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What’s really the downside of falling birth rates (as long as they stabilize, and they obviously will)? In real terms as far as I can tell: young having to sup

What’s really the downside of falling birth rates (as long as they stabilize, and they obviously will)? In real terms as far as I can tell: young having to support more old and less competitive on the world stage. There’s not many complaints from the news about those though. What they complain about is how wages will increase as labor supply tightens (hence the push for more and more immigration) and business profits will fall. So many Ponzi schemes will become ineffective. In other words, it’s going to be harder to be a rich person. Why should we have to sell out our culture via mass immigration to protect the rich and their market sizes?

goosedragons 4y ago
You have a lot of old people that can't work and not enough people to take care of them and also run the country.
- jmoak3 4y ago
  In a nutshell, it’s hard to design and build new kinds of solar panels when the scientists have to take mom to the doctor 3x a week Now imagine those scientists manage to have 3 kids a piece - what do you think is getting put on the back burner?
H_Pylori 4y ago
[dead]
xrd 4y ago
I wanted to ask basically the same question. Isn't it possible that the old models of population growth won't be true in the future? People relocate more, we have better tools for communication and collaboration. I'm curious why there isn't a path to prosperity, especially since we can watch what is happening long before the effects are felt.
jiscariot 4y ago
You have lots of things such as pensions, social security that have embedded growth obligations. Like a ponzi-scheme, everything is cool, so long as you grow the number of people paying in. Instead of reevaluating the economic foundations of these EGO schemes and ask if they are sustainable, it's easier to blame people not having children or countries that don't want open boarders, and call it a crisis.
paradox242 4y ago
The downside is that our entire world economy is predicated on the assumption that labor will be cheap and markets ever expanding. Even if the population stabilizes, it looks like it will be well below what is considered replacement level and so this will require a massive shift in our thinking about how we organize literally everything in our society. I don't know if it is possible to overstate how much things will change. The service staff you interact with at Starbucks, the grocery store, who deliver your meals, will no longer be affordable. These places will still exist in some form (though there will likely be fewer) and they will be much more automated than they even are now. These people will be so needed elsewhere that salaries will likely draw them to other industries critical to society continuing to function. Healthcare, in particular, will swallow up as much of the population as it is able to (much more than even now in a relative, not absolute sense). We will have to make hard choices about continuing to support things like suburbs and other far-flung infrastructure that only barely made sense as long as you assumed more and more houses would be built and that property taxes would continue to go up to support it all. That will no longer be true, those houses will start to go empty, then the surrounding commercial properties. There will not be anyone interested in buying them. Some will be torn down, many will probably rot in place. This has already been in progress for decades in economically depressed areas, particularly the so-called "Rust Belt" in the United States. There will (and already are) massive brain drains in key industries where skilled older workers are either not being replaced, or by those with much less directly applicable experience. The ability to maintain our infrastructure will become strained to the point where we will have to ask ourselves how we can safely reverse our maintenance and operation commitments alongside a constantly shrinking population while avoiding single points of failure that could trigger a panic or societal collapse. This is not far-fetched alarmism, the way we currently live, we are only a week or two of regional or national power outages away from complete anarchy. So many of our systems are interrelated, that a failure of one or two critical ones can have a cascading effect. The smaller local outages in Texas in 2021 was minutes away from leading to nearly months-long blackouts for this reason. We will need more redundancy and slack in the system to manage these when they occur. Market capitalism abhors redundancy as inefficient so this will not be highly incentivized to be taken on by any one corporation, leading to governments likely deciding to impose extreme regulation or outright nationalize industries. Interestingly, the United States may be one of the few societies where things more or less run along as normal, but this is only assuming a continued or increasing permissive immigration policy. The more we go the way of the Japanese, all of the above applies.
fakethenews2022 4y ago
Basic math. If your birthrate stabilizes below replacement level then you go extinct because each generation is smaller than the one before. The only way you don't go extinct is if your birthrate over the long haul is at or above replacement level. For example, the limit of 0.99^n is 0.
- fakethenews2022 4y ago
  Also the overbearing burden to support the elderly with a smaller younger population will apply to every generation (barring temporary baby booms) since each generation will be smaller than the previous one.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    I think the end result will be that elderly won't be supported anymore. But let to work until they die. Cultures can change, assisted suicide or simply not keeping people alive past certain point might come reality.
- eimrine 4y ago
  Do I need to seriously believe that there is possible to extinct for humanity because of some people are not willing to make children? Are there any chances for this to happen before heat death of the Universe if to extrapolate Japan's birth trend to all human population?
  - Georgelemental 4y ago
    No, because not all parts of humanity are equally averse to having children. So as long as it is physically possible for people to have kids and survive until adulthood, natural selection will eventually reassert itself. Things could get dicey for a while until then, though?
  - reducesuffering 4y ago
    If global fertility rate becomes that like Japan, we'll have a halving of the population every generation. This leads to a global population of 78 million after 10 generations. Also a miserable population because each person needs to support two elderly people while before it was two people supporting one elderly. That's a 4x increase in work.

goosedragons 4y ago

You have a lot of old people that can't work and not enough people to take care of them and also run the country.

jmoak3 4y ago
In a nutshell, it’s hard to design and build new kinds of solar panels when the scientists have to take mom to the doctor 3x a week Now imagine those scientists manage to have 3 kids a piece - what do you think is getting put on the back burner?

