More likely they are going to retire before they are unemployed. Working age population always declines earlier than population as a whole.

I think it's pretty clear that there is a rate of population decline that is consistent with rising living standards as long as the decline is ultimately limited.

We should indeed focus far more on productivity. If the number of sufferers from a disease falls to a fifth while research productivity increases five times, finding a cure will make just as much sense as before.

Im all for productivity, but we are very very bad at making sure productivity growth doesn't mean shrinking incomes for the majority. So be careful welcoming the closure of the widget machine factory (or it getting more efficient and laying people off).

There is a rate of population decline that's consistent with economic growth. But its very small.

Three things generally grow economies: pop growth, productivity improvement and technological advance. If your pop growth is negative, you need the others to be big positives. Except that productivity growth is hard to achieve, hard to measure, and (as above) needs a lot of political management to achieve without leading to serious social issues. So you're reliant on technology. And technology isn't really moving much at the moment.

Japan and China have both suffered these combined effects for a while. Falling, aging populations. China has been fine because they can increase both the technological and productivity levels of its economy. It can move from doing things manually to semi automation (now basically done) and it can move from doing low productivity work (putting things together) to making entirely new products. Japan can do either.

Thats why China has managed huge growth (maybe not as good as they like to claim but still) over the last 30 years. And Japan has basically languished.

We are turning into Japan, not China.

I didn't say economic growth. I said living standards. The important difference is that living standards can go up while GDP is falling.

>We are turning into Japan, not China.

Japan proves my point. The country isn't exactly impoverished, nor is it getting any poorer. They have very low unemployment and GDP per capita has grown about 10% between 2010 and 2018. That's compared to 12.5% for the US. Not a bad outcome in spite of a steep decline in population.

Isn't it time to switch to plugin making machines then ? Setup a market opportunities study to try and see how to recycle skills, know-hows and professional network?

That's sort of the issue here: too many people, not enough jobs. And an economic/political system that assumes getting a job is possible for everyone.