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Japan's 18-year-olds at record-low 1.06 million on falling births (www.japantimes.co.jp)

submitted 10 months ago by boem@lemmy.world to c/world@lemmy.world

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[-] ahnesampo@sopuli.xyz 37 points 10 months ago

It’s not fewer people that’s the problem, but fewer people too fast. A society needs labor to provide the goods and services people need. If the share of people who do labor (working age) to people who don’t (children and the elderly) becomes too lopsided, the burden on those who work becomes unsustainable. (The Boomers had the opposite: they had a smaller older generation and didn’t have many children, so during their prime years the working age population was much larger than dependants on both ends of the age pyramid. That’s part of the reason why they were so prosperous.)

Going by total fertility rate (children per woman):

2.1 is enough for replacement. No problems.
1.8 means every generation is 10 % smaller than the previous. We can deal with that.
1.5 means every generation is 25 % smaller than the previous. This starts to cause problems.
1.0 means generation size halves every generation. This is not sustainable.
0.8 RIP South Korea

[-] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 20 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

If the share of people who do labor (working age) to people who don’t (children and the elderly) becomes too lopsided, the burden on those who work becomes unsustainable.

Except that raising children requires more time and resources than caring for elderly. So having less children frees up more resources to care for the elderly. Into the next generation there are now less people which require even less resources which means you need fewer workers to produce those resources.

History provides evidence for this. After every major war there were economic booms. This is despite wars killing off the able bodied workers leaving only the sick and elderly.

The only people who suffer from a lower population are the ownership class. They live by skimming a little of the productivity off of every worker.

[-] droog_the_droog@lemmy.world 17 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Except that raising children requires more time and resources than caring for elderly.

Source on this? Doesn't sound right at all. According to my findings after a quick search, LTC (long-term care) takes a significantly higher fraction of OECD countries GDP than e.g. childcare+early education.

https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/PF3_1_Public_spending_on_childcare_and_early_education.pdf

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/cb584fa2-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/cb584fa2-en

[-] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

I'll dig up more sources but you compared public spending on childcare (which is minimal in the US) to private long term care costs.

The average cost to raise a child to age 18 is $310,000.

https://www.investopedia.com/how-much-to-save-for-college-4782579

[-] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 6 points 10 months ago

The average cost to raise a child to age 18 is $310,000.

How many days of intensive care is that? The resources we spend trying to keep dying elderly people around just a little bit longer are insane.

[-] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago

How many days of intensive care is that?

End of life care averages $80,000

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-193X(22)00176-4/fulltext

[-] Neato@ttrpg.network 4 points 10 months ago

After every major war there were economic booms.

Need citation for this. War is a net negative every time. War destroys resources and kills people. This leads to a labor shortage. It also destroys property so it leads to housing crisis and famine.

Except that raising children requires more time and resources than caring for elderly. So having less children frees up more resources to care for the elderly. Into the next generation there are now less people which require even less resources which means you need fewer workers to produce those resources.

That is a death spiral. You can consider the labor involved with caring for the elderly a sort of tax on labor. It's a net drain but required and is directly related to previous generations of labor. The labor involved with raising children is similar but is closer to an investment. The more labor done for raising children, the more labor there will be next generation. Even though the labor for children is higher than the labor for the elderly, it results in a net positive.

If you have vastly fewer children in the following generation, you end up with a higher percentage of elderly labor compared to the labor pool. If the labor for children goes down enough to more than make up for it, you don't have a per capita labor deficit. BUT you do have less total labor.

Now we get into the real issue: maintaining society. It isn't just about the labor to care for each other. But technology, infrastructure, food, etc all need a certain amount of labor. And most of these tasks are scalable so it requires less labor per capita as population increases. If you shrink your labor pool too quickly, you won't be able to sustain your infrastructure causing a collapse.

[-] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Need citation for this.

Napoleonic Wars, WW1, WW2. Not even including the US, Russia, China and Japan all had explosive growth after WW2.

War is a net negative every time.

If a sudden drop in working age labor causes a death spiral, then Russia would have had a death spiral after WW2. Instead they had a boom and put a man in space before the US.

The labor involved with raising children is similar but is closer to an investment.

It's not an investment because at the end of a child's growth, you now have a consumer who requires more resources. When an elderly dies, that frees up resources for everyone.

The Black Plague is a accepted factor for the Renaissance. Labor became more valuable. The death of so many workers allowed the surviving workers wages to increase and they got more independence. It wasn't a death spiral.

BUT you do have less total labor.

Total less labor isn't a problem when you don't need more labor.

If you shrink your labor pool too quickly, you won’t be able to sustain your infrastructure causing a collapse.

WW2 was a far quicker and far more severe labor pool shrinkage for many countries in the world. There was no collapse.

[-] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 3 points 10 months ago

It's not an investment because at the end of a child's growth, you now have a consumer who requires more resources.

You realize working people produce more resources than they consume, right? If they didn't, there would be no economy at all.

[+] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 0 points 10 months ago

[deleted]

[-] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 1 points 10 months ago

Dude, where do you think our food, housing, and consumer goods come from? Your cynicism has overshot so far you're just denying the existence of the world around you.

[-] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Dude, where do you think our food,

People make products to sell to other people. When we build more homes than we have people to buy, prices go down.

When there is more capital in the market than things to buy, people put it into investments which raises prices on those investments.

1946 US wasn't a post-apocalyptic hellscape because we only had a population of 140 million and 1 million of the most able bodied workers were killed/wounded.

Your cynicism has overshot so far

I'm not the one claiming a population decline is a death spiral.

Japan is still so overcrowded that there are train conductors who jobs is to physically smash the riders into the train because there isn't enough room.

https://imgur.com/gallery/cq7aBfT

It is my opinion that like natural predator-prey-food cycles, when population declines enough that regular people can again afford to have children like they did after WW2 because wages were high and real estate was cheap, population will go up again.

[-] tacosanonymous@lemm.ee 4 points 10 months ago

I think that’s slippery slope or presumptive, at best. Birth rates shift and flow and there will always be people that have kids.

I have more respect for people that see the trend and don’t want to create wage slaves.

If governments addressed real issues instead of maximizing corporate interests, they might create a stable birth rate.

this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024

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