Every day we read articles about how AI is going to drive massive improvements in productivity, killing millions of jobs in the process. If we really believe this is true, then a shrinking population is what we want, to "soak up" those destroyed jobs. A bonus of massive productivity increases is that real property transactions as a percentage of the economy will shrink too, softening the blow of contraction there.
Real estate is not the first industry to be threatened by changes in the economy! Creative destruction is part of our economic story and there is no inherent reason real estate should be immune from that, or that we should feel special concern about that industry among all others.
In short, I see no reason to believe that a shrinking population necessarily creates a shrinking economy. "Contraction economics" sounds cool but it's just a new name for what happened to the buggy whip industry, the telegraph industry, the canal industry, etc. And yes, maybe the real estate industry too.
EDIT to add: In my opinion a more significant future for economics is accounting for externalities that have typically stayed off the books, like clean water, clean air, a stable climate, etc. Economics has typically modeled economies as open systems, that is, there are "inputs" like raw materials and energy sources, that create economic outputs. But we've conquered the Earth now... with the exception of insolation, the global economy is a closed system. Every ounce of raw material and every joule of energy creates a complementary cost somewhere else in the system. Unless we can account for that, we will fool ourselves about the actual net value we are creating.
In any functioning economy there is obviously a correlation.
Bodies have jobs, generate income, and they buy stuff meaning GDP.
Government spends on social services per body, meaning GDP.
Not only are 'warm bodies' a part of economic growth ... 'warm bodies' are the very basis of economic growth in most of the West! If you take out population growth from US economic data, it looks a little more like Europe. If you normalize for lower rates of children ... that explains a huge amount about lagging economic growth in the West.
Populations that require homes, cars, services, food, mortgages - that's what drives the economy.
So to your point - in a dysfunctional scenario, more bodies means problems, but overall no.
How do you think America became the most powerful entity in the Western world and in some ways in the world? And not Sweden?
The story of American economic growth from 1777 onwards includes a lot of things, but if you measure up against Europe, what mostly stands out is body count.
Also - remember that growth is measured in GDP, not 'efficiency' - so as AI does 'more for less' it's technically 'bad' paradoxically, for the economy, as you point out. But as long as we figure out a way (any way!) for the surpluses to be distributed, they will be spent, hence 'growing economy'.
Canada's economic strategy is fully based on body count. The nations banks drive our strategy, and they can't grow any more through competition or innovation - they can only grow through more mortgages, which come from more bodies. So they push for large scale immigration, which is in their self interest.
'AI' is not how the economy will grow.
A sea of new homes, out to the horizon, with a Starbucks on every corner, an IKEA in every neighbourhood, a Toyota in every driveway, and a dozen prescriptions per home ... this is how our current economy 'grows'.
The number of jobs is highway correlated with the number of people (most jobs exist to serve the population). So, population decline won’t help keep (relative) unemployment numbers down.
2008 pop: 304m people. 2018 pop: ~327m people. A 7.5% increase in population across a decade.
2008 GDP: $14.72t ($17.64t inflation adjusted). 2018 GDP: $20.5t. Approximately a 17% real increase in GDP.
The US added an economy close to the size of Germany in just ten years while only adding 23m people (Germany's population is 83m). That's courtesy of increasing output per capita far more than it is population growth.
If every two people in a group have exactly one transaction, then adding 20 people to a group of 100 will create more new transactions than you'll find in a group with just 20 people.
To be fair, when I google for research on correlations between economic growth and population growth, I get a jumble of papers on opposite sides - some pro-natalist and some anti-natalist and some agnostic. (Maybe one camp is considered far more authoritative than the others?)
Maybe it's a nontrivial relationship if it exists, though I'm not convinced anyone knows definitively how the relationship plays out.
2008-2018: total US debt (government, corporate, household, non-profit orgs) increased almost 9% from ca $68.1T to $74.1T, if you trust the numbers (https://www.nwcapitalsolutions.com/project/us-deleveraging-a...)
* If you graduated university and have a 'skilled' job in Japan, you are likely to get a visa. There is no cap on the number of these. There is no language requirement.
* If you live in Japan for over 5 years continuously you can apply for citizenship, though you must renounce any other citizenships.
* If you live in Japan for over 10 years you are eligible for permanent residency.
