> Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it seemed like a solution.
They haven't, imo. I am from India, and I have been hearing for the last two decades how we have avoided same mistakes as China and the latter is headed for a demographic collapse. China is only marching forward, and focusing more on automation to hedge its bets. While overpopulation in India has choked almost every city in India. I honestly don't know what will happen as more people migrate from rural to urban areas.
India's population will peak in 2065, while China's already has. It's depressing to imagine that 250-300M more people are left to be added before we finally see a decline.
Just like 1970s claim "overpopulation will destroy the planet" turned out to be exaggerated, the modern idea that “a large population is a blessing” feels equally misguided.
European here.
One of the problems is that many of our society's systems are predicated on a growing population. Social security and pensions, for example, are structured not unlike a pyramid scheme: for every old person we should have more than one working young person. People take more than they give. Fixing that will be painful, but possible.
More worrying is how many countries' birth rates have fallen below the replacement rate. Some SE Asian countries are interesting case studies here (Japan, S Korea), but it's not looking good, and much of western Europe is heading in the same direction. Maybe the worry is overblown and populations will eventually stabilize at a lower point, but currently it seems like a declining population will just add to the stressors that are putting people off from having children, so it could just as well keep snowballing.
All that's to say, I don't worry too much about over/underpopulation, but I do worry about a shrinking population.
> Social security and pensions, for example, are structured not unlike a pyramid scheme: for every old person we should have more than one working young person.
Canada saw the demographic writing on the wall, and solved its public/government pension problem in the 1990s:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Pension_Plan#1998_refor...
Good book on the history of the CPP, and how the reforms were determined and enacted (Fixing the Future by Bruce Little):
* https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9780802095831
There's no reason other countries could not have done something similar earlier (or even now).
In France it is reported that retirees now have higher (average?) incomes than workers:
* https://archive.is/https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/m...
This is completely ludicrous. For retirement planning purposes, it is often recommended to assume you'll need 70% of your working age income for the same lifestyle (you have fewer expenses—live not having a chunk of your income go to retirement savings), but in many situations it could even be ≤50%:
* https://archive.is/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-inv...
To have the same (or more) in retirement generally means you "over saved" while working, and you could have had more resources for enjoyment of life earlier (after all, we don't know when our time will come).
> In France it is reported that retirees now have higher (average?) incomes than workers
It may not be exactly true, but it's close to be true, and then like you said the workers have way more expenses (rent, children).
I will point out that in the 90s we in France already knew that the retirement system was unsustainable. It is quite obvious if you look for 2 seconds at the population pyramid :-)
Generations of politicians tried and failed to do something about it, thanks to the left (and sometimes extreme right wing) saying that there was enough money and we just need to tax the rich more.
The problem with most current pension systems is the inability of the last boom to plan for that boom to become part of it. And people hating on immigration, not realising it is massively needed to offset the negative replenishment rate. We might also have a negative growth rate when the boom generation starts dying but that might not actually be a bad thing. Note: the boom lasted from about 1948 to 1974 so it will take a while.
> Social security and pensions, for example, are structured not unlike a pyramid scheme: for every old person we should have more than one working young person.
I'm from a western country and I agree with your statement and have a similar fear. My country is doomed because of the pension system.
BUT this doesn't apply to China. Their system isn't structured this way, therefore this is mostly irrelevant for them.
As long as China have a working population bigger than most countries, as well such amazing universities, they will perform better than all those countries.
Even with the population decline, they'll still have more able workers than all western countries for at least the next 100 years.
Let that sink in.
Exactly.
In the current pension system (at least the ones in the Nordics), the new generation pays for the old generation. This mechanism is broken, as it expects (as you pointed out) an ever-growing population, which is of course unrealistic.
Fixing [*] the broken pension system in a sustainable way is politically unpalatable and seems to have been so for decades. Lifting the pension age is the only "innovative" action available that is even discussed nowadays anywhere in public, as if that were the only viable alternative, which of course it isn't.
I've pondered why. Hammering out the details of a new system and taking care of a transition period etc. cannot be unsurmountable problems. It probably has to do with pensioners being a large voter demographic, thus the reason is some form of political self-preservation on behalf of the traditionally large parties.
