I always hear people talking about how disastrous a falling population is. But I visited Japan last year which has had a falling population for a while and was in a long term recession for decades, since the 80s.
I gotta ask, is that what “bad” looks like?
Because I thought it was a pretty amazing experience and society did not seem like it was crumbling.
I understand they have their problems as a country (so do we all), but if Japan is a future indicator, I’d say we don’t really have to worry about falling pop too much?
The population of the US, while still weighted toward cities, is for now still considerably more diffused. Even so, I’ve already seen some of the effects in my tiny rural hometown which has seen its population cut in half in the past decade and change since I moved out. The only reason it’s hanging on at all is because of the major highway running through it and because it’s one of the only places to get essentials (grocery stores etc) in the larger area which pulls in residents of surrounding towns, which are even more depopulated.
A lot of Japan is getting abandoned, Akiya (abandoned buildings) are becoming more prevalent, small communities are dying out as the younger generations are forced to move to the larger cities like Tokyo to get a good living, which leads to death spirals.
And then there's the age groups skewing, as less people are born and more people reach the point where they're dying but not fast enough, who's left to take care of the older generations, or who pays taxes to maintain their quality of living?
In 2022 the population across 47 prefectures fell over 800k [1].
Sure, immigration can help combat the issue somewhat, but Japan is a homogeneous society, and at some point you'll end up having more "foreigners" than natives if you don't properly combat the internal decline in numbers.
You ask, is that what bad looks like? I gotta ask, what would constitute bad enough if not the death of all those communities that make the country. Tokyo isn't Japan, all the prefectures and the smaller towns are what make Japan Japan, and as they slowly die out, so does a big part of their culture that so many people love and brings in so much tourism and millions to consume their media, food, fashion and more.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/26/japan-populati...
That sounds like a good thing, from an ecological perspective.
There is a long lag between below-replacement fertility and actual population decline. Because of how compounding growth works and the length of human lifespans, sub-replacement fertility won't result in population decline (for a previously fast-growing country) until 40+ years after the fact. Japan is only just now seeing the effects of lowish fertility from the 70s and 80s.
Note that one of the other consequences of population math is that if a country has been previously declining in population for a while, it'll continue to decline for decades even if the current fertility rate is at or slightly above replacement rate. This means that population decline is essentially an inevitability for most East Asian and European countries for the next several generations.
None of us knows what will happen when populations are falling by 5%+ per decade which is now the inevitable future of many countries the next few decades..it's totally unprecedented in human history (excluding cases like war/disaster).
The article actually doesn't make much of a case for its claim about America being ill-suited to handling a declining population and it doesn't actually examine other countries and how they've coped.
In the US, if the federal government wants to put similar programs in place, in many ways they’re at the mercy of the states. Certainly out of 50 states some will be cooperative, but even that is subject to rotations of state politicians. This means that any measures to counter depopulation are going to be spotty in the short term and unstable in the long term, greatly limiting efficacy.
Japan's economy has stagnated and declined, so too have real wages. Many Japanese people can't afford to enjoy or even spend time seeing the things you saw on your vacation in their own country.
Small towns can choose to go it alone, but a system of carrots and sticks crafted by the central government makes it a costly proposition. “This utter despotism will only kill off towns and villages,” groused one group of local officials.
Exactly how the decision to merge is made can be a bit murky. Some municipalities hold public referendums, but local officials are free to ignore the results. Other municipalities don’t even bother with a vote.
Among the factors towns use in choosing a mate are proximity, shared history, and whether the prospect’s job base, hospitals and shopping are desirable.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-aug-07-fg-merge...
This is such an easy to solve problem. If only we would decide to solve it.
There is no need to be glib. The United States already has the world’s most generous immigration policy. And, what is likely the most lenient stance towards illegal immigration and foreign labor of any developed nation.
A generous policy would be to make the process simple for individuals that are able to work and contribute on their own. That is not the case.
I don’t think people truly appreciate the sheer number of people who are trying to emigrate. If I may, which European country do you belong to? I invite you to compare your own nation’s legal emigration numbers and procedures to that of the US. I suspect you’ll find that the barrier to entry is even higher.
As for generosity, here is some information from Wikipedia: “In absolute numbers, the United States has by far the highest number of immigrants in the world, with 50,661,149 people as of 2019.[1][2] This represents 19.1% of the 244 million international migrants worldwide, and 14.4% of the United States' population.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...
I'm just saying, if we need more people, we know where to get them.
If we really want to address population decline, we have to reverse the reasons people are choosing to have fewer children. Which starts with policies aimed to give child-bearing aged adults better financial stability, affordable housing, and support -i.e. easily available, non bank breaking childcare (perhaps even free childcare), improved income / decreased expenses to make it easy to have financial security while also having extra bedroom(s) for kids, and longer, paid parental leave.
Whereas the existing housing crunch, continued downward pressure on median and lower incomes, bare minimum parental leaves, and high cost of childcare in the US discourages and delays a lot of people from having children.
* The people who immigrate have declining TFR after a couple of generations, if not in the first generation.
* The rest of the world has declining TFR.
So hey, you might gain a couple of generations, but maybe not even that much. Populations all over the world are rapidly gaining in education and, with it, undergoing the "demographic transition" -- later entry into the work force and much lower TFR.
(And, personally, I think it would give us much more than a couple generations.)
* Everything I'm reading about education in North Korea indicates it is actually fairly intensive.
* A trend or tendency admits of exceptions, so finding one or two exceptions doesn't answer the trend.
Further even when you let people in they most likely live and work which are already crowded because thats where opportunity will be. They are not going to live in ghost towns of America that article refers.
I didn’t see any good argument how we’re worse than the rest of the world, especially compared Germany, Japan, South Korea, and China. Ghost cities will not be unique to the US.
But the US for all its faults is very good at assimilating its immigrant population. Everyone in the end becomes mostly American. No other country manages to do that nearly as well. Not countries in Europe and definitely not China or Japan.
So that means the US will have a softer landing in the transition to a post-growth economy.
...or a Great Depression...
This Tower of debt-Babel has been a century in building. The resources[1] and ideals are present. The rot at the top is the challenge. If America is "exceptional", then another exception will be thrown, and we'll struggle onward.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Superpower-Ten-Years/dp/15...
I'm not confident enough to say this is obviously wrong. I am fairly confident in saying it is almost certainly oversold. "Uniquely ill-suited," per the headline, reeks of bullshit.
Like a third of Mormons leave the church. Ditto for Catholics. Probably similar for the rest, but I haven't looked up all the statistics.
I'd go so far as to wager that in America today most non-believers come from religious households, with second-generation-non-believers in the minority.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews (Hasidic/Haredi) and Old Order Amish have very high retention rates, by some measures >90%.
Mainstream Catholicism has very poor retention rates – there is a quip that ex-Catholic is one of America's largest religions. However, if we look at highly conservative/traditionalist groups like Opus Dei or SSPX, the retention is much better (although I don't have exact figures).
Mormons are definitely showing signs of transitioning from growth to decline, at least in the US. However, given other religious groups I mentioned appear to be avoiding that, it may be more a story of mistakes of the Mormon leadership than anything else.
Do you want Idiocracy[0]? Because that's how you get Idiocracy