* If you are married to a Japanese national you can do any kind of work and get permanent residency in 3 years.
* If you have enough points on the highly skilled professional visa you can get permanent residency in 1 year. This is retroactive as long as you lived in Japan during that time, you don't even need to have had the highly skilled professional visa.
So, is it really an issue of policy? I think the causes may lie elsewhere.
Contrast that to countries like most of the West, where at least a solid proportion of people consider it socially unacceptable to discriminate socially based on someone's looks or origins...
Those things are also socially unacceptable in Japan. My experience is that the often discussed "micro-agressions" against foreigners happen about as often in Japan as they do in my own country (US, grew up in Texas).
Of course, the only complaints that foreigners in Japan can make is about trivia. The US is so fucked up that we cannot seem to stop shooting unarmed black men, we're separating mothers from babies, and as of last week now tear gassing families at the border. So not sure if you are American, but many of the foreigners in Japan that complain of discrimination are, and I just want to say that I think it takes a lot of balls for an American in Japan to be like "hey, you guys can do a lot better with the discrimination thing."
As horrifying as someone being impressed with your ability to use chopsticks is, it's not quite so horrifying as being literally shot for walking on the street.
Many people in the US freeze up if a black person so much as walks by them on the street. And on the other side of the pacific? Ask a random stranger for directions; 9 times out of 10 they will stop whatever they are doing and walk with you to wherever you are going.
Twice as many white men are shot by police but I can't remember the last time I saw a national news story about one of them. Name one in recent years you heard covered in the national news. [0] I edited out "unarmed". That ratio slightly favors white males.
>we're separating mothers from babies, and as of last week now tear gassing families at the border.
Everyday, across this beautiful land, we seperate children from their parents for commiting crimes. We have a legal immigration system.
What does Japan do to people who enter illegally? How many refugees did they take in 2017? 20. Out of 20,000 applications. They could do a little more, right? [1]
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/police...
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/16/japan-asylum-a...
I visited your link and could not see a matching statistic.
Filtering by "unarmed" and hovering over "Race" I got a count of 19 White, 15 Black, 4 Hispanic.
I then also had a quick look at the article for "Brett Luengo", [0] (White) which states i.e. "Luengo attacked a woman first..." etc. etc.; I mean it goes on for quite a while. So seems like there's a big variation in the definition of "unarmed man" shooting that doesn't preclude other kinds of violent or aggressive activity/indications.
Looks to me like the statistics are not really telling the whole story there so maybe that's why you don't hear them "covered in the national news".
[0] https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/cleveland-met...
I was wrong. Police kill twice as many whites but I shouldn't have included the unarmed qualifier.
> I then also had a quick look at the article for "Brett Luengo"
He did attack but I think it still qualifies. I personally didn't hear of this one but a google search shows it was covered, even if not very extensively. It was picked up on national news.
Even still, the comment that law enforcement is wholesale killing young unarmed black males is just false.
I was trying to say that a) you were massively off about the relative quantities of unarmed shootings and that b) in any case; I would imagine people are more upset - i.e. it's in the national news - about e.g. [0] than; e.g. Brett Luengo, because there's a huge difference in the circumstances surrounding their deaths, something which cannot be interpreted from the statistics you cited.
Further, my admittedly limited & poor knowledge of the situation caused me to infer that the op was talking about this qualitative difference, although you are correct in saying that if you take the statement "we cannot seem to stop shooting unarmed black men" absolutely, strictly, literally; without applying any context whatsoever, then talking about quantities is completely valid.
So - my apologies.
Black people are still more likely to be shot than white people.
I don't think that anyone reasonable ever claimed that the police were 'wholesale killing young unarmed black males,' just that it happens too often.
It is possible to have a legal immigration system and to be humane when dealing with people who for some reason wouldn't/couldn't go through it. Especially if it involves kids - as I'm pretty sure they are not to blame on any of this.
And let’s not forget tear gas being used for crowds of people throwing stones at border patrol. No lets focus on tear gas issue and less of the people doing their job being assulted.
Completely citation & evidence free assertions - smells like slander to me.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/migrant-children-being-used-as-co...
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/illegal-immigration-e...
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/adults-posing-as-chi...
https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/2/illegal-immigr...
