The birth rate of many developed nations is below “replacement level” which means less than 2.x (usually cited between 2.1 and 2.3) births per woman. The CIA website has the full list of birthrates by country and as you can see, most of the developed nations are below 2 births per woman which is not enough to “replace” both parents. A lot of governments around the world are implementing measures to encourage child birth, mostly in the form of financial incentives. The government in Singapore has gone as far as to set up its own dating agency.
My main question is whether the government should be doing anything about it at all. The cynical side of me thinks that they’re worried more about their tax base than anything else. Wasn’t it not so long ago that the overpopulation was a major concern? Should we not be happy that projections show that population will reach a certain level and then begin to fall?
Tied to the government action question is of course whether you think population decline is necessarily a bad thing. I’m not talking about the humansareaviruslol point of view, but in terms of general standards of living. There would be more dirt per person and more elbow room which can only be a good thing, right? I’m interested in economic points of view too. Will this slow technological progress?
There are of course doomsayers who suggest that this marks the beginning of the end of our species. It links to a 254 page UN report (Warning: PDF file) about population predictions up to 2300. Without having read the whole site (let alone the honking great report), I find it hard to imagine that we won’t have some major medical advances in the next few hundred years that will not only lengthen life but lengthen the fertility period. On a personal level, I don’t want kids. To me, a twenty year commmitment is far too big a chunk out of the prime of my life. If my life expectancy was 200 or so and my wife and I could expect to be fertile until 100, I could see myself raising kids. Maybe even a couple of generations of them. Are advances like this at all possible, or is it a fantasy that has more or less been ruled out?
Are there any other issues relating to world population that I haven’t thought of?
Yeah, I never really got what the problem was. There will be a short term problem as a smaller number of young folk need to support the larger old population, but after they die, labor shortages will lead to wage increases and a higher standard of living.
I was watching a show about the Black Plague that was talking about how overcrowded Europe was before the plague. After a quarter of the population was killed off, basically it meant more resources - land, crops, whatever- could now be distributed among fewer people.
I guess the big concern is there will be a smaller labor force creating stuff too. Still, it’s tough to look at overpopulated countries like China and India and think they couldn’t use a lot less people.
It’s not going to be the end of our species if people don’t have 6 kids per family.
In the long term I think it’s a good thing, we overburden the world as it is. I think the world needs fewer people, and a lower birth rate is the only way to achieve that that doesn’t involve killing people.
A birthrate below replacement level does not necessarily mean a declining population in that country. You forget immigration; in my country it is enough to turn a decline into an increase.
I’m not forgetting immigration. Our Government right now is offering the “baby bonus” - a few thousand dollars per baby for parents. Peter Costello tells us to “go home and perform our patriotic duty” by making babies. Apparently it has worked somewhat, to the tune of 15000 more babies born in Australia this year than last (figures from SBS’ Insight, don’t have an online cite). Someone in power is obviously concerned about our birth rate, regardless of our immigration levels. That’s a crapload of tax money intended to encourage increasing our birth rate, and we’re not the only country doing it.
The trend is for developed nations to not give birth at replacement rates. According to my first link, the UN are prediciting that the amount of countries with below-replacement fertility is rising. If world population does hit a ceiling and then begin to drop, immigration will only be so much person-shuffling, probably increasing the competition for potential immigrants and leading to things like the brain-drain and skills-drains on certain countries.
There are plenty of dirt to go around and elbow room for human expansion, people just tent to clot together on very little of it. Economic growth is not a fixed value that is to be parceled out the existing people. People create economic growth. Less people, especially less young people, will result in slower growth. Falling birth rates will make us all poorer. In addition a graying of the population will result in a more conservative and less experimental society, as well as reduce innovation and technological progress. It’ll just become more boring all around.
You put this as if it was a total write off, like doing jail time. When in fact many parents would view the time with their children as the best part of their life. And I’d absolutely say you cheat yourself of a central, and enjoyable, part of life by completely foregoing this aspect of life – like I would if someone told me they decided to live their life in celibacy. But each to his own of course.
When I read the OP’s post, I immediately thought of the opening paragraph of Clochemerle, which described how the Black Death reduced the population, and the population liked it.
Here in the UK we have a shortage of housing which means that young people slave away paying off enormous mortgages - having once been in that position, I feel rather sympathetic.
Somehow, I doubt that a population decline would be that disasterous, although there would be a redistribution of income from the older to the younger.
Beyond killing millions and traumatizing whole generations of survivors one of the most immediate outcome of the Black Death was the reintroduction of slavery-like conditions for the poor. Following the mass death, the price of labour rose. The land owners couldn’t or wouldn’t pay, so instead they made some new laws that locked the peasants to the land.
Already now, the shortage of labour is being felt some places in Europe. Some speculate the recent German and Japanese economic slump really are(were?) to do with shrinking labour markets and uneasiness of the future due to the altering demographics. Young people are under increasing pressure to finish education and enter the workforce as fast as possible. Many countries have big and rising problems hiring people to help the growing numbers of infirm elders, taking up an ever increasing percentage of the national budget – forcing, through taxation, the young to reserve an increasing amount of their day and work to pay for elder generations. And in an even more Middle Age analogue, there have been serious debate about making it mandatory for young people to work one year in the elder sector, like mandatory military service - or I’d say slavery.
As I understand it, the main (non-cultural) policy concern about population decline is about transition. Dependency ratios rise as populations peak and then decline, with the effect magnified by increasing life expectancy. This is not an issue faced by Western countries - whilst India’s population is still climbing, China’s will start to decline by around 2030.
A.
Virtually every Industrialized Country on Earth has a version of “mortgaging the future” going on - running up big debts that future expansion will pay off (or keep running). This can’t go on in a shrinking economy. In fact, if the “Mortgage” goes high enough, in this scenerio it is possible the debt could be to be defaulted on – either through reorganization, or flat out default (doubt this at least in the U.S.) or printing lots n’ lots of dollars (or other National specie) to pay. There are all kinds of negative economic implications to all of this
B.
Capitalism requires expanding consumption. I have seen speculation that somehow FUTUREMAN™ will be super consumers and will make up for their smaller numbers. I think how well this works will depend on exactly how much the population shrinks, how it is structured and how much consumption increases.
Capitalism also requires expanding production, however I expect that the future will increase production efficiency to such a degree that this will not be an issue in a shrinking population.
C.
Actual Population vs. productive Population. We see this now and coming – huge numbers of retired people, when there aren’t many more people working, is an economic problem.
Since some of these scenarios call for living indefinitely – I assume that people aren’t thinking “I* am so lucky I don’t have to retire at 65 and plan to live off my retirement savings for 20 years, No, I will be in this job, that I am doing today for the next 200 Years!!* Presumably what people imagine is either retiring for decades or working 50 years, being off 20, schooling for 5 and repeat or something. IOW, the real population of a 3 Billion person Earth wouldn’t have more than ~1 billion working to support the economy for everyone else at anyone time – that causes problems.
There’s another issue at work here, and that’s nationalism. We could argue about whether or not a worldwide population decline is a good thing or a bad thing, but what nations worry about is a decline relative to that of their neighbors. It’s the modern version of the yellow peril argument, and much of the angst in Western Europe about Islam is fueled by this very issue. Or look at Israel, where the differential between Jewish and Arab birthrates is cause for a great deal of hand-wringing in certain circles.
My perspective is, if people can’t be bothered to have children, then they have no right to bitch about being swallowed up by people who do.
While it’s true that population growth for the developed world has peaked (and in some countries cases, declining), that’s not the case for the rest of the world (the underdeveloped or developing world). World population is still growing, although today at a much slower rate than in the past. Current predictions predict world population to peak somewhere between 9 and 10 billion people. Adding an additional 3+ billion people to the world’s total population will likely increase the problems associated with “overpopulation”.
Note: One needs to be careful when using the term overpopulation. That’s because there is no set criteria for determining overpopulation. For example, just because China has 1.3 billion people doesn’t necessarily mean that it is overpopulated. What is important to understand is whether a given environment can sustain a given population. A population of one could be considered overpopulated if it resides in an evironment that cannot sustain it - example: ship an astronaut to the moon with no support system and see how long she survives.
Likewise, the earth could likely sustain 40-50 billion people. Granted, life would likely be quite bleak for most humans (and likely for other species as well). But the earth would still sustain that 40-50 billion. Overpopulated - by what criteria?
