1.000 years ago a bare illiterate human had some considerable value. He could work in the field or he could fight. More humans, more food and production. More humans, more manpower to fight your enemies.

Now a bare semi-educated human is a liability. Which is why most countries are refusing their entrance. Times have changed. In a near future where wars will be fought with robots and drones, you need less manpower (and their wives/kids); and thus you need much less of your general population; and much more of a few specialized people to achieve your goals.

We are getting there, whether we are self-aware of it or not.

Less humans means less demand means less work. In our current paradigm, this is a problem. In a healthy paradigm, it is a solution.

Less people? Rebalance human development with nature. Less consumption of resources? Wonderful. Less jobs? Great, let's all work less and live more.

Many would call this utopia, I call it sanity. I'd also say that couple not reproducing or doing so at increasingly old age, is the ultimate sign of how our economic system doesn't even support one of the most natural things there are: to form a family. It is openly hostile to this option.

And we want do double down on that? The trend of economic security is going to be even less, not more.

This is so simplified that it is basically false. There are a range of reasons for not supporting immigration, but basically no one wants to "keep society in place". I will note that the USA had historically low immigration in the post-war period that was associated with rapidly rising wellbeing[0].

[0]: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/Ann...

Edit: Currently the poorest parts of the US population are stagnating at best, at a time when rates of both legal and illegal immigration are quite high. It is hard to make the argument that immigration is preventing things from getting worse.

France invited large amounts of immigrants from Africa to help rebuild so it’s not like they didn’t see immigration.

I think there are two main reasons that the poorest parts of the population are stagnating. One is poverty traps, and especially multi generational poverty traps are very hard to escape. Another is geographic location. Americans dont move as much as they used to, all around the world poorer people move to areas with more jobs and opportunity but today mostly richer people move and poorer people stay put in areas that are impoverished.

Immigrants largely don’t come with a set geography or generational poverty weighing them down which is why their kids do so well.

People coming from the Philipines, or India, or Eastern Europe, post communism from the 90s had to restart everything from scratch, including learning the language, yet over time they end up doing well.

You have this weird mentality, that all immigrants are coming rich, and from rich countries, which is the opposite from the truth.

I guarantee, that Someone in Bangladesh coming here, has had a much harder life, than the average minority living in Brooklyn or Queens.

Yet, even the obstacles, they end up doing better than the locals. So, initial conditions are not the major hamperer of success.

That doesn’t seem correct, at least not universally. Germany invited a large number of immigrant workers to deal with its labor shortage after WW2.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastarbeiter

An argument that immigration is a net positive for the economy:

https://www.thebalance.com/how-immigration-impacts-the-econo...

Some anecdotes of small towns being saved by immigration:

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/gray-matters/article/...

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/08/15/hmong-immigrants-he...

Why would saving small towns in general be a value?

The US has desperately needed vast consolidation of small population centers and increased population density toward greater urbanization, for many decades.

One of the worst attributes of the US is its over-sprawl and weak development of public transportation. The ideal would be to eliminate thousands upon thousands of small towns, with those populations moving to far superior situations in or near cities, and for the US to stop being lazy and stupid about building out public transportation.

Saving small towns is certainly not a good argument for huge volumes of low-skill immigration at exactly the wrong time in history for that type of immigration. The US should be copying Canada and Australia, focusing primarily on high-skill immigration and dramatically reducing low-skill immigration. What the highly developed welfare states all grasp that the US still doesn't (apparently), is that the immense value in high-skill immigration, beyond the obvious, is that it brings a huge immediate net tax positive that pays for your existing population's social welfare costs, whereas low-skill labor does something closer to the exact opposite. Most low-skill labor would struggle to covers its own real social security cost over time, much less everything else. The US has a very progressive taxation system, high-skill labor foots the tax bills. High-skill labor is also vastly superior as it pertains to net healthcare costs and system subsidization. Every functional welfare state in Europe knows all of this, meanwhile the US is wandering around like an idiot in the dark bumping into walls.

Far less low-skill labor, more automation, far more high-skill labor, increased social safety net from the net tax boost of inverting the labor focus, build public transportation, greater consolidation of population centers, all linked by regional high-speed rail. We already know this model works exceptionally well and we know exactly why it works.

You're going to get pushback if you try to say "everyone needs to live in the Big City". They don't. There are other options.

Because streetcar suburbs are fine. Villages are fine. Actual towns are fine.

What's bad is strip-mall sprawl. Highways, burbclaves, and office parks. None of that is worth saving.

And some of the new "denser" development misses the point. Rows of townhomes set up in a farm off the highway with no commercial center? That's dense but bad.

New condo complexes -- private compounds with pools and such -- that take up whole city blocks? Also dense, but bad. These represent the "enclosure" (with everything that entails) of urban space.

But "small towns"? Fine -- if they're actually towns, and not just strip-mall wastelands.

You can try to spur local demand by expanding your population (via birth or immigration) but what we really care about is GDP per capita. Most very populous countries are not wealthy.

You're assuming an efficient market, which we've long known is a flawed assumption.

the wonder of economic development is that as a country's quality of life and wealth increases, consumption increases.

the typical american probably consumes about 4000x as much energy as the typical DRC. we still have a long, long way to go before we can accommodate the whole world living like an american.

even as population growth stalls, or even reverses course, the ability of humans to keep expanding its appetite for the finer things in life can never be quelled.

That heavily depends on the immigrant group, and is, on average, not true in most of Europe where many immigrants heavily depend on welfare and it turns into intergenerational dependency. I'm sure it's different in countries that aren't offering full benefits to immigrants, and are much harder to reach via illegal migration, i.e. the US, Canada, Australia or New Zealand, but that kind of blanket statement isn't accurate.

Maybe read what Marx wrote about Irish immigrants to UK. And those already spoke local language and shared similar culture.

USA is amazing at assimilating immigrants. Mostly the places the furthest away from any immigrants that don’t actually interact with them have a problem. The melting pot isn’t a myth it’s real.

Did you actually try to immigrate into US? It is one of the worst countries at accepting immigration. Any normal country gives citizenship after 5 years of residency. In US it is like 30 years.

And from far away it looks like your melting pot is broken. Too many groups fighting each other.

[1] resident to me means lawful permanent resident

[2] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...

I was born in the US but a lot of my family are immigrants and I know how tough the system is, I’m arguing to make it much easier.

I’m sure on the outside it does look broken and there are lots of issues to fix, but take a walk around pretty much any American urban metro area and it’s working amazingly well.

I can understand the situation in Greece is much different, especially when compare the amount of refugees compared to the population of Greece. But I think a lot of the issues boil down to Greece having a quite shit economy at the moment causing more issues. If jobs were abundant in Greece then I think immigration wouldn’t be as contentious. Although that’s just me taking from no experience. I’m interested in hearing your view.

Greece does not have a shit economy, we do relatively well. There are simply not enough jobs.

US is the same. Show me an entry level job, that pays enough to buy a house and raise a family...

I'm not sure where you're getting your news on America but martial law isn't being declared anywhere. Most of the country is relatively peaceful and people are happy - https://news.gallup.com/poll/351932/americans-life-ratings-r...

If there are simply not enough jobs in Greece, that means the economic situation isn't great. A highly functioning economy should be produces lots of jobs as businesses grow and expand. I'm not arguing Greece should take more immigrants though, you sound like you don't want them and neither does your country. I would be happy for America to accept all of them, refugee or PhD Scientist, but unfortunately the political situation at the moment doesn't allow for that.

I choosed SF bcos you wrote this. NY etc have similar problem. Modern US cities are not capable to accept and absorb large scale immigration of people who are not already integrated into society. People who do not speak local language and have very different culture.

