6 ms·

No evidence ageing/declining populations compromise socio-economic performance

82 points by bikenaga 1y ago

thechao 1y ago
This is the great part about science: whether or not you agree with the authors' conclusions, they just asked the question "is our preconceived 'obviously correct' conclusion actually correct". Then, they dove in to the data and tried to prove or disprove the hypothesis. I'm still not sure that the local trend of population decline is a long-term indicator; but, there's a bunch of economies along the curve, and things seem fine, for now? My worry is that this is a railroad fallacy: you can see the train coming, but it's not hitting you now, so everything must be fine in the long-term?
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > This is the great part about science: whether or not you agree with the authors' conclusions, they just asked the question "is our preconceived 'obviously correct' conclusion actually correct". Then, they dove in to the data and tried to prove or disprove the hypothesis Unfortunately it also shows the difficult part of modern scientific publishing: The authors try to downplay the existence of problems (labor shortages) by arguing that it's really a problem of immigration policies not allowing enough new labor in. That's a tacit admission that labor shortages are a problem. Proposing a solution to the labor shortage doesn't mean that it's not a problem. You have to read scientific papers carefully. It's increasingly common to find editorialization or wishful thinking mixed into the logic of papers. More so in some fields than others.
- username332211 1y ago
  Actually, in social science you really can't test a hypothesis with data. What's true under one set of conditions won't be true under another and conditions change all the time. Famously, there's the Lucas critique - the idea that a relationship (or the lack thereof) between variables may break, if a policy that exploits the relationship is implemented. Or take the matter of immigration and international conditions that many others noted in this thread. If every rich country depends on immigration and every poor country strives to become rich, at some point you are going to start running out of places to source immigrants from and there will be a relationship between birth rates and economic performance.
0xcafefood 1y ago
"Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies that limit or deny the movement of capable, working-age people from elsewhere to fill local demand. Indeed, none of the existing credible population projections predicts a decline in the global population." This seems to weaken the entire paper. The only regions poised for continuing population growth into the second half of this century are in sub-Saharan Africa and maybe Afghanistan [1]. Is the premise here that unlimited immigration into other regions from sub-Saharan Africa will sustain their economies (and other ways of life?) as the local populations decline? I'm extremely skeptical of that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_projections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_projections
- nsxwolf 1y ago
  So the assumption is that some populations will always reproduce in sufficient numbers and immigrate, and this just goes on forever and everything’s fine? Those other populations never age and decline?
  - 0xcafefood 1y ago
    That is _one_ assumption. Another is that immigrants into these countries can and will just plug right into the local economy and be adequate substitutes for the economic effects of the local population decline. There's everything about a country unrelated to economics that isn't even addressed too that will likely have ... big implications for these countries receiving the mass immigration too. These will likely also affect the economy.
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    That sums up the ideology: That some ethnicities should continuously replace other ethnicities until the latter group has been genetically exterminated.
  - allemagne 1y ago
    The paper explicitly states that global population decline is not being projected. Obviously that can't be true "forever" assuming that trends never reverse, but their scope is just the "long-term."
socalgal2 1y ago
This just seems obviously false. I'm sure their data shows something but come on, take a population of 5,000,000. Reduce it to 1. 1 person can not do all the things needed to run a society. They can barely do the stuff needed for 1. Specialization makes things possible. So then the question becomes, what number is too small. Population of Seoul metro is 26 million people. It's suppose to drop by 2/3rds by 2060 (or worse). That's 1/3 less taxes, a 1/3 less transportation riders, 1/3rd less customers, etc.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk
- amanaplanacanal 1y ago
  I'm guessing you didn't click through to read the paper. Their take is that immigration policies rather than an aging population make the difference.
- bequanna 1y ago
  > Population of Seoul metro is 26 million people. It's suppose to drop by 2/3rds by 2060 (or worse). That's 1/3 less taxes, a 1/3 less transportation riders, 1/3rd less customers, etc.... If there are only 2/3rds as many people, why would the same infrastructure be required?
  - jfoster 1y ago
    There's an infrastructure inflection point. Note how cities have much better infrastructure than country towns.
  - jjk166 1y ago
