It's not like Japan deteriorated into some extreme poverty because of it, right?
So maybe it's not that bad, "to be in decline" (in population number, or related GDP), as we are meant to believe?
I think it's a little too early to draw conclusions. Japan reached their peak population in about 2010, and the decline since has been mild.
> ...pretty painful.
How will the subjected population notice that you reckon? Prices change, sure, but many of us on earth also live in a lot more luxury than 200 years ago: so we have some fat on our bones.
If an economic system works so poorly for people they have to be imported (I.e. locals who want to form families can’t) it should be dismantled.
I care about “global capital” far less than I care about my compatriots ability to form strong families. We should absolutely be worried by terrible birth rates.
Interesting thought. The notion that GDPpopulation has to grow comes comes from that economic system. The problem is that the economic system dictates policy to such a large extend that democracy is a farce.
> I care about “global capital” far less than I care about my compatriots ability to form strong families.
+1
> We should absolutely be worried by terrible birth rates.
Why? What's the daily life/ human problem with becoming less humans? (I know the economic GDPpopulation reason, and I know why militarily that IS very important)
Most of developed countries have bad fertility rate, some developing and/or poor countries have good fertility rate. People in rich countries don't have children not because they can't afford to, but because they don't want to.
It’s that people stopped wanting kids. How silly of me. We undid all the evolutionary programming of our species to play XBox and rent.
…or it’s that the system is broken and we should cease importing people because the only people that “win” in that situation are those connected to global capital.
Did you somehow miss word "Spain" in the title and immediately proceeded with US-specific rant?
Additional info from Wikipedia[0]:
> As of 2020, according to the World Economic Forum and to Bloomberg, Spain has the most efficient health system in Europe, and also ranks at the top worldwide along with Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore.
> Due to universal health care coverage, inequality is reduced substantially. Inequality in Spain is even further reduced in that co-payments do not usually apply, limited to special medicines and services that are not covered by the National Health System.
And yet socialist Spain has fertility rate of 1.3 compared to 1.7 of dystopian capitalist-driver privatized-healthcare-only US [1]. I'm sure everyone buying a house every year and enjoying even better health care in such countries as Niger, Chad and Somalia that somehow on top of the fertility list though.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Spain
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
your solution requires a dismantling of the entire global system of governments and economies and the implementation of something new and poorly tested. which may be in our future regardless, and may be necessary at some point. but massive change on that scale only happens in response to horrifying levels of war or unpredictable changes in technology(changes on the scale of a power positive fusion revolution). You either dont want or cannot force those things.
the immigration solution is a stop-gap and still a big change for most, but one that buys nations 40+ years and is no harder than simply opening the door that millions are banging on right now, and billions will be banging on as climate disaster grows.
So the system we currently have, which we already agree is failing people here, but we’re worried changing the system is bad?
Why take 40 more years if it’s already failing?
Letting millions of people in is NOT GOOD for the people already here. I say we just don’t do that.
The only people benefitting are part of a global capital class and not regular workers. We were sold that it would bring worldwide peace and better living conditions. It was a lie and we know it - why continue?
I have the same sentiment. Though I take that "reflection" means that it was the economic model we live in/under is what gave rise to the "population growth concerns".
That's part of why it's so hard to think of alternatives from within this model.
Anyway, the problem is not the current decline in population, it is a fertility rate that remains far below a replacement rate. That means there is no bottom to the population decline. The immigration solution would need to be applied again and again.
The only reason I still don't have a kid is expensive housing (i.e. too many people for too little space). My partner is more or less tied to the capital because of her job and our apartment literally (and I mean literally) can't fit one more desk, much less one more person.
A population decline (with the society kept running by more automation) should make things a bit easier, shouldn't it?
For the global liberal capitalism, the only way it can maintain its egalitarian promise is for it to rely on infinite growth. You can promise to the exploited that they will have even more people to exploit in the future if they keep their head down and stick with the status quo for long enough. It’s starting to hit external limits given by the environment, and available space only recently.
Meanwhile, some societies are aging and doing fine. The economy can be fine tuned to prioritize basic needs, and sustainably supply the people regardless of their age. For example automation in agriculture means that we’ll need less and less people to produce food. UBI is just one tool that could be useful here.
Immigrants (at the scale Spain needs) don’t want to move to a shrinking economy. Spaniards themselves are leaving the country to look for work. As an example, Central American immigrants will immigrate through multiple low growth countries specifically to get to the U.S. for work.
