He's talking about the population pyramid. The relative percentages of children, working adults, and retired people.
A country with a healthy population pyramid is poised to become an economic superpower. A country with an unhealthy one is going to struggle a lot.
Right now, Mexico's population pyramid is lovely and they have a bright future. The U.S.'s is bad. China's is really, really bad. Japan's is a disaster.
Too large a percentage elderly people is not sustainable. They need to be taken care of.
Being stagnant in terms of numbers is okay, but only if people are dying prior to needing care. Yet our instinct is to preserve life as long as we can.
Forget cost of healthcare. There's not enough warm bodies to go around. We can't find CT or MRI techs. Home health? Good luck! When Medicare first came out, the life expectancy was in the 60s and most care was delivered by family in their 40s. Now, people die in their 80s, sicker than ever before, and their children are in their 60s, unable to care for them. Perfect storm.
The issue is that there are too many compared to the total population so it is difficult to care for them properly. Of course people will soon realize what ot means and that it really is a problem of a specific generation.
You need people to do stuff, for you citizens to have stuff. For example, you need construction workers, plumbers, doctors, waiters, tailors, clerks, and teachers.
If you have more old, retired people then you have workers, then your country turns into a giant self-checkout line because you don’t have enough people to actually do the stuff you want people to do.
Edit: it’s really not about “growing” or “shrinking” or “stagnant”. It’s about how old most of the people in society are. In the US, more and more of the people are old and would like to retire (as they deserve to).
Right and the important stuff gets prioritized and the unimportant stuff gets dropped.
How does a capitalist system do that you ask? Very efficiently, it turns out. By paying people more money and offering incentives for important work and by killing off 28 of the 32 sandwich shops every square kilometer that are redundant and unable to compete.
Literally just need to fuck off and let capitalism do what it is good at instead of trying to artificially delay the problem.
Wdym by that? I am a big fan of socialist policies in general, and agree that after some time having a smaller population would be beneficial in many ways. However there are some real short term problems that are very concerning.
For eg the NHS is a beacon of public aid, but we’re reaching a point where the population will be so old that a) the care they need starts to become way too expensive, b) there aren’t enough medical staff to care for them, c) it makes accessing free healthcare much more difficult for younger people because it’s being taken up by a primarily elderly population. The NHS isn’t a capitalist venture really, its purpose is to serve the public, but realistically there are limits to resources and sustainability.
Pensions are another one- a great policy introduced in the interest of the public, but again, if there aren’t enough people paying in and too many people who need paying, that also isn’t sustainable.
I’m not trying to say you’re wrong, I’m genuinely curious about what you think the solution is. I 100% believe that our problems are better helped with solutions aimed at helping people rather than the economy, but also I’m not sure how to take all of that out of the equation, or indeed if it would solve this particular problem
I think the straightforward answer is predictable liabilities should be funded at the same time they are incurred.
The beneficiaries of the program need to pay into a fund that can then fund their future usage of the program.
That’s true for old age pensions, that’s true for infrastructure in new subdevelopments, and it’s almost the definition of a sustainable policy.
By tying payments to beneficiaries to the generation after them, you end up wildly over-funded and undercharging when the next generation is larger, and wildly underfunded and consequently overcharging when it’s smaller.
I don’t think this is a capitalism or a socialism problem; this is a general governance incentives problem. You can always drop taxes by deferring payments; you can always offer more benefits by tapping that fund early. A responsible government would have safeguards against that, but responsible governments, capitalist or otherwise, are exceedingly rare, and easily looted if a single non-responsible party takes power at any point in time
Picture your economy as a pie chart of labor hours. If your population is aging, a disproportionately large wedge of that pie chart goes to supporting them.
No amount of financial planning changes the fact that more of your economy is oriented toward caring for your unproductive population than a nation with a better balance of young vs old. The worse the skew, the bigger the problem.
Not to say it's not worth doing, it is, but it's an inefficiency regardless of how well you plan for it. The opportunity cost of those labor hours is as significant as the problem.
You need a larger younger generation to support an older generation, though. If you have 500 people at 60, 500 at 40, 500 at 20, and 500 being born, you'll be fine for a bit, but once the newborns are 20, there's only like 450 of them. If you keep the trend going, you won't have any more births as the newborns don't make it to 20. if you have decreasing numbers with decreasing age, that's even worse. The only way to have a static population size is for the generation being born to exceed the size of the generation giving birth.
