"Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies that limit or deny the movement of capable, working-age people from elsewhere to fill local demand. Indeed, none of the existing credible population projections predicts a
decline in the global population."
This seems to weaken the entire paper. The only regions poised for continuing population growth into the second half of this century are in sub-Saharan Africa and maybe Afghanistan [1].
Is the premise here that unlimited immigration into other regions from sub-Saharan Africa will sustain their economies (and other ways of life?) as the local populations decline? I'm extremely skeptical of that.
> "Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies
This does appear to be an admission that labor shortages occur due to lack of workers. The authors propose a solution (immigration) to the problem, but in doing so pretend the problem doesn't exist.
somenameforme · 2h ago
The paper is fundamentally flawed in numerous technical ways also. The most overt is that they are looking at the current state of countries with low fertility rates. The consequences of low fertility lag the onset of low fertility by many decades, but are largely inescapable. Taken to an extreme, if everybody in a country just stopped having children, that country would look, from an economic point of view, excellent for at least a couple of decades.
For a real example, South Korea has a fertility rate of ~0.7 while Japan has a fertility rate of ~1.4. Yet South Korea seems to be doing okayish, while Japan has clearly entered into decline. The reason is because South Korea had a 3+ fertility rate all the way up to 1976, whereas Japan hasn't had a 3+ fertility rate since 1952. Give South Korea a couple of decades and it'll make the Japan of today look like a utopia. For that matter give Japan a couple of decades and it'll make the Japan of today look like a utopia - their decline is still just beginning, as they only hit the current lows in the 90s.
rayiner · 2h ago
> The authors propose a solution (immigration) to the problem, but in doing so pretend the problem doesn't exist
It’s quite remarkable. They assert the problem doesn’t exist by essentially treating a highly debated policy change as inexorable.
loeg · 4h ago
It is a major flaw. Birth rate is falling basically everywhere and below replacement (~2.1) even in places people think of as booming in recent history -- India is at 1.98, South America somewhere around 1.8. It's really just portions of Africa that still have TFR above 2.1 and the rates there are declining over time, too. Immigranting your way of a demographic collapse only works if there are lots of births happening somewhere else.
> Roughly speaking, the bottom 70% of the population receives net payments (and services) from the government over their lifetime, while the 70%-90% percentile receives approximately zero net payments, the top 10% pays it all.
Well, maybe if there was more equal income distribution, less overall penalization to those who do not have as many assets, and so on, then it would be more distributed?
I mean, that is basically what is happening anyway, but you have a nation distributing that wealth through social programs, instead of capitalists sharing their take willingly with those who helped them earn it.
somenameforme · 2h ago
Yip, I'm a advocate for capitalism but there's definitely a bug with interest/investments in that earning money makes it even easier to earn money, even if you do absolutely nothing with your life. Just dump everything in a diversified portfolio and you become an infinite money printer when you reach the point of having enough money that all your expanses are small relative to your capital gains.
This issue radically distorts the concept of who is contributing to society and who is living off the contributions of others.
imtringued · 49m ago
Ok, now go on YouTube and search for root bug, since you're so keen on bugs.
nullc · 2h ago
OTOH that same unequal distribution allows investment and patronage in areas that would otherwise go unfunded, ... some of which goes on to create revolutionary technologies that benefit everyone.
slaw · 5m ago
Africa has TFR 4.1
loeg · 4m ago
For now, yes. It’s trending down, just like everywhere else.
PicassoCTs · 1h ago
The truth is that woman, given a informed choice without societal or religious pressure - would rather not have children. So artificial wombs and AI for raising it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_womb
Is this a good solution? No. But its a foreseeable feasible one that does not involve slavery. Which, lets not kid ourselves, the migration approach is also. Just outsourced slavery.
Of course, societal status and contract-control functions that were allocating resources and value to woman would have to be reevaluated - as what remains is a faction of the population unwilling to contribute anything but terrorist movements trying to take over because that urge for societal control and fear of non-power is to strong.
loeg · 1m ago
I don’t think that’s necessarily true — people have fewer kids than they desire. Addressing that gap would get us to replacement rate. And obviously, the current rate is significantly non-zero.
PlunderBunny · 46m ago
No criticism of you, nor do I want to put words in your mouth, but there seems to be a generalisation to 'all woman' in this argument, and from that an unstated assumption that the only way for humanity to preserve itself is something like artificial wombs/coercion etc. Surely another possible scenario is that the people that aren't interested in having children (or the conditions that make people not want to have children) will 'go away' as the population declines, and we will reach a new stable population level? Who can say which one of these is more likely?
danaris · 13m ago
I can't speak to places outside of the Western Anglosphere, because I simply don't have any information about them—but within it, it's abundantly clear (and there have been some recent studies bearing this out) that a major cause of reduced birth rates is lack of economic opportunity among the non-capital-owning classes.
