The Decline is Near
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 …
Continue reading “Incentives Do Not Fix Fertility Rate Decline”
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 …
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “Internal Migration Will Worsen Population Decline”
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/
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 …
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 …
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 …
Most people are aware of how declining fertility rates, and longer life spans, means that demographics of advanced economies is trending towards more older people. Japan is the common example of where it is currently a problem, but it will be a global issue to content with later this century. A figure from a study …
That doesn’t sound like a lot, but there were 644,000 more deaths than births (assuming an immigration rate of zero). Every prefecture on mainland Japan saw a decline, so even internal migration was not a help anywhere. Elon Musk saw this news and his saying that Japan will disappear was widely spread. He seems to …
