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"Population crisis" is a myth, created by people who want cheap labor. What's the crisis? What's so bad about a declining population number? Spell it out!
It's also possible they are racist.
But if the choice were between racist and greedy, I'm going to bet on greedy 100% of the time.
The biggest issue is probably not being able to play pensions or have people care for the older generation.
Correct. When we hear concerns about a declining population, the concern (typically) isn’t that a population should always be rising, or even that it shouldn’t shrink, it’s more about the long-term economic stability of the age distribution of a population within the demographic pyramid. If your demography skews significantly older, you’re going to have fewer working age people supporting your economy and more post-retirement age people needing to be supported. This can do double damage to government revenue in particular, as they will see a simultaneous decrease in tax income and an increase in pension payouts, and this can lead to a sharp contraction in the available share of the budget for all of the other government priorities.
It’s a bit ironic in this case, as this is pretty common in developed economies, and typically the way you would offset this is via immigration, as that allows you to tailor your requirements to exactly what you need to balance your demography, and so anti-immigration sentiment is only likely to cause a more severe spiral.
...and that means retirees will literally starve and live on the streets? I don't think it will. It will just be less luxurious.
So wages in care work are rising?
Who exactly will work those jobs?
Anyone. That's how the labor market works. There aren't going to be zero people capable of doing the work, they're just going to be rare.
The same amount of work needs to be done to keep the economy running as it is, so you're stretching those people out over a lot of additional jobs. How many jobs do you expect a young person to take simultaneously before they decide "this sucks, I'm emigrating to Canada where you only have to work one lifetime before getting to retire"?
Yeah, or, hear me out on this crazy theory: the supply of labor is low, so wages rise and young people can finally earn more money on just one job?
And then all those bullshit jobs that are not actually producing value get cut?
It wouldn't be the same amount of jobs.
There is a limit to how much work you can get out of a fixed group of people no matter how much money you throw at them. If you ask me to build a thousand houses in an hour I'll say "I can't do that" and it won't matter if you offer me a billion dollars to do it, I can't do it.
The reason the population crisis in Japan is called a population crisis is because it is threatening to go past that threshold. It wouldn't be a crisis otherwise.
Right, and I'm doubting that that is the case, because nobody who claims these things actually shares data and evidence to support that claim.
I linked you to a page specifically about that 14 hours ago elsewhere in this thread.
Pretty sure the user you're replying to is a troll or a literal child. The rest of their conversations about this topic didn't go much better.
That's so surface level, it's basically insulting and doesn't support the argument you're making. It's just some website saying random stuff that could or could not be true.
you might think that japanese boomers have generational wealth in form of real estate. this is not really the case, especially for rural population. houses aren't built to last, lose value like motherfucker and are commonly demolished after 20-30 years, in part because people don't like second hand, in part because there's no point of building anything sturdier if typhoon or earthquake takes it. there is some newer construction that is intended to last longer, but it's not a very common thing. so a reverse mortgage type thing won't exist there, and yeah lots of people will get shafted by these conditions
Not to mention that with a declining population the value of real estate is likely going to decline as well since there's less demand for it. Especially in those rural areas, people are moving to the cities.
They won't starve and live in the streets because something will change before society reaches that stage, but theoretically it's not impossible. In Japan, for example, a significant chunk (unsure if a majority) of homeless people are elderly men.
so wages in care work are rising?Who can pay those higher wages? The impoverished older generation? Or three state that is not able to keep up with the costs of pensions?
If you keep taking out more than was put in the fund to fund the larger population in retirement, at some point there's just nothing left.
Here's a simple problem from it: taxes.
If the infrastructure was built to main x people but there's suddenly a huge drop in how many can pay taxes, then you can't maintain the infrastructure.
Say you made trains for a population for a million people. But in a single generation it's going to drop to about 700,000 people.
Those 700k are now going to have to pay nearly 1/3 more just to keep the same trains running. Drop that population further another generation and the cost will only go up. Yet you can't just not have the trains because the existing people still need transportation.
Now multiply that problem to everything else that needs maintenance and is essential in a modern society - universal healthcare (which gets an added extra cost of older people costing more than younger), sewage, roads, natural disaster mitigation, etc. Even taxing the rich like crazy won't make up for it if it's bad enough, and that's in a system where you assume the population goes down because basically everyone has at least one kid. What Japan is facing is most of the population having no kids, and this is after there being a baby boom at some point. That's an extremely steep drop.
That's not even getting into the housing issues with such a densely designed cityscape like Japan has. If there's too many apartments, they'll just start closing down at some point rather than just going down in cost because apartments act kind of like a micro city in costs, and a lack of tenants because there's just no people to fill the space is the same issue as the trains mentioned earlier. This one takes longer to manifest though.
okay then i guess you should think about what rate of population decline is acceptable? like, you're saying the current rate is unacceptable; where do you draw the limit and why?
