I see someone mentioned population growth is the safety net for once people get older the younger generation pays into the older population retirement. There's an issue with that thought, won't it be unsustainable after the population reaches a certain threshold?
As to your question about the snap... 3.5 billion would be an economic disaster and because people have fewer children it would take forever to rebuild that wealth.
Perhaps, but the hard limits set by physics are probably ludicrously high, and the soft limit set by physical and social technology can, in theory, improve alongaide population until they hit the hard limits.
I mean wouldn't it be better if the changes were more gradual?
Yeah, in the long term, we’re all dead. The path is all that matters, not the steady end state.
Capitalism requires an expansion of consumption to grow. Even in a recession/depression the old natural birth rate guaranteed that there would be a larger body of workers and consumers to grow the economy when you came out of it.
Secondly, the elderly require more care (Social Security, Medicare) while also paying lower taxes mostly because of lower earnings. Our social support systems are funded primarily on the assumption that there will always be more young people than old paying into the system to support it.
Once countries stop growing in population the weight of the old really takes its toll on growth.
Export oriented countries can get away with it for a little longer because the populations growing in other countries will support their economies for a while. Japan would otherwise have collapsed by now under the weight of a shrinking population.
Aside from a small core of anti-immigration extremists in the US, most people on the right and left, including our very Orange President, are for legal immigration, which is the best way to stave off population decline.
Isn't this primarily a problem of poor planning? Making the young pay their fair share to ensure stability of that individual for the future seems like the proper course of action.
To think of it differently.. I know when I'm old life is going to get expensive. I'm trying hard to make sure I don't end life broke and in a terrible care facility. Why is the government not also thinking like this with regards to how they handle finances? Is it surprising that people get old?
Of course this does not help the situation we're in current. Where the old did not properly pay for their own support.
The labor market is increasingly becoming machine-based, rather than human-based. As the number of humans drops, the number of machines grows.
We need fewer humans to maintain growth, so dropping birth rates could be a good thing, since machines require less maintenance than humans.
At that point we would probably start looking at other economic systems anyway.
Not necessarily.
Per capita metrics are more important that national metrics. I.e. I don't care what the size of the national economy is as long as people as individually getting better off.
This is a fallacy. The ratio of elderly is fixed; even if it grows somewhat it can't grow indefinitely. Meanwhile productivity usually grows exponentially. Therefore the elderly population cannot be a drag on growth.
The demographic transition is the result of development, which usually brings with it increasing mobility for women and depresses birth rates. Another, independent, effect of development is low growth rates, because a developed economy has less room for productivity growth (i.e., when you give an uneducated person an education and some technology, you can increase their productivity - it's hard to do the same with an educated, tech-savvy person).
To sum up: development causes demographic transition causes aging. Development also causes low growth rates. Aging does not cause low growth rates.
But aggregate growth isn't important, per capita growth is, and that only requires per capita increases in consumption.
Which is actually easier, with fixed resources, with a shrinking population.
OTOH, support of an aging population is an issue.
On the third hand, for the near term, immigration can handle that for most countries facing that problem.
> Aside from a small core of anti-immigration extremists in the US, most people on the right and left, including our very Orange President, are for legal immigration, which is the best way to stave off population decline.
That's not true; there is a very large group, including “our very Orange President”, that are opposed to immigration in general, and are actively working to reduce the level of legal immigration, and especially targeting the legal immigrants that do the most to contribute to the viability of social support strucutures by paying heavily into payroll tax funded trust funds.
Historically, per capita consumption is more difficult to increase than growing the overall size of the population (and US consumers already lead the world in consumption so I don't see that being a solution for us). It works well for export oriented countries with protectionist policies that promote the growth of a middle class.
I am not in favor of population growth, it is just basic capitalism/economics. At some point flat or declining global population will force us to find a better system than the one we have.