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 …
Author Archives: Rob Skelton
Japan’s $38B Child Care Plan
That’s $38 billion (USD) annually. While it sounds like a lot, it actually isn’t much relative to the severity of their situation. Politicians would rather have small failures over larger ones… “This will bring our country’s spending per child on families to the level of Sweden,” said Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. In other words, socialism is …
Incentives Do Not Fix Fertility Rate Decline
In this well-researched and well-written article at Reason magazine, the primary focus is on what has caused the fertility decline. It pinpoints no single factor, and says that all of the known factors combined still do not explain the dramatic drops in children being born. It suggests that everything matters, plus there may be lag …
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Nagi, Japan – Baby Making Town
The WSJ reports on a town in Japan that is bucking the trend, and easily have fertility above the replacement rate. What is their secret? The fertility rate reached 2.95 in 2019, and has slipped back to what is still a very commendable 2.68 in 2021, a pandemic year. Japan as a whole is a …
Korea’s Economy & Population Decline
When researching degrowth, I find that nobody ever advocates for or predicts actual degrowth. They end up discussing no-growth, which of course is impossible to keep at precisely not going up or down. So sometimes instead of degrowth they advocate for very low growth, below 1%. But actual economic degrowth is too hard to discuss …
Internal Migration Will Worsen Population Decline
While we tend to look at averages and global totals, the reality is the population decline is going to be very lumpy. After we reach peak global population, Africa will still grow for a while. Even though Japan peaked ages ago and there are empty houses everywhere, Tokyo is still growing and houses are being …
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Fertility Rate: Declining Everywhere
The data is lumpy and uneven, and every country is on their own journey. However, the global trend is unmistakeable: downward. The underlying data is here, also the source of the graph https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charted-the-global-decline-of-fertility-rates/
Elon Musk and Population Decline
Mr Musk is of course wrong and over-reacting to peak population predictions. He has it in his head that we will stop making babies altogether and go extinct, which is ludicrous. If his intention was to get the general problem noticed, he actually made things worse. The media reached out to academics who take the …
Japan: Drink More Alcohol
One of the reasons given is that they want more revenue from liquor tax, because in 2020 it declined by 10% ($813M). However, considering that it is a “sin tax”, intended to moderate consumption, that is hard to accept. The real reason is what everyone knows, young people are more likely to hook up if …
Are We Really Having Less Kids?
Here are some very basic statistics, to give you an idea of why we are on a journey towards too few children, below the replacement rate of 2.1 per woman: Globally the fertility rate has dropped from 5 to 2.4 (children per woman) between 1970 and 2016. In high income countries it is already below …