Martial law was suggested as a way to force homeless into shelters and rehabs. SF gets around 700 people per year, and it already abandoned basic humanitarian principles. Look at recent Louis Rossmann video, this mishandling is systemic problem in US: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8WGjCeFyr1g&pp=sAQA

》USA is amazing at assimilating immigrants

I disagree with that. I will leave it here.

"Since 1970, the share and number of immigrants have increased rapidly, mainly because of large-scale immigration from Latin America and Asia. The vast diversification of immigration flows was ushered in by important shifts in U.S. immigration law (including the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 which abolished national-origin admission quotas; the creation of a formal refugee resettlement program with the Refugee Act of 1980; and the Cold War-era grant of preferential treatment to Cuban immigrants); the United States’ growing economic and military presence in Asia and Latin America; economic ties, social linkages, and deep migration history between the United States and its southern neighbors; and major economic transformations and political instability in countries around the world." - [0]

People from Asia and Latin America, those who contribute the majority of the boom in migration since 1970s, are those by default don't speak English natively and have distinct culture. 22 percent American spoke a language other than English at home.

> Modern US cities are not capable to accept and absorb large scale immigration of people who are not already integrated into society. People who do not speak local language and have very different culture.

Incorrect. As of 2018, 20% of NYC residents are naturalized citizens (born abroad), 10.9% are legal and 6.3% are undocumented immigrants. [1]

[0] - https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested...

[1] - https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/immigrants/downloads/pdf/moia_an...

And as retirees continue to make up a larger portion of the popular vote - they'll continue to demand more from a shrinking workforce.

At some point (I imagine in my lifetime) - the straw will break the camel's back.

Sure, if you fail to outsource to other countries; or automate your economy enough.

> There's only so much juice you can squeeze out of a shrinking workforce, though.

For most countries, you can get access with a job offer. Countries are not against people who can get employment where they have shortages.

But a "bare human" is barely employable which is how he turns into a liability. ie: immigrating more people (randomly) will generate a negative return at least in the short-term.

On the assumption that the economy is based on a workforce. An economy can be based on paper assets. An "innovation nation" that makes GDP out of intellectual property assets, banking and offshore investments could sustain itself without the need for an ever-growing labor force. SK isn't Luxembourg, but nor is it India.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Luxembourg

For the developed world, where a lot of the wealth coming in is capital returns from global corps whose ability to generate wealth isn’t constrained by local population size, that just means you need to tap that more effectively. It’s a problem for the payroll tax model of social support funding, perhaps, but unless you are emotionally attached to that model, I don't see that as a big cost.

However, it requires great long term management making the system overall less stable.

No, it has less labor supplied at current prices than purchasers would prefer. Market clearing quantity at current prices being less than buyers would prefer is...the normal case of a market economy.

It's only a shortage if buyers paying more wouldn't increase market clearing quantity, because of some constraint besides “you haven't offered enough money to convince more people to sell their labor”.

Yes, that constraint is immigration law.

The US tech sector can pay every software engineer 300k starting salary but at some point you’re completely hobbling the ability for new businesses to start and grow.

US has been letting in millions of IT immigrants for decades and it’s technology salaries are highest in the world. Simply put the demand created by these immigrants for more software services outstrips the increase in supply of engineers. They also start a ton of new companies so you have agglomeration effects of having more people.

Sure US companies can and should pay more but there is certainly a point where labor is expensive enough to make new growth prohibitive. The USA has much more abundant cheap labor than Europe which is why we have all the new innovative companies starting and not there. When these companies grow they produce lots of high skilled jobs as well. Think of Uber. Lots of drivers are low skilled immigrants, but the ability for a new company to have so many to drive for them spurred and entire new industry with thousands high paying tech jobs as well.

Low skilled immigration is a win win win for the USA. Americans get cheaper goods and services, a fast growing dynamic economy and hard working tax paying citizens to grow the nation and make it richer. They create huge demand for goods and services growing the US economy and market size. Low skilled immigrants may not be working the most glamorous jobs but they come to the US voluntarily knowing their children will vastly out earn them and be American. They prefer it to the situation that they left behind. These people are not financial liabilities to the USA.

None of this is an argument against higher pay, workers rights, safety standards. Uber drivers and strawberry pickers should be protected with the full force of the US government from abuse, and we should have safety nets in place to make sure they’re not destitute. Those should all be sought after. But increasing low skilled immigration makes the USA much richer overall and should be drastically increased.

> There is no scenario where they buy strawberries picked by people making $30/hr.

You're presenting a false dichotomy. Not only would people would pick strawberries in the U.S. season for less than that (assuming they would seek unskilled labor), consumers are accustomed to paying premium for "local" produce when in season.

> The US tech sector can pay every software engineer 300k starting salary but at some point you’re completely hobbling the ability for new businesses to start and grow.

There are always young engineers starting out desperate to get a job who would kill for the opportunity to work at a startup.

> the demand created by these immigrants for more software services outstrips the increase in supply of engineers.

FANG serves a global market, and the notion that there's some sort of lack of software services that consumers want is ludicrous. In the first place these are quickly filled in by app creators capitalizing on opportunity, in the 2nd, people generally don't know what they want when it comes to as-of-yet-invented software, they're told what they want by large companies.

> Americans get cheaper goods and services,

They already get that from imports.

> a fast growing dynamic economy

Benefiting the rich overwhelmingly.

Notwithstanding skill, because immigration isn't just about low-skilled workers (Canada doesn't prioritize it for instance), high supply of workers is lobbied for on the part of companies in order to suppress wages. That is the only reason.

Maybe I misunderstood your comment but Canada does prioritize high(er)-skilled immgrants over low-skilled immigrants as per the Canadian Federal Skilled Workers points system used to score potential immigrants applying to enter the country on a long-term basis.

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...

Yea but that's my point. In the US for a lot of industries such as agriculture you can allow immigrants to come to the US and pick them for cheap or its going to get outsourced. There isn't a scenario where you have highly paid strawberry pickers. The amount of people paying premium for local produce is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall market. American consumers overwhelming buy whatever the cheapest produce is. I think increasing the number of agricultural visas for Mexican & South/Central American workers to come the US is a good thing, otherwise those strawberries just get grown in Mexico. Even in the depths of the great recession Americans were not lining up to pick produce, it's just not a job Americans want to do or are there enough non-immigrant workers in places with lots of farms.

> There are always young engineers starting out desperate to get a job who would kill for the opportunity to work at a startup.

This is much more true in the US than Europe because we have way more startups that make it big. And we have way more startups that make it big because there are so many more engineers here. More skilled tech immigrants is good. It's a cycle.

> FANG serves a global market, and the notion that there's some sort of lack of software services that consumers want is ludicrous. In the first place these are quickly filled in by app creators capitalizing on opportunity, in the 2nd, people generally don't know what they want when it comes to as-of-yet-invented software, they're told what they want by large companies.

I'm not sure what point you're even trying to make tbqh, did I say there way a lack of software services? I'm arguing when more tech immigrants come to the US, they create more demand for services like cloud computing and other SaaS. That in turn increases the need to hire more engineers to fulfill the demand. The end result of letting more highly skilled immigrants come to the US is a fast growing and innovative tech sector more-so than other nations. Yes tech is global but a huge, outsized part of it is centralized in the US. The more people we allow to come here, the more startups can hire and grow. If you cut off immigration, lots of startups wouldn't be able to hire enough engineers to grow as they would get out competed by the big tech companies. Yes you can pay more, but if you have 20k job opening and 10k engineers then the companies that lose that bidding war just won't get started or grow.

