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?
"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.
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....
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.
>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.
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.
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.
I've wondered about this. The current world population is close to twice what it was when I started college in the late 1970s.
Comparing what life was like then to life now and thinking about what I'd miss if I had to go back to say a 1976 lifestyle everything I'm coming up with is just that we've now got better technology, more advanced medicine, cleaner energy sources, and we passed laws and regulations to take better care of the environment.
Did we need 4 billion more people to get those things? I don't think so. In an alternate universe where the world decided in 1976 to voluntarily lower the fertility rate to just keep the population at 4 billion I think that 2025 in that world would be a lot like 2025 in our world as far as tech, medicine, energy, and the environment go.
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.
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.
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?)
Actually, declining birth rates have a positive effect on national per capital wealth, but not in the way the paper talks about it.
By not having children, parents save costs and can instead accumulate more wealth per capita. This doesn't actually increase aggregate wealth though. It's the same wealth distributed over fewer people, making it look like you can population crash your way to wealth.
It is a somewhat perverse way to look at society, but par for the course for economists.
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.
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.
23 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 55.0 ms ] threadI'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?
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
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
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.
>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.
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.
Comparing what life was like then to life now and thinking about what I'd miss if I had to go back to say a 1976 lifestyle everything I'm coming up with is just that we've now got better technology, more advanced medicine, cleaner energy sources, and we passed laws and regulations to take better care of the environment.
Did we need 4 billion more people to get those things? I don't think so. In an alternate universe where the world decided in 1976 to voluntarily lower the fertility rate to just keep the population at 4 billion I think that 2025 in that world would be a lot like 2025 in our world as far as tech, medicine, energy, and the environment go.
Country of Theseus.
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.
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?)
By not having children, parents save costs and can instead accumulate more wealth per capita. This doesn't actually increase aggregate wealth though. It's the same wealth distributed over fewer people, making it look like you can population crash your way to wealth.
It is a somewhat perverse way to look at society, but par for the course for economists.
---
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.
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.