Ideally they are matched to productivity and wage rates. So if productivity goes up 50%, and wages go up 50% (pw), with population being (k), then I think ideally it would be
K(-r%)=pw(r%)
But, humans don't follow consistent rules in that particular way, so just somewhere around pw.
Alternatively, if they stagnate equally, that would be sustainable too. Not much decline or increase.
That's assuming you only tax income.
Yep, not buying it. Let's tax them like crazy first, for 20-40 years and when that has actually failed, we can talk about next steps.
No, it's not. The maintenance still has to be paid somehow, whether that's from a VAT, income tax, inheritance taxes, etc. Either way, taxes will go up because there's less people but the same amount of infrastructure.
You're not buying... Basic math? Well, if you want small numbers as an example (and we'll even make it so in the example the rich would be paying a lot now so it's more fair):
There are ten people: 1 (Sherry) has 10 pieces of candy, 8 with 1 pieces of candy, and 1 with no candy. The amount they have resets at the end of every year after tribute.
They must pay the candy monster 10 pieces of candy every year or it'll eat them. Currently, Sherry gives 8 pieces, 8 people give 25% a piece, and Bob gives none.
Next year, some people decide to "move". There's now 5 people, including Bob and Sherry.
In order to make the required tribute, Sherry gives 9 pieces, 3 others give 33% a piece, and Bob still can't give any.
Next year, more people leave. There's now 3 people, including Bob and Sherry.
How much should Sherry give this year, and how much will she have left after giving versus the other person (excluding Bob)?
This little math problem is basically a simplified version of the population collapse problem. In reality, it's worse, because with less people, there's less candy (money) generated for everyone, including Sherry, but the candy monster (infrastructure) will still ask for the same tribute.
Yeah, you're doing the math wrong, because maintenance cost goes down the less people there are. And the share of actually critical work is way less than what's actually being... worked, so shifting some parts of the luxury production to critical production is trivial, it just needs to be done and the people doing the critical work need to be paid well enough to make the switch.
That's it.
Do you have evidence for that? Because I already explained how it doesn't earlier.
A half full train still runs the same track and route. A half used sewage system still needs to be filtered, cleaned, and repaired. Half used roads are still fully exposed to the elements. Half used buildings still degrade from time. Half empty buses are still used to get around.
The medical systems in this case, like I mentioned earlier, however, only go up in use.
You didn't explain it, you asserted that it does and then gave no evidence.
I want the actual numbers, as proof.
I want you to actually look up, how much it actually costs citizens and society to have for example, running and sewage. I want you to actually calculate how much that would go up.
Like...
Nobody will do this. They will use the 50% of the buildings at 100%. Same maintenance cost.
For example, let's say everyone's electricity bill is 50$... Out of your wage of what 1500$? 2000$? So if population declines by 10% and the electricity bill goes up by 10% or 5$ you're telling that it will collapse the nation?
And while all of that happens: keep in mind that real estate value and prices will go down. Less people means less need for living space. It means it will be cheaper to move to cities, with higher concentrations of people in areas that already have infrastructure, that's already mostly paid for.
If you want that type of detailed analysis report then, I give you two options:
As for your other hyperbolia:
The issue isn't that places on Japan are facing a 10% population decline. It's that they're facing a 50+% generational decline. That distinction is important because if it was only the elderly population that dropped, there actually wouldn't be as much financial stress or labor issues to support systems as currently, where the elderly population grows massive while the younger one shrinks drastically.
It isn't a 500¥ increase that's the issue, it's the rise of everything that'll be the issue, especially since the elderly will be the overwhelming majority.
That's not how modern real estate works. Cities would become more expensive to move into - because it'll have the higher infrastructure costs, it'll be mostly filled with the elderly, but most importantly, because many apartments will be shutdown due to growing vacancies making it unprofitable. If modern cities were mostly houses, then everything would actually be great. But because they're mostly apartments, it becomes an issue. If anything, it'll be cheaper to move out of the cities, because public transportation will be underfunded anyway, and infrastructure costs in rural areas will become lower because rural areas are designed for smaller populations and less people, unlike cities. Cities will just keep getting more expensive to maintain - that's an effect you can already see in multiple countries.
no, though I understand that it's effort.
Also no, because the whole thing is YOUR CLAIM, and I'm not going to go around looking for evidence to disprove random theories on the internet.
And the rest of your comment again relies on statements that may or may not be true and both of us don't have the data that could be used to decide either way.
sidenote:
That's what you are doing. I'm just calling you out on it.
The crisis isn't simply from a declining total population number. It's from the demographic shape of that population. Here's Japan's population pyramid. As you can see, it's not really a pyramid - it's heavily weighted at the older end. As people continue to age that big bulge reaches retirement, and then you have more people retired than you have people still of working age. This causes a number of problems.