> Americans get cheaper goods and services,

America is filled with lots of double income highly educated couples with children that rely on low skilled immigrants as nannies, landscapers, cab drivers and other domestic jobs that can't be exported but make their lives run. As long as there is no abuse and the immigrants want to be here and make enough to get by, I don't see this as a bad thing. They are willing to work incredibly hard to give their children the chance at a better life.

> Benefiting the rich overwhelmingly. If you're in the top 40% of America you're rich. Hacker News is filled with rich engineers due to the points I've outlined above. America is really good at creating more and more rich people because we're good at business. Back to my Uber example, how many millionaires has Uber created, and how many immigrants make some money and get the chance to support a family based on it. Now if they think the bargain isn't worth it, then they don't have to stay in the US. But the truth is lots of them do think its worth it because they and their children will be better off down the line.

> Notwithstanding skill, because immigration isn't just about low-skilled workers (Canada doesn't prioritize it for instance), high supply of workers is lobbied for on the part of companies in order to suppress wages. That is the only reason.

If you believe this you've missed my entire point. The labor market is supply and demand. If you think it suppresses wages you've missed the entire demand side of the equation. Immigrants increase demand more than they increase supply. Wages are not reduced. There is papers and papers worth of academic literature on this subject. The only demographic that sometimes looses out is low skilled workers who directly compete with low skilled immigrants. There is very little of this overlap as a lot of the poorest American's aren't willing to go pick produce or cut lawns. If more immigrants lowered wages the US would have the lowest wages in the world but it doesn't, not by a long shot. By your logic software engineers would be making poverty wages due to high levels of immigration, but they don't. They're some of the highest paid people in the country. More immigrants mean more economic growth which is good for everyone.

For this particular US industry, it already is outsourced, the company profits from labor in Mexico.

> There isn't a scenario where you have highly paid strawberry pickers.

You're doubling down on this when I made it clear it's all relative. You don't need an engineer's payscale to entice more agricultural workers when they have zero education.

> I think increasing the number of agricultural visas for Mexican & South/Central American workers to come the US is a good thing, otherwise those strawberries just get grown in Mexico.

Yes, they already are. Check the packaging at your grocery store. The company just yields the profits.

> This is much more true in the US than Europe because we have way more startups that make it big. And we have way more startups that make it big because there are so many more engineers here. More skilled tech immigrants is good. It's a cycle.

This is too simplistic of a view. The valley has the capital, that's why startups can make it. There are more engineers because they're clamoring for potentially large salaries in very expensive cities. More engineers means more competition and consequently suppressed wages; it's not a given that they all make it to FANG, and it's not a given that the small company or startup they start with will get any consideration or funding. For a young engineer, a company's success doesn't matter so much in the beginning, they're desperate for experience in order to better compete if they've missed their first opening at a FANG. You can be a good developer and still never get hired there, in which case you'd eventually move out of the valley.

> did I say there way a lack of software services?

That is the exact implication when you suggest the demand for software services sufficiently outweights the supply of workers. It is a nonsensical statement. Demand being created basically reiterates what I said, but here again, it's not a given that your shiny new service will lead to substantial demand. The vast majority fail.

> If you cut off immigration

No one said anything about cutting off immigration. The counter to high, unfettered immigration isn't "no" immigration, it's a sensible rate that actually considers other factors like wages, unemployment status etc rather than only a corporation's desires.

Even Statistics Canada clearly lays out that increasing immigration over a certain rate suppresses wages: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/89-001-x/89-001-x2007001... . This is from the government itself.

> The end result of letting more highly skilled immigrants come to the US is a fast growing and innovative tech sector more-so than other nations.

The end result is a faster growing GDP, and as we have already established, a higher GDP does not reflect better prosperity for people in places of high inequality. It means the rich get richer, and the purchasing power of the middle class diminishes.

> nannies, landscapers, cab drivers and other domestic jobs that can't be exported but make their lives run.

Nothing reflects privilege like a nanny. Working class Americans don't have nannies. Landscaping can pay quite well and you can make a living driving cabs, it's not something only immigrants want.

> If you're in the top 40% of America you're rich.

The poverty rate is 10.5%. The average annual wage is $51,916.27 and the real median personal income in the US in 2019 is $35,977. Most workers are not rich, and wages have not been catching up with inflation let alone GDP. Wages are suppressed over decades.

> If you think it suppresses wages you've missed the entire demand side of the equation.

You have a distorted, naive view of the consequence of this increase of demand.

New bodies need a place to live (housing prices are skyrocketing), they need food (this increase does basically fuck all for the vast majority of Americans because it's so automated and controlled by very few rich families), they need transportation (the infrastructure is effectively just maintained at this point i.e. subways and buses, and vehicle manufacturing is going fully automated), and they want entertainment (so an elite cadre of Hollywood studios and video game producers can get slightly richer).

So far in these examples, the increase in demand does not demonstrate a need for new jobs. Housing would be one, except it's artificially restricted owing to zoning laws so the snail's pace is pegged. Basically everything else as demand goes can already be met with, in aggregate, very little need for new workers on the whole. With the grip of automation tightening, among other issues, this idea that demand will automatically lead to new jobs is unsubstantiable. The most generous view is that the ratio of new bodies to new jobs created is worsening.

We're on the cusp of serious popular consideration for UBI, with the implication that availability of jobs will diminish more rapidly than new ones are created. If this is further realized, then an increase in immigration makes zero sense.

> By your logic software engineers would be making poverty wages due to high levels of immigration, but they don't.

No. FANG is a top money-maker that dominates the stock exchange but represents a fraction of total occupancy by sector in the country, so they're interested in maintaining talent. Not every sector is like FANG, but then not every programmer works at one - wages won't be maintained everywhere, pretty much like the other sectors. Add to the fact, programming jobs available are projected to decline 9% in the next decade - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... . So it seems more bodies will not in fact directly translate to more available jobs even in IT. Consequently wages will fall if there is high competition, and a 9% difference sounds like it.

Mediocre, bad, unlucky or badly located, geographically, citizen workers lose out. And then they vote for Trump :-)

In reality, age discrimination makes it nigh impossible to land a meaningful job once you're over the age of 60.

I think another reason for some negative feelings is the appearance that some generations have pulled up the ladder after their accent: in real estate, pensions, healthcare, etc.

In the US alone, we literally import seasonal workers to prop up our agriculture industry. We pay them just enough to survive, give them few rights and little stability, and generally tread them as an underclass.

People like this undergird the whole of the modern global economy.

If you want to be really draconian about it, immigration can select for people with skills where the home populate will always have the same average of innate abilities.

Also, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109095162...

There's more than enough research that we don't need this, "prime neurological and societal plasticity" pseudoscience.

Fewer people -> fewer sales for Ioniq and Galaxy S -> less money made by these companies -> less money available for industrial research -> worse technology for your servers, drones, military satellites, submarines, whatever -> lose the war.

With “worth”, “value”, “liability” you are only talking about the narrow, economic definitions of those words.

The problem is not everything valuable is captured in economic expression, not everything is readily marketable, which doesn’t mean they are not valuable. And I am not being romantic here; for the longest time we suffered for not measuring the value of childbirth, mothering a newborn and general domestic labor for example. (Surrogacy being new aside, also doesn’t make a reliable proxy because it doesn’t measure mothering in situ, contractual asymmetries get priced into the transaction.)

Hyperindividualistic western fantasy assumes even attachment and emotional needs can be marketed (eg therapy), but suicide rates show that traditional close-knit societies fare much better. Just because you can’t measure the dollar amount of small talk and care from your neighborhood grocer, doesn’t mean it is worthlessness.

