the shrinking european population

Alternatively, I think we should hide his playstation.

If Capitalism requires an ever expanding population to work then what effect is China's one child policy going to have on its economic future? How is China to avoid a rapidly ageing population once this works through system? And how will they pay for it?

Capitalism requires growth in output not population, although the easiest way to achieve this is an expanding productive base. See Deep economy by bill mckibbe, will report back when I have finished reading.

How will a shrinking working age population support an expanding elderly population? +increased longevity - older-longer. And unlike Japan won't this be a quick process due to implementation of one-child policy?

Will China need to increase immigration by 2015 to underpin its economy?

They have all this new-fangled machinery and production lines and stuff which means that one working person can actually produce enough stuff for a whole bunch of non-working people. Hope I'm not blowing minds here.

It depends how expensive the elderly are too. China may not have to divert much resources into caring for old folk, in which case it shouldn't make much difference (though this may not be plausible in 50 years' time, when the one-child policy has worked fully through a couple of generations and the elderly massively outnumber whippersnappers). The reason why ageing is such a big problem in Europe is because the elderly as presently treated are so expensive - raise retirement age to 70+, or remove state pensions, and the problem goes away.

China will likely have to divert more resources into caring for old folk than it has in the past, where it was traditionally the children’s duty to look after their ageing parents. The one-child policy has made it much more difficult to do that where there's just the one child rather than several to help out. So the taboo of offloading them Western-style may well change.

It depends how expensive the elderly are too.

This seems only one half of it. While the costs of the elderly spread across a shrinking working age population are one thing - isn't the other side that are a rapidly expanding section of population is now non productive? That in effect there are less productive people

Or to ask a slightly different question - are there similarities with Japan at the mid-late 1980s?

fewer

or maybe less. hmmmmmmmmmm.

And with much of China undergoing rapid suburbanization how many of the China's new old are going to be in inefficient locations?

aw man i didn't know sweden needed to reproduce six years ago. i would have gone over to help

that's the kind of nice guy i am

Lars Needs Women

It depends how expensive the elderly are
isn't the other side that are a rapidly expanding section of population is now non productive?

Yes, the two usually go hand-in-hand. But you could in theory have an enormous elderly sector that wasn't a burden at all, e.g. if retired people had sufficient savings to pay their own way (though even that would have a big effect on resources in that e.g. people would work in nursing homes instead of making stuff. There would probably be massive inflationary and interest rate distortions too because of so much cash sloshing about).

I guess the US is probably quite close to being such a society - but Europe (and I'm guessing Japan) certainly isn't such a place, as the generous pension settlement hasn't been properly revisited other than recent erosion by inflation (e.g. when pensions were introduced, the average worker lived something like six months as a pensioner - nowadays it's probably twenty years or more). It's all very nice, but someone's got to pay for it. The only way round the problem would be to leave the elderly outside in the snow every winter, or raise retirement ages to more sensible and affordable levels. I really don't see why people should be compulsorily retired at 60 any more.

What was said up there ^ about Chinese traditions of caring for the elderly would seem to put it in the Europe/Japan camp - even if there aren't generous pensions as such, the fact is that masses of otherwise-productive resources will have to be devoted to caring for them. It's a really interesting question. I read a convincing paper that argued that Ireland's last fifteen glorious years is largely explained by the reverse process - that the liberalisation of contraception there in the 80s, and resultant decline in fertility, freed up so many resources that had previously been devoted to childcare that the result was an unprecedented ecpnomic boom.

I think China is definitely on the Japan route. Europe is too at the moment, but Europe I would think should be in less difficulty as:
- Europe's problem is at base failure to adequately reproduce, which is or should be fixable
- China's problem will be inability to adequately reproduce due to gender imbalance, which isn't
- If that doesn't work, Europe can attract immigrants by virtue of being richer, and can certainly integrate them to a reasonable extent (including lots of East Asian women, which I suspect is the biggest unnoticed migration in history - who knows how willing China will be to attempt this? Japan certainly hasn't really shown any appetite for it
On the other hand, as regards sources of immigration, the demographic projections for places like Saudi Arabia or Yemen are astronomical, and I'm not convinced that counting on bringing in millions of Saudis in due course is very clever. I don't know what Europe's reproduction problem is, but sorting it out pronto would seem to be a pretty good idea.