I 100% guarantee you that if we implemented a full UBI today—one that would pay something close to the median individual income, and even if it were only for adults (and thus you got no "bonus" for having extra kids)—once the initial chaos settled down, you'd see those birth rates go up quite a bit. So many people are waiting to have kids until they're financially stable enough...and then they never become so.
I know that one of the big reasons my wife and I didn't have kids in our 20s was because we were concerned about our financial stability (and frankly, we were better off than most of the people that age today—by quite a ways, since we were homeowners).
raincole · 4h ago
It also means some places on earth have to be kept in poverty or even wars. That's the biggest driver moving people out from their homeland. People who live good, peaceful lives are mostly staying where their are.
It might be a valid strategy and a very likely future, but I hope all the "we will just let immigrants in so don't worry about birth rates" people think about the implications here.
MSFT_Edging · 3h ago
If all this sounds unsustainable, it's because it is.
We're essentially legitimizing a pyramid scheme here. Economics and policy are all centered around extraction and share holder value. I've never seen any attention paid to making an industry stable or resilient.
Nearly every issue we face day-to-day is either due to companies holding massive control over our society, or companies degrading services we rely on because profit is no longer increasing.
We're not allowed a stable, peaceful life in a stable climate because someone else needs to get one over on someone else.
We could provide for everyone but we have decided making immaterial numbers go up is #1 priority.
When I ask why can't we have companies that exist in a steady state, the answer is another company will take advantage if the first company doesn't first. Why do we live like this? Is this system truly responsible for our technology and comfort? or is the comfort a side-product that can be produced by a number of other systems?
We're being played for fools. We all know it, but we can't imagine an alternative because they've got us all by the balls controlling our health care and housing.
(You're right, it is a suboptimal socioeconomic system)
MSFT_Edging · 3h ago
I really appreciate you providing citations for my screed. Thank you.
toomuchtodo · 2h ago
Happy to help. Facts, data, and evidence matters.
HankStallone · 4h ago
Yeah, the open borders folks like to paint a rosy picture of, "If we let a bunch of people come here and work cheap, it'll make things better back in their homelands too as they take their training and wages back sometimes." But if that's true, pretty soon they won't have any reason to come here and work cheap, and then the reason the bosses wanted them in the first place is gone.
I don't think they really expect that to happen (and we can observe that it hasn't); it's just a sales pitch.
AlOwain · 3h ago
So what to you is the alternative better interpretation; that they continue in destitute poverty?
toomuchtodo · 3h ago
As total fertility rate continues to rapidly decline due to educated, empowered women having less kids or no kids, wages will rise globally due to reduced labor supply as prime working labor force cohort compresses. To get to that point, domestic economies with surplus labor need to be stoked with investment (Africa and India) to maximize economic potential until the labor supply constraint is reached.
Why do people have enormous amounts of children when they live in destitute poverty, and why is that the responsibility of somebody else to fix?
GuinansEyebrows · 2h ago
> open borders folks
i don't mean to sound pithy, but some "open borders folks" just fundamentally disagree with the concept of borders (and usually, by extension, the monopoly of violence employed at those borders), regardless of economics.
wat10000 · 3h ago
That does sound like bad news for exploiters, but it sounds like a good thing for people who actually want people to be better off. If open borders means people come, work for cheap, improve their homelands, and eventually stop coming, that sounds like a win-win to me. Are you sure some of the open borders folks aren't thinking like that?
raincole · 3h ago
If rich countries' sustanibility depends on poor countries staying poor, it creates a huge incentive for the rich countries to destablize the poor countries and keep them poor.
Just like the US once destablized its southern neighbors to keep them exporting cheap fruits, if the only thing that keeps the US's pension system from exploding is cheap workers from the neighbors, it'd want them to keep exporting cheap labor.
Of course one might argue rich countries will do that anyway so it's not a concern. It's just icing on a poisoned cake.
dkiebd · 3h ago
The issue here is that nowhere is the wellbeing of the low income natives considered.
wat10000 · 2h ago
Is it not considered, or do they just disagree on the effects? The open borders advocacy I've seen is based on it being good for everyone.
mattlutze · 3h ago
That's an unsupported assertion.
Lots of non-Ukranian Europeans still want to move to the US for example, because there's an idea that in skilled jobs you can make more money in the US.
Likewise, India isn't "kept" in poverty nor is the country at war, but the opportunity for economic prosperity elsewhere is a strong driver for migration. And when India surpasses the US or Europe in economic prospects, the trend will reverse and enterprising people will flock to e.g. Hyderabad and New Delhi.