I Guess cos cnn didn’t talk about it, it must be slander and lies tho.
"On Thursday, officials revealed that in seven of 102 cases involving children under 5 separated from their guardians, the adult was determined not to actually be the parent."
So ok, you're only slandering ~95% of those 102. If you don't like the term "slander" how about "generalisation" or "prejudice".
Forgive me if these words have negative connotations, or "trigger feelings" - but what term would you use, to describe declaring 100% of a group to have attributes that only apply to - by your very own research - 5% of that group?
That sounds serious. How many?
https://www.businessinsider.com/border-patrol-also-used-tear...
> The use of tear gas at the border by CBP began in 2010.
> Since fiscal year 2012, CBP has employed tear gas a total of 126 times, but its use hit a 7-year high under Trump in fiscal year 2018.
No one above thread claimed any individual was responsible. The apologetics of inserting that statement is unnecessary. I do respect that you added citations.
Admittedly, I've never lived in any of the out-of-the way places where most of these properties are located.
Well, maybe because you're not Japanese?
A different question is: "Would you feel welcome"
I would consider it weirdly arrogant to go to Japan and then have them ever accept me as 'Japanese'. I would hope that thy are respectful to me, and treat me well, and maybe even 'as a Japanese' but not actually 'Japanese', because - I'm not!
There's a big difference I think between 'rights' and 'cultural attribution', we mix them up a lot in the West.
This video pokes some fun at it, taken to an extreme for comedic purpose of course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLt5qSm9U80
You're assuming that those White/Black people were Japanese because they were born and raised Japanese.
From a certain perspective, that would not be correct.
Many people (most of the world) view race as fundamentally intertwined with ethnicity, ergo, the white folks in the video may never really be considered 'fully Japanese', although surely they are mostly accommodated as such.
'American' really isn't an ethnicity so 'new world' people often have difficulty grasping how others might view ethnicity.
As longs as people are treated reasonably, frankly, I don't care.
That goes for a lot of countries, especially if your skin color is different as well as your accent, language and whatnot. Heck, even when you are born in a country where you are not the same skin color as the majority you can feel not welcome. So, it's kind of a generalization to say that only about Japan.
You can apply, but actually getting both permanent residency and citizenship isn’t nearly that trivial.
“Working in japan” and “becoming Japanese” are different things, and the latter is very much more difficult.
Japan is very happy to have foreign workers who will politely leave once they lose their jobs / get old, but the immigration figures, in absolute terms, are tiny.
My anecdote: without fitting into any of the qualifying categories, I was able to get a PR in Japan after residing in the country for 10 years. The rules have changed and with the right qualifications it's possible to apply for PR with only two years residency (work visa).
Further anecdote: My wife recently got her Japanese citizenship. This was difficult, it took over a year and an intrusive investigation. Like getting top secret clearance. The investigation brought up why I wasn't pursuing Japanese citizenship until they discovered my low level of Japanese skills, and it was no longer an issue.
My entire family here in the greater Tokyo area is doesn't quite fit in with the Japanese. We're a bit loud. We're consumerists. We get quizzical looks when filling in applications. We've broken software that expected only Japanese to use. It has it's negatives but the positives of being different in this mostly homogeneous society has it's advantages.
Yes, my situation is a small minority but with the policy changes, it's one less hurdle for people who want to live in Japan. We are what makes the "society".
Even with the work visas themselves, I know someone at a small R&D company in a small city desperate for people, earning kinda low. He got a 1 year visa, then after a decent raise, a 3 year visa. I make more money in a big city, and got 5 years right off the bat, with poor Japanese. PR eligibility once it expires. I still hear about English teachers bouncing between 1 year visas after 10+ years in the country and near fluency.
I think a lot of what you hear about Japan comes from the English teacher side of things. Those guys are a dime a dozen, and have to hustle a lot. But there is a sense that Japan is desperate for skilled workers, and is trying to attract more of them. I've mentioned working in software to old dudes in bars and been instantly treated like an anticipated special guest, and told how good my opportunities are, that I should find a local girl and stay etc. Even if they'd rather not have foreigners in general, they are kinda rolling out the red carpet for a selection of them. All over the place companies advertise in English, promote their foreign working styles, and offer overseas relocation. They'll never be seen as Japanese, but welcomed to stay as if the country depends on them, which it just might
All countries drool after certain professions nowadays and those people are doing pretty well pretty much anywhere. Head hunt for those people is a tiny dent in demographic trends.