Population decline, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily good or bad. Arguments could be made either way. From an economic (and technological perspective), if people are able to increase (and sustain) a level of productivity at a rate equal to or greater than the rate of population decline, then there’s no reason to suspect that a decrease in population would necessarily have negative consequences for an economy. Same would apply for technological progress - it would need to outpace population decline. The kicker, of course, is determining what those productivity levels (and technological progress rates) are (or would be).
Says who? Why does capitalism require expanding production and consumption? Under what theory? What happens then when production and consumption fall? Does that mean we no longer have capitalism?
This is a silly argument. Capitalism can exist in any size of market.
Adam Smith and Karl Marx for starters. This guy explains it this way
Smith and Marx both agree that capitalism requires ever expanding markets. Smith believes this is so because you cannot divide jobs down too much unless you have a large market. For example, city doctors, with their large population (market) can specialize while a country doctor must be a generalist. Unless the market continues to grow, jobs cannot be divided down further and large machines cannot be justified, thus production cannot continue to become more efficient. Marx, on the other hand, believes that you must have expanding markets because as you produce more you have more to sell (duh) and if you have more to sell you either have to have more people to sell it to or lower your prices in order to convince the same number of people to buy more. And the goal of course is to keep prices high.
My orginal link in an MIT journal was included because of the part:
Capitalism may resemble multi-level-marketing with the need for an ever-expanding base. What is the impact of a static base or of a declining one?
I dunno and I guess OK I thought it should be explored
I agree that “capitalism” in a primitive sense can easily exist.
What with the constant growth in crop output, the posibility of converting “useless” land to cropable ground, and the increased infrastructure to distribute those goods required for life, I don’t see the problem with that.
Capitalism does not require any particular degree of specialization, or a trend toward increasing (or decreasing) specialization, so this is irrelevant.
to declining birthrates. For one, crime rates drop (crime is a youth activity, plus, fewer young people means that wages tent to rise. As for countries with huge birth rates vs low birthrates (say India vs Denmark)-which country would YOU rather live in?
I don’t buy an increasing population as a prerequisite for economic growth (or more accurately economic activity)
Companies can thrive in a declining market.
We have technological ‘growth in productivity’ which means that a declining workforce can produce the same output.
My understanding that both the Japanese and German economies are currently sluggish because their consumers are reluctant to spend - not because their consumers are impoverished.
Also, Rune, while the earlier plagues did result in an attempt to enforce feudalism, there was still a steady drift to towns.
If we look at UK agriculture, the decline in people involved is astonishing, yet the sector is highly productive. The same could apply to other sectors.
I’ll take this as a negative assessment of my statement that the earth could sustain 40-50 billion people. Given that I added that this number of people would likely mean that human existence would be quite dire (and likely entail problems for other species - mass extinction, for one), does not mean that I support such a scenario.
A decrease in population isn’t necessarily a bad thing, depending on the circumstances. However, given the current economic realities and technological capabilities, a decline in population can have negative economic impacts in the short term if population decline is rapid (I’m thinking along the lines of mass casualties a la the Plague) and widespread (on a global scale).
I would not consider declining populations in the developed world a bad thing due to the (currently) increasing population throughout the developing world. One way that developed countries can stem the loss is by immigration.
Conversely, I would not automatically consider a rise in population a bad thing, either. Some may argue that in order for technological progress to continue at a particular rate, this entails a particular rate of population growth. We see evidence of this via history - with the advent of the agricultural revolution (and later the industrial revolution), world population has increased over the last 10,000 years (with the greatest rise since the industrial revolution - last 250 years).
An interesting question - and one that I don’t think has been satisfactorally answered - is “Does population growth influence technological progress or does technological progress influence population growth?” Another way to think of this question - “Did an increase in population force humans to adapt to their environment in new ways (e.g. by adopting agriculture), or did the adoption of agriculture lead to the increase in population (e.g. by being able to support a larger population)?”
Esther Boserup did research on the former (rise in populations force people to adopt new farming methods to sustain growing population), but there isn’t a clear concensus as to what drives the other (population growth drives technological progress or technological progress drives population growth). Personally, I think its a bit of both, depending on the circumstances.
