The Decline is Near
As an experiment it was interesting, from 50 men and 50 women, just over 50% of them rated each other in the top 3 matches, for 27 couples who can now go on a date.
But just like UBI, it is a limited experiment. There will be no desire to expand it greatly. And if governments want to get people breeding again, half-hearted efforts will not achieve it.
The lucky couples get a $225 prize package of restaurant and cultural event vouchers.
Low fertility affects populations, but slowly, because people live for 80 years or so.
Cuba doesn’t have a fertility problem, it has a “I don’t want to live here any more” problem. There can be a snowball effect – the more of your relatives have fled to Florida, the more appealing it becomes to go yourself. Because normally family (and jobs and friends) is what keeps people from fleeing.
Sorry, it does also have a problem with the fertility rate being only 1.4. That could be due to fertile people being the most likely to leave. Over 65s are the only age category that is growing in numbers in Cuba.
Over 850,000 people have fled Cuba for the United States in the last 3 years, reports the Latin Times. For a country with only 11 million people, that is highly significant
It has been clear over the last few years that incentives and positive reinforcement are not helping stem reduced fertility levels in countries globally. At best they are making the decline less bad, but not stopping it. For counties with an iron grip over their citizens, unimaginable responses might occur. Keep in mind China’s historical, rigid one-child policy (unless you were rich).
Now, Russia is starting to get aggressive. Lawmakers have proposed a ban on “propaganda of conscious refusal to bear children,” https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russia-proposes-ban-child-free-lifestyle-rcna172616
When the parameters are ill-defined, and the punishments severe, expect the Russian populace to be very careful about any mention of choosing to not have children, anything gay, ideas on global over-population, and so on.
It won’t work, of course. Baby-making is such a serious part of life, people will still make their own conclusions and decisions.
Then what will follow will be punishment (not taxation) for those who go child-less. China will do the same and all other communist countries. Capitalist countries will rely on immigration, for now.
Japan has millions of abandoned rural houses for sale.
The glut delights foreigners, who’ve been able to buy one for as little as US$23,000. But underlying the surplus are meaningful shifts in Japan’s culture. Demographic and economic patterns – including a shrinking population and migration from the countryside to cities – are combining to create a “ghost town” problem in Japan.
Japan’s 8.5 million abandoned rural homes, or akiya, have become a ‘cheap’ option for foreigner owners | South China Morning Post (scmp.com)
The Japanese word for the abandoned houses is akiya and the last official count (in 2018) was 8.5 million, so the 11 million estimate seems reasonable.
Population decline is of course part of the problem, but so is people moving to Tokyo where new housing is still being built.
Something kinda cool about Japan’s predicament is that they are giving us glimpse of what will happen in most countries, and happen soon. There will be abandoned housing, but it won’t be uniform across the nation. It will be clunky, with some towns reaching a tipping point where they become unviable, and end up as ghost towns. While ghost towns sound cool and feel like something to take advantage of, I think the 50% of Detroit’s empty houses, during a housing crisis, says it all.
There are plenty of individuals and communities who want more babies, and more people. I am an example of that – my former wife and I only stopped at three children because we had to – otherwise we adore them and would have wanted at least one more. Churches of course like a larger flock and famously ban contraception, or the like. Entire countries are currently actively promoting having more kids, because of the demographic and financial nightmares they fill soon be facing.
But nobody, and I mean that literally, thinks that Planet Earth should collectively have more people.
More people would be a drain on resources of course, but even though technology has in recent decades more than countered that, making sure that people have food, clothes, plastic and fuel is only one consideration. Every single aspect of more people means a worse for all the animals and plants, their diversity and flourishing, on our planet. It is selfishness from the only species that knows how to be so selfish.
With the expectation that nobody is going to argue for more of us, then the serious question, and one rarely asked and never answered, is how few of thus there should be. Given our destructiveness, and green, and damage, one answer is that we should exit from the equation altogether.
I would argue that there is a place for us – even, at a stretch, a technological us – even potentially us on planets that can be grown instead of destroyed – and maybe all we need is some tough love to make the hard decisions.
That hard decision is to – collectively, in aggregate – have fewer children. Dramatically so, so that our numbers are decimated.
I say tough love because we have well proven it is too hard of an ask for us to voluntarily make, and the harm we are doings means any natural decline will be too slow. The dictates of capitalism, and its thirst for growth, suggests that degrowth is not something we will allow.
So all that leaves is for someone, for some people, to make that decision for us. Few people would condone actual slaughter or effective slaughter (concocted diseases for example), yet I am surprised no super-villian has emerged who is actively doing it. And no, Bill Gates is not that guy.
But persuasion is a tool we can use. And I am okay with taking that angle. Simple persuasion, as in advertising, is unlikely to be effective. But radical actions, forms of civil disobedience, and wanton destruction, of tearing apart the fabrics of all the negative sides of society and putting the spotlight on the harms of capitalism and overconsumption, might persuade enough people that bringing more kids into this world feels wrong.
Radical actions of the few, in arenas that are not expecting it, in fragile systems that are barely staying afloat anyway, is what I am talking about.
