no more than one child, that leaves a lot more time in which to invent stuff. And true, over time there will be fewer people doing the inventing, but a world with ~a billion people in it still managed to invent flight, and one with billions fewer than today still got to the Moon.

newyankee 7y ago
If it was true India and China would've been much more successful ( i know China is now due to the miracle they had) a lot earlier
- imtringued 7y ago
  They are much more successful than a China or India with only 10 million people.
htns 7y ago
Exponential population growth leads into hyperbolic economic growth.
satyrnein 7y ago
I think the idea is that progress (at this point, anyway) is the cross pollination of different ideas, so there is a kind of Metcalf's Law in effect. The more people, the many more combinations of ideas.
Nasrudith 7y ago
I think it is a lesser driver if anything but can help some. If the current demand can be met then there is less of a need to develop anything new. Why farm if there is an abundance of fruit essentially. But if demand grows there is more reason to try something new instead of waiting for the existing to wear out completely. Previously population growth was essentially a prerequisite for specialization in order to but well that has been broken for a while now. Education, research funding, trade, cross pollination of ideas and similiar would have more of an influence but population growty does drive some.

adrianN 7y ago

Why would you care about economic growth in absolute terms instead of productivity per person?

lostlogin 7y ago
Because wealth isn’t evenly spread and those that beat this drum are on the wealthy end of the spectrum.
- adrianN 7y ago
  Those seem like orthogonal problems to me. (People beating the growth-growth-growth drum are also typically on the rich end of the spectrum btw).
  - daxfohl 7y ago
    Seems like we could have some other metrics that could also be relevant to our happiness here on Earth? Nah. Or, I think I've heard it said better, "If the purpose of life isn't 'maximizing shareholder value', we're fucked".
    - Guthur 7y ago
      Do you believe all the countries over the past 2 centuries that have enjoyed amazing economic growth are better or worse for it?
      - daxfohl 7y ago
        I said also relevant.
- lazyier 7y ago
  Wealth spread really doesn't matter so long as everybody is getting wealthier. Which is exactly what is happening. By every metric imaginable the entire population of the planet is gaining in wealth. Some quicker then others. But gains are largely universal. Poverty is at it's lowest point in all of human history. And in a month it'll be even lower. Also when wealth goes up, overall consumption as measured by actual natural resources consumed goes down. People have this misconception that increased wealth equals increased consumption, which is hardly the case. Wealth represents a increase in well being, which more often then not, is a result of increased efficiency. By 'increased efficiency' I mean less human effort is required to produce more with less.

travisoneill1 7y ago

The important part of economic growth is GDP/capita, not total GDP. And if we are to keep growing GDP/capita without destroying the environment, a population decline is absolutely necessary. Increasing population is only economically beneficial in the most short term sense.

thulecitizen 7y ago
I don’t think I 100% understand what you mean by population decline? Do you mean planned parenthood/contraception? In other words: what are some of the strategies you are in favor of to make this decline happen?
- leetcrew 7y ago
  in the west, one strategy would be to do nothing and let the current trend run its course.
  - thulecitizen 7y ago
    What current trends are you talking about here?
    - leetcrew 7y ago
      birthrates in the west are trending down. the US hit a new low recently of 1.8 births per woman, well below the replacement rate. the US currency has a slightly positive (0.5%) population growth, but this is only due to immigration. if we merely do nothing (and don't adjust immigration quotas), we will have negative population growth in the near future.
xg15 7y ago
I'm assuming you mean "population decline due to death of old age and more empowerment not to have children". Even then, this would only work until the population has shrunk to a certain point. Then what? Maybe a more useful way forward would be to question if we need perpetual growth at all.

known 7y ago

10% Owns 82% Wealth http://archive.vn/1zpaE http://archive.vn/1zpaE "The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them" --Einstein

pimmen 7y ago

I think this will have unforseen effects on real estate. If the population globally is shrinking, that means the likelihood that any given town will increase in size is also shrinking. At first, this might look like the real estate prices across the board will decrease but I don’t think so. I think that when people factor in that the town they are in currently will not increase in size they look at cities that already have good markets and move there instead, driving up the prices of already established cities. This is basically what is already happening in European countries with falling birth rates.

leetcrew 7y ago
this could also cause a vicious cycle for the towns and smaller cities. there's a certain amount of fixed cost to maintain existing infrastructure. if a significant number of properties become vacant, the municipality will have to start hiking taxes to keep the same revenue, making the place even less desirable and causing more tax base to leave.