Economic prosperity, until we do away with capitalism, probably won't ever be homogeneous. Where there's a potential across a circuit the electrons will flow.
nsxwolf · 4h ago
So the assumption is that some populations will always reproduce in sufficient numbers and immigrate, and this just goes on forever and everything’s fine? Those other populations never age and decline?
0xcafefood · 4h ago
That is _one_ assumption.
Another is that immigrants into these countries can and will just plug right into the local economy and be adequate substitutes for the economic effects of the local population decline.
There's everything about a country unrelated to economics that isn't even addressed too that will likely have ... big implications for these countries receiving the mass immigration too. These will likely also affect the economy.
allemagne · 2h ago
The paper explicitly states that global population decline is not being projected.
Obviously that can't be true "forever" assuming that trends never reverse, but their scope is just the "long-term."
carlosjobim · 3h ago
That sums up the ideology: That some ethnicities should continuously replace other ethnicities until the latter group has been genetically exterminated.
jjk166 · 3h ago
Even if global population continued to increase forever, that doesn't mean a particular nation would be able to get those immigrants to come fix their demographic woes. It doesn't matter how easy Moldova makes it for people to immigrate, who is choosing to go there over other destinations just as in need of fresh blood? Countries like the US and western Europe maybe can solve their demographic problems with immigration for the next few decades, that doesn't mean that its a generally viable strategy or that it will keep working in a future world when these nations are well past their prime.
rawgabbit · 3h ago
Below is the entire paragraph. The first part of the paragraph summarized their research that declining populations do not decline in wealth or productivity; instead their Figure 8 shows increases in Wealth, Research & Development, Human Capital etc. The second part of the paragraph is obtuse and ambiguous wording where they advocate for increased immigration and as far as I could tell had no basis on their actual research.
Our results provide a strong evidence-based counter to the politically motivated claim that declining/slow-growing and ageing populations in any way compromise national economic performance, income distribution, productivity, political stability, well-being, or health of its citizens. In fact, such populations generally have the highest socio-economic performance indicators in the world. This result supports the mounting evidence that smaller populations are in fact beneficial to most of society37, in sharp contrast to the unsubstantiated political rhetoric of ‘baby busts’ and an ensuing economic Armageddon1-5. This is because investing in the health, training, and education of workers — especially older, more experienced workers — increases human capital, making the workforce more productive29. Neither is there a basis for an expected penury of working-age people for countries experiencing low population growth or even decline. Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies that limit or deny the movement of capable, working-age people from elsewhere to fill local demand70. Indeed, none of the existing credible population projections predicts a decline in the global population30,37,71-73.
amingilani · 3h ago
> they occur instead because of inadequate immigration
How did they make that assertion?
In the body of the paper immigration policies were not included as a variable in the data, nor were they a part of the statistical analyses. I couldn't find anything regarding labor movement at all. It feels weird that it was just thrown there in the end.
Yoric · 2h ago
Indeed, this specific sentence seems a bit odd.
However, if there is one thing we're not lacking, it's crisis zones, where people are desperate to move away from if given half a chance. Given both the current rate of climate change and the current political climate, this is bound to increase, even after the global population peak.
So I suspect that a lack of migrants willing to resettle to unaffected/less affected regions will not be a problem for the next few decades.
mattlutze · 3h ago
Perhaps you've misread the quote? It and your counter affirm each other.
The quote suggests that there won't be labor shortages in markets that have adequate and adaptive immigration policies, because migration into a country with an aging population is how countries today maintain their labor pools.
That the global population will continue to grow into 2100 supports their assertion that all countries should be more immigration friendly so as to reap the bi-directional benefit of available labor moving into geographies that need workers.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 · 3h ago
> This seems to weaken the entire paper.
It is relative, no? If a nation's population decline isn't as high as another, maybe because of immigration, then they have more human resources? Also, humans tend to migrate?
jjk166 · 3h ago
If everyone around you is starving, it doesn't satisfy your own hunger. Your quality of life depends on absolute production output.
Guthur · 4h ago
It's also extremely exploitative, the premise is actually that we will offload the burden of raising next generations and then effectively steal those that we need to prop up what would naturally be hollowing societies.
HankStallone · 3h ago
Yes, if the process works in the way it's being sold to us, it skims off their smartest, most talented and ambitious people--the people they most need to improve conditions in their own nations.
AlOwain · 3h ago
No one is stealing anything, millions willingly immigrate, they get to live better lives (according to their desires) and the home country gets back increased trade, transfer of capital, tourism, and many other things.
No comments yet
gotoeleven · 4h ago
[flagged]
AnotherGoodName · 3h ago
It's super lightweight and superficial even in full. It's just not a large paper and takes a very superficial view of a lot of high level statistics. You can read through it in full in a few minutes and likely come to the same thought.
>This metric ignores the youth cohort
That's very very significant. They are not looking at population pyramids holistically at all. They are just focusing on part of the pyramid. Are there lots of people >65 compared to those between 16 and 65?
