What’s really the downside of falling birth rates (as long as they stabilize, and they obviously will)?
In real terms as far as I can tell: young having to support more old and less competitive on the world stage. There’s not many complaints from the news about those though.
What they complain about is how wages will increase as labor supply tightens (hence the push for more and more immigration) and business profits will fall. So many Ponzi schemes will become ineffective. In other words, it’s going to be harder to be a rich person. Why should we have to sell out our culture via mass immigration to protect the rich and their market sizes?
You have lots of things such as pensions, social security that have embedded growth obligations. Like a ponzi-scheme, everything is cool, so long as you grow the number of people paying in. Instead of reevaluating the economic foundations of these EGO schemes and ask if they are sustainable, it's easier to blame people not having children or countries that don't want open boarders, and call it a crisis.
I wanted to ask basically the same question. Isn't it possible that the old models of population growth won't be true in the future? People relocate more, we have better tools for communication and collaboration. I'm curious why there isn't a path to prosperity, especially since we can watch what is happening long before the effects are felt.
Basic math. If your birthrate stabilizes below replacement level then you go extinct because each generation is smaller than the one before. The only way you don't go extinct is if your birthrate over the long haul is at or above replacement level.
Do I need to seriously believe that there is possible to extinct for humanity because of some people are not willing to make children? Are there any chances for this to happen before heat death of the Universe if to extrapolate Japan's birth trend to all human population?
No, because not all parts of humanity are equally averse to having children. So as long as it is physically possible for people to have kids and survive until adulthood, natural selection will eventually reassert itself. Things could get dicey for a while until then, though?
If global fertility rate becomes that like Japan, we'll have a halving of the population every generation. This leads to a global population of 78 million after 10 generations. Also a miserable population because each person needs to support two elderly people while before it was two people supporting one elderly. That's a 4x increase in work.
But what if we adjust the figure to take into account those percent Japanese who want children but cannot afford them? When the population begins to "extinct" because of those who can but do not want to reproduce, those who want to but cannot now will be able to do it.
Also the overbearing burden to support the elderly with a smaller younger population will apply to every generation (barring temporary baby booms) since each generation will be smaller than the previous one.
I think the end result will be that elderly won't be supported anymore. But let to work until they die. Cultures can change, assisted suicide or simply not keeping people alive past certain point might come reality.
I said they obviously will stabilize. They always do. Everything always does. At a certain point the population is just so low that having children becomes highly advantageous again. There's very very few biological system where the entire population just dies out from lack of reproduction (despite all other resources to do so being available).
On the other hand: there is absolutely 0 evidence to suggest that the population wouldn't stabilize. There are sub populations of humans that already have stabilized populations, this is true throughout the animal kingdom. If it's just preferences to not have kids, then those people will see their genetic line stopped and the people with preferences to have kids will see their genes dominate. If it's environmental, then our path will look a lot like that of other animals experiencing environmental shifts: certainly tough, but if you can adapt fast enough you'll be ok.
Right now, the main reason people don't have kids who want them is finances. The likely outcome here looks like the economy will winnow as a consequence until having kids becomes a positive financial decision (and that might mean going back as far as subsistence living in a worst case scenario). Regardless, the population will stabilize short of an asteroid or other catastrophe.
There's not a single precedent ever for what you suggest. The population stabilizing is the default for all of nature.
Your argument about sub populations can be just as easily applied to humans as a whole. Perhaps humans will be replaced by another species.
If you look at nature more coarsely, you don’t see population stabilization. Instead you see speciation and extinction due to random and constant changes. Perhaps there will be an environmental event that we would otherwise survive that will do us in because of our low population.
The downside is that our entire world economy is predicated on the assumption that labor will be cheap and markets ever expanding. Even if the population stabilizes, it looks like it will be well below what is considered replacement level and so this will require a massive shift in our thinking about how we organize literally everything in our society.
I don't know if it is possible to overstate how much things will change. The service staff you interact with at Starbucks, the grocery store, who deliver your meals, will no longer be affordable. These places will still exist in some form (though there will likely be fewer) and they will be much more automated than they even are now. These people will be so needed elsewhere that salaries will likely draw them to other industries critical to society continuing to function. Healthcare, in particular, will swallow up as much of the population as it is able to (much more than even now in a relative, not absolute sense).
We will have to make hard choices about continuing to support things like suburbs and other far-flung infrastructure that only barely made sense as long as you assumed more and more houses would be built and that property taxes would continue to go up to support it all. That will no longer be true, those houses will start to go empty, then the surrounding commercial properties. There will not be anyone interested in buying them. Some will be torn down, many will probably rot in place. This has already been in progress for decades in economically depressed areas, particularly the so-called "Rust Belt" in the United States.
There will (and already are) massive brain drains in key industries where skilled older workers are either not being replaced, or by those with much less directly applicable experience. The ability to maintain our infrastructure will become strained to the point where we will have to ask ourselves how we can safely reverse our maintenance and operation commitments alongside a constantly shrinking population while avoiding single points of failure that could trigger a panic or societal collapse. This is not far-fetched alarmism, the way we currently live, we are only a week or two of regional or national power outages away from complete anarchy. So many of our systems are interrelated, that a failure of one or two critical ones can have a cascading effect. The smaller local outages in Texas in 2021 was minutes away from leading to nearly months-long blackouts for this reason.
We will need more redundancy and slack in the system to manage these when they occur. Market capitalism abhors redundancy as inefficient so this will not be highly incentivized to be taken on by any one corporation, leading to governments likely deciding to impose extreme regulation or outright nationalize industries.
Interestingly, the United States may be one of the few societies where things more or less run along as normal, but this is only assuming a continued or increasing permissive immigration policy. The more we go the way of the Japanese, all of the above applies.
This just looks like basic biology to me. Yea it will be rough and quite the adjustment, but not catastrophic and totally precedented in nature. We will reach a new equilibrium - like all nature does.
These same people just a few decades ago were saying we're on track for runaway population growth because they couldn't imagine birth rates slowing. Now they say we're on track to go extinct because they can't imagine birth rates every picking up again. There are communities even in developed countries that are at an equilibrium birth rate, and the rest of the world will get there. That's simply how nature has worked over and over. The population will continue to grow, slow, then level off. Maybe decline somewhat, but find it's new equilibrium.
There's pretty simple logic to this too from natural selection: the types of people who don't want kids will see their genetic line end or can't, the people who do want kids and can will see their lines continue. The remaining over time will be people more and more inclined to have kids and the environmental effects will decline the population until we're at a sustainable level. Nature is self-correcting, always has been, and there doesn't seem to be any evidence for why that wouldn't just happen here too. These same corrective mechanisms are the same in the economy.
In real terms as far as I can tell: young having to support more old and less competitive on the world stage. There’s not many complaints from the news about those though.
What they complain about is how wages will increase as labor supply tightens (hence the push for more and more immigration) and business profits will fall. So many Ponzi schemes will become ineffective. In other words, it’s going to be harder to be a rich person. Why should we have to sell out our culture via mass immigration to protect the rich and their market sizes?