One of my favorite b-movies z-movies.
Well, yes. It’s an average, not a crystal ball.
Japan needs carers and geriatric nurses, who would be there to do a job, not cultural tourism. I don’t think being enamoured with Japanese anything will matter (other than Japanese money).
Or the next question “How do I get to Europe or North America to equalize population growth a bit?”
Actually, quite a few of them do indeed seem to be working on that question, if not for that motive. The problem is that when they do get there, the countries they’re trying to get to often won’t let them in.
Or did I just get whooshed?
They’ve been trying technological measures first–that’s a large part of the reason why Japan is a leader in robotics. They’ve been trying to make robots good enough, and advanced enough, that robots can take over many jobs–because Japanese leaders have known for some time that they won’t have enough human workers to go around.
As I remember, Asimo, Honda’s humanoid robot, was intended as a personal assistant robot to help elderly and disabled people.
ISTM (as someone mostly ignorant of the details of socioeconomic systems in Japan) that a great deal of the problem with aging populations everywhere could be mitigated by extending employment, in modified forms suitable for the elderly, beyond traditional retirement age.
Especially with increased automation and better physical and mental health in old age, a lot of workers in the 65-75 age range putting in, say, 10-20 hours per week at various crucial jobs could stop a lot of gaps.
Besides the fact that the thread title isn’t accurate, another problem is that there is a difference between statistics that have collected and those that are forecasts. Nobody can be absolutely sure about a forecast, while a statistic that has been collected is correct unless someone has been lying about those numbers. Forecasts, even when made by people who have made thorough and sincere attempts to understand the present state of the world, are often wrong. A famous example is the book The Population Bomb published in 1968, which predicted that there would be a major world famine in the late 1970s. It was wrong. The authors weren’t stupid or liars. They just didn’t see certain trends which would happen over the next decade and they missed some trends that were harder to see:
Nobody can say for sure that the world population will go down in some future year any more than they can say that any other future event can be precisely predicted.
Already happening. Gift link to New York Times article that discusses this.
With populations across East Asia declining and fewer young people entering the work force, increasingly workers like Mr. [Yoshihito] Oonami are toiling well into their 70s and beyond. Companies desperately need them, and the older employees desperately need the work. Early retirement ages have bloated the pension rolls, making it difficult for governments in Asia to pay retirees enough money each month to live on.
Sorry, yes. I don’t know if it’s a whoosh exactly.
One of the safety valves for high birth rates and population growth is migration to low birth rate countries/regions.
The annual thread bump: China just reported a population loss of two million, more than twice the real decline of the previous year.
I’ll be interested to see the trends from elsewhere around the world when other reporting surfaces.
Interesting animation of China’s demographic trends, projected out 78 years:
The decline in China is due to a combination of higher death rates from Covid-19 and reluctance of Chinese women to have children.
China’s population drops for a second year despite President Xi’s push for more babies (msn.com)
Well, if you look at that chart (howsoever accurate it might be), there is also a pretty significant male surplus in the range of breeding age. That cannot help.
Here is a gift link to a New York Times opinion piece from September about the expected population decline. The article says that various groups think that the global population will peak in the 2060s, 2070s or 2080s and then decline, perhaps fairly quickly.
In the comments to that piece the author took a lot of flack for “underplaying” the positive ecological impact of a smaller global population but I think overall it highlighted the difficulty of managing climate change at the same time that population continues to grow and age. Which is indeed where we’re headed for the remainder of the century.
That’s a nuanced observation which, by law, means it’s not very interesting to those who need hot, simplistic takes.
Yes, in the long run earth returning to a human population of two billion is probably healthy. Equally yes, the transition to that point in time may be incredibly difficult and complicated. And humanity doesn’t do difficult and complicated with aplomb.
A slow decline would be a lot easier to manage than a fast one.
But we’ve got a world wide economy based on the theory that everything’s supposed to increase every year, forever.
The economy is a social construct. It isn’t a living monster that is going to devour people if it isn’t fed.
Rich people are gonna be okay. Labor will be more expensive, probably a lot, but people will still have wealth. They aren’t going to force people to have more children.
A slow decline should be easier to manage than a fast one. But sometimes the human body doesn’t, or won’t, recognize slow change that contradicts its own long standing world view, even if the world’s most learned people are expostulating it. Witness climate change, among others.
We’ll probably ignore the negative effects of depopulation and population aging until it becomes a crisis so great that even the blindest among us can’t help but see. And if someone wants to read a political statement into what I’m saying, feel free.