This graph from Statista accounts for fertility decline and current rates of immigration, to come up when actual population will start to decline in some countries
In the last couple of years, the subject of population decline has become topical, with even Elon Mush mentioning it a few times. And rightly so. Not only is it well-known (because of Japan leading the charge) that the new population pyramid will mean more retired people and fewer workers. there is also the barely recognised endgame, the failure of capitalism. That is because capitalism has never experienced prolonged negative growth, and quite likely is incapable of surviving it. And even with growing populations (via immigration) most countries are struggling to grow. GDP is a dud measurement…
So we have these factors in play:
One way of looking at that is to consider that bringing forward the decline of capitalism, could mean fewer babies, more rapid population decline and less harm to the environment. There are a number of reasons for lower fertility rates, but economic conditions and uncertainty are major.
Potentially called econo-terrorism is the purposeful destruction of infrastructure to cause economic harm. We could start with global trade, because in some ways import is theft and export is theft.
In all industries, where there is exports and imports, certain aspects are almost universally true. The supplier at the start of the journey will get beaten down to the lowest price they can produce the product for. And the end purchaser will pay the most the market will allow. Neither are allowed to profit from global trade. That profit goes to middle-men, corporations and governments. That means shipping, duty, tax, banks and profit margins, often through grift and corruption.
These could be implemented by governments, except they all want artificially-derived growth from population growth:
All of the above means we can at a minimum halve the population globally in 80 years, and make it only 2 Billion in 120 years.
But they will ever happen, so which potential tactics are available to a wannabe econo-terrorist?
(It goes without saying that even though depopulation is the aim, no deaths – even accidental – are wanted. Every action would need to be carefully thought through for possible direct harm to people),
Global and domestic trade has become increasingly fragile, with high rats of debt and just-in-time systems that are highly efficient but not resilient. A few spanners-in-the-works can have a ripple effect, not just in actual hindrances but also perceived future problems. The ultimate goal is to minimalise world trade and emphasise local reliances. That should lead to countries having to live according to their environmental means.
Railways are long and insecure. They are relatively easy to damage. Or hinder. A person chained to the tracks, or a drone carrying a sheet hovering above the track and impeding views beyond it.
Crops and livestock are easily destroyed from disease. Water can be infiltrated. We do not want people to starve, but they can do without beef and flowers.
Piracy still happens in the Africa and can happen more in international waters.
Machinery can be tampered with. Look up monkey wrenching, Earth First and Ed Abbey.
Retail businesses can be attacked. Drop off some manure on the doorstep of a McDonalds, or any other company directly profiting from environmental harm.
Such actions, under an umbrella name, but barely affiliated otherwise, can get a lot of publicity from not many activities, and a low risk. While laws are rapidly changing, in many cases the risk is a large fine which is meaningless for those who already have nothing.
Until now, economic terrorism has been a state vs state concept. Now it could be a means to ending capitalism more quickly and “saving the planet” by small groups and individuals who feel the calling and can grasp the consequences.
When one of the globe’s largest economies is facing a demographic crisis, throwing $3M at an app won’t help, especially when it is run by the Tokyo government.
Absurdly:
Japanese media reports that said the app will require a confirmation of identity, such as a driver’s license, your tax records to prove income and a signed form that says you are ready to get married.
https://time.com/6986142/japan-tokyo-government-dating-app-marriage/
It isn’t judge fertility that is dwindling in Japan. Unlike western countries, marriages and sexual relationships are reduced as well, and surveys show that there is a lot of disinterest.
A meagre investment in a state-controlled app will not be the solution. Maybe a billion dollar investment in movies and TV shows that feature young happily married people would work better?
The rich world is in the midst of an unprecedented migration boom. Last year 3.3m more people moved to America than left, almost four times typical levels in the 2010s. Canada took in 1.9m immigrants. Britain welcomed 1.2m people and Australia 740,000. In each country the number was greater than ever before. For Australia and Canada net migration is more than double pre-covid levels. In Britain the intake is 3.5 times that of 2019. Economist
It has been long-known that increasing the population is a cheat’s way of improving the GDP, and giving governments something positive to point to. However, the GDP is failing metric, and the populace are working that out. More so when it is pointed out that all the countries above having a declining GDP per capita. In the retail world, opening more stores won’t fool investors if the per-store revenue is dropping.
Even Japan is doing it, although stealthily. The number of foreign workers in Japan has quadrupled since 2008, reaching the 2M mark last year. This is happening in places that are common in other countries, like convenience stores. In the Konbinis of Japan, 9% of the workforce are foreigners, but it is as high as 50% in some 7-Eleven stores in major cities (Economist).
Every advanced economy except the US is suffering from a fertility rate that is too low. While immigration can offset that, not many people are keen at present to move to Hong Kong, given all of its recent problems. People have been leaving, of course.
The number of children being born in Hong Kong each year has been in steady decline since 2014, but the decrease quickened to an almost 40% drop between 2019 and 2022, falling from 52,900 to 32,500 births last year, according to government data.
Wall Street Journal
That means the current fertility rate is 0.8, even lower than South Korea.
The government is now offering a $20K (Hong Kong dollars, around $2500 USD) bonus for new babies, but like most countries they are offering too little to make much difference. 40% of young local women say that Hong Kong is not a suitable place for child-rearing (up from 16% just over a decade ago), and 44% of women have no children.
The situation is similar to climate change, with governments only willing to make minor concessions, that ultimately won’t fix the problem.