Now here's something to consider. If a population has very few children but many elderly they may actually have a great ratio of working/not-working. This study won't see this at all. Merely, look lots of elderly and they're doing great!!
I suspect the reality may well be that the most successful economies have offset the extra costs of more elderly with far far fewer children. So the elderly are indeed a burden as you'd expect but we're offsetting it with fewer children.
I'd also point out that I'm not convinced the arbitrary cutoff of >65 is correct since western governments are all pushing for retirement ages well above that. As in the worst of the bubble in the population pyramids is yet to fully hit, many in that bubble are still working and the effects of below population sustainment birth rates is also yet to fully hit (we don't yet fully have the narrowest parts of the population pyramids sustaining the widest parts). When it does all hit though it could well be devastating and this really superficial study doesn't reassure me at all.
catigula · 3h ago
>But these fears are frequently based on oversimplified or misapplied interpretations of economic models, and appear to be driven more by political agendas rather than evidence
A razor for people who think like this:
Do you think Japan and Japanese people would have a higher or lower quality of life if they had accepted unlimited sub-Saharan Africa immigration?
This should separate serious people from the not so serious people pretty rapidly.
Pooge · 3h ago
It's not directly related to your post, but Japan has a very significant Brazilian population that live in very specific parts of Japan. Toyota[1], and its prefecture Aichi, are known for having a Portuguese-speaking population and they are, of course, working as cheap labor in automobile industries. In fact, some signs on the road are written in Portuguese, too.
[1] Name of a city
wombatriot · 3h ago
There's a significant number of Japanese in Brazil, and a large portion of the Brazilian population is of Japanese descent. They're called the Nikkei Japanese, and they're predominantly ethnically Japanese.
Pooge · 1h ago
I wonder if there's the stat somewhere but I'm sure a sizeable portion is at least half Brazilian so it makes them a "half"—as Japanese like to say—which they don't tend to regard very highly. It is indeed a marginalized group in Japan and probably why there is such a big community in that area.
carlosjobim · 3h ago
Since Brazil has a very significant Japanese population, that makes me wonder: Are these Brazilians in Japan ethnically Japanese or of other ethnicities?
wombatriot · 2h ago
They're mostly ethnically Japanese Brazilians.
os2warpman · 57m ago
>Do you think Japan and Japanese people would have a higher or lower quality of life if they had accepted unlimited sub-Saharan Africa immigration?
Higher. After a while.
Signed, someone whose ancestors thought the Irish and Italians were subhuman degenerate invaders.
Now that I think of it, I still have living relatives who think the pope is the antichrist and people who follow him are degenerate subhumans.
catigula · 42m ago
So your answer is "higher" with a moral vignette of dubious veracity and applicability.
rokkamokka · 3h ago
Unlimited? Do you think Sub-Saharan Africa would have a higher or lower quality of life if they had accepted unlimited Japanese immigration?
Of course literally unlimited amounts of people is a bad thing. Did you mean unregulated?
catigula · 2h ago
No need to be pedantic, we know that there are physical limits to people that exist. Obviously, we're talking about uncapped immigration.
Regarding your question, it's for you to answer bi-directionally, the result being interrogating hidden information.
thechao · 4h ago
This is the great part about science: whether or not you agree with the authors' conclusions, they just asked the question "is our preconceived 'obviously correct' conclusion actually correct". Then, they dove in to the data and tried to prove or disprove the hypothesis.
I'm still not sure that the local trend of population decline is a long-term indicator; but, there's a bunch of economies along the curve, and things seem fine, for now?
My worry is that this is a railroad fallacy: you can see the train coming, but it's not hitting you now, so everything must be fine in the long-term?
Aurornis · 3h ago
> This is the great part about science: whether or not you agree with the authors' conclusions, they just asked the question "is our preconceived 'obviously correct' conclusion actually correct". Then, they dove in to the data and tried to prove or disprove the hypothesis
Unfortunately it also shows the difficult part of modern scientific publishing: The authors try to downplay the existence of problems (labor shortages) by arguing that it's really a problem of immigration policies not allowing enough new labor in.
That's a tacit admission that labor shortages are a problem. Proposing a solution to the labor shortage doesn't mean that it's not a problem.
You have to read scientific papers carefully. It's increasingly common to find editorialization or wishful thinking mixed into the logic of papers. More so in some fields than others.
username332211 · 3h ago
Actually, in social science you really can't test a hypothesis with data. What's true under one set of conditions won't be true under another and conditions change all the time. Famously, there's the Lucas critique - the idea that a relationship (or the lack thereof) between variables may break, if a policy that exploits the relationship is implemented.