To GP’s point though, I think Spain’s population problems aren’t all that related to dense apartments and more tied to economic opportunities.
Also, the healthcare options, the lack of violence even at night (relatively, every city has its 'bad zones' but even with that it's far safer) and the welfare state makes their lives a paradise compared to, for instance, a hell zone in the Dominican Republic or narcozones in Mexico.
importing large groups of people sometimes works; we did it pretty well in America because we had so much room to grow. transportation and communication were also much harder, so it was less easy for people to maintain ties to their former country and family there; they adapted a little more, though ethnic ghettos were still a problem.
it's not an intractable problem but saying "just get immigrants bro" isn't really a good solution. we are sometimes biased in the US because we are selective (too much so, I think). we bring in the best from high-population areas like Africa and India and we see benefits for that. on the other hand, while migrant working and a moderate level of illegal immigration are fine and even economically beneficial, it would be silly to deny that the current levels are causing severe problems. when you lose that selectivity and control, things don't turn out so well. and to import enough people to make up for falling birthrates we would have to broaden our horizons beyond skilled workers.
I am not, i am acting like immigrating literally anybody is going to be massively better than a declining population. If they live in a country, they are paying for housing, food, and services, and almost certainly have a job. taxes on top of all of that. I think the attitude of being picky is fine and wise, right now, but eventually you are really going to just want anyone instead of going inverted.
High-skill immigrants are almost always a big win for the host country because of the things you cite, and more (they bring innovation). Low-skill/low-education ones are a crapshoot. It's better to have an inverted population pyramid than deal with all the social ills that come from immigrants that cause too many problems.
Europe's struggles seem to be caused more by a culture clash. Immigrants will always bring their way of life with them, and group together - it's a constant of human nature, this is how we preserve identity. Moving to a different country is a traumatic experience when done voluntarily; imagine having to permanently leave home under duress and on short notice.
As an immigrant myself, what always struck me as paradoxical is the nationalist / cultural pride that a lot of immigrants tend to display. I'd sum up my knee-jerk reaction to it as "Bro, if X is so great, why did you leave?" -- again, this is spoken as a person who left their homeland, with first-hand experience of some of the complex issues that surround all that. I still don't quite understand what drives that "flag-waving", but I hope to one day.
Having said all that, I would encourage my adoptive country to be proactive in their immigration policies. Putting it harshly, "get the good ones before they go somewhere else". The geopolitics of the world will only become more chaotic as the impacts of climate change cause hardship in the less habitable areas of the planet -- big migrations are inevitable. If you want your country to arrive in the 22nd century while preserving most of your way of life, you can't be clinging to outmoded ideas.
I'd love to hear some examples where this has caused technological stagnation and blocked skilled migration -- US and Canada provide solid counter-examples to these claims. Both countries take in immigrants at both ends of the economic spectrum, from coveted H1B high-paying tech jobs, to seasonal farm workers who exist in slavery-like circumstances. Both countries show significant, sustained technological innovation.
I agree this is destructive to the social fabric, and it separates us into strata. But I have a hard time believing that immigration is the cause; a simpler explanation would interpret it as one of the symptoms, with the underlying causes being closely related to the relentless transfer of wealth to an ever-shrinking "elite".
A better example might be the low price of labour-intensive hand-picked fruit (particularly berries) in the US and the correspondingly low agricultural automation. It's not that machines don't exist, or that berry picking is going to prevent the next Facebook, it's that they aren't cost effective in the short to mid term even when longer term investment would eventually improve the whole industry. This is really hard to measure and I don't have any good sources for either side of the argument right now.
I also want to make a distinction between skilled and unskilled migration. I don't think skilled migration is harmful to the social fabric in an enduring way, nor migration with the same proportion of skilled and unskilled labour as the host country.
Also an immigrant, and I have observed that some immigrants tend to be become more conservative when they move. Or perhaps they have stopped evolving when their peers in the home country have moved on. I think this might be partly due to dealing with the trauma of displacement, and partly due to lack of diversity in thinking. I have mainly noticed this in a generation older than mine.
The population of prospective immigrants who completed 12 years of education or more is already largely gone, because the fertility rates in countries with this level of development are either already below replacement or on the way to it at a rapid pace.
And you need at least that to contribute to an advanced economy.
Since the early days of humanity, we've relied on children taking care of us in our old age. I haven't seen a solution for that.