Yes, I'm asking you (or other people making the argument that population decline is so bad) to list them.
You're still missing the basic point by talking about the "population decline." The crisis is not the decline. The crisis is the age distribution.
Here's a page discussing some of the specific problems of an inverted population pyramid, and it uses Japan as a specific example of a population facing this.
I still don't see how that's an issue. Just spend less money on elderly people?
I wish everyone worked in logistics for just like, a year or so. When you grasp how big and complex the systems are and how fragile they are to even small disruptions, you get immediately why demographic changes and population disruptions are incredibly scary.
A nation in Asia collapsing economically doesn't mean "less people so less expenses" it actually creates ripple effects that can lead to millions of people starving on another continent.
One would think we'd all have a clue after COVID. The supply chain shocks reverberated for years.
I would have thought a single ship getting stuck in a canal basically bringing the world to a standstill would have woken people up, but we treated it like a funny meme 😭
Only to people like you, whose job depends on it. If a nation half way around the globe has economic troubles, I don't think that's going to impact me much...
Glad to know you live somewhere outside of supply chains and distribution, must be nice being entirely self-sufficient and having the ability to feed yourself if the grocery stores don't have your tendies and pizza rolls or essential medications or antibiotics or anesthesia if you have medical problems. Must be nice knowing you don't need to worry about fueling your vehicles or having packaging for your products or having electricity or internet.
I'm sure your entire community is also equally content and satisfied with being off-grid, and if the food stops being imported, everyone will be calm and happy.
Letting old people suffer in poverty or die of treatable illnesses even though they were promised a decent retirement seems like a bad solution to me, and if it's happening it's exactly the sort of thing I'd call a symptom of a "crisis." And unlikely to go over well with the population at large.
Just let them fend for themselves. That should totally work. I'll let my 96 year old grandma know that she's gonna have to hold a bake sale to pay for dinner tonight.
Also, your solution is to spend less money on elderly people, while at the same time there is a growing population of elderly people.
Are you seriously this stupid?
When an overwhelming proportion of the population is elderly, an overwhelming proportion of the working age populations earnings have to will go to support them. This is measured by an economic ratio known as the dependency ratio which is going to get out of hand for countries like Japan. The strain on public finances paying for pensions and healthcare reduces quality of life for everyone in the country and depresses economic growth as young people working to support the countries elderly population and their own parents have less to invest in the wider economy.
It's a massive problem when you have an older population outnumbering a younger population. We have a system that is built and designed around a certain number of able-bodied workers supporting the structures that this labor is built on.
It doesn't even take very much to wreck economies and send nations into depressions or catastrophic collapse. Wartime in history has hurt small percentages of populations and caused this effect, but the declining birthrates we're seeing around the world are going to be worse in the long run than even all the plagues and wars if the trend continues.
The problem is nobody can talk about it because so many authoritarians and fascists have coopted the issue and made it about ethnicity and immigration. This is a huge problem so don't let the narratives spin you around.
Our problem is, once again, lack of community. In a world of information and isolationism, we're not nurturing each other in positive ways, we're not sharing love and empathy, we're not helping each other so why would anyone want to have kids? To say nothing of the incredible costs of living that are basically preventing people from even having free-time, much less 18 years of focus on raising another human being. We don't have paid leave, we don't have wages that can support a growing family, we don't have child-care and healthcare in much of the world, we don't have incentives to bring children into the world and even for people who have all that lined up, there's a lot of dread and pessimism towards what the future will be like, so people are also making a moral decision not to inflict more suffering on people who didn't consent to being born.
I don't see a solution that doesn't involve major social reform. Cities will crumble, economies will collapse, and maybe eventually something better will come from it.
Ok, but all of the things you listed are reasons why I would like this kind of economic system to decline. It's what's creating these circumstances and problems in the first place.
I'm not sure how people here can say they're against genocide in other countries while praising and fantasizing about the collapse of society. The death and suffering would outweigh anything we've seen so far before any kind of equilibrium is reached.
I guess you can just go ahead and have your apocalypse fantasies, you will probably continue to live in comfort even as countless people are displaced and made refugees from population decline, environmental changes and the wars that will be sparked as a result.
The problem is that the "decline" is going to be accompanied by a mountain of people living in miserable squalor or simply dying. That's the crisis that needs a solution. If a change in economic systems can solve it then sure, do that, but coming up with the details of how that'll work is the hard part.
There’s an excellent video that explains all the ramifications of populations decline and it’s not only an economical nightmare but also a cultural obliteration as well over time. They use South Korea as an example but mention that even the US is heading this way but has another decade or so before it gets really bad.
https://youtu.be/Ufmu1WD2TSk
if this is all true it makes me wonder how can a country like Russia continue to exist? is it because old people just die and no one cares?
It's not so much the decline but the ageing. A society mostly consisting of OAPs can't support itself.