    The problem is if you have overbuilt infrastructure, it doesn't just magically go away. You either need to pay to get rid of it, pay to maintain it, or deal with the consequences of letting it decay. Further, with an aging population, the decrease in their ability to pay for this infrastructure doesn't neatly balance out with a declining need for infrastructure. The retiree in poor health is more reliant on public transit, more reliant on healthcare, etc, while they both have less money to directly pay for those services, and contribute less to the economy as a consumer of manufactured goods or as an investor. There is nothing special about any population number, it's how quickly and in which direction your population is changing that matters.
gweinberg 1y ago
It takes more than 20 years for a kid to provide net economic benefit to a country. So unless they're just looking at countries whose population has been declining for well over 20 years, this "data" is bullshit.
catigula 1y ago
>But these fears are frequently based on oversimplified or misapplied interpretations of economic models, and appear to be driven more by political agendas rather than evidence A razor for people who think like this: Do you think Japan and Japanese people would have a higher or lower quality of life if they had accepted unlimited sub-Saharan Africa immigration? This should separate serious people from the not so serious people pretty rapidly.
- rokkamokka 1y ago
  Unlimited? Do you think Sub-Saharan Africa would have a higher or lower quality of life if they had accepted unlimited Japanese immigration? Of course literally unlimited amounts of people is a bad thing. Did you mean unregulated?
  - catigula 1y ago
    No need to be pedantic, we know that there are physical limits to people that exist. Obviously, we're talking about uncapped immigration. Regarding your question, it's for you to answer bi-directionally, the result being interrogating hidden information.
  - wakawaka28 1y ago
    I think you know very well what he means and you're latching onto semantics for no good reason.
- Pooge 1y ago
  It's not directly related to your post, but Japan has a very significant Brazilian population that live in very specific parts of Japan. Toyota[1], and its prefecture Aichi, are known for having a Portuguese-speaking population and they are, of course, working as cheap labor in automobile industries. In fact, some signs on the road are written in Portuguese, too. [1] Name of a city
  - wombatriot 1y ago
    There's a significant number of Japanese in Brazil, and a large portion of the Brazilian population is of Japanese descent. They're called the Nikkei Japanese, and they're predominantly ethnically Japanese.
AnotherGoodName 1y ago
It's super lightweight and superficial even in full. It's just not a large paper and takes a very superficial view of a lot of high level statistics. You can read through it in full in a few minutes and likely come to the same thought. >This metric ignores the youth cohort That's very very significant. They are not looking at population pyramids holistically at all. They are just focusing on part of the pyramid. Are there lots of people >65 compared to those between 16 and 65? Now here's something to consider. If a population has very few children but many elderly they may actually have a great ratio of working/not-working. This study won't see this at all. Merely, look lots of elderly and they're doing great!! I suspect the reality may well be that the most successful economies have offset the extra costs of more elderly with far far fewer children. So the elderly are indeed a burden as you'd expect but we're offsetting it with fewer children. I'd also point out that I'm not convinced the arbitrary cutoff of >65 is correct since western governments are all pushing for retirement ages well above that. As in the worst of the bubble in the population pyramids is yet to fully hit, many in that bubble are still working and the effects of below population sustainment birth rates is also yet to fully hit (we don't yet fully have the narrowest parts of the population pyramids sustaining the widest parts). When it does all hit though it could well be devastating and this really superficial study doesn't reassure me at all.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
izzydata 1y ago
Is a declining socio-economic performance inherently a bad thing? Why does the output of a country need to go up forever rather than remain constant? Or even decline to come to an equilibrium with the new lower population. I feel like the ideal is to have a population with a near perfect 2 - 2.1 replacement rate with a socio-economic performance that allows for the fewest people in poverty and then for that to continue forever. Perhaps this is the first time in history that most of the world has reached its population limits and since we overshot it, it is now attempting to correct and will come to an equilibrium eventually.
- krunck 1y ago
  Yes. It's time we rejected the cancer economic growth model.
- roguecoder 1y ago
  It is a bad thing for the people being left worse off by their parents looting the country on their way out.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- hliyan 1y ago
  Inclined to agree. If per-capita well-being and productivity continues to rise, is a GDP decline in proportion to population decline such a bad thing? The only bad thing I can think of is that we will see fewer children around than we're used to.
- tzs 1y ago