People are worthless only if you waste them. You risk wasting them when you instrumentalize and objectify them excessively, when you interject the market into relationships you shouldn’t.

The waste theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy of neoliberalism. And I agree that we might be getting there if we don’t awaken from the normativity of market thinking.

As people have less kids, age out of the workforce, and live longer, who's going to pick the crops? People far away in 3rd world nations? Who's going to be working the jobs to pay them? Do we expect the small amount of working-age people to support themselves + their kids + retired parents + grandparents? Who's going to be the nurses and the firefighters?

Japan and Germany both have aging populaces and low birth rates. Germany is taking the immigration route, and Japan is taking the automation route (as it's much more xenophobic). From a macroeconomic perspective, Germany's strategy seems to be winning.

And I don't know about you, but when I'm old, I'll take a human nurse over a robot nurse any day of the week.

It's going to happen. Ambitious, power-hungry humans are like moths to a flame.

So if you want to imply that you possess some level of intelligence, then take a small inductive step, and then, consider reevaluating your moral outlook on the value of human life.

I’m sceptical of this claim. Demand per capita grows unabated. Working lives are lengthening. A smaller population living well is economically indistinguishable, in the aggregate, from a large one living poorly. Maybe post-industrial civilisations settle into a lower-population steady state than ones requiring lots of unrefined labor.

Yes, dependency ratios will mean re-jiggering the skewed benefits almost every country provides its old at the expense of the young. But that, too, isn’t a bad thing, particularly if it encourages labor force participation.

(There is another comment arguing demographic the dividend’s inverse is a myth. I don’t go that far. I just think it’s a manageable problem versus a catastrophe.)

I'm sceptical of this claim. Young people and old people are biologically different, in the aggregate. Obvious differences in physical capabilities aside, arguably even more impactful for the future of a given nation are their psychological differences; i.e. innovation and risk-taking invariably comes more from the younger generations.

Perhaps if you're only considering dollars being circulated in a domestic economy, an abundance of wealthy old folks can potentially offset the lack of youthful societal members. But the developmental direction such a demographic structure pushes its society is unlikely to be good for sustaining itself in the long run.

The problem is in the short/medium term, figuring out how to pay for all these checks that politicians have been writing over the last 50 years.

The problem isn't that "the young" have to support "the old", it's that a lot of promises were made on the assumption of indefinite growth.

Because people saying that are doing accounting with money, not productivity.

People need three things to live in retirement. Food, water, shelter[1], and some degree of medical care. We are not in a demographic collapse situation where society cannot be productive enough to fail to provide the first three to the retired. The latter is the only thing in danger of seeing some cuts.

[1] Housing isn't expensive because building four walls and a roof is expensive. Housing is expensive because there's no upward bound on the cost of a square foot of land in a city.

What if the votes of each age group were weighted to account for the size of that group, e.g. making the votes of 18-20 have the same weight as the votes of 40-42, even if there may be more people in the 40-42 group.

This would prevent an aging population from giving too many benefits to older age groups, and would encourage policies that consider long term impacts more.

Because the principle of "one person, one vote" is widely (and correctly IMO) accepted.

It’s unclear that an age-based distribution instead of geographic distribution would be worse. But it would probably be unrealistic to achieve without basically completely upending existing political structures.

The US is one country and disparate voting power between states(mainly in the Senate, to a lesser extent with the electoral college) is a real problem. I see little reason to make it worse. Although it's useful to rhetoric out how little sense the current system makes

What is actually practiced is 'One collection of zip codes, one vote.'

My proposal is: Multiply the number of house reps and senators by ten (for instance). Each representative now represents a district / state as well as a decade of life (for instance). When voting for an age-graded role, your vote only counts towards the decade of life that you're currently in. You can only run for a position that matches your age range.

This would have a number of advantages: Disrupt two-party dynamics. Increase granularity of representation. It's harder for older folks to take younger folks hostage. Younger folks will feel more enthusiastic about voting for someone who actually represents them.

Probably, you'd want to fiddle with the numbers based on age demographics. 7-year intervals is probably the right number, with a big bucket for people over a certain age. (So, 18, 25, 32, 39, 46, 53, 60, 67, 74+) might be right.

and that's why it'll never happen without a revolution

Whether those public funds and private options will be enough, of course, is a different question.

When you're investing in a private fund, or in real estate, you're still relying on your children. The material wealth you are consuming is still being produced by the generations that come after.

If your children's generation is poorer than your own and if there is less of them, then there is nothing you can do except rely on the children of people in other countries.

The government could just mandate old buildings get destroyed and turned into parks.

Remember, >55% of people are homeowners - they'll vote for anything that will protect the value of their homes - especially if non-homeowners pay for it entirely.

Governments can always find ways to limit the supply of housing. They've been doing it fabulously in most of the West for the last 30 years.

Two reasons why I don't think there will be a supply/demand mismatch:

1) Housing doesn't simply stay there once it has been built. Koreans seem very eager to tear down "old" buildings (anything more than 30 years old), so it's going to be fairly easy to control supply if demand goes down.

2) The number of people per household is steeply declining. Even if the population drops to half of the current level, if there are only half as many people per household, the total number of housing units needed will be largely the same. Smaller units will become more popular, though.

I don't see that. Demand for what? Consumption? Increasing the flow of "stuff" from store/Amazon to the landfill? If we account for inflation, what's increasing?

GDP per capita growth is still growing a few percent (accounting for inflation).

Old people consume 1:1 care. And as medical technology improves, elderly people survive increasingly complex conditions requiring increasingly labor-intensive management. At the same time, work with scalable impact is still getting more valuable, so 1:1 care positions have to pay more to win workers, so 1:1 care gets more expensive (cost disease).

If you're wrong, the consequences are dire.

If you're right, there's not much upside compared to being prepared for being wrong.

That's not a reasonable calculation.

Wait a sec - a population being economically forced to retire later (or not at all) is not one "living well". People are being squeezed.

Its kind of amazing how often people make judgements based on extrapolating demographic trends over much longer terms than there is any reason to think that they will hold, and then as soon as they fail turn around and do the same thing based on the new demographic trend.

Encouraging births isn't hard if a government decides its important.

OTOH, most of the arguments I’ve seen for it actually being important (in the near term) are the kind where you scratch the surface and underneath is pure racism, so I’m not all that concerned.

UN 2015 report on Japan's birth rate policy attempts: https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/events/pdf... To summarize, they've started policies and measures since 1992-1994 but UN reports and I quote: "Despite these efforts, Japan’s family policy so far appears to have been largely ineffective."

There are other news opinion articles from Japan: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/06/04/editorials/u...

The other kind of trying is when you put vigorous effort into making it easier to have children. Dramatically ramp up childcare support. Strongly enforce anti-discrimination laws, particularly in the case of discrimination against mothers. Forbid employers from requiring more than 40h of work per week under certain (very high) compensation thresholds. Provide direct payments to parents that substantially offset the costs of additional children. Align housing policy with the need for larger dwellings for larger families, but still with decent commutes. Etc.

Where has this been shown to work?

By and large, the nations with more childcare support, more protections for pregnant women, etc have lower birthrates than those that don't.

For example, if we look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d..., then America seems to be the developed country with the highest birth rate despite having little of the social policies you mention.

In fact, based on that chart, it would seem the opposite is true. The less social safety net, the more kids. This makes intuitive sense since if government isn't taking care of you, you'll need children to.

Give poor women education and access to those, and even poorer countries will see similar declines in birth rate.

I think humanity’s growth was dependent on women not having a say in the matter. All the situations I see where women have gained the ability to easily choose whether or not to have kids lead to lower birth rates.

Seeing new role models who had interesting lives, and especially learning that it was possible to withstand pressure from grandparents to have children seemed to be more important than mere availability of contraceptives or education.

IIRC there was a similar effect in Bangladesh, but it was harder to track since TV rolled out more quickly there.

One wrinkle is the gap between how many children women say they want when surveyed (about 2.5 in most western countries) and how many they end up having on average (fewer).

It could be that the surveys are asking the wrong questions, or that for some people they just never get the circumstances they want.

As far as I know that gap has never been conclusively explained. Hypotheses abound, of course.

That's because they also have more public poverty and old-age support; which reduce the incentive for large families as old age and disability “insurance”.

Which on its own is a good thing, but if you want to encourage births anyway, your public support for parenting has to offset the effect that has on incentives to have children, which is a very bif effect. Nations don't do that because they don't think its an important-enough public need to warrant that approach.

We hesitate at being dependent on others or having others help us. In the us, no matter your political side, the idea of finding meaning only through service to others is not only in short supply it's actively demonized.

For now, it's easier to kick the can down the road.

Not...really.

> UN report on Japan's birth rate policy attempts:

And details defects in the specific policies (notably, these defects are, one who is familiar with policies of the type will notice, ways they fall short of the support policies in many European countries that aren't even specifically trying to boost birth rates.)

E.g., a paid family leave policy with low payments and lacking legal force, so many employers haven't actually implemented it.

This is a government making a pro forma show of “doing something” about a problem, not a serious policy effort.

Do you have any examples or even just any precedents how decades of declines and lowest birth rate in the world have been easily and successfully turned around, or this is all just hypothetically probably not hard?

Ethnicity is more memetic than genetic.

> Look at Norway and Sweden, the people in those countries long ago decided their culture was not worth preserving.

Culture isn't transmitted by reproduction but by socialization. Immigration tends to involve socialization; indeed, the usual observation about future generations of immigrant populations aligning to preexisting native low birthrates in the developed world is evidence of either culture transfer (meaning reproduction not key to preserving culture) or that birth rates are a product of material incentives not culture (indicating that reversing low birth rates at need is a matter of changing material incentives, not culture.)

Either way, the low current birth rates = irreversible drive to cultural death claim is inconsistent with the evidence.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/06/why-does-iran-ha...

Can you go into more detail on that? In some respects "demographic suicide" solved with immigration has many (but not all) of the characteristics of colonization, and I think it's a reasonable speculation that colonized and diminished cultures would be unhappy with more than just the coercive aspects of their colonization, and that a non-racist person could have reasonable anxieties about their culture becoming diminished and dying out in the future. Though I suppose racists probably see an opportunity to exploit those anxieties to spread their racist ideology.

A typical example is a two-step argument equating race/biological heritage with culture and/or ethnic identity coupled with appeals to an imperative to preserve culture and/ot ethnic identity.

Something like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28051854

Honestly that comment doesn't read "racist" to me. Maybe the disconnect is taking "culture" too literally, or using "culture" when one really means "people" (i.e. a combination of culture and ancestry/descent). Also even though an entire culture can technically be transmitted memetically, that's practically not the case except in cases of early childhood adoption. Immigrant populations may tend to take on certain cultural characteristics (e.g. economic and political ones) of the population they get socialized into, but those characteristics may not actually be the ones particular individual cares the most about preserving (e.g. culture in a narrower non-anthropological sense, like religion and and attachment to certain literature).

And even assuming a full memetic replication of a culture, I don't think the last member of a colonized people would be entirely happy that his people went extinct even if some of the colonizers fully took up his culture.

The excellent blog ACOUP has just had a five-part series, "The Queen's Latin", in part describing mass cultural transmission from Rome to various ethnic groups in Europe. TLDR: it helps to have a culture that readily accommodates different religions and other regional variations.

Cultures are not fixed for all time; they change all the time.

So for many of these countries you're asking for a lobotomy.

We're also not great at scaling trust.

"We the people of Rojava in Northern Syria: Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Turkmens, Armenians, Chechens, Circassians, among them Muslims, Christians, Yazidis and various other creeds and sects, declare that the nationalist State has placed Kurdistan, Mesopotamia and Syria at the heart of the chaos that is afflicting the Middle East and has brought acute crises and suffering upon the people. ... The Democratic Federation of Northern Syria is founded on a geographical concept"

(https://www.scribd.com/document/441234886/Social-Contract-of...)

And yes, trust doesn't really scale well, which is why centralized governance in general is a big problem. But there are known techniques to decentralize it in ways that can still scale, e.g. council democracy.

Yes it is. The only first-world nation with replacement birth rates is Israel.

Caucescu famously tried to increase the birthrate and that backfired spectacularly. Sweden tried to do a lot of stuff, still doesn't work. Japan also tried.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770

Got an example of a successful encouragement of more births? Plenty of countries have tried.

The second core issue is modern dating. That one I don't know how to fix, but the essential issue there is the dynamics of dating not requiring commitment coupled with financial security for women mean long term pair bonding happens at a lower rate and later in life.

1. Having children without being married has a bunch of problems, and in some countries like singapore gets punished for it in lack of certain social services

2. Most of these societies expect women to work or have their husband take care of them. Maternity leave is in some aspects as bad as or worse than in the US.

3. Having children is expensive and the education stress that follows for over a decade after giving birth is even more straining. The subsidies people get in Asia hardly even make up for the cost of a c-section. Sure the same might be true for the USA, but we know it's not a good place to compare things to. But birth and housing are also a fraction of the long term pain of raising a child in those societies.

Other people have mentioned dating. I think modern societies in general have had a break down in social structures, where people used to get their partners from.

This times 100. The US education system has a lot of flaws, but for the most part, school placement is usually based on geographical location (which comes with its own set of problems), the SAT and ACT are not terribly difficult, and more importantly those college exams can be retaken multiple times a year.

East Asian education is extremely competitive with competition for spots starting as early as pre-K (age 3). Japanese media often shows how students get their grades ranked and posted outside of the classroom. The college exams are more comprehensive than the American ones; the South Korean Suneung is scheduled to take 9 hours. The Suneung (and Chinese gaokao, Japanese Center Test, Singaporean GCE) are only held once a year, so if you want to retest you have to wait the whole year.

And then there is the problem of school bullying: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/metoo-style-reckoning-ove...

> “A lot of the people used to say bullying matters in school were merely immature scuffles between teenagers,” she said. “Some would even blame the victims, saying that it is their problem that they cannot fit in.”

> Two decades ago, her daughter was beaten by a dozen schoolmates and spent five days in a coma. Yet, when Jo attempted to hold the students accountable, the wider community viewed her as a troublemaker, and her family was forced to move to another area.

The one difference I have noticed is that some of those Asian countries are more extreme in that more people choose to not have kids and more people choose to have only one kid instead of two.

I didn't get into any of my Ivy first choices and ended up going to a mid-tier state school and still wound up living well, except without the massive private debt burdens of my peers.

This is different from South Korea or most of East Asia. South Korea's unemployment rate among graduates is pretty high and underemployment even higher, because the system is producing too many university graduates. From Wikipedia:

> As of 2007, 80% of college graduates were job seekers while only 30% of jobs demand highly educated workers.[7] With the recent overabundance of high school and college graduates,[8] the requirements of the labor market mismatch the skills provided by the education system.

Also, our big cities have evolved to serve adults vs children. We have a proliferation of services for adults: sit in restaurants, cafes, coffeehouses, etc… Just look at turnstiles to the subway and the stairs you need to ascend/descend. Good luck trying to push strollers or drag children around in our urban areas.

