I understand that if you decline like Japan, life gets hard economically. But I find that growing like we do in Canada also puts a lot of strain on us.
Is there any reason why we can’t aim for 0 growth each year? Just import enough people that we don’t grow / decline more than like 5000 people each year. I get 100% accurate forecast is impossible, but can’t we try to get close? What am I missing, since I realized no country has attempted this.
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Because industry needs labor. The more people, the bigger pool to choose from and the more workers have to compete against each other, lowering the overall cost of labor. That’s good for profits.
Japan’s problem is mostly how old the population is. Modern countries are setup with social systems to provide for the elderly. In the US this is social security and medicare. The working population pays into this to provide for the elderly population who are not working anymore.
When population growth slows down, it means fewer babies. Fewer babies grows up into fewer workers. Then you run into a situation where there are a lot of elderly people relying on care and not enough working people to pay for it.
Social programs, funded by tax dollars, require a constant inflow of new income earners to keep the coffers full, as people retire and start drawing on those funds themselves.
Many people are under the false impression that the money they pay into CPP is what funds their retirement payouts. In truth, the money I currently send to Ottawa is being sent out to people already retired, like my older sisters and brother. And, when my wife and I put our feet up, you and your kids will be paying for it.
Throw in increasing longevity and the skyrocketing costs for end of life care, and Canada needs more and more people annually just to keep the math working.
What happens in 60 years when nearly everyone in your country has reached retirement age, and the life expectancy has risen to 100? It’s not that we need an ever increasing population, but we need an at least constant workforce.
Theres a number of things. For one the current status quo may not be sustainable (ie, the worker to retiree ratio is *already* a problem), in other cases the immigration / emigration has a lot of variables. Sure you could limit the residence permits granted to a certain set amount but people leave your country, people stay temporarily, people come and go to study, refugees etc… it’s non trivial to plan around population growth even at municipal level. After all it’s not like you can force people to stay or keep people waiting for years until it’s convenient to you for them to move in
Why would a country want its power, influence and economy not to grow?
what is the downside of increasing these things?
For much of Europe, the population growth is close to zero, with declining native birth rates leading to an aging native population being offset by mostly younger immigrants moving in.
Everyone wants to grow their wealth. It’s harder to grow your wealth when your population is stagnant.
>What am I missing, since I realized no country has attempted this.
There are countries, like the US, that have level or low population growth entirely due to immigration while birth rates are far below replacement.
At some point, you have to look at the global scale. Does it make sense for there to be excess population producing countries that have their local population/resource constraints/limits removed because they migrate the growth to other places?
It would make more sense to let the populations level out locally on their own, let the economies re-adjust and find their new balance at steady state.
Zero growth is perfectly fine (capitalists desiring infinite growth might not like it of course but that’s another matter entirely). One in, one out, resources and services sitting in a steady state. All good and probably the best case scenario (even a very slight decline is safe).
The problem you are seeing across the West right now is Japanese style decline. The numbers are masked because people are living longer so you end up with not just less people going in but less people going out too. Eventually you hit a tipping point though and those older folk start dying and then you see the collapse a few decades after the damage is done.
A larger and larger portion of the population is used to care for a group that require more and more resources. That’s fine if you are in a steady state and can adjust, but birth rates are collapsing due to economic problems (and unlike other parts of the world people still having access to education and birth control).
You bring up Canada, the current fertility rate is 1.33. That means every adult woman has on average 1.33 children. To have a steady state that needs to be 2 (normally adjusted to 2.1 to accommodate for child mortality).
Immigration is being used by many countries as a stopgap to try and overcome this, the problem is those immigrants are subject to the same economic issues and after a generation or two you’re in the same situation, not to mention growing right wing anti-immigrant pressure that’s growing across the West.
TLDR: a stagnant population is fine, but a declining population can be easily mistaken for a stagnant population for decades before its too late.
That would require exactly 2 kids per family. You can’t legislate how many kids people have, like logistically it would be a nightmare.
There are two problems with this:
A welfare state with a pension system requires a sustainable ratio of young, working people paying for all the old, retired people. This system could be scaled back (reduce the standard of living for old people) but it is politically unfeasible because old people as a group tend to vote more than young people as a group, so it is political suicide to turn your back on them.
State economic policy is made with future economic growth as an assumption. When the tax revenue isn’t enough then states take on debt so they can keep operating, this debt (and the interest payment on it) tends to grow larger over time which isn’t an issue if you also assume that the population (tax base) will also grow with it and become more productive. If population growth stagnates then generation C will not only have to pay their debt, they will have to pay the debt of generation B and A as well.
(more of an ELI15…)
The current economic structure doesn’t support it. It’s why we have to keep fighting (even if we’re currently losing) to stop from shoving old people onto the streets and to keep teen pregnancy low. Both of those things happening are desired by the current system. More workers, and less of what the Germans called “useless eaters”.
We’re plenty productive enough for it to not be this way, have been for nigh on a century, however the current system forces the wealth to slow down by concentrating into the hands of the very few. With such a low velocity the money just stagnates, doesn’t get used for anything, generating more material wealth or taking care of those who produced the wealth the current system was built upon.
tldr: it can in a different economic ruleset, the current economic ruleset doesn’t want it to because those who maintain the current ruleset are benefiting greatly.