So, instead of changing things to the better, a broken system must be maintained. Since the system is not only broken, it's essentially untouchable, therefore political decision-taking has to accept possibly sub-optimal decisions in related areas to avoid disturbing anything. In a way, the brokenness leaks.
Then, a shrinking population only exacerbates the problems of the pension system, spreading the brokenness further into other societal systems and decisions. And that's a bad path to be in.
[*] In an example of a better-working alternative system, any pension contributions would be personal, kept in an account managed by the state. The money is (low risk) invested by the state, profits/dividends reinvested, etc. Once one becomes a pensioner, the money can be withdrawn in whole or parts. Add taxes somewhere, such as when withdrawing the money. The state guarantees the lowest level of pension, something like today. Simple enough, and not tied to "children pay for parents".
Edit: formatting
Might aswell outsource the responsibility of fund management to highly regulated third parties and you're basically describing Australia's superannuation scheme.
Issue is due to the same politics as everyone else, Australia is having trouble reigning in the state pension (ideally in this scheme meant as a fallback to provide a minimum subsistence level).
> for every old person we should have more than one working young person.
I never understood this thinking. Doesn't it assume infinite population is possible?
No, it does not. If, for example you define old persons, as persons above the age of 90, you suddenly have many young to old persons.
It's not like people sat down and said "clearly we'll have infinite population and hence a pyramid like scheme for social support for the elderly is ideal".
It was more likely something like "for the foreseeable future we'll have population growth and therefore a pyramid like scheme is a good solution for now".
Ideally the scheme should have already started adapting to the changing population dynamics, but humans for the most part (unfortunately) tend to kick problems down the road.
Politicians don't tend to get rewarded for solving tomorrow's problem when their populace tend to me more interested in having more money to spend right now.
So here we are, living large today with little regard for the cost to our future.
At a steady population number, it just requires people to work for longer than they are retired. Which is mostly already the case.
Occupy Mars!
We are already seeing the effects of this. Rich people still get to take more than they give, poor people increasingly do not.
Neither Japan nor Korea are in SE Asia
Damn, I goofed, thanks for calling that out. Can't edit the comment anymore unfortunately.
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>Just like 1970s claim "overpopulation will destroy the planet" turned out to be exaggerated
<looks at the world today>
Seems to me like that prediction is pretty on track.
The predictions of Ehrlich in "the population bomb" and the club of rome were undone within a few years with the "green revolution" which saw massive increases in food production.
Ehrlich in particular was suggesting mass starvation by the 1980's. Conceivably, it is possible that too many people will cause problems, but nothing like what they actually predicted has come to pass.
I encourage you to revisit what you know about the club of rome and what was actually published in the Limits to Growth paper. We have been disturbingly on track for a lot of the variables that were of interest back then in the “business as usual” model.
People tend to dismiss anything and everything around resource constraint thinking by doing the quick Ehrlich quip, and never really dig deeper into where people like Ehrlich ever got their ideas to begin with.
What's fascinating is the the Rat Utopia[0] experiment in overpopulation from the late 60's that Dr. John Calhoun ran.
As a result, more than fifty years ago, on tape, Dr. John Calhoun made some eerily accurate[1] extrapolations of where human population is going to be now, and how our TFR (total fertility rate) would collapse (which they basically are, particularly since Millennial & Gen Z generations).
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOFveSUmh9U "John B. Calhoun Film 7.1, (NIMH, 1970-1972)"
Since nobody pointed that out yet: rat utopia results are questioned now, based not only on a fact that the enclosed space where rats resided were sitting in direct spotlight, but also on a replicability issue. An experiment with results that couldn't be replicated should be dismissed.
It's entirely possible that the mice in this experiment were overheated, and dominant males didn't fight to "stay in solitude" but rather to be out of direct sunlight.
That's to say, if the cause for such mouseslaughter really was in the temperature, climate change could make original experiment relevant again.
What were those variables?