Or take the matter of immigration and international conditions that many others noted in this thread. If every rich country depends on immigration and every poor country strives to become rich, at some point you are going to start running out of places to source immigrants from and there will be a relationship between birth rates and economic performance.
lisbbb · 18m ago
Governments always want an excuse to terrify people and inflate the money supply so they can continue to grind us all down.
roguecoder · 3h ago
That might be true, but this paper is wildly unconvincing. Cross-country comparisons have way too many confounding factors. Not least that economic growth reduces population growth.
As for an aging population slowing the economy, Japan is the classic example of the dynamic: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succ... Looking within-country during a retirement boom seems more informative than trying to compare apples to oranges.
somenameforme · 2h ago
A fun thing about fertility rates that most don't know. They also determine the exact age ratios within a society. Imagine a population has a common fertility rate of 1. That means each successive generation is half as large as the one prior. And we can approximate the age of fertility as between 20 and 40. So now let's start with 1 newborn and we can work backwards from there.
---
1 new born ->
2 20-40 year olds ->
4 40-60 year olds ->
8 60-80 year olds ->
16? 80-100 year olds
---
Just ignoring the 80-100 year olds, we end up in a scenario where you have 6 people in the working age for every 8 people of retirement age. And if life expectancy inches up, then it may be closer to 6 working age people for every 16+ retirees.
declan_roberts · 3h ago
Turns out if the population of your country is declining, you can just replace it with a different population and everything will be just fine.
Country of Theseus.
roguecoder · 3h ago
Isn't every country a country of Theseus? Not one American was part of America 125 years ago.
allemagne · 1h ago
True, and sure their ways of life were largely alien to us, but I'm confident that our more modern static assumptions can and should outlive us THIS time.
carlosjobim · 3h ago
How did the native Americans enjoy it?
reissbaker · 2h ago
This entire paper is baloney. Here's the critical excerpt they're basing their statements on:
The log10 per-capita domestic comprehensive wealth index is related positively to the logit of the dependency ratio (Fig. 4a), but with countries in the Middle East departing from the expected relationship (Appendix II, Fig. S3). The boosted regression tree analyses showed that the dependency ratio had the highest relative influence on wealth (43.5–82.5%) compared to rmean and population size (Appendix II, Fig. S4), and a clear threshold effect where wealth increased rapidly from a dependency ratio of ~ 0.09 (-2.3 on the logit scale) to ~ 0.16 (-1.65 on the logit scale) (Fig. 4a). In other words, most countries with relatively older populations are those with the highest national per-capita wealth on average.
All they did was... show that countries with lower birth rates correlate to countries that are richer. No kidding! Everyone knows that wealthy countries have had declining birth rates for decades. Presenting this correlation as causation — that is, implying that the declining birth rates have a positive impact on wealth (!!!) (rather than wealth having a negative impact on birth rates) — is basically nonsensical. This paper is just degrowth propaganda designed to trick numeracy-poor journalists into writing articles about how declining birth rates are fine, actually.
(And huh... Middle Eastern countries are an exception? Wow! Almost like it's not low birth rates that cause wealth... And there's something different about Middle Eastern countries. I wonder what that could be?)
socalgal2 · 4h ago
This just seems obviously false. I'm sure their data shows something but come on, take a population of 5,000,000. Reduce it to 1. 1 person can not do all the things needed to run a society. They can barely do the stuff needed for 1. Specialization makes things possible. So then the question becomes, what number is too small.
Population of Seoul metro is 26 million people. It's suppose to drop by 2/3rds by 2060 (or worse). That's 1/3 less taxes, a 1/3 less transportation riders, 1/3rd less customers, etc....
You are entirely right; but the conclusion they intend to argue for is that immigration supplements the declining population, still this is obviously just an attempt at giving authority to preconceived political beliefs.
RajT88 · 4h ago
Your argument is extremely relevant to some of the current AI Hype:
My hypothesis:
Prosperity induces the population decline. That means there will be some momentum behind prosperity in the initial stages of the population decline. The population decline eventually induces a prosperity decline.
amanaplanacanal · 4h ago
I'm guessing you didn't click through to read the paper.
Their take is that immigration policies rather than an aging population make the difference.
Barrin92 · 3h ago
>Population of Seoul metro is 26 million people. It's suppose to drop by 2/3rds by 2060 (or worse)
This doesn't make any sense at all. The median age of Seoul is 42, slightly younger than the national average. 2060 is in 35 years. If Seoul had zero births, zero immigration, most people in Seoul today will still be alive by 2060.
I feel like every time someone comes up with one of these predictions the numbers get more nonsensical.
bequanna · 4h ago
> Population of Seoul metro is 26 million people. It's suppose to drop by 2/3rds by 2060 (or worse). That's 1/3 less taxes, a 1/3 less transportation riders, 1/3rd less customers, etc....