Nursing homes are not a solution. I listened to some grim statistics from my state recently. In many nursing homes, the ratio of staff to patients is 6:1. It takes 6 full time employees to take care of 1 patient. Now I'll grant that these numbers were outliers, because the population was challenging - many/most of these patients had dementia, etc. And they were handling rural areas - you'd get better scaling in the city. Still, I'm sure in a major metropolitan area it's at least 2:1.
And that doesn't account for the poor existence in those places (abuse by employees, abuse by fellow residents - you're screwed if you don't have family members advocating for you).
And that's for patients who get to go. Many elderly will have chronic conditions which are bad enough that you can't live alone, but generally not bad enough for Medicare or health insurance to pay for assisted living. Examples are things like mobility issues - only long term health care insurance covers this, and it's way too expensive. I don't own such a policy and likely won't ever be able to afford it.
Maybe we should invent more on robotics and healthcare so elderly people could live as independent as if they were in their 40's.
It's not as if no one thought of what you're saying. I think you don't appreciate how unfeasible it is currently. First off you have economics. Can we make it cheaply enough so that it's available to everyone, and not just white collar folks?
Even putting aside the economics of it, once you start itemizing all the possible ways one would need help, you'll realize you're effectively asking for the equivalent of an intelligent android.
It's way way easier to deal with neutral/slight growth than shrinking. Like take teachers as an example. In an ideal world the demand for them is the same year in year out. Every year X of them will retire and Y new graduates will be hired. In a declining world you need 3% fewer teachers every year so when 3% retire you don't hire new ones. Multiply that across every industry and you have a youth unemployment crisis.
Look in the US? Pressie is near senile, senate is full grey. Not all countries are this bad, but where I live it's similar.
But culturally oldies need more respect?
Your first paragraph is most relevant. The thing about the pressie and senators is only relevant to the miniscule minority of the most powerful people.
now "old folks" in question are demanding a lavish retirement at the expense of me and those who are currently young despite the fact that when they funded something similar for their grandparents, the proportional burden was radically lower. a society that would significantly burden the future of its young (and therefore its own future) to cash out the olds smacks of a ponzi scheme and is hideously distorted.
what's more, elder care sucks dollars from investing in interesting industries (colonizing space, growing our industrial base, new computing technologies) to mindless nonsense. instead, those dollars will go to building bingo halls.
UN article on it here: https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/events/pdf...
The population explosion isn't happening very much, quite the opposite.
(But: it might be pretty “urban” for that matter since some countries have a lot of empty spaces which bring down the population density.)
Spain's economy is very screwed up. Unemployment rate tends to hover above 20% and I think it has the highest rate of students dropping out of basic education.
To top things off, cost of living in urban centers is way way above the median income, specially nowadays. Young families have to make do with either sharing apartments/renting rooms or living way outside city centers in small apartments. In some cases the only affordable option is renting rooms way outside the urban centers.
So the average Spanish couple has to make very hard decisions on if/when to start a family. Quite often the decision tends towards "not right now, we can't afford it."
Marketing brochures tend to emphasize Spain's "terraza" lifestyle, as in people hanging out in cafes/bars/restaurants in the afternoon, evening, and even night, and brag about the fantastic social life that sprouts from there, but the ugly truth is that one important factor of that pattern is the fact that housing is very expensive and very low-quality to the point that staying indoors in one of those flats can have a huge detrimental impact on your mental health, and the only way to avoid that is to minimize the amount of time you spend indoors.
The first claim is true, but there's a lot of under-reported economic activity, and a lot of fraud (people claiming they don't work when they actually do), so the unemployment rate figure can't be trusted.
Your second claim around the highest rate of students dropping out of basic education needs a citation.
I'm sorry, but that's just hand-waving over the problem to pretend it isn't there.
> Your second claim around the highest rate of students dropping out of basic education needs a citation.
I learned that fact because the Spanish Government posts tv ad campaigns on how Spain has the highest rate if students dropping out of basic education, and how they should instead explore options such as pursuing trade education.
If you really are interested on the topic, you could start by checking what OECD has to say about Spain's education problem, including how 27% of its 25-34 yo cohort (i.e., the latest generation entering the workforce) did not complete basic studies and does not have postsecondary education. Spain also boasts a NEET rate of 17%.
https://www.oecd.org/education/education-at-a-glance/
Spain's astronomical dropout rate is not a secret. The issue was even reported in Swedish news outlets.
https://www.thelocal.es/20221003/spain-has-the-eus-highest-r...
It's also noteworthy that Spain's horeca industry started to rely on heavy influxes of immigrants from South America to meet their demand, in spite of Spain having one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe.