Does a smaller population not benefit everyone?
In: Planetary Science
You have to define “bad thing”. There are many who thing population decline is a good thing. Less stress on the environment, more resources to go around for the smaller younger population, declining prices for real estate, etc….
There are serious societal challenges resulting from declining birth rates and the impact that has on populations, especially when you take national economic issues and nationalism into consideration.
If well managed, it will be a good thing for the long run. The world collectively has to get used to the idea of “steady state” economics, as opposed to the growth based model we have now. As well as address how people view national boundaries and national and ethnic identities.
Sometimes it’s just a racist dogwhistle. SOME people are outfucking OUR people, and we don’t want that, now do we?
I think a constructive way to think about this problem is that there are different economies, social norms and cultures you can have in a society. Right now, capitalist free-market societies expect constant growth in everything without much if any thought about sustainability. This expectation is projected onto our healthcare system, our pension system, virtually every social institution is organized in such a way that for optimal function it requires a nonstop growth of tax-paying citizens.
When population not only stagnates, (because reality is that you can’t have endless supply of houses, energy, food, etc., so at some point the free market puts a hard limit on how much stuff we can have) but declines, these institutions go from “ugh, maybe we can get by with some tricks” to “everything is on fire”. Education systems fail, healthcare fails, pensions fail, virtually everything that makes a society a society just collapses.
So, it is not a bad thing necessarily in and of itself, but the economic system needs a constant growth, the social institutions need constant growth, our culture (vaguely western) believes in being “fruitful” and ethnic groups want to prevail within their own defined lands, so this decline of population leads to things getting more expensive, worse in quality, (at some point even essential) services disappearing or failing, social unrest, and all of this is just because of the kind of socio-economic system we decided to live in along with the (fundamentally human, but when it comes to specifics, non-trivial) cultures we have.
We can have societies turn around and focus on sustainability, we can have cultures that are radically xenophilic, etc., but all of these different systems have their own drawbacks and problems that can equally be catastrophically bad as our current system experiencing population decline.
healthy populations fluctuate up and down
the ‘problem’ with human population decrease is only a problem if you’re economy is based on assumptions that the population will grow, with no plan or options in place for a change in the growth rate to either flatten or decrease
If you are relying on getting an eager workforce of young poor people do all the shitty dangerous jobs for fuck all while your property passively increases in value because of increasing population demand you’re fucked.
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.
Because somebody has to continue consuming and supporting the economy, and someone has to take care of the rest of the elderly population.
A lot of things in the economy rely on an ever growing population…bad idea, but that’s how they did it
You need people to make stuff and pay for stuff.
Kids can’t do either, old people typically can’t and also need to be paid for as well.
If less people are working, that’s more strain on the working people to make stuff and pay for stuff.
Basically it’s easier to have 3 young people support 2 retirees rather than 1 supporting 3.
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