H_Pylori 4y ago

[dead]

xrd 4y ago

I wanted to ask basically the same question. Isn't it possible that the old models of population growth won't be true in the future? People relocate more, we have better tools for communication and collaboration. I'm curious why there isn't a path to prosperity, especially since we can watch what is happening long before the effects are felt.

jiscariot 4y ago

You have lots of things such as pensions, social security that have embedded growth obligations. Like a ponzi-scheme, everything is cool, so long as you grow the number of people paying in. Instead of reevaluating the economic foundations of these EGO schemes and ask if they are sustainable, it's easier to blame people not having children or countries that don't want open boarders, and call it a crisis.

paradox242 4y ago

The downside is that our entire world economy is predicated on the assumption that labor will be cheap and markets ever expanding. Even if the population stabilizes, it looks like it will be well below what is considered replacement level and so this will require a massive shift in our thinking about how we organize literally everything in our society. I don't know if it is possible to overstate how much things will change. The service staff you interact with at Starbucks, the grocery store, who deliver your meals, will no longer be affordable. These places will still exist in some form (though there will likely be fewer) and they will be much more automated than they even are now. These people will be so needed elsewhere that salaries will likely draw them to other industries critical to society continuing to function. Healthcare, in particular, will swallow up as much of the population as it is able to (much more than even now in a relative, not absolute sense). We will have to make hard choices about continuing to support things like suburbs and other far-flung infrastructure that only barely made sense as long as you assumed more and more houses would be built and that property taxes would continue to go up to support it all. That will no longer be true, those houses will start to go empty, then the surrounding commercial properties. There will not be anyone interested in buying them. Some will be torn down, many will probably rot in place. This has already been in progress for decades in economically depressed areas, particularly the so-called "Rust Belt" in the United States. There will (and already are) massive brain drains in key industries where skilled older workers are either not being replaced, or by those with much less directly applicable experience. The ability to maintain our infrastructure will become strained to the point where we will have to ask ourselves how we can safely reverse our maintenance and operation commitments alongside a constantly shrinking population while avoiding single points of failure that could trigger a panic or societal collapse. This is not far-fetched alarmism, the way we currently live, we are only a week or two of regional or national power outages away from complete anarchy. So many of our systems are interrelated, that a failure of one or two critical ones can have a cascading effect. The smaller local outages in Texas in 2021 was minutes away from leading to nearly months-long blackouts for this reason. We will need more redundancy and slack in the system to manage these when they occur. Market capitalism abhors redundancy as inefficient so this will not be highly incentivized to be taken on by any one corporation, leading to governments likely deciding to impose extreme regulation or outright nationalize industries. Interestingly, the United States may be one of the few societies where things more or less run along as normal, but this is only assuming a continued or increasing permissive immigration policy. The more we go the way of the Japanese, all of the above applies.

fakethenews2022 4y ago

Basic math. If your birthrate stabilizes below replacement level then you go extinct because each generation is smaller than the one before. The only way you don't go extinct is if your birthrate over the long haul is at or above replacement level. For example, the limit of 0.99^n is 0.

fakethenews2022 4y ago
Also the overbearing burden to support the elderly with a smaller younger population will apply to every generation (barring temporary baby booms) since each generation will be smaller than the previous one.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I think the end result will be that elderly won't be supported anymore. But let to work until they die. Cultures can change, assisted suicide or simply not keeping people alive past certain point might come reality.
eimrine 4y ago
Do I need to seriously believe that there is possible to extinct for humanity because of some people are not willing to make children? Are there any chances for this to happen before heat death of the Universe if to extrapolate Japan's birth trend to all human population?
- Georgelemental 4y ago
  No, because not all parts of humanity are equally averse to having children. So as long as it is physically possible for people to have kids and survive until adulthood, natural selection will eventually reassert itself. Things could get dicey for a while until then, though?
- reducesuffering 4y ago
  If global fertility rate becomes that like Japan, we'll have a halving of the population every generation. This leads to a global population of 78 million after 10 generations. Also a miserable population because each person needs to support two elderly people while before it was two people supporting one elderly. That's a 4x increase in work.