Demographic Collapse: Economic Burdens

I know that I harp a lot about collapsing birthrates--probably too much in some people's opinions--but it is an important topic and the response, at least in the West, has been to destroy our culture for the sake of importing foreign workers. 

    A few recent articles on the topic are:

• "The 'Population Explosion' Myth Blows Up" by Robert Spencer, PJ Media.
• "Low Population in 2050 for $50 Trillion Economic Loss – Over Ten Times More Than Climate Change" by Brian Wang, Next Big Future.
• "Japan's Old Age Crisis and Ours to Come" by Virginia Postrel. 

    Spencer's article is about how, notwithstanding the propaganda we've been exposed to our whole lives about "the population bomb", even major media outlets are finally being forced to admit that it was a lie. Writing on March 27, 2023, he relates:

    The UK’s far-Left Guardian admitted Monday that “the long-feared ‘population bomb’ may not go off, according to the authors of a new report that estimates that human numbers will peak lower and sooner than previously forecast.” The Club of Rome study, which was “carried out by the Earth4All collective of leading environmental science and economic institutions, including the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Stockholm Resilience Centre and the BI Norwegian Business School,” predicts that “on current trends the world population will reach a high of 8.8 billion before the middle of the century, then decline rapidly.” This being the Guardian, it added: “The peak could come earlier still if governments take progressive steps to raise average incomes and education levels.”

    It’s jarring to read this. Population explosion hysteria has been a staple of education for decades, and there are no doubt millions of people who still take the idea that soon there will be many more people on earth than can possibly be fed as axiomatic fact. Americans have so internalized this belief that people with large families are guilt-tripped on a routine basis. I myself can remember being inundated with this propaganda in public school at all levels, although of course, no one recognized it as propaganda in those palmy days, as far back as the early 1970s. The population explosion myth became the basis for many of the Left’s other favored agendas, including the “climate crisis,” the bug-eating plan, and even the sexual revolution, which was in large part made possible by the contraception and abortion that we were told had to be readily available in order to try to bring the world’s population under control.

The next two articles discuss a bit more of what we can expect from shrinking populations.

    Wang's article approaches the issue from a purely economic perspective. He notes that the propaganda from our elites is that the greatest threat we face is from climate change.

In 2021, the World Economic forum called Climate change ‘most impactful risk facing the planet. The largest predicted economic losses of climate change are from models that predict a lot more storm damage. This is mainly worsening droughts, storms and torrential rain in some of the world’s largest economies could cause $5.6 trillion in losses to the global economy by 2050. This has not happened yet as the world has been experiencing $100-250 billion per year in such storm damage. The agricultural losses from climate change might be $330 billion in 2050 and this does not calculate the improved agricultural yields from warming conditions for Canada and other northern farmland.

This, however, is dwarfed by the economic losses caused by shrinking populations. He points out, for instance, that "[p]opulation loss from now to 2050 will cause about 20-30% in economic damage or about a $60 trillion in economic loss." He continues:

    China will be losing 10 million people per year from its working age population from 2027-2050. Japan will be losing 1 million people per year from its working age population from 2023-2050. The working age populations for China, Japan, Italy and Spain will be about 20-30% smaller in 2050 than today.

    Japan is going from 122 million people today to about 100 million people in 2050-2056. By 2050, its population could fall below 100 million, of whom 38.8% will be 65 or older. IF there was magic policy to double Japan’s birthrates then instead of a working age population of about 58 million in 2050, Japan could have 72 million working age people and a population of about 120 million.

I would point out that China may already be farther into the demographic hole than most people think (see my post, "VIDEO: 'China doesn’t have 1.4 billion people. Its population is under 1 billion.'"). But it isn't just an issue for China or Japan. Wang points out that "All of the developed countries except Israel have a total fertility rate below the replacement level of 2.1." Most are well below replacement level.

    Postrel's article focuses on Japan and how it got to its current demographic emergency. She relates that it is primarily due to Japan's lax laws on abortion and birth control (I would argue that it was more because the Japanese lost their faith). She notes, for instance, that in 1948, the Diet passed the Eugenic Protection Law which made abortions both legal and cheap, and encouraged the use of contraception. It was successful in forestalling a population boom. She writes:

People over 75 now make up 15 percent of the population [in Japan], and they don’t have a lot of kids to take care of them. Japan’s postwar baby boom lasted only about two years. By contrast, the U.S. experienced high birth rates from 1946 to 1964.

The problem facing the Japanese, then, is:

a rapidly growing population of very old people without much family support. In some cases, the unshared burden of taking care of parents simply becomes too much, especially when the parent is a difficult character. In others, middle-age children—including increasing numbers of men—are quitting their jobs to take care of their parents. At the extreme are “lonely deaths,” or kodokushi, when people die alone and go unnoticed for days. (In some cases, the deceased elderly person was not alone but living with a person with dementia.) 

In other words, other potential workers are being removed from the labor force to take care of aging parents. She warns that this is America's future (and that of most other industrialized countries, for that matter). 

    Postrel, admitting that she is a childless spinster, acknowledges that she doesn't have a solution. I obviously don't know her particular situation and why she is childless, but I can say that women like her--urban and professional--are the problem. Giving up family roles to pursue careers. That is why female education is the biggest predictor of population decline, and why religiosity is the common trait among populations bucking the overall trend of declining populations. 

    I was recently reading a piece from Robert Zubrin entitled "A Declaration of Decadence" which began:

The French historian Fernand Braudel remarks in Out of Italy that “decadence” is what occurs in a civilization when it rejects the ideas and ideals responsible for its origin and growth.

And such is the case for declining birth rates: it is a rejection of the importance and role of being a wife and mother. Oswald Spengler touched on this in his work, The Decline of the West, with his complaints of the "Ibsen woman" (in reference to playwright Henrik Ibsen who featured works of, for that time, strong independent women who abandoned families to discovery their true selves) who might attend all the best plays and indulge in intellectual pursuits, but are barren and useless.