Maybe I'm looking at it wrong, looks like Korea has a year, just split into maternity and parental, and Japan has a year off for both mother and father, although the father seldom takes it. Which countries are comparable to the US?

I see 90 days. 60 paid full and if its anything like other Asian countries there a pretty low limit for the partial paid part. Maybe you can take a year but you will almost certainly not keep your job afterwards. I guess 45 days after birth is much better than most US jurisdictions.

If the father does get it and doesn’t take it it will most certainly also be because of fear of punishment down the road.

And funny you should say Japan, because from what I hear most people wouldn’t dare take time off.

Maternity leave is 90 days( Article 74 (Protection of Pregnant Women and Nursing Mothers [0]), paternity leave is actually 10 days( Article 18-2 Paternity Leave [1]).

What you're referring to is CHAPTER III-2 assistance for work-family balance. And it only applies "provided, That this shall not apply to cases prescribed by Presidential Decree, such as where it is impossible to employ his or her substitute or where the normal operation of business is significantly impeded"[1]. The burden of proof like always is on the employee.

And while you can't get fired during(provided the presidential decree doesn't apply to you), the employee may still try to get rid of you after you did it. But this also needs explaining that people in South Korea oftentimes stay with their employer a lifetime, that 1 year maybe chosen across 8 years of the Childs birth, and it's unlikely that in Asian culture someone will dare taking it in the first year of their employment.

[0] https://elaw.klri.re.kr/eng_service/lawView.do?hseq=25437&la...

[1] https://elaw.klri.re.kr/kor_service/lawView.do?lang=ENG&hseq...

It's difficult to commit to dating when you are time-poor and struggling to even get close to the financial trajectory that your parents were on.

It's too easy to blame the kids or whatever, without considering that the kids had and have it harder in many ways than the old people did. Being a millennial in the '00s was pretty good, being a millennial after '08 has not been good (unless you happened to get a sweet high-paying tech job in the '10s).

At the other end of the spectrum the increasing gap between rich and poor pushed a lot of men completely out of the dating pool because they can no longer afford basic housing for themselves, so even if they would be willing to commit they don't have options.

It is pretty hard to find though. It seems people want either hot casual sex or a house in the suburbs within 6 months, not much in between.

1. Yes, obviously Japan housing prices have fallen from their insane 90s peak, but housing is still very expensive in Japan, and especially in urban areas where most Japanese (especially younger Japanese) live, space is famously at a premium.

2. I can barely count the number of times I've read articles on the reasons Japanese women don't want to get married. Unlike some Western nations, there is still a cultural expectation in Japan that women do a ton of housework and childrearing with little help from men, to the point that famously elaborate childrens' bento boxes are a source of stress. Many Japanese women with careers easily see marriage as a net negative, obviously different than decades past.

2. The reasons you listed are completely different from the one I responded to, and these are certainly potential factors. At least they’re often considered reasonable suspects in Japan.

Not "most" people live in where housing price is rising. Foreigners tend to see only metropolis. There are many people living non rural (some are urban? but having car is good) area but affordable housing price.

One way to fix it is the government deciding to highly encourage 'old-fashioned' social norms.

For example, we could have single-sex spaces, which help the sexes develop unique cultures that they then have to rely on each other for.

Or we could encourage single-income-earning, realizing more men are going to take advantage of this, and encourage more stay-at-home parenting, realizing that more women will take advantage of this (but by no means should the sex of either role be forced).

Or, we could change sex-ed curricula to focus more broadly on family formation and its importance.

Encourage church membership, since that used to constitute a large portion of the dating pool, and makes it easier for people to find others like them.

Idolize the roles of mothers and fathers and how it's a national duty.

There's lots of ways to fix it. The willpower simply isn't there. Of course, many people are in complete denial as to the root causes too. The truth is sexual attraction is fundamentally based on sexual difference. Save for a slim minority of the population, this is true across the board (yes, even in homosexual relationships). The reason why dating sucks and people can't find partners is because we've attempted to eradicate all sexual difference, but every once in a while human nature overpowers even this, and we see phenomena which our current culture cannot explain but is easily explainable in the larger context of the human condition (for example, the popularity of 50 shades of grey amongst women, or the popularity of 'seduction culture' and the manosphere amongst men).

You talk about 'knowing your place in society' as if that's a bad thing. A lot of social problems today descend from the fact that large portions of the population have no place in society.

Does low fertility correlate with dense urban dwelling and sky high real-estate prices? I suspect it probably does, but I haven't seen any proof.

Maybe this shift to remote-first work that happened over the last 18 months will help....

Or neither. Cities since at least the Roman era have been considered "population sinks". That is, they often maintain or grow their population by attracting surplus population born outside of the city.

As an experiment, if you ever find yourself in a large city like San Francisco, New York, London, or Tokyo, ask around and note what fraction of the residents you meet were actually born in the city.

From a purely financial standpoint, skimming motivated young talent from around the world and then discouraging them from having kids or encouraging them to leave if they do seems like it would be a cheaper approach than raising a native population.

I think this would make cities a bit more "pro-child" than they are currently.

Despite having tens of millions of people and average densities much higher than most cities, they’re both among the most livable cities in the world.

Both of them inherited pre-war street layouts (in Tokyo’s case, despite being bombed, the layouts stayed the same). So neighbourhoods have narrow streets which makes them safer to walk (due to cars needing to drive slowly) and more interesting. And most neighbourhoods have older 2-4 storey or newer 10-20 storey apartments that provide the density to enable local shops and amazing public transit.

So much easier to raise children when you have everything you need within walking distance in the same neighbourhood, including child care.

All that convenience that you see is there because of that fast paced life style people have.

Source: Married to korean and lived in Korea.

Having lived in Toronto, South Korea (Ulsan), and now SF (Sunset), I can’t imagine a better place for a family to live than many neighbourhoods in Korea.

Now that I’ve got a wife, dog, and newborn baby, we needed to purchase a car to get them around (since SF public transit isn’t good enough for this). At least in Toronto we were within a few hundred metres of doctor/dentist/pharmacy, but lacked a walkable grocery store despite being in the city.

There are reasonably nice walkable streets, but in both Toronto and SF the neighbourhood streets are too wide, which results in traffic going way too fast along them. I’ve seen some traffic-calmed streets with artificial barriers and curves but there’s not much.

When I lived in Korea, both neighbourhoods I lived in contained everything I needed, and would have needed if I had a family at the time. And walking around (even with no sidewalks) was a pleasure because cars took the main roads. (Only the delivery scooters were a menace, which I’m sure you were familiar with ).

Of course, this excludes societal pressures, personal finances, etc that affect local Korean and Japanese people.

This is anecdotal, but I've been casually studying urban planning for years to help quantify why I found daily living in Korea to feel so much nicer than anywhere else.

1. Noisy apartments and noisy streets typical for asian megalopolises.If you can afford to live in one of the more quality condos it's better though.

2. Commuting by subway for an 1h with 1-2 stops to change lines is dreadful during peak hours.It's worse than commuting by car from a suburb here in Europe.Michael Wolf's video captures this very well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxZLq3IpYAU

Living in Korea is convenient but not comfortable.

2. I didn't mention commuting because I was referring to living locally within a neighbourhood where you don't have to leave. I didn't commute far (walked to work), and I couldn't imagine commuting with multiple line changes in either Seoul or Tokyo. It was bad enough in Toronto with just a 30 minute commute. (I won't commute ever again due to remote work so it's no longer a consideration for me.)

You're lucky to live in Europe, where the suburbs/non-downtown is much more livable and walkable than North America. In many ways, many European cities have the best of both worlds.

For the entire recorded human history, people have lived in cities just fine.