If there are only 2/3rds as many people, why would the same infrastructure be required?
jjk166 · 3h ago
The problem is if you have overbuilt infrastructure, it doesn't just magically go away. You either need to pay to get rid of it, pay to maintain it, or deal with the consequences of letting it decay. Further, with an aging population, the decrease in their ability to pay for this infrastructure doesn't neatly balance out with a declining need for infrastructure. The retiree in poor health is more reliant on public transit, more reliant on healthcare, etc, while they both have less money to directly pay for those services, and contribute less to the economy as a consumer of manufactured goods or as an investor.
There is nothing special about any population number, it's how quickly and in which direction your population is changing that matters.
jfoster · 4h ago
There's an infrastructure inflection point. Note how cities have much better infrastructure than country towns.
elzbardico · 3h ago
The assumption of rich country boomers that they will be able to have a constant influx of immigrants wishing to receive low salaries to change their diapers in their retirement communities is going to be the bet of the century.
SirFatty · 3h ago
Peter Zeihan would certain disagree with that..
tharmas · 2h ago
Canada has been absolutely ruined by these elites following the path of immigration. Canada is the perfect case study. Not just in immigration but foreign investment too where you allow all the investment to pour into just one sector: housing.
Canada has been so badly managed that it gives the Soviets et al a run for their money in stupidity, short-sightedness and greed.
Also, Canada is not as big a country as it appears on a map. A good deal of it is uninhabitable.
izzydata · 3h ago
Is a declining socio-economic performance inherently a bad thing? Why does the output of a country need to go up forever rather than remain constant? Or even decline to come to an equilibrium with the new lower population.
I feel like the ideal is to have a population with a near perfect 2 - 2.1 replacement rate with a socio-economic performance that allows for the fewest people in poverty and then for that to continue forever.
Perhaps this is the first time in history that most of the world has reached its population limits and since we overshot it, it is now attempting to correct and will come to an equilibrium eventually.
roguecoder · 3h ago
It is a bad thing for the people being left worse off by their parents looting the country on their way out.
hliyan · 3h ago
Inclined to agree. If per-capita well-being and productivity continues to rise, is a GDP decline in proportion to population decline such a bad thing? The only bad thing I can think of is that we will see fewer children around than we're used to.
krunck · 3h ago
Yes. It's time we rejected the cancer economic growth model.
gweinberg · 4h ago
It takes more than 20 years for a kid to provide net economic benefit to a country. So unless they're just looking at countries whose population has been declining for well over 20 years, this "data" is bullshit.
This seems to weaken the entire paper. The only regions poised for continuing population growth into the second half of this century are in sub-Saharan Africa and maybe Afghanistan [1].
Is the premise here that unlimited immigration into other regions from sub-Saharan Africa will sustain their economies (and other ways of life?) as the local populations decline? I'm extremely skeptical of that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_projections
This does appear to be an admission that labor shortages occur due to lack of workers. The authors propose a solution (immigration) to the problem, but in doing so pretend the problem doesn't exist.
For a real example, South Korea has a fertility rate of ~0.7 while Japan has a fertility rate of ~1.4. Yet South Korea seems to be doing okayish, while Japan has clearly entered into decline. The reason is because South Korea had a 3+ fertility rate all the way up to 1976, whereas Japan hasn't had a 3+ fertility rate since 1952. Give South Korea a couple of decades and it'll make the Japan of today look like a utopia. For that matter give Japan a couple of decades and it'll make the Japan of today look like a utopia - their decline is still just beginning, as they only hit the current lows in the 90s.
It’s quite remarkable. They assert the problem doesn’t exist by essentially treating a highly debated policy change as inexorable.
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
(slide 39, net migration to Earth is zero)
Well, maybe if there was more equal income distribution, less overall penalization to those who do not have as many assets, and so on, then it would be more distributed?
I mean, that is basically what is happening anyway, but you have a nation distributing that wealth through social programs, instead of capitalists sharing their take willingly with those who helped them earn it.
This issue radically distorts the concept of who is contributing to society and who is living off the contributions of others.
Is this a good solution? No. But its a foreseeable feasible one that does not involve slavery. Which, lets not kid ourselves, the migration approach is also. Just outsourced slavery.
Of course, societal status and contract-control functions that were allocating resources and value to woman would have to be reevaluated - as what remains is a faction of the population unwilling to contribute anything but terrorist movements trying to take over because that urge for societal control and fear of non-power is to strong.
I 100% guarantee you that if we implemented a full UBI today—one that would pay something close to the median individual income, and even if it were only for adults (and thus you got no "bonus" for having extra kids)—once the initial chaos settled down, you'd see those birth rates go up quite a bit. So many people are waiting to have kids until they're financially stable enough...and then they never become so.
