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 …
Author Archives: Rob Skelton
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 …
Continue reading “Internal Migration Will Worsen Population Decline”
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 …
700 Million More Elderlies
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 …
Japan Down 0.51% in One Year
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 …
Bulgaria is Fading Fast
Nobody wants to be the poster child for population decline. Losing 11% in 10 years is serious. Enough for people to extrapolate that to think they could lose 100% in a century. Bulgaria’s population shrunk more than 11 percent over the past decade, according to its latest census, as the Eastern European country struggles to …
How Much Decline = Permanent Recession?
One of the reasons this website exists is that the detrimental effects of population decline on capitalism haven’t been acknowledged yet. While it has long been known that increasing the population is good for the economy, it is rare for someone to put a value on it. Recently the WSJ reported: Historically, nearly half of …