The problems today are entirely self created and imposed by governments and culture of people.

Take housing, the easiest way to solve the housing crisis in Canada and the US is to build more supply and a variety of housing (boarding homes, multi-family homes, 12-unit condos, mixed housing, giant apartment complexes, studios, micro studios). That would likely alleviate a multitude of problems cities have and probably solve a few others unexpectedly (increasing the tax base, the variety of people that live there, etc).

But walk into any public development meeting you will see a few dozen people force the process to a crawling halt because of a myriad of reasons. The needs of the few now outweigh the good of many.

Or, people now value cities more than they value having more children, leading to depopulation due to replacement rate reduction, rather than people leaving to have more children.

Otherwise, maybe the ‘modern city’ is where cultures go to die.

It's pretty ugly situation inside right now it seems like. Koreans still have the idea that it is a homogenous country and majority of korean is pretty extremely conservative about this new policy obviously, you could easily imagine it's like ticking bomb.

I live in Denmark, a country portrayed as anti-immigrant by American and British media.

However there is no opposition to educated professional immigrants from India, China, Iran and Eastern Europe.

Brain drain of these countries could be a problem but countries like India and Iran are probably producing many more highly educated individuals than they can domestically employ.

You will always be the "foreigner".

Sure, there is some minor "friction" because of my different ethnicity (basically I look white), such as random people first assuming that I am a foreigner, which is completely understandable for historical reasons. I do that myself, whenever I see a white or black person, my first reflex isn't to assume that they are Korean too, there is a 99% chance that they are foreigners. But all it takes is a 10mn conversation for them to know that I am "one of them". I sometimes get puzzled looks from people who have never met someone like me, but that's mainly because most of the population don't even know you _could_ naturalize and become Korean. At the airport, the staff speaks in English to me at first, but as soon as they see my passport they profusely apologize and switch back to "Korean" mode. That's about it.

I do however understand and sympathize with the fact that many foreigners, even long-term residents, might feel the way you described. I am just disputing your claim that it's "impossible" to become Korean.

I personally think because Korean society functions in a very binary way: either you accept everything and take it in as a whole and then can become a member of society, or you just do a few things (such as marrying a Korean person, speaking Korean to a certain level, etc.) and you don't. There are valid reasons to act like that, there is this instinct of jealously preserving Korean culture out of fear that it will be taken over by other giants: China, Japan, the US, etc. And Koreans would rather keep the bad aspects of their culture than risk losing it all. It's just part of the deal, and I think many foreigners have a hard time understanding/accepting this fact.

Only America is a country where you can call yourself American after living there for few years.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Integration-Parado...

To butcher an unrelated saying: "We can't all get immigrants from each other".

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/south-korea-popu...

While it definitely means some reduction and prestige and power, and in some areas scale does provide advantage - in most ways, it's not decline in anything but the 'major shareholders of the economy'.

It's a 'Investor Problem' for the most part.

Japan never needed 180M people to maintain their standard living, so from the average person's perspective it looks different.

Otherwise, it's a little bit of an economic Ponzi scheme.

Of course, 'permanently fewer children' to the point where population goes to 0 - well that's a problem, but hopefully they will mitigate that and find a happy equilibrium.

As for why this is a problem, Japan's pension system is already insolvent and the country is starting to experience massive manpower shortages in sectors like nursing, agriculture and construction. Sometime last year Japan passed the point where the amount of money & effort needed to maintain existing infrastructure exceeded the country's capability to build it, and the depopulation and dilapidation of Japan's second/third tier cities and the countryside is already striking and poised to accelerate rapidly as villages, towns and cities can no longer fund their basic obligations.

Can you share where you found that? I'd like to read more about it

> and the depopulation and dilapidation of Japan's second/third tier cities and the countryside is already striking and poised to accelerate rapidly as villages, towns and cities can no longer fund their basic obligations.

Isn't that a worldwide phenomenon though? Podunk towns can't keep their young people around because there is nothing for them to do and within in a generation or two they fade away. It's sad, but is there even a reason to save those towns?

It's mostly due to political gridlock here, but look at all the crumbling bridges and dams -- the transit that never got built, and the feeling that somehow we are wealthy yet we never have any money for important issues.

Japan's GDP per capita still keeps growing. And the average Japanese still has an excellent quality of life.

Japan also has so many pointless infrastructure projects; things like laying concrete into river beds to control their flows, or retention systems to stop mudslides that only started because they clear-cut forests and replaced them with sugi as a make-work project... The workers are there, if they got rid of the make-work projects.

The Grenadier Guards?

How does it work again?

If shrinking populations are okay, what is the desired population level? Right now no country seems to be able to stop this decrease in the modern/developed world. We are just currently shrinking.

The answer might simply be "we don't know" here.

> Right now no country seems to be able to stop this decrease in the modern/developed world. We are just currently shrinking.

Why is that being treated as inherently bad, though?

We are not making this decision completely willingly, it is more just happening and it is out of the governments control. To me this means it is risky, and can we pull out of it? How do we pull out of this shrinkage?

I guess the good thing is that the developed world is all in this together, rather than only parts of it. That reduces the chance of massive disparities as a result of the changes it causes.

If would feel much more comfortable that we completely understood it, and how to control it.

There will be a lot of changes that will occur. For example conservatives are less effected by population shrinkage than liberals in the US -- probably just because conservatives are less likely to be city dwellers? Or maybe it is conservatives have different values... or a combination of values that effect whether they live in the cities.

Atheists have lower reproduction rates than those who are religious as well. (which probably correlates with liberalism/conservatism as well.)

I wonder if there are any genetic contributions to conservatism/religiousness? If so this may be a period of rapid genetic evolution...

Isn't all this equally true of population growth as well as shrinkage?

The only major time i can think of where there were major depopulation events are in the times of the Fertile Crescent civilizations and perhaps in Asia in Angkor Wat. In both of the scenarios this massive depopulation led to the extinction of those civilizations.

Nah, at least not of this magnitude. The world's population only hit a billion at about 1800, two billion around WWII. We're now at nearly eight. The idea that we understand all the consequences of that is silly; we're only just recently starting to understand the climate change aspect of it.

However the childhood mortality rates have gone down so raw # of children per household could be lower and still have a higher growth rate.

I’m just curious if you considered military concerns since war is a young man’s game as they say.

Robotic war is interesting and specifically drone warefare in my mind is similar to the role carriers played in World War 2 which is having a great cost benefit ratio along with great flexibility on damaging enemy ships and allowing longer range bombing runs. I agree that killer robots would definitely alter the battlefield equation but over the long run I think youth should still get the edge.

Having said all of that based on WW2 technological advantages eventually get countered or erode in a war of attrition with the largest industrial base eventually winning by simple over production and/or reducing the enemy's industrial capacity through strategic bombing of factories / input resources.

Either way in a total war scenario where attrition crowns the eventual winner devising counter measures and other cognitive work in general is easier when workers are <50 since there's measurable cognitive decline after that at least productivity wise. The average age of the Manhattan project scientists was ~24-25.

Additionally, a country needs to be able to simply replace it's productive experienced workers with new workers after it's factories get bombed and having a fatter more numerous population pyramid would definitely help. It's also entirely possible that robotic workers / automated factories get degraded over time due to missing parts when the enemy blows up supply chains or other resources required to get the to full robo productivity.

To sum up my entire argument/assumption youth + more population is robust to the chaos of war.

Make childcare easier. Traditionally people lived in the same town as their parents and in-laws. Now days it is thousands of dollars a month in day care.

Want your kids to go to college? In 18 years that is expected to cost well over 100k for a state school.