The scenarios were calculated based on hypothetical 'policies' of a society and the availability of natural resources. The scenario (from the 2004 book) we are tracking most closely is no.2, i.e 'business as usual' but with twice as much resources as was assumed in the 70s.
I don't know the work in question, but the extremes of agriculture we have gone to aren't sustainable simply from a soil destruction standpoint. We may figure that problem out too, but just assuming our ingenuity will get us out of any predicament we create will eventually leave us with a catastrophe. Carefully planning demographics is going to be necessary for stable long term well-being. Doing that in a way that isn't dystopian is a good problem to point our ingenuity at.
Why would we ever want to revisit people like Erlich and the Club of wrong who were famously extremely off in their predictions? And when some of the writings contributed to forced
The claims that theyll be proven right /on track any day now decades after their predictions failed is hard to take seriously.
It's not the business as usual people who made sure that their predictions fail its people working to either improve the world or sometimes to make money that actually changed things. In fact it was the people who pushed neo malthusian thinking that assumed things would continue as usual and therefore get worse
> Seems to me like that prediction is pretty on track.
For an interest take on this debate (?) I recommend the book The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann (who also wrote 1491 and 1493):
> In forty years, Earth's population will reach ten billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups--Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin. Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, whose research, in effect, wrangled the world in service to our species to produce modern high-yield crops that then saved millions from starvation. Innovate! was Borlaug's cry. Only in that way can everyone win! Mann delves into these diverging viewpoints to assess the four great challenges humanity faces--food, water, energy, climate change--grounding each in historical context and weighing the options for the future. With our civilization on the line, the author's insightful analysis is an essential addition to the urgent conversation about how our children will fare on an increasingly crowded Earth.
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/220698/the-wizard-a...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_C._Mann
Partially, yes! Population is #1 strain on resources. However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever. We at least now know that population peaks with prosperity, and food is largely a solved problem.
We're on the verge of ecological collapse, undergoing an insane mass extinction event with ocean acidification and methane release going off the charts. I can't even begin to conceive of your reality.
The point is that this is not what people were worried about in the 70s. Even halving the population we’d still have all of these problems. While we obviously don’t suffer from famine, at least not globally.
Those predictions have completely failed and were replaced by new issues.
We're not yet suffering from famine, because new technologies allowed us to extract way more food than anticipated from the same surface area. However, these practices are not workable long term. You can't actually extract the amount of food we are currently extracting from our agricultural land for another 100-200 years. If we try, we'll ultimately leave the soil in such a bad state that will not grow much of anything - and mass starvation will happen long before then.
"We at least now know that population peaks with prosperity, and food is largely a solved problem."
Solved problem for now. A large part of world's agriculture is dependent on stable rainfalls and temperatures. If climate change gets bad enough, a big collapse in world's food production capability might happen.
"Solved problem for now." With "now" being the important word here.
We should not forget the significant amount of soil erosion. Not only, but especially in already vulnerable regions. While I will probably not get to feel it, the next generation will.
There are quite relevant studies already showing how the erosion of soil is already impacting agricultural yields. And that it is likely only getting worse from here on out.
>food is largely a solved problem
It really isn't...
Distribution is an issue, but the imminent capacity issue perceived in the late 1960s when The Population Bomb was written was already being solved when it was entering the popular consciousness (but the impact of the solutions had not been fully appreciated) by the Green Revolution through high-yield crop varieties and other advanced in agriculture.
Production of calories is a solved problem. Distribution of food to people in need on the other hand…
It's not really a solved problem, we're depleting many extremely slow to recover resources in order to produce the amounts we are today.
There's more to nutrition than calories. Generally speaking: the more nutritive, the more expensive.
Yeah, spoken like someone who only understands food as something that magically and without fail appears on their local stores.
*logistics of food is not solved?
Neither production nor logistics is solved at all. We have bought ourselves time, largely by racking up environmental debt on our planetary credit card. Food is still massively dependent on fossil fuel consumption (machinery, transport, fertilizer).
The good news is that the answer is to reduce the cost and carbon impact of energy production, and we’re making great progress here, but we cannot afford to take our foot off the gas, because although Ehrlich was wrong about the timing, he wasn’t wrong in his fundamental observation that the Earth has a finite carrying capacity.