  I've wondered about this. The current world population is close to twice what it was when I started college in the late 1970s. Comparing what life was like then to life now and thinking about what I'd miss if I had to go back to say a 1976 lifestyle everything I'm coming up with is just that we've now got better technology, more advanced medicine, cleaner energy sources, and we passed laws and regulations to take better care of the environment. Did we need 4 billion more people to get those things? I don't think so. In an alternate universe where the world decided in 1976 to voluntarily lower the fertility rate to just keep the population at 4 billion I think that 2025 in that world would be a lot like 2025 in our world as far as tech, medicine, energy, and the environment go.
declan_roberts 1y ago
Turns out if the population of your country is declining, you can just replace it with a different population and everything will be just fine. Country of Theseus.
- roguecoder 1y ago
  Isn't every country a country of Theseus? Not one American was part of America 125 years ago.
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    How did the native Americans enjoy it?
  - allemagne 1y ago
    True, and sure their ways of life were largely alien to us, but I'm confident that our more modern static assumptions can and should outlive us THIS time.
- wakawaka28 1y ago
  [flagged]
roguecoder 1y ago
That might be true, but this paper is wildly unconvincing. Cross-country comparisons have way too many confounding factors. Not least that economic growth reduces population growth. As for an aging population slowing the economy, Japan is the classic example of the dynamic: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succeeds-despite-stagnation https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succ... Looking within-country during a retirement boom seems more informative than trying to compare apples to oranges.
SirFatty 1y ago
Peter Zeihan would certain disagree with that..
elzbardico 1y ago
The assumption of rich country boomers that they will be able to have a constant influx of immigrants wishing to receive low salaries to change their diapers in their retirement communities is going to be the bet of the century.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
reissbaker 1y ago
This entire paper is baloney. Here's the critical excerpt they're basing their statements on: The log10 per-capita domestic comprehensive wealth index is related positively to the logit of the dependency ratio (Fig. 4a), but with countries in the Middle East departing from the expected relationship (Appendix II, Fig. S3). The boosted regression tree analyses showed that the dependency ratio had the highest relative influence on wealth (43.5–82.5%) compared to rmean and population size (Appendix II, Fig. S4), and a clear threshold effect where wealth increased rapidly from a dependency ratio of ~ 0.09 (-2.3 on the logit scale) to ~ 0.16 (-1.65 on the logit scale) (Fig. 4a). In other words, most countries with relatively older populations are those with the highest national per-capita wealth on average. All they did was... show that countries with lower birth rates correlate to countries that are richer. No kidding! Everyone knows that wealthy countries have had declining birth rates for decades. Presenting this correlation as causation — that is, implying that the declining birth rates have a positive impact on wealth (!!!) (rather than wealth having a negative impact on birth rates) — is basically nonsensical. This paper is just degrowth propaganda designed to trick numeracy-poor journalists into writing articles about how declining birth rates are fine, actually. (And huh... Middle Eastern countries are an exception? Wow! Almost like it's not low birth rates that cause wealth... And there's something different about Middle Eastern countries. I wonder what that could be?)
- imtringued 1y ago
  Actually, declining birth rates have a positive effect on national per capital wealth, but not in the way the paper talks about it. By not having children, parents save costs and can instead accumulate more wealth per capita. This doesn't actually increase aggregate wealth though. It's the same wealth distributed over fewer people, making it look like you can population crash your way to wealth. It is a somewhat perverse way to look at society, but par for the course for economists.
somenameforme 1y ago
A fun thing about fertility rates that most don't know. They also determine the exact age ratios within a society. Imagine a population has a common fertility rate of 1. That means each successive generation is half as large as the one prior. And we can approximate the age of fertility as between 20 and 40. So now let's start with 1 newborn and we can work backwards from there. --- 1 new born -> 2 20-40 year olds -> 4 40-60 year olds -> 8 60-80 year olds -> 16? 80-100 year olds --- Just ignoring the 80-100 year olds, we end up in a scenario where you have 6 people in the working age for every 8 people of retirement age. And if life expectancy inches up, then it may be closer to 6 working age people for every 16+ retirees.
tharmas 1y ago
Canada has been absolutely ruined by these elites following the path of immigration. Canada is the perfect case study. Not just in immigration but foreign investment too where you allow all the investment to pour into just one sector: housing. Canada has been so badly managed that it gives the Soviets et al a run for their money in stupidity, short-sightedness and greed. Also, Canada is not as big a country as it appears on a map. A good deal of it is uninhabitable.
lisbbb 1y ago
Governments always want an excuse to terrify people and inflate the money supply so they can continue to grind us all down.
- declan_roberts 1y ago
  Be a good boy, do your job without complaining. Don't you know that you can and will be replaced at any moment? I just read a study that it's good for you actually.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

