Does a smaller population not benefit everyone?
In: Planetary Science
It depends is the clearest answer. If the total fertility rate (TFR) remains just under 2.1 (say 1.8-1.9) and remains that way for a long period (half a century or more) then the population decline is probably quite manageable and perhaps not even having many bad consequences. India is like this today but their TFR is continuing to fall.
The problem is that this isn’t really what is happening. In many countries, TFR is 1.5-1.8 while the average lifetimes is increasing which indicates that the working population drops quite quickly while the elderly population increases rapidly. This is hard but likely not impossible to manage for relatively wealthy economies with already high productivity. Taxes might have to rise while total GDP remains flat. Countries like the USA, France, Brazil and Mexico are in this category.
If a country has TFR below 1.5 (and in some cases very close to 1), it becomes much more difficult to manage. The working population drops very quickly and the elderly population as a proportion of working adults increase rapidly. Even for wealthy countries, this might be very difficult to manage. Broadly speaking though, wealthy countries might be able to bolster the population through immigration from poorer countries. (although there may be lots of social discontent) Most of Western Europe, Canada, Singapore and Japan is in this group.
The really big problem is for not quite wealthy countries whose TFR have fallen below 1.5 very quickly (say in the last 30 years) In these cases, the elderly have built up far less savings/retirement and the government will almost be forced to tax the working population AND also dedicate much more of the working population to care for the elderly. And this will be a problem for at least 25-30 years because the rapidly falling TFR means there is a huge group of people going into retirement. China, Russia and Thailand are in this category.
Then there are countries like Taiwan and S Korea. Their TFR is below 1 and falling. There is no way to predict how these countries will manage this.
Now consider that this list contains nearly ALL the wealthy or large economies of the world today and this covers something like 50% of the world’s population today. These are the countries that are productive and generally give lots of economic aid and support to the poorest countries in the world. In fact, this list covers nearly all the countries that produce a large excess of food that is sold/given to poorer countries. If these countries no longer have the ability to do this in the next 10-20 years, this is a huge risk to the rest of the poorer nations whose populations are still growing.
Ultimately it is not only that populations are or will decline soon, it is declining FIRST in the countries that are most capable of excess production. So we can only hope that this doesn’t lead to major problems, conflicts and mass migration from the poorer regions.
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