IIRC, the Black Death in England, which killed perhaps half of England’s population from late 1348 through 1349, was a major boon to the economic welfare of the common people.
In 1347 the average annual wage in England was £1137 (in constant pounds: 2010 pound purchasing power).
In 1350 the average annual wage in England was £2147, a 90% rise in three years.
This effect was rather permanent; here are the decade averages:
1310’s - £1014
1320’s - £1157
1330’s - £1332
1340’s - £1323
1350’s - £1803
1360’s - £1860
1370’s - £2022
1380’s - £2356
I think liberals refuse to embrace the idea that declining populations result in higher standards of living because it undermines their desire for mass immigration and open borders. I look to Japan and they seem to be doing fine with a declining population.
I think you haven’t read the rest of the thread and are just interjecting your politics in this thread to attack Liberals over a strawman.
Japan isn’t doing fine with a declining population. The expense of caring for their older population is falling on the younger generation and they know and admit that this is becoming a serious problem.
Won’t 40%of Japan’s population be over 60 by 2050? That means a. Lot of people under 60 will have to work to take care of them.
On the plus side, this will create massive incentives to invent and invest in robotics, automation and labor saving devices. Those are what truly grow an economy, but it will be an unpleasant period because the middle generation will be squeezed.
Numerous threads by liberals warn of technology displacing people from their jobs. The solution? Bring in more people. I see that liberals are unable to reconcile these two issues. Natural resources especially land are finite. Less people means more resources are available to everyone else.
Japan’s GDP is stagnant but their standard of living remains high. There is a difference. Due to declining population, many areas populated by man are being returned to nature.
Maybe it’s off topic, but are higher taxes a drag on the economy in this situation? That higher tax renebue funds pensions and health care, and the pensions will just be spent on consumer goods, foods, real estate, etc. Which would increase demand. I believe food stamps are one of the best government programs regarding economic growth provided per dollar spent. I’d assume elderly pensions are the same.
The black death was not a good reason, and was pretty much the only reason for Europe’s population decline in the middle ages, but it did (over the long term) bring about an increase in the standard of living for everyone. There are a number of reasons for this - the plague took out the old and infirm (along with a lot of everyone else), so there wasn’t the additional labor involved in caring for an aging population which is burdensome for the current Japanese generation, for instance. A shortage of labor drove the necessity of figuring out better ways of doing things - so an era of technological improvement to make up for the loss of labor started - which fed the Renaissance - we’ve seen huge technology gains, but the economy is now global. As the labor force grew after the plague had passed - a second or third generation provided labor plus had the technological advances left behind, enabling them to create more value in the economy.
It’s weird that you keep trying to politicize this discussion with the constant mislabeling of “Liberals”.
Also, you are factually incorrect. Japan is a fairly xenophobic society when it comes to open borders, has a problem with an aging and declining population and their economy hasn’t been “doing fine” for quite some time.
The main resource bottleneck is not “land”. We do not have problems figuring out where to put people and it is a problem that is relatively easy to solve with building higher buildings. It is energy consumption and the destruction of non-renewable resources (or renewable resources at a rate faster than they can renew).
To an extent, yes. If half the population disappeared, our impact on the environment would be much smaller in terms of energy consumption, pollution, trees knocked down and so on. Probably a good thing.
However, for an example of the negative effects of a declining population, look no further than the city of Detroit. Detroit went from a height of 1.8 million people to about 700,000, or a decline of around 60%. This creates a couple of long-term problems:
-Shrinking markets means shrinking demand means shrinking prices over time, discouraging investment.
-Detroit neighborhoods are rife with abandoned properties. These create attractive nuisances for drug dens, homeless people or just general unsafe eyesores.
-Lower population density means it’s much harder to provide core services like police, fire, medical, water. Because the population decrease is unmanaged, fire and police must cover the same area, but must do so with lower budgets and reduced manpower.
“Since the late 1990s, the growth in Japan’s real GDP per head has outperformed every other major economy. And unlike other major economies, income inequality in Japan has not increased, remaining amongst the lowest in the developed world” https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/04/09/1523246400000/Japan-s-economic-miracle/
You should look at the section in that article on Social, Environmental and Economic Effects.
Europe had been overpopulated before the plague, and a reduction of 30% to 50% of the population could have resulted in higher wages and more available land and food for peasants because of less competition for resources.[22] Historian Walter Scheidel contends that waves of plague following the initial outbreak of the Black Death had a leveling effect that changed the ratio of land to labor, reducing the value of the former while boosting that of the latter, which lowered economic inequality by making landowners and employers less well off while improving the lot of the workers. He states that “the observed improvement in living standards of the laboring population was rooted in the suffering and premature death of tens of millions over the course of several generations.” This leveling effect was reversed by a “demographic recovery that resulted in renewed population pressure.”[23] In 1357, a third of property in London was unused due to a severe outbreak in 1348–49.[12] However, for reasons that are still debated, population levels declined after the Black Death’s first outbreak until around 1420 and did not begin to rise again until 1470, so the initial Black Death event on its own does not entirely provide a satisfactory explanation to this extended period of decline in prosperity. See Medieval demography for a more complete treatment of this issue and current theories on why improvements in living standards took longer to evolve.
I’m not much of an Asian Historian - did they see the same level of technological innovation as a result, or did they keep doing things the way they always did and let the next generation add famine to the black death? Did they lose significantly more population - it looks from that Wikipedia article that historians think they lost half, while historians think Europe lost between 1/3 and 1/2?
That’s my point - if they suffered similar losses, but didn’t see the same societal change, then the driver for the societal change isn’t the plague, it’s whatever social structures or other conditions the plague advantaged in Europe but not China.
I didn’t make the claim so I can’t argue the difference between the two and am disinclined to research it today.
I do know that parts of Europe were overpopulated in the 1800’s and that was one of the big things pressing emigration to America. When your family farm has been subdivided by inheritance to the point where you might get 2-5 acres to support your new family, there’s good reason to move to some place where you can get a quarter section (160 acres) for the money you got from selling your 5 acres in Germany. Especially when you know a lot of other people headed to the same place.
I would suspect the rise in income in Europe was due to inheriting the lands and moneys formerly belonging to those who died along with the mentioned job openings. Europe was more decentralized and localized, so there would be competition for the surviving people to come and work for the local nobility.
China, having been more organized, centralized and less balkanized, would be less affected by the plague than the teeming masses of local Knights, barons and petty kings all struggling to maintain their little fiefdoms.