People Americans treat (arguably) worse than foreignors:
- Those whose ancestors were in North America before it was colonized
- Those whose ancestors were forcibly brought to North America more than 150 years ago.
Yes, the US has done some horrible things in the past, yet:
1. we publicly admit them in the historical record
2. we teach these mistakes to our children in our schools as both reminders and ways to avoid them in the future.
You cannot say the same about Japan.
[1] https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2017
Other permanent resident status issuances take up to 15 years to achieve, meaning you won't see the effects of recent policy changes in that metric until the years to come.
A better metric is visa issuances, since those are the first step for many to becoming a legal permanent resident. Those have peaked in 2015 and have declined back to 2013 levels now: https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Annual...
PM Abe is actively trying to change the immigration policies as of Nov. 2018.
I know this is difficult for some to understand but brown, black and asian people are made via sex and birth (Shocker of shocks, I know).
What you're arguing for is for the birth rate of the undeveloped world to continuously grow at a never-ending rate in order to compensate for the utter laziness of the developed world.
I hate to break it to you but that'll simply lead to a flip in which countries are classified as developed.
Interesting that has not been Europe's solution so far...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Next_100_Years:_A_Forecast...
Japan's politics, with a strong aversion to open immigration and a desperate need for labor, have landed on some controversial compromises--for one, "internships" for temporary foreign workers with questionable protection for rights. May be an early signal for how the rest of the world will handle this.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/japan-skirts-immigration-debate...
Not all immigration is of equivalent "quality". The worsening IQ test results in europe is often credited to the african immigration. On the other end of the spectrum, asians are being actively restricted from entering the top schools in the US.
Europe (and pretty much every country in the world) is already competing for qualified immigration.
I don't think we will arrive at declining housing prices the way you suggest. Something will have to give way before that.
> There will be fewer humans each year making the total pressure on land values negative
Your premise about real-estate inherently contracting in value due to population contraction, is not correct. Nor is your premise about the driving force correct.
Double the US population and drop the total national income by 95%. See which is the greater driving force in real-estate values. You can see this in action right now just by looking at high population density countries that are poor. Bangladesh has extreme population density, their real-estate is not expensive compared to Canada (~1/400th the population density) or the US (~1/40th the population density).
You can increase the value of real-estate while contracting the population, by increasing the per capita income of each person enough to overcome the effect of the population decline. Germany's population has barely budged in 50 years, their real-estate has increased in value in that time as the economy has expanded in real terms with a climb in their per capita wealth and incomes.
Today nearly everything you've ever heard about healthy (ie non-war, famine, etc) population decline being a horrible outcome, is false. It may have been true in the past, it is no longer.
The ideal outcome is for populations to decline while productivity and income soars per capita, improving the standard of living of each person remaining and lightening the burden on earth's resources. The focus of all nations should be on aggressively increasing per capita output, not on fighting healthy population decline.
Population might just stabilize at some point, and then there's not much of a driver to expand off of our planet (apart from some resource mining, and other activities.)
If you want to pay the mortgage, have a fulfilling job, have time to spend with your family, and give your child a good start in life, you can't have 8 kids in a middle class family.
Sometimes 1 is the right number if you want your child to be successful and have enough free time to enjoy life yourself.
That IS resource constraint, the resource just isn't food.
The replacement rate is a little above 2 children in the modern world. Three kids is a burden for a lot of people.
My paternal grandfather was a farmer. He had 20 children who survived to adulthood. By two wives, the second having been the nursemaid. As I understand it, all of the children worked. Basically as soon as they could walk. Girls focused on childcare and housework, and boys on farm work. If they'd been living in a city, the boys would have had factory jobs.
So anyway, that's how you raise many children. That or be wealthy, of course. But current expectations, social norms, and laws make that impossible. Except perhaps for farm families, where substantial child labor remains legal.
"Freedom of career" for women is more like freedom to have to work. It's hard to raise a family on a single salary. Previously, a woman would work at home and husband would work outside. Now both of them have to work outside of the house to pay for appliances that do stuff back at home.