I know that one of the big reasons my wife and I didn't have kids in our 20s was because we were concerned about our financial stability (and frankly, we were better off than most of the people that age today—by quite a ways, since we were homeowners).
It might be a valid strategy and a very likely future, but I hope all the "we will just let immigrants in so don't worry about birth rates" people think about the implications here.
We're essentially legitimizing a pyramid scheme here. Economics and policy are all centered around extraction and share holder value. I've never seen any attention paid to making an industry stable or resilient.
Nearly every issue we face day-to-day is either due to companies holding massive control over our society, or companies degrading services we rely on because profit is no longer increasing.
We're not allowed a stable, peaceful life in a stable climate because someone else needs to get one over on someone else.
We could provide for everyone but we have decided making immaterial numbers go up is #1 priority.
When I ask why can't we have companies that exist in a steady state, the answer is another company will take advantage if the first company doesn't first. Why do we live like this? Is this system truly responsible for our technology and comfort? or is the comfort a side-product that can be produced by a number of other systems?
We're being played for fools. We all know it, but we can't imagine an alternative because they've got us all by the balls controlling our health care and housing.
How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245229292... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2024.100612
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465127 - March 2025 (26 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42529256 - December 2024 (10 comments)
(You're right, it is a suboptimal socioeconomic system)
I don't think they really expect that to happen (and we can observe that it hasn't); it's just a sales pitch.
The Great Demographic Reversal Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6 | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6
https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbe...
https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/dependency-and-dep...
https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/spring/summer-2018/demogra...
https://www.bis.org/events/conf160624/goodhart_presentation....
i don't mean to sound pithy, but some "open borders folks" just fundamentally disagree with the concept of borders (and usually, by extension, the monopoly of violence employed at those borders), regardless of economics.
Just like the US once destablized its southern neighbors to keep them exporting cheap fruits, if the only thing that keeps the US's pension system from exploding is cheap workers from the neighbors, it'd want them to keep exporting cheap labor.
Of course one might argue rich countries will do that anyway so it's not a concern. It's just icing on a poisoned cake.
Lots of non-Ukranian Europeans still want to move to the US for example, because there's an idea that in skilled jobs you can make more money in the US.
Likewise, India isn't "kept" in poverty nor is the country at war, but the opportunity for economic prosperity elsewhere is a strong driver for migration. And when India surpasses the US or Europe in economic prospects, the trend will reverse and enterprising people will flock to e.g. Hyderabad and New Delhi.
Economic prosperity, until we do away with capitalism, probably won't ever be homogeneous. Where there's a potential across a circuit the electrons will flow.
Another is that immigrants into these countries can and will just plug right into the local economy and be adequate substitutes for the economic effects of the local population decline.
There's everything about a country unrelated to economics that isn't even addressed too that will likely have ... big implications for these countries receiving the mass immigration too. These will likely also affect the economy.
Obviously that can't be true "forever" assuming that trends never reverse, but their scope is just the "long-term."
How did they make that assertion?
In the body of the paper immigration policies were not included as a variable in the data, nor were they a part of the statistical analyses. I couldn't find anything regarding labor movement at all. It feels weird that it was just thrown there in the end.
However, if there is one thing we're not lacking, it's crisis zones, where people are desperate to move away from if given half a chance. Given both the current rate of climate change and the current political climate, this is bound to increase, even after the global population peak.
So I suspect that a lack of migrants willing to resettle to unaffected/less affected regions will not be a problem for the next few decades.
The quote suggests that there won't be labor shortages in markets that have adequate and adaptive immigration policies, because migration into a country with an aging population is how countries today maintain their labor pools.
That the global population will continue to grow into 2100 supports their assertion that all countries should be more immigration friendly so as to reap the bi-directional benefit of available labor moving into geographies that need workers.
It is relative, no? If a nation's population decline isn't as high as another, maybe because of immigration, then they have more human resources? Also, humans tend to migrate?
No comments yet
>This metric ignores the youth cohort
That's very very significant. They are not looking at population pyramids holistically at all. They are just focusing on part of the pyramid. Are there lots of people >65 compared to those between 16 and 65?
Now here's something to consider. If a population has very few children but many elderly they may actually have a great ratio of working/not-working. This study won't see this at all. Merely, look lots of elderly and they're doing great!!
I suspect the reality may well be that the most successful economies have offset the extra costs of more elderly with far far fewer children. So the elderly are indeed a burden as you'd expect but we're offsetting it with fewer children.
I'd also point out that I'm not convinced the arbitrary cutoff of >65 is correct since western governments are all pushing for retirement ages well above that. As in the worst of the bubble in the population pyramids is yet to fully hit, many in that bubble are still working and the effects of below population sustainment birth rates is also yet to fully hit (we don't yet fully have the narrowest parts of the population pyramids sustaining the widest parts). When it does all hit though it could well be devastating and this really superficial study doesn't reassure me at all.