pdimitar 7y ago

I am not an economy expert by any stretch. Just going to share my take. Growth cannot go forever due to these factors I observed: 1. More and more wealth seems to be captured and locked away somewhere while the rest of the populace is left to having to cope with globally dwindling redistributable capital. 2. Population isn't even declining everywhere but I've read several times here in HN that white people in first-world countries procreate less and less. Reasons can be a lot and my anecdotal evidence is that the cost of a basic life and some small extra affordances goes up every year. Families get more and more conservative on their spends and/or jobs. Many people here in Eastern Europe just decide to live on welfare and half-day crappy jobs somewhere but at least these jobs aren't stressful and don't require 2-3 hours in traffic every day. When you do the math such a way of life nets them 70-80% of what they would otherwise make so their choice is really quite logical. In these conditions the economy stagnates and companies get desperate for good staff while the government couldn't care less. 3. The population declines at places because people view raising kids as a huge financial and stress investment and not as the life-fulfilling purpose that raising kids is usually viewed as. This is mostly related to how much time is needed for a young person these days to actually start contributing to their raising (or new) family. Many people are just scared if they are going to be able to be financially stable for 25-30 years in the future. Others like myself are just burned out. 4. The economy gradually seems to be taken over by the very classic breed of venture investors that don't give a hoot about organically growing your customer base or actually taking care of your employees. Even in a presumably more conservative market like Europe, I see this more and more. Can we even discuss growth if, even against all odds, your company becomes hugely successful BUT has to return the investments tenfold? Again, this is a captured wealth going to somebody else's pocket (and they don't seem to be interested in redistributing it). --- I could be gravely mistaken and be a victim of living in a filter bubble. Of course. But it's what I am seeing periodically and it worries me. People just don't care that much for making kids or looking for jobs since it all just guarantees suffering and sacrifices and nothing much else. Many elderly people tell me that they regularly chat with their kids (now 30-45) and are convinced that having a fulfilling life was easier even as back as 20-30 years ago. They might be right.

digitalengineer 7y ago
Looks like you’re not too far off. World fertility rates are dropping very sharply: “ The world is undergoing an unprecedented demographic transformation. Between now and 2050,the number of older persons will rise from about 600 million to almost two billion. In less than 50 years from now, for the first time in history, the world will contain more people over 60 than under 15.” https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/the-unprecedented-demographic-boom-and-bust https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/the-unprecedented-demo...

carapace 7y ago

I think it's saying that the "optimal allocation" "of people into workers and researchers" can result in ... uh, something they're calling "expanding cosmos" (as opposed to "Empty Planet") but I couldn't find any mention of space colonization.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

I am in a minority, but I would welcome the economic decline that would come with growth reduction if it were accompanied by using less manufactured goods (like cars), more locally grown food, more craft and art locally produced, more travel done in VR (with addition that local guides would be there to talk with you), etc., etc.

dx87 7y ago
I feel the same way as you. It seems like "economic growth" is being used to justify ignoring other societal issues. For example, you can pretty regularly see people on this site saying that retired people should be forced to relocate out of SV because they aren't contributing to economic growth as much as a high density apartment building filled with recent STEM grads would. Having everything focused so much on growing makes it feel like I'm stuck on a runaway train, where I'm forced to either spend most of my life trying to feed the "economic growth" engines, or risk dropping into poverty if I live a simple life how I actually want to.
- thatfrenchguy 7y ago
  The issues with retired people in the Bay Area that they have prevented any housing construction at all in the last 30 years, while living in gigantic houses for now one ortwo people: that’s why they get so much hate.
  - DataWorker 7y ago
    There are downsides to democracy, one of those is that old people, women and minorities get a say in what happens. If they don’t want to sell out to corporate interests pushing growth at any cost, they can use their votes to favor slower more sustainable growth policies that protect people at the expense of corporate profits.
  - fierarul 7y ago
    The USA has a surface of 9.834.000 km². California is ranked #17 within the US based on population density and has only 97 people / km². The Bay Area seems to have 18,000 km² which at 7.1 million people makes is quite dense already.