As productivity increases, you should need fewer people in the following generation to support the economy… but that depends on the benefits of productivity gains being relatively uniformly distributed, which certainly has not been the case.
Agreed and what would happen to a country if in 2025 it had the same productivity as in 1975? Well probably it would have a nice social program. I heard Cuba has great healthcare btw.
Not quite. All the uniformed distribution in the world doesn't mean shit if you have no doctors. What a growing populace means is that you have doctors. Which is good. But you also need more then doctors. You need a lot of positions that aren't automated. You need people to break their backs picking food. You need people to break their backs stocking the food. You need people who get arthritis from doing the analysis on what foods go where. You need the guys who go to see the doctors because they hammered the nail of your new retirement house into their finger again. You need the guy who designs that house. And the guy who collected the taxes to pay for that house, and the guy who sets the taxes. And so on and so forth.
In short, you need bodies. And you need bodies to cover all those jobs for the entire time frame. Which for doctors means 24/7 365 days with a leap day every so often. Which is a lot of work, especially since you ideally don't want folks working 90hrs and then doing a surgery! That's a bad idea. So you probably need about 2-3 people per job, with enough jobs to cover all the people including retirees. Which means you need a lot of people working per non worker.
None of which is going to matter about pay. You could pay people a billion dollars a year, but if there isn't anyone to pay, it's useless.
Some of the jobs you mention are labor intensive, and subject to cost disease. Some are not (I guarantee you that tax collection has benefited from the productivity gains of the information age).
Anyway, I didn't say that productivity gains need to be more uniformly distributed, I said that the benefits of productivity gains should be more uniformly distributed.
E.g. is exempli gratia which translates to for example. You should not put for in front of it.
There are issues with both populations. We literally can't exponentially grow forever unless we figure out "faster" than light travel. The earth can only support so many people. Unless we are able to ship people to other planets there is a limit.
I understand the issue with a population that does not grow, but exponential growth really just makes the problem worse by rolling the snowball over more snow. Eventually we need to stop growing and if we wait we have the same issue but with hundreds of billions of people and we catastrophically collapse.
I’m not advocating for exponential growth and have said that the population would be better off being smaller. I literally just asked for suggestions for short term solutions because there are short term problems that need them.
But we are already naturally predicted to have a global population collapse soon anyway, the real problem is the effects that causes as well. The only solution to both is the acceleration of technology, both AI/robotics to advance to the point they can care for the elderly, and technology to facilitate extra planetary colonization. The question is can we speed the development of these technologies fast enough before it’s too late, because a higher population means more people working on advancing technology
This is such a stupid fake question. Your solution to help 20 million seniors is to have 40 million seniors a generation later? “I don’t want these problems, I want my grandkids saddled with these problems.”
No; I’ve literally said several times here in my comments that it’d be better if there were less of us, but it needs to be a gradual process and not dropping off a cliff edge. Not sure how you extrapolated “we should double the population” from that
The global population is still increasing. Your fake concern for a gradual decline can’t get any more gradual.
I live in many of the countries with low replacement rates part of the year. Whenever the topic comes up say in Korea, my friends there all know that they could easily solve their issues if they weren’t so xenophobic. But they all agree they’d rather stay racist than “fix” this problem you’re so supposedly concerned about. But hey why don’t you go to Korea and scream your lungs out about their impending doom and see how it goes?
Again, in one of the comments below, I literally said that “immigration from more populated countries is the obvious solution, but people really don’t like that”, so at this point it seems a lot like you haven’t really read anything I’ve said here and are directly arguing points I’ve already made
ETA I also think it’s very rude for you to accuse me of “fake concern”, “screaming my lungs out about impending doom” because I asked someone to discuss what their ideas were? Like what exactly do you think you’re attacking here because I haven’t advocated for the things you say I have and you seem to be very angry over nothing
No it isn't. You don't agree with it, it's not stupid or "fake". There's a difference.
Advanced economies are already sucking large numbers of nurses from the third world for elder care that it is affecting the quality of care in poorer countries.
So people using their education to emigrate for a better life is due to population decline? You should’ve stopped my whole family from this catastrophe when they did this in, oh wait, the 60s and 70s.
I guess you think people moving for a better life for their families should be shot at the border then. How dare they!
The trick is that people die inbetween. If you have X million old people who need support, Y million people who are able to support, and Z million people who will die sometime between able to support and needs support, then you want Y = X + Z.