ITT: People totally ignoring OPs question. Yes, we all understand how those still in the workforce pay into social programs that the elderly use today.
OP poses a situation where the growth is zero. Not negative, but zero.
Negative growth means fewer people in the workforce.
Zero growth means zero change. For every elderly person who dies, another young person enters the workforce.
Very few of the top answers even bother to address this, and instead parrot the same old points about what happens when there aren’t enough young people to sustain the social programs.
In an objective sense, nothing says we can’t have countries and social systems designed around 0 growth/shrinkage. However, the problem is that every government and economic system in use today presupposes growth over time.
To operate on a system designed for functionally 0 growth, we’d first have to transition away from our current systems over to it. And this would take a lot of power from people who benefit from the current systems. They have no incentive to enable/allow such a move, and plenty of incentive to prevent it.
Strictly speaking, with economics and productivity, nothing says we couldn’t turn hard into the automation wave and get ourselves in a position where nobody HAS to work, all are provided for. However, a lot of growth systems are at odds with this. Leaving people the option to not-work, means you have to entice people TO work, thus lessening your growth curves. Why pay someone $30/hr if you can get someone “good enough” to do it for half that? If people HAVE to work to live, and you put the market in a position where jobs are scarce, you’ll get people agreeing to wages that, strictly speaking, are not self sufficient simply because they’d rather starve to death over three years than in three months. That’s a lot of power for pro-growth systems.
Now, you can also obtain a bit of a hybrid in a way. You can go static on population and tune yourself to expect growth in the form of automation/scientific boons. Getting more out of less, and so on. But again, you’d have to globally transition to that system and there’s no incentive for the people at the helm to do that.
Population decline isn’t bad for regular people, it’s only bad for money. If there’s less people, they have to pay better or compete for workers with other goodies.
Housing prices go down because there’s less people needing houses.
It’s not bad for you and me at all.
It can and it will. The same people writing doomer articles about population decline were writing nearly identical articles about overpopulation a decade ago.
Don’t take them seriously they are looking at trend lines slapping a linear fit on it and pretending they are doing deep analysis.
Capitalism relies on continuous growth.
Eventually things will have to change as infinite growth isn’t a sustainable model but everyone’s hoping they’re not going to be the one holding the hot potato when it explodes.
In short, because systems where working class folks help support retired folks rely on a relatively constant ratio of working class folks to retired folks.
You already know that such systems are strained when population declines, relative to population growth. Essentially the same thing happens (relatively speaking) with population stagnation, just with a lower severity of change. If you have fewer working class folks for each retired person, those workers each have to contribute more (on average), or retired folks have to get less support (on average).
To really understand what’s going on, though, look at the math. Statistics are simplified to assume that we all die of old age, at age 80. We join the workforce at 18, and retire at age 65, then collect some form of support (like social security) until we die. I also re-ran the numbers for life expectancy 100, which I think is less realistic, but is also generally a trend the world is following, as healthcare gets better.
Hat tip to u/drugbird for getting started on the math.
Numbers for life expectancy 80:
With 1% growth:
% over 65: 13.29%
% 18-65: 56.89%
% under 18: 29.88%
Ratio working age to senior: 4.30
With 0% growth:
% over 65: 18.75%
% 18-65: 58.75%
% under 18: 22.50%
Ratio working age to senior: 3.13
With 1% decline:
% over 65: 25.33%
% 18-65: 58.60%
% under 18: 16.06%
Ratio working age to senior: 2.31
Numbers for life expectancy 100:
With 1% growth:
% over 65: 24.43%
% 18-65: 49.55%
% under 18: 26.01%
Ratio working age to senior: 2.03
With 0% growth:
% over 65: 35.00%
% 18-65: 47.00%
% under 18: 18.00%
Ratio working age to senior: 1.34
With 1% decline:
% over 65: 46.78%
% 18-65: 41.77%
% under 18: 11.45%
Ratio working age to senior: 0.89
Methodology:
Excel spreadsheet with ages 0-79 or 0-99 respectively, each with its own row. Because 99 really represents ages 99 years to 99 and 364 days, we go from 0-99, not 1-100 or 0-100. The oldest age has population 1 in that year (arbitrary, but simple, and for ratios it doesn’t matter). For population growth, each row beyond that is 1.01 times the row above it. For stagnation, they’re just all 1. For decline, each row is 0.99 times the row above it. Copy down the formula.
I use Excel to add up those numbers for age rows 65-79 or 65-99 depending on the life expectancy, for 18-64, and for 0-17 (remember, it’s effectively going to 17 years and 364 days). For percentages, I divide that resulting age group number by the total for all ages (cutting off as appropriate at our life expectancy). For number of working age folks to seniors, I divide the working age number by the senior number (underage gets ignored here).
Please let me know if you think I got something wrong, or follow this guide if you want to adjust some assumptions to see how the answer changes.
Note: Most of this was buried further in comment threads, as a response to someone else who did the math, but I thought it deserved a top-level place, with some minor tweaks.