82 points by bikenaga 1y ago

This is the great part about science: whether or not you agree with the authors' conclusions, they just asked the question "is our preconceived 'obviously correct' conclusion actually correct". Then, they dove in to the data and tried to prove or disprove the hypothesis. I'm still not sure that the local trend of population decline is a long-term indicator; but, there's a bunch of economies along the curve, and things seem fine, for now? My worry is that this is a railroad fallacy: you can see the train coming, but it's not hitting you now, so everything must be fine in the long-term?

Aurornis 1y ago
> This is the great part about science: whether or not you agree with the authors' conclusions, they just asked the question "is our preconceived 'obviously correct' conclusion actually correct". Then, they dove in to the data and tried to prove or disprove the hypothesis Unfortunately it also shows the difficult part of modern scientific publishing: The authors try to downplay the existence of problems (labor shortages) by arguing that it's really a problem of immigration policies not allowing enough new labor in. That's a tacit admission that labor shortages are a problem. Proposing a solution to the labor shortage doesn't mean that it's not a problem. You have to read scientific papers carefully. It's increasingly common to find editorialization or wishful thinking mixed into the logic of papers. More so in some fields than others.
username332211 1y ago
Actually, in social science you really can't test a hypothesis with data. What's true under one set of conditions won't be true under another and conditions change all the time. Famously, there's the Lucas critique - the idea that a relationship (or the lack thereof) between variables may break, if a policy that exploits the relationship is implemented. Or take the matter of immigration and international conditions that many others noted in this thread. If every rich country depends on immigration and every poor country strives to become rich, at some point you are going to start running out of places to source immigrants from and there will be a relationship between birth rates and economic performance.

0xcafefood 1y ago

"Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies that limit or deny the movement of capable, working-age people from elsewhere to fill local demand. Indeed, none of the existing credible population projections predicts a decline in the global population." This seems to weaken the entire paper. The only regions poised for continuing population growth into the second half of this century are in sub-Saharan Africa and maybe Afghanistan [1]. Is the premise here that unlimited immigration into other regions from sub-Saharan Africa will sustain their economies (and other ways of life?) as the local populations decline? I'm extremely skeptical of that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_projections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_projections

nsxwolf 1y ago
So the assumption is that some populations will always reproduce in sufficient numbers and immigrate, and this just goes on forever and everything’s fine? Those other populations never age and decline?
- 0xcafefood 1y ago
  That is _one_ assumption. Another is that immigrants into these countries can and will just plug right into the local economy and be adequate substitutes for the economic effects of the local population decline. There's everything about a country unrelated to economics that isn't even addressed too that will likely have ... big implications for these countries receiving the mass immigration too. These will likely also affect the economy.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  That sums up the ideology: That some ethnicities should continuously replace other ethnicities until the latter group has been genetically exterminated.
- allemagne 1y ago
  The paper explicitly states that global population decline is not being projected. Obviously that can't be true "forever" assuming that trends never reverse, but their scope is just the "long-term."

socalgal2 1y ago

This just seems obviously false. I'm sure their data shows something but come on, take a population of 5,000,000. Reduce it to 1. 1 person can not do all the things needed to run a society. They can barely do the stuff needed for 1. Specialization makes things possible. So then the question becomes, what number is too small. Population of Seoul metro is 26 million people. It's suppose to drop by 2/3rds by 2060 (or worse). That's 1/3 less taxes, a 1/3 less transportation riders, 1/3rd less customers, etc.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk

amanaplanacanal 1y ago
I'm guessing you didn't click through to read the paper. Their take is that immigration policies rather than an aging population make the difference.
bequanna 1y ago
> Population of Seoul metro is 26 million people. It's suppose to drop by 2/3rds by 2060 (or worse). That's 1/3 less taxes, a 1/3 less transportation riders, 1/3rd less customers, etc.... If there are only 2/3rds as many people, why would the same infrastructure be required?
- jfoster 1y ago
  There's an infrastructure inflection point. Note how cities have much better infrastructure than country towns.
- jjk166 1y ago
  The problem is if you have overbuilt infrastructure, it doesn't just magically go away. You either need to pay to get rid of it, pay to maintain it, or deal with the consequences of letting it decay. Further, with an aging population, the decrease in their ability to pay for this infrastructure doesn't neatly balance out with a declining need for infrastructure. The retiree in poor health is more reliant on public transit, more reliant on healthcare, etc, while they both have less money to directly pay for those services, and contribute less to the economy as a consumer of manufactured goods or as an investor. There is nothing special about any population number, it's how quickly and in which direction your population is changing that matters.