IMO one of the top issues is housing cost. Increasing specialisation, both parents having to work and urbanisation means people are crammed into more and more condensed cities. Space comes at expense. Children need space. Cheaper space out of the city means more transport costs and/or less job opportunities and likely lower wage. All in all, children is damn expensive.
People want to buy more stuff? Hardly a requirement of years gone by.
People want more free time? Doubtful, otherwise people would work less and buy less stuff - which we don't see. People keep getting more productive, but they just funnel that into a more expensive lifestyle rather than cutting back on work.
I don't think the reasons are simple (or even the same between people) but I don't think it's dominated by resource constraints.
I know software engineers with no children and school teachers with four. Very different lifestyles, but all middle class. And I don't think resource constraints factored heavily into their decision making.
Since both parents now work, often with lengthy commutes, there isn't a whole lot of person-hours left to spend with the children. That means people have fewer of them.
When the kids get older and it's time to send them to university, well, that's something which has gone backwards in affordability. The cost of a university degree has shot through the roof. How could anyone afford to send 3 kids to university these days, let alone 8?
Why do you say especially the woman? Not trying to pick a fight, I'm genuinely curious.
Kids have turned from a resource like they were to farm families to an expense and an increasing one at that - and I don't mean in a "kids these days" sort of way - the world changed and not people. Which leaves children to be had by those who want to have them for the sake of having them - some sort of enjoyment or sense of obligation.
1. Backup in case things go wrong (meteor strike, end of the Earth, nuclear war, mass plague, AI/robot revolt)
2. Outright inability to live alongside other cultures and societies/groups. Just like throughout history, some beliefs will also be controversial at best/illegal at worst, and while in the past finding a unoccupied area on Earth was practical, that's not really the case now. So space it is.
3. Science/academic study. Robots are neat, but there are some things it's better to send humans for, and a fair few scientists would probably rather be out there exploring than sat behind a computer screen.
4. General boredom/tourism/whatever.
5. Environmental concerns. Not just resource mining, but let's face it... eventually a lot of environmentally unfriendly industrial processes will probably work better in a place with no atmosphere/biosphere to ruin.
Probably a bunch of other things too.
Infinite growth and finite material resources are perfectly compatible. Case in point: Fortnite.
Fortnite makes money by selling digital in-game goods. Their revenues could grow infinitely without their material footprint expanding one iota. What they demonstrate is not infinite growth, but the capacity for infinite growth in a finite universe.
Value, at the end of the day, is subjective. Growth is a measure on this subjective value. It is not a measure on material inputs.
The proposed metric, a product of population and incomes, is unbounded (in aggregate). Population isn’t. But nominal incomes, a function of the unbounded money supply, is. Real incomes are trickier, but they--too--are unbounded. It just requires some fraction of the basket be immaterial. As long as that component grows sufficiently, the real value of the basket–which, again, is subjective–grows.
This isn't some edge-case philosophy, but a well-recognized effect of the subjective nature of value. (The physicist in me points out that the observable universe has, based on known physics, a finite computational capacity, but that objection merely illustrates the absurdity of proposing a practical upper bound on growth.)
We're used to thinking of production as making cars and ships. Those activities represent a falling share of human activity (weighted by value). To illustrate, witness the falling material intensity and energy intensity of GDP growth.
Anyway, let me rephrase your argument to make sure I understand it correctly:
There exists resource sinks like Fortnite, media & alike. Thus regardless of how much growth we will have / more efficient we become, even more would be better so we can spend it on those sinks.
This seems technically correct, but I doubt this is how our civilization should spend the finite amount of resources available.
As we saw in 2008 curtailing or reversing growth in real-estate can have major impacts on society, but in the future this won't be just a correction it will be a new phase of global economics. There will be fewer humans each year making the total pressure on land values negative. Even before that an aging workforce will cause the total working population to contract (as it already has in Japan). Everything the Japanese do with more land and fewer workers is a canary in the coal mine for the global economy.
One of the great predicates of modern economics (perpetual expansion) will need to be re-thought. In some ways it's great news (more space for everyone after the great pinch of the 21st century) but in others it will necessarily wipe out the speculative aspect of many current growth markets. Contraction economics means deflation becomes a norm not an exception.
* Urbanization means cities will lag behind this reversal.