A razor for people who think like this:
Do you think Japan and Japanese people would have a higher or lower quality of life if they had accepted unlimited sub-Saharan Africa immigration?
This should separate serious people from the not so serious people pretty rapidly.
[1] Name of a city
Higher. After a while.
Signed, someone whose ancestors thought the Irish and Italians were subhuman degenerate invaders.
Now that I think of it, I still have living relatives who think the pope is the antichrist and people who follow him are degenerate subhumans.
Of course literally unlimited amounts of people is a bad thing. Did you mean unregulated?
Regarding your question, it's for you to answer bi-directionally, the result being interrogating hidden information.
I'm still not sure that the local trend of population decline is a long-term indicator; but, there's a bunch of economies along the curve, and things seem fine, for now?
My worry is that this is a railroad fallacy: you can see the train coming, but it's not hitting you now, so everything must be fine in the long-term?
Unfortunately it also shows the difficult part of modern scientific publishing: The authors try to downplay the existence of problems (labor shortages) by arguing that it's really a problem of immigration policies not allowing enough new labor in.
That's a tacit admission that labor shortages are a problem. Proposing a solution to the labor shortage doesn't mean that it's not a problem.
You have to read scientific papers carefully. It's increasingly common to find editorialization or wishful thinking mixed into the logic of papers. More so in some fields than others.
Or take the matter of immigration and international conditions that many others noted in this thread. If every rich country depends on immigration and every poor country strives to become rich, at some point you are going to start running out of places to source immigrants from and there will be a relationship between birth rates and economic performance.
As for an aging population slowing the economy, Japan is the classic example of the dynamic: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succ... Looking within-country during a retirement boom seems more informative than trying to compare apples to oranges.
---
1 new born ->
2 20-40 year olds ->
4 40-60 year olds ->
8 60-80 year olds ->
16? 80-100 year olds
---
Just ignoring the 80-100 year olds, we end up in a scenario where you have 6 people in the working age for every 8 people of retirement age. And if life expectancy inches up, then it may be closer to 6 working age people for every 16+ retirees.
Country of Theseus.
The log10 per-capita domestic comprehensive wealth index is related positively to the logit of the dependency ratio (Fig. 4a), but with countries in the Middle East departing from the expected relationship (Appendix II, Fig. S3). The boosted regression tree analyses showed that the dependency ratio had the highest relative influence on wealth (43.5–82.5%) compared to rmean and population size (Appendix II, Fig. S4), and a clear threshold effect where wealth increased rapidly from a dependency ratio of ~ 0.09 (-2.3 on the logit scale) to ~ 0.16 (-1.65 on the logit scale) (Fig. 4a). In other words, most countries with relatively older populations are those with the highest national per-capita wealth on average.
All they did was... show that countries with lower birth rates correlate to countries that are richer. No kidding! Everyone knows that wealthy countries have had declining birth rates for decades. Presenting this correlation as causation — that is, implying that the declining birth rates have a positive impact on wealth (!!!) (rather than wealth having a negative impact on birth rates) — is basically nonsensical. This paper is just degrowth propaganda designed to trick numeracy-poor journalists into writing articles about how declining birth rates are fine, actually.
(And huh... Middle Eastern countries are an exception? Wow! Almost like it's not low birth rates that cause wealth... And there's something different about Middle Eastern countries. I wonder what that could be?)
Population of Seoul metro is 26 million people. It's suppose to drop by 2/3rds by 2060 (or worse). That's 1/3 less taxes, a 1/3 less transportation riders, 1/3rd less customers, etc....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelashley/2025/02/17/the-fu...
My hypothesis: Prosperity induces the population decline. That means there will be some momentum behind prosperity in the initial stages of the population decline. The population decline eventually induces a prosperity decline.
Their take is that immigration policies rather than an aging population make the difference.
This doesn't make any sense at all. The median age of Seoul is 42, slightly younger than the national average. 2060 is in 35 years. If Seoul had zero births, zero immigration, most people in Seoul today will still be alive by 2060.
I feel like every time someone comes up with one of these predictions the numbers get more nonsensical.
If there are only 2/3rds as many people, why would the same infrastructure be required?
There is nothing special about any population number, it's how quickly and in which direction your population is changing that matters.
Canada has been so badly managed that it gives the Soviets et al a run for their money in stupidity, short-sightedness and greed.
Also, Canada is not as big a country as it appears on a map. A good deal of it is uninhabitable.
I feel like the ideal is to have a population with a near perfect 2 - 2.1 replacement rate with a socio-economic performance that allows for the fewest people in poverty and then for that to continue forever.
Perhaps this is the first time in history that most of the world has reached its population limits and since we overshot it, it is now attempting to correct and will come to an equilibrium eventually.