Nasrudith 7y ago

Anyway it is a pet peeve of mine about talking about economic growth and ending. Growth isn't just more stuff but also better stuff and how it is used. If there is no growth even in such hypothetical extremes as a fixed population sustainable everything model then society is fundamentally doing things very wrong. Because you have global workforces working at things and nobody is learning to do anything better. A newbie having the exact same productivity as a veteran. In every field. That is deeply contrary to the state of being of everything and implies truly epic levels of mismanagement.

salawat 7y ago

This paper really annoyed me last night. The assumptions made don't even render a world that looks remotely similar to what we have, and that abstracting away of messy complexity actually makes the central characteristics of the problem harder to wrap your head around, even if it does make it easier to reframe into a paper that'd look good in an academic journal. Case in point: You don't need higher math to understand that human beings are fundamentally lossy in nature. Perfect replication of the information required to sustain the current cumulative knowledge level doesn't happen because there is no guarantee that any one person that knows a thing can successfully communicate it to someone else in a way that can be understood, and that in the process of doing so, that that information isn't mutated in such a manner that something important isn't lost. Children amuse themselves with this phenomena all the time. It's called a game of "Telephone". Given an acknowledgement of this, the tendency for population decline to result in problems for a world that has been architected around the guarantee of population and economic growth is immediately intuitive. As death removes older generations, the knowledge they had and failed to clearly replicate dies with them. Each new member of the population birthed in is a new crank on the slot machine of information propagation. Their life circumstances might allow them to understand that bit of arcane knowledge that no one else was able to do anything with because it didn't make sense to them because the constellation of shared lived experience between communicator and communicated necessary for comprehension wasn't there. New idea formulation, or old idea reformulation and propagation becomes reliable and less likely to snowball out of control to irrevocable loss as long as you keep throwing new blood at it. If there is no new blood though, the numbers quickly begin to favor the life experiences required to underpin all the minutiae to sustain the corpus of knowledge as is not reoccurring in total across the entire breadth of the population, and you start to find your smaller remaining population further and further isolated from the practical experiences that made the linguistic representations of knowledge written down understandable. The knowledge then becomes useless, a dependency in the infrastructure that enables efficient physical completion of labor is lost, thus your population's output of tasks done per unit time drops, thus more work must be done just to keep things running, and so on and so forth until basic principles are again reformulated, and efficiencies from a chance rediscovery of the necessary experience underpinning a lynchpin technology can be realized again. Just as information transfer is lossy, so is physical labor. If you have 1 million tasks that must be done in a day to maintain a stable level of output, and you decrease the number of agents available to do the tasks, the math simply works out that more work has to be done per agent to maintain output in a steady state, and we all know that the work output of a human being isn't trivially scaled up without ballooning the prerequisite knowledge required to do the task (I.e. skills at using tools, skills to teach the skills to use the tools, the tools to make the tools, the skills to operate the tools to make the tools, etc...) all of which themselves become tasks added on to the overall workload of your dwindling population who are working harder and harder to maintain the highest level of output possible. The other issue not even touched on is the desirability of continued high growth regimes in the presence of a near tipping-point constraint violation to which a remediary measure has not been formulated. I.e. Excess carbon footprint. If you stay in your high growth regime in a wager to get that innovation faster from a new member, you're still templating your current footprint of resource use, and accelerating reaching your tipping point, with no guarantee you'll find it in time. Decline is a natural outcome in an organism facing this type of environmental dynamic constraint to buy time for other (in this paper, unrepresented, but which one can represent as decreased demand to output more of the destabilizing factor by your population, or natural processes operating to free up buffer space by things like carbon recapture and sequestration) processes time to shift the dynamics back in favor of supporting a new high growth regime. I have the utmost respect for those that can trivially converse in the higher maths; I'll admit I had to crack open some books to understand what the heck they were getting at and whether it even made sense. I draw the line though where doing your analysis as they did takes you right out of reality into the atrophied realm of post-facto narrativization. Those equations are meaningless to most readers, whereas putting things in terms of tasks to be completed, and characterizing overall knowledge level management as what it is, a bunch of overhead tasks draws the same Senate picture that it took them mucking around in control theory to even tangentially articulate. It started a conversation yes, but by constraining it to the realm of finance and economics, and leaving out the rest of the world you run afoul of that great aphorism that "problems cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that created them in the first place", which is exactly what this paper appears to be an example of doing. Gah!

naveen99 7y ago

Real estate is currently the largest asset class. Maybe it will lose some of its importance when most people inherit housing. Home ownership rates are already over 60% in the us, and over 80% in india.