The idea that he was off on the timing is wrong. He was wrong and continued to be wrong even as he insisted his predictions would come any day now
>However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever.
All of those things came to be - and we're on track for food shortages and famines too with the environmental crisis.
The latter has the qualifier "without interventions". The interventions just happened (widespread acceptance of abortion, "1 child per family", increased neoliberalization attack leading to less people being able to afford to start a family, cultural changes around marrying, loneliness epidemic, etc).
We are not on track for famines due to lack of food production. It's been solved.
There is more trade then ever people are richer then ever and therefore less likely to have kids. 1 child per family law was a gross violation of human rights that likely did not significantly change the birth rate compared to other countries
In my opinion, we might have avoided some of the mistakes, but that is still costing us.
The best usually leave the country after getting the prime education India can provide, and support the retirement plans of other countries' aging populations more than their own - the Indian government actively seems to encourage this, looking at how our PM tries to negotiate for more visas during every first-world trip. Even with the demographic dividend, we do not have enough jobs, so the elderly are not supported neither fiscally, nor infrastructure-wise, since old people cannot walk on bad roads or take advantage of non-existent programs anyway. For the younger people, the insane competition makes both work and personal life hell.
Whenever I see videos of China and their cities, and then look out of my window, it makes me both depressed and angry. I still don't understand how India can even be compared to China any more.
The talent drain is real... when the system doesn't create enough high-quality opportunities at home, people are going to leave, no matter how patriotic they are.
Yes and it creates a mad scramble for people to get out to any other place they can find. An immense incentive for corruption, crime and trafficking.
The main issue with a demographic decline is that fewer people can live of their wealth.
This is in particular a problem for the older generation.
But if you are not a big believer in retirement, then there are no issues with demographic shifts.
It is really astounding that there is not a clear divide between younger worker people and older richer people in voting if you think about it.
Especially when basically every single thing is about money in politics
What’s astounding is that for basically any obvious voting block or political pain point there’s basically no effective political organizing anywhere I’ve lived. We’re more connected than ever, and yet none of that connection matters if we can’t leverage it into positive action.
Old people all have massive long term health issues. That's where most of the healthcare costs in universal healthcares go. Change the balance way more towards old instead of young being generally still healthy and feeding the system financially, and it just doesn't work anymore and becomes unsustainable.
There are partial solutions, ie adding some small fees for each visit (since a lot of retirees are lonely and go for the doctor visit just to talk to somebody or complain, and as I said they all have various mix of long term issues). Where we live healthcare isn't fully free and you have to chip in a bit, and this ain't such an issue (apart from wealthy old people).
a better solution would be imo to move resources from mindless consumption to healthcare
And why would people work if they do not get to consume? Okay some amount of self-actualisation. But doing some real work say manufacturing goods used in health-care. The factory part of that?
With such move, there would like to be move to general welfare as well. So enough people might just cut down their labour to match the minimum level they would be getting anyway. And then you have no more surplus for healthcare...
There are MANY issues with a demographic decline, "that fewer people can live of their wealth" is the least of it.
Less productive hands (60 year olds are not as productive as 20 and 30 year olds, especially in any industrial and labor intensive field, but also in intellectual ones - who would have thought?). More older people in need of health support. Less dynamic society. Slowing economy.
Beyond some (not very low) point it's also a self-reinforcing feedback point to relatively quick (in historical term) elimination of a whole people.
If the population is declining, it's not a problem that the economy is also shrinking, assuming the rates are equal. What matters is GDP per capita not decreasing, it doesn't matter if total GDP decreases because the population shrinks.
The only real issue is the demographic shift - and old people will bear the brunt of that, not younger ones.
From me what you mention seems to be derivative of the retirement argument where you clearly state that those not being able to work as much and have higher maintainance needs are the ones at disadvantage.
Living of wealth does not only mean your own wealth. That is also state wealth as in getting services redistributed to you.
>From me what you mention seems to be derivative of the retirement argument where you clearly state that those not being able to work as much and have higher maintainance needs are the ones at disadvantage.