Raising kids has gotten more stressful and more expensive, of course people aren't having kids! And those who do stop after one.

Not that I have any good idea for childcare. Real estate prices in cities are so high that opening a day care is not the wisest financial decision. Home day cares are a solution, but licensing and compliance issues abound that can also destroy their ability to stay in business.

Heck in America if I want a care that seats more than 4 (I'm ignoring the "5th" middle seat) I am stuck buying a bloody SUV or minivan. Can't even get a 3 row compact people mover because CAFE rules quite literally ban their existence. So 2 kids is basically has a "get a giant vehicle" tax attached to it. Live in a city? Have fun parking that SUV!

And how about schools? In my city, a house that is zoned to good schools has a 200-300k price premium! Want to move to an area with really good schools? That can become a 500k premium.

Japan has separate issues, if fathers are working 10-12 hours a day and are never home, and women are expected to just stop their careers after having kids, well of course women aren't jumping at the chance to start a family. Raise a kid with an absentee husband? No wonder that isn't going over well.

tl;dr life is too expensive. We've created a society that does not promote having children or having a family. Everything down to our underlying infrastructure is anti-family.

The reason why the birth rate strangely low, is quite interwoven. TL;DR: People (think they) are not capable enough to raise a child.

First: Real estate prices is skyrocketing. This bizarre phenomenon began in the 2000s. The 17th administration completely reversed the situation, which became another problem, and the 18th administration made real estate prices to soar again. The 19th (present) administration tried to control real estate prices with complicated regulation, but it never worked so far.

Second: An educational craze. 386(1960s) and X(1970s) generations believe that children should go to the prestige university to survive in this harsh world. So they let their children go to 'hagwon'[1], something like cram school but really competitive. E.g. (a) Almost students in SK go to hagwon. (b) Some 6th~9th grade students study 10AM~10PM everyday in hagwon during the vacation, to pass an enterance exam specialized high school(10th~12th grade). (c) Some kindergartens promotes themselves as "English Kindergarten"; where every teacher and student speaks English. The problem is -- because of these craze, a lot of childless family concern that they can't afford expenses for hagwon($300~400/mo in average. In the case of the above-mentioned entrance exam, It goes more than $1000/mo) so their child won't be happy because they'll fall behind when they grow up.

Third: Saving for retirement. Because of these problem, rearing child in Korea costs an arm and a leg. In the past, education was not overheated like this, and Korean-specific mindset forced family to give birth. However, starting with military administration's birth control policy, people changed their mindset, and now a significant number of people are more interested in saving for retirement than give birth.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagwon

Hungary gives life time tax exemption to mothers of 4 children, and may lower that to 3.

It's too early to tell if it's working.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/04/baby-bonuses-f...

You want more families? You need to unashamedly celebrate your nation and culture.

South Korea has invested billions in trying to have its fertility rate increase by giving incentives to couples, it has only worsen.

We must get to the idea that it will be almost impossible in the developed world to get back to a fertility rate above 2.

Ectogenesis can be one of the solution.

1. Find a young woman

2. Make her happy, and confident in you

3. ?

4. Pull your family for the next 30-40 years

With all respects, I always seen a family as a man's responsibility, and a failure at creating/maintaining one to coming from man's deficiencies first.

In virtually every human culture in the world, even matriarchal societies, it is by default that a man needs to put more effort than a woman to score a marriage. It is very deeply ingrained into human culture.

A man can always always find another woman if one does not want a family with him up until mid-thirties. A lot of time.

And yes, I really want to have a family, and I really want to work hard to have one.

It really sucks for bachelors. Unmarried people in most of Asia effectively lost 2 years of their reproductive life, and probably will lose at least 1 more year.

It's completely incorrect to think that China had any much of normal life after quarantine succeeded. Last 12 months was a life in constant paranoia, extreme social unease, and daily life disruptions from periodic Covid breakthroughs.

Best of luck in your search for a wife. As a married man with kids, starting a family is the most wonderful thing. I feel terrible for young men and women during COVID, it's just a terrible human tragedy created by the government. IMO, dating should have been considered an essential activity. It would have been good for restaurants and the economy and young people. Tell the married people with kids to stay home while the young people can all go dance it up and get hitched. It's foundational to society.

If you filter out the overweight, tattoo-covered ones, having kids by another man etc. you are left with just a few percent though.

The higher up you are on the social ladder, the quicker are the spouses taken from the marriage market.

I was fortunate to go into somewhat prestigious highschool back in Russia. The last 3 bachelors from my class are all the people who managed to get it abroad.

Everybody else was gone by mid-twenties, anybody with higher education by 23 at most.

Seeing an unmarried woman with PhD level education, job, own roof over her head, and no skeletons in the closet over 30 in Russia is likely a hallucination. In Canada, I met new such almost monthly, and I grew rather rather complacent.

I can imagine this problem solving itself on some timeline if that is the case e.g. people with a strong desire to have children have more kids, their genes are more prevalent while people inclined to have fewer kids sort of select themselves out of the gene pool by having 1 or 0 kids. This seems to me entirely possible, as I know genes can code for basically any arbitrary behavior, but I'm not an expert.

If there is any genetic contributions, then this will be under intense selection pressure.

Maybe this is why religion has survived so long? It tends to our reproduce the non-religious?

They'll have to unite with North Korea eventually. Make of that what you will.

I don't know. United Germany was still within living memory when reunification happened, and it cost a huge amount to integrate East Germany, even though they had a functional society and industry. For example, Zeiss Jena (East German) camera lenses were competitive with those from the west. That would be like North Korea making good phones in the modern day.

Also, there are non-economic factors at play, too. For example, South Korea could grandfather in North Korea's nuclear arms.

The carrying capacity of the planet earth would like to have a talk with you.

Continuing exponential population growth is obviously not a sustainable path forward. At some point, The world's economies are going to have to realign to a flat population and will have to adapt to the demographics there of. And if humanity does not choose not to do so, at some point in the future, the choice will be made for us.

Population growth is not a requirement for economic growth, it is just one of the laziest ways to move the dial up.

Yes, by 2100, the population might be all the way down to where it was in 1980.

Also, at some point, South Korea and North Korea may settle up, much as West Germany and East Germany did, and for much the same reasons.

Black Death, Mongols, world wars, not even intentional genocides managed to inflict this level of population loss. And it's met with yawns and shrugs, as if it's unavoidable like gravity.

And no - people's desire to have children hasn't dropped all that much:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility...

https://www.oecd.org/els/family/SF_2_2-Ideal-actual-number-c...

https://qz.com/africa/1881468/how-fast-is-africas-population...

But current trends never continue forever. In large part because we like to avoid disasters.

Women have many options/entertainment now and don't want to go through pregnancy especially multiple times. This coupled with fact that you have only 10 years for childbearing (before 40) and you drastically cut carrier advancement when it just started explains a lot IMO. Requiring two people to support family in XXI century feels like a scam and race to the bottom. It's mostly due to scarcity of land that you have to bid on housing (that owned by too rich people in many cases, so they literaly can manipulate market to extract rent) and all profitable activity moved to cities so you also want bw there.

Make housing cheaper => I think will happen with decentralisation of energy sources and cheaper transport (tesla). Also some family friendly social policies (china?).

I think remote work made a lot of people choose to live in houses instead and this might lead to some positive change in demography.

But the cheapest way IMO is to just make families trendy via Hollywood (instead of this homo propaganda on Netflix)

Lois Bujold explored this subject - and, specifically, the socioeconomic and cultural implications - thoroughly in her Vorkosigan series, although it is referred to as "uterine replicator" there. And she is a married woman with children, so it's not exactly an abstract subject matter for her.