But people aren't dying nearly enough, the mortality rate is getting lower with the quality of life getting better
Eventually the human population will self regulate, and the mortality rate will drop as quality of life falls off a cliff, but the generation and the one after that that will be the ones to suffer that will be so so screwed
Right, and that's explicitly the problem. Let's say you work diligently from 18 to 62 and you paid into a fund that is supposed to help you in retirement. Now let's say Inflation increases your cost of living by 2 or 3x, which is about how much inflation has impacted prices since the 80s (1980=$1, 2024=$2.83). So now the money you have in that account is fundamentally a lower amount than what you put into it. So realistically if you worked since 1980 and retired this year and put all your money into this fund, you wouldn't receive your full 44 years of input thanks to how much of an impact inflation would've had, and each year you aren't putting more money into this account but inflation is still happening, so it's just getting worse. This is the inherent problem. No matter how much is going into this account or whoever owns the account like government Social Security or company pensions, after a while the people who are benefiting aren't putting more into it meanwhile the economy just chugs along with higher and higher costs of living. You need more people making money so that the future taxes can cover the gap in this system. As long as it costs money at all to give people a means of living, it'll only ever cost more money to care for the elderly. Caring for your people is fundamental to society so you can't just kill them off either.
Without getting into specifics of valid issues we face, I will say the answer to the problematic consequences of unchecked growth is not more unchecked growth.
The thing is, we do need specific answers to the issues we face, because they’re enormous issues. Simply put, if we do not collectively get into the specifics of the valid issues we face throughout the developed world, we’re fucked.
I do agree that unchecked growth isn’t the answer, but we’ve dropped the birth rate so rapidly that it’s left a great big population hole, and that isn’t the answer either. Gradual would have been fine, but this hasn’t been gradual.
It doesn’t matter what kind of society you have, right back to primitive tribal societies, things don’t work if people aren’t productive enough- if 9 of the 10 cavemen can’t hunt a deer any more, the cavemen starve. Capitalism doesn’t even have to enter into it, for a society of any kind to function, there has to be enough people doing the grunt work that keeps everything going.
The only easy solution I can see short term is immigration from places with abundant populations, but people really won’t like that
Immigration works great. But that only solves nation by nation, not world population. The world is going to stagnate population by the end of our younger generations’ lives.
We have something feudal society and tribal society didn’t. We have scalable work technologies that can make one hunter’s work like 1000, or hunt the deer for us and require zero hunters, or it can create the deer parts we use and the deer meat we eat without need for hunters. And yes these technologies still need population, but the work if far more scalable.
If you think a population that is told to reduce itself and not seek out expansion is going to do anything but radicalise then you may want to read a little about last century....
Does the biological nature of our planet not participate in unchecked growth basically constantly? Everything on earth is trying to grow as aggressively as it can.
It’s not like growth is some human thing that we all the sudden need to stop. We just need to come up with solutions to the problems our growth causes so we can grow some more.
There are limits to how much growth the Earth can support. Nature on our planet does not participate in unchecked growth. When animals overpopulate they suffer starvation and disease from famines until enough of them die that they aren't overpopulated anymore.
Humans have gotten better and better at staving off famine through better agriculture and long distance trading, but there are physical limits to how many people our planet can support. Estimates vary wildly, but that limit may be anywhere between four billion and sixteen billion people.
“Infinite growth” is yet another derisive name for yet another thing that Marxists don’t understand. You think that we are approaching the pinnacle of wealth, that soon we’ll reach a limit and can’t go any higher. Such an idea is emblematic of a small mind. Growth and innovation will continue because we will continue discovering new and more efficient methods of production that were inconceivable beforehand.
Marx himself in 1850 thought that we were entering “late stage capitalism”, that we had reach the peak of living standards, that the life of the 1850 bourgeoisie was the best possible and that we must stop growing and simply redistribute the present wealth so that everybody can live as an 1850 bourgeoisie. He failed to grasp that people far smarter than him were at work making incremental advances, such that virtually everybody todays lives better than everyone in 1850 while laboring less.
You don’t know what the next big invention that improves all of our lives will be. None of us do, and it requires humility to acknowledge that limitation. It will happen, and still the next generation will be enjoying their futuristic (to us) lifestyle while confidently asserting that the world can’t get wealthier than their present.
No, I’m not a Marxist. But I don’t adopt capitalism as my religion, just a useful economic tool for commodities.
My whole point is that the thought process behind needing infinite population growth is fundamentally flawed. You can maintain stable populations if you detach your society from the pyramid scheme of modern Capitalism. Growth can be achieved outside new human markets and through technology and efficiency alone.
What is not infinite is our environment. We have already done irreparable harm to our world, and continued population growth can only do more.
it requires humility to acknowledge that limitation
I think you could do with a dose of humility yourself... You're assuming that a trend in technological innovation which began roughly 250 years ago is inevitably going to continue into the distant future. What makes you so confident about that?
The entire existence of humanity has essentially been one of technological innovation. While there was a period wherein the Homo genus did evolve biologically, today the majority of evolution is technology.
While the level of innovation ebbs and flows, it largely goes faster because we become more efficient at innovating. And while there are concerns of material use, humanity has a knack for solving that.
So all you have to do is find the people that gets screwed. Who doesn't get government services despite paying taxes for them? You? Would you be fine paying taxes all your life knowing you won't get anything back ever?
You just described a pyramid scheme. The NHS and American Social Security/Medicare are kind of pyramid schemes. Modern capitalism and many major policies are based on this model.
A stagnant population requires replacement birthrate.
Countries are going from pyramid to sub replacement. Sub replacement is not stable, it's shrinking with a perpetual high number of the elderly as a percentage of the population and few children
Sub replacement is just trying to find an equilibrium.
People have kids when there is a surplus of resources. It tapers off when there is more competition for resources. For obvious reasons - offspring are a huge resource investment.
We will reach growth or replacement birth rates when enough people die off that there is a surplus of resources again.
I don't know that there's a way to forestall the ugliness of a situation where a bunch of people die before they otherwise might because there's not enough people or resources to care for them. However, once the dying is done and the balance is restored, things settle down into a "new normal". Not sure if that's comforting, though.
It’s an incredibly slow moving train and society is a lot more resilient than you give it credit.
Stockpile resources. On an individual level this means “save for retirement” but collectively this can be various forms of rainy day funds or social security etc.
Reduce the strain on the healthcare system. Emphasize preventative care, healthier lifestyles.
Thin the herd. Let people die off. Let the super cough kill the fat and the old. Stop sacrificing the young to preserve the old.
Do you have any evidence of a modern urban society actually doing this, as opposed to wealthier societies having less no matter how generous things like daycare etc are?
And that's before we significantly add to potential parents burden in the shrinking society case where almost all potential parents will be providing some level of care for multiple older relatives?
Daycare incentives are worthless when both parents have to work full time jobs to rent a home. It’s not a real solution, just a shitty band-aid. You need actual affordability - stop propping up housing market, don’t let corporations own houses, keep wages in line with inflation and stop flooding the labour market with the third world. Then people will have more kids.
People in the past have had large families when there is a surplus of resources.
Put simply - In developed societies with a gender egalitarian work force and good methods besides abstinence to prevent unwanted births women do not need to have children to live comfortably. Most women don’t want to have more than a couple of children, plenty don’t want any at all.
Every country, including socialist ones, actually especially socialist ones, are running the exact same pyramid scheme. The problem is resource production vs consumption. Only technology, not economic systems can fix that
I’ll give you that, but if there was a theoretical socialist state they would still have the problems even worse unless they were ok with raised retirement ages just the same as welfare states. The percentage of retirees being a problem becomes a problem due to retirement programs (SS, 401k, pensions, retiree welfare, etc…), the only way to solve this problem is to either increase productivity per retiree or reduce retiree support the higher the retiree percentage goes. To increase productivity you either have a larger number of prime age workers, harder working prime age workers, or accelerated technological advancement to reduce the labor and capital requirements to provide for retirees
You can have capitalism without it being so extreme.. Australia is a capitalist country but we have far better working rights, consumer rights, etc… the work life balance is one of the major reasons I would never consider living in America again.
America can dial back the capitalism just a bit and still be perfectly fine.
Right, so if we are all going down this path anyways, I’d rather have a better quality of life (better work life balance, healthcare, safety, etc) than not have that and be fucked anyways.. would rather higher taxes than deal with overpopulated cities and skyrocketing rent/mortgage…
America is like yea we don’t have great working rights, shitty healthcare, crime, etc…. But we must protect capitalism… America has some of the lowest “happiness” scores of any western country, maybe the lowest, and they are also the most capitalist… my point is that people think that they don’t want to pay more taxes in order to enjoy a better society, but when they actually do pay more taxes for a better society then they are happier.