Capitalism requires growth in output not population, although the easiest way to achieve this is an expanding productive base. See Deep economy by bill mckibbe, will report back when I have finished reading.

-- Ed, Monday, June 9, 2008

Wanted to come back to this. I don't agree.

If money is a...promise of labor, and borrowing is s promise of labor in the future, then this is a transfer of wealth from young to old. We borrow today what will be paid back in the future. By the next generation

You are saying that the next generation does not need to be larger in number, increased efficiency and technological advances mean that as long as output increases it doesn't matter if it is from fewer people? But I don't see this. Plus this would require that output growth must continue to grow to pay for all that has already been borrowed plus what must be paid for today, exponential growth from finite resources. A whole other problem

Going back - this is what I don't really get. At all times during the period of capitalism, the demographic graph has had significantly more people in the younger bands than in the older bands, there have always been more young people to pay what has gone before. Money can be borrowed into existence with the assumption that the future will have more people to effectively pay that off in addition to their own costs.

Bus this is no longer the case. It isn't just that the generation below is smaller, or even if it were only marginally smaller. The rise in borrowing over the last 25-45 years is predicated on there being more people in the age bands below to pay it back. But there are not more people to pay it back, even with immigration. An ageing population isn't just more elderly people to support, the generation below is not large enough to pay the debts of the generation above, this hasn't happened before. Isn't the system reliant on a demograph with the highest number of people in the lowest age bands.

A growth in output without a growth in population might be a good idea but I don't see how this is a necessary component of capitalism when it has never happened

^^^whose sockpuppet is this?

You lost the right to ask that question a looooooong time ago.

Flip it round the other way if there are more people but they are less productive so that they produce less output than is required to pay for the output bought forward then you are just as fucked. You need growth in output and it doesn't matter where it comes from, but if there is a demographic shift to a a population where fewer are productive then the productive portion has to get more productive or we are all fucked.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53409521

As a result, the researchers expect the number of people on the planet to peak at 9.7 billion around 2064, before falling down to 8.8 billion by the end of the century.

Japan's population is projected to fall from a peak of 128 million in 2017 to less than 53 million by the end of the century.

Italy is expected to see an equally dramatic population crash from 61 million to 28 million over the same timeframe.

They are two of 23 countries - which also include Spain, Portugal, Thailand and South Korea - expected to see their population more than halve.

https://www.denofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/communications.jpg

There’s no global issue less important to me than population decline.

Just gotta make sure I know how to debug my robot carer in 40 years.

silby otm.

this is, AFAICT, the opposite of a problem (except that state responses will likely be Bad)

If you want people to have more children, you have to give them help with childcare, housing, services. Not complicated.

If your tax base is reliant on new workers to fund the retirement of the old, then it’s immigration.

If you refuse to do either, well, I can’t say I feel sorry for you. I only feel sorry for younger people tasked with funding the retirement of older people who hate both them and the immigrants making up the rest of the workforce and will probably continue voting for further and further right parties.

I'm Doing My Part

elon musk should design a car that just buys itself.

lol

There’s no global issue less important to me than population decline.

I mean who should I tell to have a baby? What I mean is sure let’s react to it but not by telling people to have babies.

Isn’t one of your big things that ppl should have fewer kids???

Not to mention potential climate ramifications for dramatically decreased human population

Clearly it will have some effect but boosting fertility is an outrageous policy goal. Fertility declines with increased heath, childhood survival, prosperity, and workplace achievement of women, and so forth, and that’s perfectly fine.

I never said “people should have fewer kids”.

I do not have a globally antinatalist/eugenicist policy in mind when I post about having children being morally hazardous or whatever.

It’s just totally bizarre to me that every time I read this story (and it gets published about six hundred times a year) there’s much handwringing from various social scientists about how to boost (white!) fertility in developed countries lest economic decline and an unsustainably agèd population settle on a nation state. Ending capitalism seems easier than pestering barely-prosperous young people to have 3+ children when they could be playing video games or whatever.

i thought this bump was about elon musk's newer tweet about being concerned about population decline which i took to mean something something about grimes not paying enough attention and he already has a flamethrower so whatever.

also gyac otm as well. like who is paying and supporting all these people to produce for you?

Croatia due to lose half its population by 2085

https://www.populationpyramid.net/croatia/2100/

Bulgaria already lost a quarter of its population since 1990