gweinberg 1y ago

It takes more than 20 years for a kid to provide net economic benefit to a country. So unless they're just looking at countries whose population has been declining for well over 20 years, this "data" is bullshit.

catigula 1y ago

>But these fears are frequently based on oversimplified or misapplied interpretations of economic models, and appear to be driven more by political agendas rather than evidence A razor for people who think like this: Do you think Japan and Japanese people would have a higher or lower quality of life if they had accepted unlimited sub-Saharan Africa immigration? This should separate serious people from the not so serious people pretty rapidly.

rokkamokka 1y ago
Unlimited? Do you think Sub-Saharan Africa would have a higher or lower quality of life if they had accepted unlimited Japanese immigration? Of course literally unlimited amounts of people is a bad thing. Did you mean unregulated?
- catigula 1y ago
  No need to be pedantic, we know that there are physical limits to people that exist. Obviously, we're talking about uncapped immigration. Regarding your question, it's for you to answer bi-directionally, the result being interrogating hidden information.
- wakawaka28 1y ago
  I think you know very well what he means and you're latching onto semantics for no good reason.
Pooge 1y ago
It's not directly related to your post, but Japan has a very significant Brazilian population that live in very specific parts of Japan. Toyota[1], and its prefecture Aichi, are known for having a Portuguese-speaking population and they are, of course, working as cheap labor in automobile industries. In fact, some signs on the road are written in Portuguese, too. [1] Name of a city
- wombatriot 1y ago
  There's a significant number of Japanese in Brazil, and a large portion of the Brazilian population is of Japanese descent. They're called the Nikkei Japanese, and they're predominantly ethnically Japanese.

AnotherGoodName 1y ago

It's super lightweight and superficial even in full. It's just not a large paper and takes a very superficial view of a lot of high level statistics. You can read through it in full in a few minutes and likely come to the same thought. >This metric ignores the youth cohort That's very very significant. They are not looking at population pyramids holistically at all. They are just focusing on part of the pyramid. Are there lots of people >65 compared to those between 16 and 65? Now here's something to consider. If a population has very few children but many elderly they may actually have a great ratio of working/not-working. This study won't see this at all. Merely, look lots of elderly and they're doing great!! I suspect the reality may well be that the most successful economies have offset the extra costs of more elderly with far far fewer children. So the elderly are indeed a burden as you'd expect but we're offsetting it with fewer children. I'd also point out that I'm not convinced the arbitrary cutoff of >65 is correct since western governments are all pushing for retirement ages well above that. As in the worst of the bubble in the population pyramids is yet to fully hit, many in that bubble are still working and the effects of below population sustainment birth rates is also yet to fully hit (we don't yet fully have the narrowest parts of the population pyramids sustaining the widest parts). When it does all hit though it could well be devastating and this really superficial study doesn't reassure me at all.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

izzydata 1y ago

Is a declining socio-economic performance inherently a bad thing? Why does the output of a country need to go up forever rather than remain constant? Or even decline to come to an equilibrium with the new lower population. I feel like the ideal is to have a population with a near perfect 2 - 2.1 replacement rate with a socio-economic performance that allows for the fewest people in poverty and then for that to continue forever. Perhaps this is the first time in history that most of the world has reached its population limits and since we overshot it, it is now attempting to correct and will come to an equilibrium eventually.

krunck 1y ago
Yes. It's time we rejected the cancer economic growth model.
roguecoder 1y ago
It is a bad thing for the people being left worse off by their parents looting the country on their way out.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
hliyan 1y ago
Inclined to agree. If per-capita well-being and productivity continues to rise, is a GDP decline in proportion to population decline such a bad thing? The only bad thing I can think of is that we will see fewer children around than we're used to.
tzs 1y ago
I've wondered about this. The current world population is close to twice what it was when I started college in the late 1970s. Comparing what life was like then to life now and thinking about what I'd miss if I had to go back to say a 1976 lifestyle everything I'm coming up with is just that we've now got better technology, more advanced medicine, cleaner energy sources, and we passed laws and regulations to take better care of the environment. Did we need 4 billion more people to get those things? I don't think so. In an alternate universe where the world decided in 1976 to voluntarily lower the fertility rate to just keep the population at 4 billion I think that 2025 in that world would be a lot like 2025 in our world as far as tech, medicine, energy, and the environment go.

declan_roberts 1y ago

Turns out if the population of your country is declining, you can just replace it with a different population and everything will be just fine. Country of Theseus.

roguecoder 1y ago
Isn't every country a country of Theseus? Not one American was part of America 125 years ago.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  How did the native Americans enjoy it?
- allemagne 1y ago
  True, and sure their ways of life were largely alien to us, but I'm confident that our more modern static assumptions can and should outlive us THIS time.
wakawaka28 1y ago
[flagged]

roguecoder 1y ago

That might be true, but this paper is wildly unconvincing. Cross-country comparisons have way too many confounding factors. Not least that economic growth reduces population growth. As for an aging population slowing the economy, Japan is the classic example of the dynamic: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succeeds-despite-stagnation https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succ... Looking within-country during a retirement boom seems more informative than trying to compare apples to oranges.

SirFatty 1y ago

Peter Zeihan would certain disagree with that..

elzbardico 1y ago

The assumption of rich country boomers that they will be able to have a constant influx of immigrants wishing to receive low salaries to change their diapers in their retirement communities is going to be the bet of the century.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

reissbaker 1y ago

This entire paper is baloney. Here's the critical excerpt they're basing their statements on: The log10 per-capita domestic comprehensive wealth index is related positively to the logit of the dependency ratio (Fig. 4a), but with countries in the Middle East departing from the expected relationship (Appendix II, Fig. S3). The boosted regression tree analyses showed that the dependency ratio had the highest relative influence on wealth (43.5–82.5%) compared to rmean and population size (Appendix II, Fig. S4), and a clear threshold effect where wealth increased rapidly from a dependency ratio of ~ 0.09 (-2.3 on the logit scale) to ~ 0.16 (-1.65 on the logit scale) (Fig. 4a). In other words, most countries with relatively older populations are those with the highest national per-capita wealth on average. All they did was... show that countries with lower birth rates correlate to countries that are richer. No kidding! Everyone knows that wealthy countries have had declining birth rates for decades. Presenting this correlation as causation — that is, implying that the declining birth rates have a positive impact on wealth (!!!) (rather than wealth having a negative impact on birth rates) — is basically nonsensical. This paper is just degrowth propaganda designed to trick numeracy-poor journalists into writing articles about how declining birth rates are fine, actually. (And huh... Middle Eastern countries are an exception? Wow! Almost like it's not low birth rates that cause wealth... And there's something different about Middle Eastern countries. I wonder what that could be?)

imtringued 1y ago
Actually, declining birth rates have a positive effect on national per capital wealth, but not in the way the paper talks about it. By not having children, parents save costs and can instead accumulate more wealth per capita. This doesn't actually increase aggregate wealth though. It's the same wealth distributed over fewer people, making it look like you can population crash your way to wealth. It is a somewhat perverse way to look at society, but par for the course for economists.

somenameforme 1y ago

A fun thing about fertility rates that most don't know. They also determine the exact age ratios within a society. Imagine a population has a common fertility rate of 1. That means each successive generation is half as large as the one prior. And we can approximate the age of fertility as between 20 and 40. So now let's start with 1 newborn and we can work backwards from there. --- 1 new born -> 2 20-40 year olds -> 4 40-60 year olds -> 8 60-80 year olds -> 16? 80-100 year olds --- Just ignoring the 80-100 year olds, we end up in a scenario where you have 6 people in the working age for every 8 people of retirement age. And if life expectancy inches up, then it may be closer to 6 working age people for every 16+ retirees.

tharmas 1y ago

Canada has been absolutely ruined by these elites following the path of immigration. Canada is the perfect case study. Not just in immigration but foreign investment too where you allow all the investment to pour into just one sector: housing. Canada has been so badly managed that it gives the Soviets et al a run for their money in stupidity, short-sightedness and greed. Also, Canada is not as big a country as it appears on a map. A good deal of it is uninhabitable.

lisbbb 1y ago

Governments always want an excuse to terrify people and inflate the money supply so they can continue to grind us all down.

declan_roberts 1y ago
Be a good boy, do your job without complaining. Don't you know that you can and will be replaced at any moment? I just read a study that it's good for you actually.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]