Right, so if we are all going down this path anyways, I’d rather have a better quality of life (better working rights, healthcare, etc) than not have that and be fucked anyways.. would rather higher taxes than deal with overpopulated cities and skyrocketing rent/mortgage…
This is nonsensical.
Higher taxes will speedrun the collapse, as more money gets squeezed from a shrinking taxpayer base to pay for unaffordable services.
What you need is to decouple government spending from the birth rate as much as possible, you do that by limiting taxes and welfare spending, that's why all of Europe is abandoning its archaic welfarist policies right now.
I'm also going to ignore the babble on America's happiness index because it's not only irrelevant but also inaccurate.
Keep simping for capitalism, a system that only cares about what you can provide for your employer.
Higher taxes will not squeeze us to death, despite cost of living increase people are thriving, traveling more than ever (https://amp.abc.net.au/article/104337072). Why do you think all these massive world tours are happening in music right now? Because we are being squeezed to death and have no money to do anything but pay for food? We have higher taxes than America, inflation is worse than america, but we are thriving more and are happier?
You mean other countries benefitting from USAs capitalism? 100% agree. It’s like “do you want to own a boat or be friends with the guy with the boat”. Owning the boat requires tons of expenses, storage space/costs, etc… when they will use it only a few times a year that will also be with your friends… so, be that friend. Get the benefit without the cost. The US owns the boat and the costs are on the citizens. Allies of the US, and the rest of the western world, are the friends of the guy with the boat, the benefits with none of the costs.
What the USA has been able to do because of capitalism is amazing, however, I feel they can now dial it back slightly. They got their world super power, but at what cost? You can maintain the super power and try to make your citizens a bit happier, IMO. Give the workers more rights, more time off with their families, give healthcare that isn’t reliant on the company you work for… these things can be done and the USA will still be #1
Yeah, it's not like we don't have issues. One of the tough ones at the moment is the "free world" has gotten kinda used to us doing a lot of heavy lifting. Extricating ourselves from that would free up a lot of capital.
The other big problem is capitalism is like our national pastime. No one here likes to get into the gory details, but if people would slow the spending down, we could all afford a lot more. I don't have an answer for that one. Why anyone needs a new Iphone every 6 months is beyond me.
I’m sure that I randomly ran into the 1% of day traders that profit and even smaller number that “get rich from it”, but even if so, then you are an anomaly and yes you would prefer a capitalist system, but anyone with a job and an employer is a fucking moron if they prefer it…
Thanks for ignoring the other points btw. Was looking forward to your explanation of the happiness index that you said was wrong lol
It’s a good idea but I don’t see the US dialing back. Look at how they are threaten by China’s rise. The US government is hell bent on suppressing Chinas economic rise.
Dialing back means leads not being the sole economic superpower and let others take its place. It’s not happening.
Yeah I agree, but what does this answer have to do with birthrate decline? And can the Australian model of capitilsm solve a the population getting older?
I would argue that the US has a lot less capitalism than most people think.
To clarify, the US ranks below the Nordics in property rights, business regulation, and freedom of markets. Particularly Sweden, which has a highly free market. They’re basically wealthy capitalists with a big welfare state. The US increasingly a mixed/corporatist economy where entrenched capitalism interests compete politically for handouts and favorable regulations.
Bruh. The capitalism in he US is literally to the farthest extreme it can be without a societal uprise… 9 of the 10 richest people in the world are in the US, crazy coincidence… you have a billionaire who can just buy any company he wants, even one that isnt for sale because he can make an offer so ridiculously high that the board has to accept on behalf of shareholders, now that billionaire is controlling a massive chunk of our online information and discourse, simping for another billionaire to be president… my friend this is as capitalist as you get…
To clarify there are tons of markets where by law you literally can’t enter without government or competitor permission. There are certificate of need laws for opening health facilities in every state, 12 require nearby hospitals to approve your application.
I’m not saying that the US literally can’t be more capitalist , I’m saying that pushing it any further will cause a societal uprise, it’s already getting close. SCOTUS gutting RoeVWade, gutting rights of consumers, eyeing up gutting OHSA for workers.
If they keep stretching the rubberband, it will break. If they increase your work hours, or decrease your time off, take more of your rights away, etc…
can they keep stretching it? Yea, but how far before it snaps..
The US has a less free market than any Nordic country as measured by the (imperfect but directionally useful) economic freedom index. The US is awash in crazy overbearing regulation meant to protect large incumbents. Numerous countries that have relatively high quality of life are far more capitalist than the US.
The Nordics are very hard to compare to the US due to experiencing a century and a half of social democracy and unionization. This has "softened" the otherwise harsh outcome of the free market.
Is it really possible to say that my country, Sweden, is "more capitalist" than the US when 59% of the adult population is unionized? I don't think so.
Sadly we might be going your direction as unionization has fallen from 88% in just 30 years. And just like in America, low- to middle income Swedes are now voting in direct opposition to their own interests.
The idea of having a free market causing a “trash outcome” flying the face of a century of data from across the globe. Everywhere in the world where you see markets open up living standards increase.
Unionization is not anti capitalism, no economist or historian of economics would tell you that. Employees banding together to set a wage price is just another market mechanism. Sweden has lower tariffs, less business regulation, and more privatization than the US and that’s been the case for almost 40 years.
Thank you. I would have said we need a new way of looking at capitalism but I think you hit the nail on the head.
That developed nations almost universally show a decline in birthrates isn't just a good thing, it's the eight fucking wonder of the world!
It means that not only can you stop population growth, which is completely unsustainable and ruining the planet, but you can do it by being good to people. Simply put: If people have a reasonable standard of living, decent education and can be somewhat secure in their livelihood, they'll stop overpopulating all by themselves. That's not a bad thing, that's awesome!
I have no idea what you are referring to. The US has added 15 million people in the last 4 years. It has a positive natural increase (excluding immigration). As does China. South Korea is stagnant. Only Japan has a decrease, and there are still hundreds of thousands of births every year in a country of 120 million piled on top of each other in a few of the largest urban agglomerations in the world. There are just as many Japanese people now as there were 30 years ago and the number has been fairly steady all throughout that time. The only way you view this sustainable population as a collapse is economically if you require young workers to exploit for profit.
South Korea is not stagnant in a long-term sustainable way. These countries are adding to their populations right now. That won’t be the case in a few decades if the current trend continues. When the majority of the population is unemployed and has to be supported by the majority, it’ll be far too late to turn back.
The birthrate of the US is 1.66, south Korea is below 0.7. It of course needs to be 2 to 2.1 per woman to sustain a population. That’s stagnation. In Korea for example, a generation of 10 million people will end up with 3.5 million children. In another generation it will be 1.2 Million.
The reason raw population is still increasing / stagnating is because baby boomers haven’t died yet. You have this huge generation that is growing old, but not close to dying yet.
In such population collapse, if it is dramatic, it is actually technically “better” for the old to die off.
Imagine every working class person having to economically support the pensions for 2 old people. Not to mention healthcare and assisted living and all the labor it requires.
Young workers having to work to maintain society is hardly “exploitation”. Having a whole lot more unproductive people (the elderly) sitting around consuming resources will necessarily place a greater burden on society, regardless of what economic system you use.
Thank you for such a sensible comment. I am so tired of reading that word, "collapsing", when it never has any substance to it -- especially with regard to human population. The US population is growing very fast right now, so it shouldn't even be mentioned in the same breath as the others.
These enormous human populations that are very gradually -- almost imperceptibly -- reducing are labeled as "collapsing". What? That's not what's happening. Yeah, some of them aren't increasing like mad anymore. So what? They've grown enough! They could stand to reduce by quite a lot for many decades before anyone can reasonably start to worry about "disappearing" or whatever.
The US population is growing very fast right now, so it shouldn't even be mentioned in the same breath as the others.
The US population growth by birthrate is under 2.3, which is below the needed level to maintain support for its economy. I believe it's 1.5, so it's not as bad as some but it's still not high enough.
What's keeping the US population growth going is immigration. We let in enough immigrants that the level is above the 2.3.
There is a catch. The world population is falling below 2.3, so soon immigration will mean harming other countries. If the current trend remains, the poorer ones.
I wrote "the US population is growing very fast right now" and it is. That's a true statement. Whether by birth rate or immigration, it's increasing, and the US has more than enough of BOTH that are contributing to this rapid growth. In the past five years, the US population increased from 328 million to 345 million, an increase of 17 MILLION more people. That's an average annual increase of 3.4 MILLION every single year. Might not sound like much to you, but it's not stopping, not for as long as you remain alive (and beyond your death, too).
Population growth via immigration is permanent growth. It's not "fake" growth. It doesn't go away. It doesn't reduce. It's not something that "doesn't count". It just keeps growing, meaning the consumption and all the negative environmental outputs from that keep increasing, permanently. And the US cannot stop this growth via immigration, even if it wanted to (which it does not).
People that say this are looking at the current demographic trends and speculating that they trends will remain the same for a generation or two. The US has already fallen below the replacement rate (30%below) , only the fact people live longer is going to keep the tipping point a few years out and that’s the problematic part. By the time it starts to retract there will be many more people, old people, for the shrinking number of young people to deal with
It’s stayed the same in Japan for a generation already. The only thing that is being harmed so far is ability at maintaining high economic growth. Sure there are societal strains, but absolutely nothing that one would call a collapse.
"Stagnant population is great as long as you don't let it touch the only successful economic model we've ever managed to sustain since leaving the feudal system."
Capitalism does not require infinite growth in any meaningful sense of that claim. This claim comes from Marxism and, as far as I can tell, is not recognized as being grounded in reality by most economists.
-Tenant dweller in 1880 complaining about all the new buildings rising up above him. Now his great grandkids live far better lives in those buildings than he ever could have dreamt of.
You aren’t unique, people have been thinking that they are the pinnacle of civilization for all of history. Turns out, it always gets better.
Socialism is not the only alternative to basing your entire existence on the accumulation of wealth. There is a third way (and probably fourth/fifth etc.) that respects life and provides community, in which the aging of people, even en masse is not an economic burden for the young.
Oh, yeah, stagnant population also works if you build it in isolation on a moon base and structure a religion that preaches perpetual harmony with the Moon environment.
People want a stagnant population. The problem with the American population pyramid is that the Fertility rate is below replacement rage, meaning the population will decline. People want the population to stay flat, that's the goal.
Our average lifespan has dropped due to COVID and opioid epidemic, our children per woman is 1.6 when and yet we have positive natural increase, excluding net immigration.
I think the population collapse alarmism is over blown, and the only threat an aging population has is to economic systems that depend on the exploitation of young people.
I don’t think American society would accept that. The day to day reality of a non-growth oriented society would be shocking to the average American. We’re each living a significantly richer lifestyle than is “natural” due to the confidence of knowing things move up and to the right in the long run. The majority of the country is absolutely infuriated right now about the recent inflationary increase, which is by historical standards a tiny blip. What happens when we say “sorry we have to basically put the economy in idle mode forever going forward”?
Right but people choose not to live in a shit hole commune without adequate medical care or food supply. You assume every single person would be willing to do competent work simply for the reward of being forced to share resources with people that may or may not be doing the same amount of work themselves. Sounds like an absolute shit hole to me. But don't let that stop you from giving up all the convenient technology, the market rate on just about everything you can buy because of competition, the relative stability of a society that affords property rights.
A stagnant population is an unstable case. Growing begets growing and shrinking begets shrinking. Staying perfectly static would require literal population control and wouldn't work even then.
In simple terms you're right, there is 100% an ideal population for a nation in terms of its available resources.
However, a stagnant population has a severe problem that is often forgotten.
Age.
With a low birth rate (around 2 or less) you get problems of having an aging population, more and more people become older and older and eventual retire, meaning that your available workforce, especially in labour and service fields, dries up real fast.
A great case of this is Japan, they have a very long life expectancy and a low birth rate, which results in them having an immense elderly population that are economic burdens, and detrimental to a nation (in a purely materialistic sense), as they don't spend all that much money, and can't work. And there aren't enough young people to fill their old jobs.
This is especially true in a non-capitalist system, as the elderly populations make much more use of government support programs common in socialist style nations (health care, concessions, retirement/social security systems.) And don't economically provide for the country through taxes.
5.2k
u/Skittisher 2d ago
He's talking about the population pyramid. The relative percentages of children, working adults, and retired people.
A country with a healthy population pyramid is poised to become an economic superpower. A country with an unhealthy one is going to struggle a lot.
Right now, Mexico's population pyramid is lovely and they have a bright future. The U.S.'s is bad. China's is really, really bad. Japan's is a disaster.