I state the opposite: the younger people, who are being able to work as much, are the ones at a disadvantage.
That's regardless if the older people live off their wealth, have state services redistributed to them, or are just left to die. You could even confiscate their assets and kill those old people, it wont fix most problems associated with a shrinking demographics.
The economy has fewer productive people, so the (fewer) younger ones have to work more, while at the same time the economy contracts around them because of fewer consumers. Infrastracture built at X level of population also can't be maintained (due to cost, political justification, and capacity) as the population drops far below X.
The younger ones have to live in a staler society, which an increased average age (in some countries the average person is already over 45 - used to be the average person was merely over 20-25 in the same societies decades ago), more decisions taken by people on their way out and not to their benefit etc.
This is simply not correct.
The "the young people have to work more" argument is only valid as they are working for the older generation.
If we follow your proposal to euthanize every one over 60 then there really is no additional work.
>The "the young people have to work more" argument is only valid as they are working for the older generation.
Nope, that's just a tiny part of the problem.
An economy has a certain size, which depends on how many people support it (work) and how many people buy stuff (consume).
Fewer young people means (everything else being equal) less productivity. That's regardless if the old people are kept around or euthanized (!) or whatever.
Seems you forgot that declining fertility also means less young people each year, not just a larger percentage of older people. Even if you ...kill anybody above 40 years old, the number of 20 and 30 year olds will still drop because of the declining fertility.
Smaller worker and consumer base then means contracting economy.
I see what the issue is - you see a contracting economy as being a problem in itself. It is not, as another commenter pointed out.
Ah, ok, if another commenter pointed it out it's not a problem, I guess it's fine then!
Let's check back in 20 years.
Well, there is not reason to rewrite what another commenter wrote.
But I agree, let's check back in 20 years
> But if you are not a big believer in retirement, then ...
Unfortunately, "believer" or not, modern Western medicine has gotten extremely good at keeping infirm elderly people alive.
From a Capitalist medicine PoV, that's optimal for extracting their wealth.
From a macroeconomic PoV - "retired" or not, the net economic input from the top decades of the demographic curve will be nothing so positive as you seem to assert.
Not at a whole-population scale level to any real significance though. There are just an abnormally large number of baby boomers, exacerbated by the subsequent massive fall in birth rates following them.
It's a "law of large numbers" problem - if you have a big population, you'll just have more people who live longer within that population then a similar, but smaller population.
US life expectancy has actually been falling somewhat recently - the whole "people are living longer" thing has always been a massive over simplification of long term historical effects and pressures (i.e. life expectancy didn't change all that much with the discovery of medicine, but it changed a lot because infant mortality stopped dragging down the average).
India’s problems have nothing to do with population and everything to do with complete collapse of all government institutions.
An inverted population pyramid is a huge problem. What does China do when it has far too few workers and far too many elderly? This is coming for them in the next few decades, a slow moving crisis in demographics.
Optimistically: Advancement in gerontology and improvements in problems that the elderly face.
Pessimistically: A society that doesn't support it's elderly, well it's a self correcting problem.
robots
I believe automation can solve this problem. Perhaps the government believes it too. But there are still many people who don’t believe it. I sincerely hope automation can solve this problem.
My thought was that we should develop a good DSL to design pensions. You obviously cant have a formula with more money coming out than going in. Pensions can gradually scale up and down depending on all factors.
It isn't even hard to create. Things currently work like that children's game where each participant has to write the next word in the sentence. No amount of effort or coordination will produce a good novel.
The nice thing about being a growing, underpopulated country, is that you're very attractive to immigrants. China can just fill the demographic gap with migration policies.
Overpopulation is not the problem of India. Mindset towards public areas and public behavior is - and the very much active in practice caste system, still excluding millions from full participation in all of society.
And inversely, demographic collapse if fertility falls will be a problem, just because it will hit after 2065 doesn't mean it's something to ignore.
China’s economy is transitioning to one of taking care of the elderly.
With a shrinking workforce and more robots, maybe that productivity gain is good enough to stall the inevitable.
Their crazy bad policy decisions resulting in 20% youth unemployment is a risk.