Of course. But if people keep trying to act on that social construct when it isn’t working, that will have poor results. And some people may wind up, effectively, being devoured.
By who? The population is declining, so by definition there are going to be fewer and fewer rampaging hordes. Because there are fewer and fewer people.
Even the labor issues is balanced to an extent by inherited wealth. More people will be dying with maybe only one or in fact zero direct heirs. That wealth is going to go somewhere. So people will be inheriting more. They may have to pay that out in higher labor costs, but it would be balancing to some extent.
Huh? I didn’t say anything about rampaging hordes. I was talking about finances. And the “devouring” was metaphorical.
Wealth is a social construct. Society has to agree that the rich people have a right to it. In an environment of declining population, which will be coupled with shortages (each driving the other), there will likely be cultural shifts that make wealth harder to defend from everyone else and less inclination to respect heritability.
Again with this “everyone else.” Which people exactly? The people that are no longer being born? I think this is a rational road of inquiry, that in a declining population scenario, every “but people” statement should be backed up with where exactly are these people coming from?
Example. A couple has one child. This child never has any children themselves. After the parents die the child goes back and lives in the parents home until they die. Now there is an empty home available for someone. And since there isn’t necessarily a someone for that home, population is declining, then what?
It seems to me that when the country’s population was a third of its current one a hundred years ago that there were still people and social and economic systems that were impactful. But maybe I just don’t understand the nature of the current arguments.
Some small towns will die. Some housing will be left vacant. Some fortunes will be passed along. Many other things will happen that have been previous rarities.
So for the slow witted among us, what exactly are we saying here?
A hundred years ago, population was increasing. The dominant socio-economic system was/is based on growth, we had room to grow,and we were growing. Look at the US in the past two or three decades: population growth is stagnant, with statistical noise. And now, in the US, we have labor shortages, because the economy demands growth, and it has not been able to automate its way past the lack of population growth that it needs.
There are also serious resource and ecological issues that were not evident a century ago. The world has changed, and the socio-economic system that functioned in the previous century has not demonstrated its capability to adapt to those changes. If we fall into a situation in which there are shortages of important consumables, it is not obvious that the system will be able to handle that without some manner of failure.
IOW, the fact that it worked just fine back then does not mean it would work fine in every case.
I don’t disagree; all of that could happen if we don’t address the stesses with modifications to the current model. But what does the revised model need to look like?
To sidetrack and address an earlier post, in their now nearly-40-years-old book The Millionaire Next Door, the authors said that their data revealed that the majority of new fortunes didn’t last past three generations. Various factors were involved but one was simple dilution as the wealth was passed down to less driven but more numerous descendants. But what if ensuing generations were fewer in number? Would the wealth become even more concentrated or would a smaller population in general reduce the markets required for wealth maintenance?
And the house is no longer in livable condition, because there was no one available to fix it; or, at any rate, the person living there couldn’t afford any of the few who were available, and wasn’t by then up to fixing it instead, if they ever had been.
And they died alone of exposure and malnutrition because ditto that situation with caretakers.
If the drop is slow enough, there will be minimal such problems; and there may indeed be benefit to members of each generation which is a little smaller than the last. If it’s too fast, there will be a whole shitload of such problems.
And as far as the “wealthy” – a great deal of current wealth is held on paper, much of it in the form of shares of companies that are expected to continually increase their production and their sales every year; those shares will lose value if they don’t. At least, under the current system.
I have a pretty clear memory of the late 50’s and early 60’s. We were on top of the world! We had all sorts of shit nobody ever had before! We were at the cutting edge of technology! (And lots of fascinating stuff was, and had been, happening in the arts.)
World population was approximately 3 billion. There was no general complaint that there weren’t enough people. 3 billion people is enough to sustain a world-wide civilization that’s creating all sorts of things. It’s already been proven.
– the OP article’s complaint that oh, no, we’d be missing all of those people’s possible lives! seems to me to be nonsense. We don’t need 10 or 15 or 20 billion people all at once. If we can find some functioning sustainability, they’ll all be born eventually. If we can’t, a whole lot fewer people will be born in the long run.
But a fast population drop will be an unholy mess. If we push it too far, we’re likely to get one. I hope we haven’t already done so.
As to how to get numbers back up to replacement when needed? I think we’d have to start actually supporting both bearing and caring for children – both financially, and with respect.
One thing that might happen in a no-growth global economy is that really important individual basics like housing and transportation are re-focused to be easily maintenanced instead of complex. Maybe public transport comes back, maybe housing is smaller with most items fixable with a pack of components and a YouTube video.
There was a discussion elsewhere about how many foreigners were willing to forego the securities of their home countries for the opportunity to engage in the decidedly more capitalistic US system. What if de-population squelches those capitalistic growth opportunities in favor of greater security and wealth equality?
