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As a peer post hit on, this sort of stuff is mostly related to collapsing birth rates. Japan's lost about 6 million people since 2009 [1], and the rate of decli

As a peer post hit on, this sort of stuff is mostly related to collapsing birth rates. Japan's lost about 6 million people since 2009 [1], and the rate of decline is still accelerating. That's millions of homes, businesses, and so on that no longer serve any purpose. And the wild thing is that, due to the way fertility works, they will keep losing at least the same ratio of people per year (currently about 1 in 200) until they either start having children, or go extinct. This, in turn, causes economic problems. When a country has high fertility rates, their market naturally grows year by year. And vice versa, when they have a low fertility rate. So it's likely to become a vicious cycle. The population declining because of low fertility rate drives economic chaos resulting in even lower fertility rates. And this same future awaits every country with sub-replacement fertility rates. It's like watching a train wreck unfold in ultra slow-mo, but being no more capable of independently stopping it. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/japan-population/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/japan-populat...

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>When a country has high fertility rates, their market naturally grows year by year. But that market, can't grow forever. Population can't grow forever. You will hit the wall at one point unless you want your population living in cramped and impoverished conditions like in India. Is it bad they hit it now instead of 10-20 years down the line?
- thfuran 3y ago
  Hitting a wall is one thing. Reversing back away from the wall is an altogether different issue.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    You can't really convince people to plateau their procreation activities so that fertility rates stay perfectly balanced over time. Fertility is always ciclic. It either goes up when times are good, and goes down when times are bad. And good times don't last forever.
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      Here's [1] a graph of US fertility since 1800. That trend doesn't look cyclic, at all. [1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033027/fertility-rate-us-1800-2020/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033027/fertility-rate-u...
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        Wait for the next world war/big crash.
        somenameforme 3y ago
        But there were plenty of other major wars and crashes. That brief boom phase only appeared after WW2. It seems fairly safe to say it was an aberration.
Xirgil 3y ago
Given that fertility is negatively correlated with income until you start reaching very high levels, economic disaster might actually boost fertility. That's not to say it's entirely an economic issue, it's also social, but it's definitely a factor.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  The problem with that correlation is that it fails all over the place. In the past, people of high and low income alike were having healthy, large families. And even in the present places like Thailand, with a nominal GDP/capita of $9,300, has a catastrophically low fertility rate, lower than even the US and most of Europe. IMO there's a really simple explanation for what it's "really" observing - consumerism. Poor individuals don't have enough money to fall into consumerism, the ultra wealthy have so much that there's no carrot to be dangled in front of them that they couldn't grab on a whim. The correlation captures the remaining middle class that has just enough money to always have a carrot just slightly out of reach. And so that drives different motivations for this group of people. They'd rather chase the carrot, rather than go through the sacrifice involved in raising a family. This not only explains the past, when consumerism was much less of a thing, but also the present when even poor countries can be disproportionately driven by consumerism. This is probably why religion is correlated strongly with fertility. It's simply anti-consumerist by nature, so religious individuals become somewhat less likely to fall into the carrot loop.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    People in the past didn't have birth control yet did have high infant and mother mortality
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      Birth control dates back at least 3800 years, and probably much longer, as that 3800 year old reference comes from documentation accurately referring to various substances with spermicidal characteristics. [1] The same is true of abortion and ways to induce it. And anybody who's had a child can tell you that getting pregnant is not as easy as you might think. In general women are only fertile for a window of several days per month, which they are capable of also determining due to various physiological changes that happen during that window (and also the fact that the window occurs during the, more or less, exact same time each month following their period). And even if you nail that window, the chances of a successful pregnancy are relatively low - only about 20% per month for young couples, and then rapidly decreasing for women beyond the age of 30. Notably, in the century prior to the Roman Empire's collapse, fertility rates collapsed for reasons that are still unclear. Anyhow, this is all a very long-winded way of saying that the higher birth rates of the past weren't simply because of unplanned pregnancies. If they wanted to lower their fertility rates, they would have been fully capable of doing so. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_birth_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_birth_control

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

>When a country has high fertility rates, their market naturally grows year by year. But that market, can't grow forever. Population can't grow forever. You will hit the wall at one point unless you want your population living in cramped and impoverished conditions like in India. Is it bad they hit it now instead of 10-20 years down the line?

thfuran 3y ago
Hitting a wall is one thing. Reversing back away from the wall is an altogether different issue.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  You can't really convince people to plateau their procreation activities so that fertility rates stay perfectly balanced over time. Fertility is always ciclic. It either goes up when times are good, and goes down when times are bad. And good times don't last forever.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    Here's [1] a graph of US fertility since 1800. That trend doesn't look cyclic, at all. [1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033027/fertility-rate-us-1800-2020/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033027/fertility-rate-u...
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Wait for the next world war/big crash.
      - somenameforme 3y ago
        But there were plenty of other major wars and crashes. That brief boom phase only appeared after WW2. It seems fairly safe to say it was an aberration.

Xirgil 3y ago

Given that fertility is negatively correlated with income until you start reaching very high levels, economic disaster might actually boost fertility. That's not to say it's entirely an economic issue, it's also social, but it's definitely a factor.

somenameforme 3y ago
The problem with that correlation is that it fails all over the place. In the past, people of high and low income alike were having healthy, large families. And even in the present places like Thailand, with a nominal GDP/capita of $9,300, has a catastrophically low fertility rate, lower than even the US and most of Europe. IMO there's a really simple explanation for what it's "really" observing - consumerism. Poor individuals don't have enough money to fall into consumerism, the ultra wealthy have so much that there's no carrot to be dangled in front of them that they couldn't grab on a whim. The correlation captures the remaining middle class that has just enough money to always have a carrot just slightly out of reach. And so that drives different motivations for this group of people. They'd rather chase the carrot, rather than go through the sacrifice involved in raising a family. This not only explains the past, when consumerism was much less of a thing, but also the present when even poor countries can be disproportionately driven by consumerism. This is probably why religion is correlated strongly with fertility. It's simply anti-consumerist by nature, so religious individuals become somewhat less likely to fall into the carrot loop.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  People in the past didn't have birth control yet did have high infant and mother mortality
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    Birth control dates back at least 3800 years, and probably much longer, as that 3800 year old reference comes from documentation accurately referring to various substances with spermicidal characteristics. [1] The same is true of abortion and ways to induce it. And anybody who's had a child can tell you that getting pregnant is not as easy as you might think. In general women are only fertile for a window of several days per month, which they are capable of also determining due to various physiological changes that happen during that window (and also the fact that the window occurs during the, more or less, exact same time each month following their period). And even if you nail that window, the chances of a successful pregnancy are relatively low - only about 20% per month for young couples, and then rapidly decreasing for women beyond the age of 30. Notably, in the century prior to the Roman Empire's collapse, fertility rates collapsed for reasons that are still unclear. Anyhow, this is all a very long-winded way of saying that the higher birth rates of the past weren't simply because of unplanned pregnancies. If they wanted to lower their fertility rates, they would have been fully capable of doing so. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_birth_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_birth_control