Unlikely IMHO. Less population means lower population densities which means public transportation becomes less practical. And if anything, housing becomes larger as more resources to go around less people.
For historical examples of depopulation, I would look to the following:
Europe post-Black Death. Something like half the population died. One the one hand, there were positives like an end to serfdom / the manor system and less income inequality. There weren’t enough workers to do the work so wages increased.
Modern Detroit. Detroit’s population has shrunk from 1.8 million to 600k over the past 75 years or so. There are vast tracks of neighborhoods full of abandoned homes that serve as eyesores and attractive nuisances where crackheads, gangs, and other criminals congregate. Many of these neighborhoods no longer have the tax base to support local services, creating a vicious cycle of abandonment and decay.
Trivially true, in the sense that there will be fewer people with the same amount of land, but not locally true. Consider the spread of housing along I80 in the Bay Area due to population growth. If population declines, housing prices everywhere will decrease due to lesser demand and people will move closer to their jobs, increasing population density near cities and saving all kinds of money and reducing pollution.
Before the rise of suburbs public transport was more efficient despite (or maybe because of) lower populations, as people could live close to public transportation.
As I understand it, public transport was more efficient before the rise of suburbs because superhighways connecting sprawling subdivisions weren’t an option.
Maybe the sprawling suburbs will be the areas abandoned and people will cluster more closely around the core cities for work, services and convenient public transportation.
I don’t know for sure and I doubt if anyone else does either; we’re entering unknown territory if the fertility trends continue. I don’t think post-Black Plague and Detroit are applicable examples, though. In Japan and Spain, for example, it is the outlying villages that are turning into ghost towns.
Levittown predated the Long Island Expressway. But expanding population gave impetus to highways out of cities (the 3 digit interstates today) and the highways encouraged the growth of suburbs.
Although I agree with your overall point, I don’t think Levittown is that good an example: The Southern State Parkway already existed well before Levittown was built and it was built essentially right off the Parkway. The LIE is much further north. But, of course, the Southern State is not what one would call a superhighway, even though drivers try to treat it as one.
Again, look at Detroit (and almost all the other Rust Belt cities). The population dropped because the jobs moved elsewhere. There can be no reason to expect that the jobs will stay in place and be as numerous in a period of major population decline.
It’s unclear that the jobs will be anywhere. Businesses are currently growing as large as possible as fast as possible, both to maximize efficiency and to run competitors out of the market. They are not constituted to shrink to serve smaller and less lucrative sets of consumers. If the population drops many businesses won’t be able to downsize along with them. They will simply fail. Building new businesses to replace them will be difficult because banks and venture capitalists will be decimated along with the big businesses.
In recent history, the Rust Belt businesses could move elsewhere, putting factories in the non-union south or in other countries, to feed a population growing overall. That last clause is crucial. If the population is shrinking elsewhere then the site of the factory is less meaningful. The same holds for other businesses. Amazon and Apple depends on the growth of users. Google and Meta depend on the growth of advertisers. If growth disappears so do they.
Today’s economic basics rely upon population growth. Ending growth will require a totally new economy. Good luck with that.
Given the issues caused by climate change and groundwater depletion, might a city like Detroit that’s close to an enormous source of fresh water find new appeal?
Well, up here in decimated Rochester we’re certainly hoping that a move from the idiotic growth in Arizona might trigger a return to the North Coast. Unfortunately, it will take at least a generation for the idiots to realize their idiocy.
Maybe when it gets hots enough that our winters are better. Talk of snow and below freezing cold frightens too big a slice of the population these days.
I agree that the jobs won’t stay in place. However I think they will move back to the cities where they used to be. The gigantic suburban office parks we see now are both for lower real estate costs and to attract workers who have already moved to the suburbs for affordable housing. If reduced population hollows out the suburbs, and if office space costs less due to fewer occupants and more WFH, it would make more sense to move the work closer to the people.
Factories moved overseas due to lower labor costs partially from larger populations and lower standards of living. But this could reverse if we see a global population decline. We see it already in China, which has gotten expensive enough to encourage factories to move elsewhere. (There are other reasons, of course.) As wages go up due to shortages of workers automation will make even more sense, and an automated factory could be anywhere.
Yeah, it sucks for Google to have a stable market, but there are good business models with steady profits and relatively little growth. It will surely affect their stock price, but not the basic business. A smaller set of consumers is not necessarily less lucrative per capita. They’ll probably have more money, and thus be more lucrative. Downsizing is simpler if you are getting fewer new workers than worker retiring. You can shrink through attrition, not layoffs.
There will definitely be disruptions, like in figuring out how to pay and take care of increasing numbers of old people, but I don’t thinks are nearly as gloomy as you do.