Resource depletion is among the highest risks to civilization. Seems straightforward that severe population decline should be desired, and voluntary refraining from reproduction should be welcome.
(Please don't just extrapolate the trend till extinction. See http://xkcd.com/605/. )
I think the concern is an ageing population rather than a shrinking one. Too many older people, no longer working, who need care or support and not enough younger people to provide it.
> Too many older people, no longer working, who need care or support and not enough younger people to provide it.
But this will be a trend that autocorrects itself after some time, as less elder people will be there in the future. Also, the younger people if both working will create more prosperity than being married with one working and the other one staying at home.
In the short term this sounds bad, but long term doesn't seem that worrisome.
The problem is that people in general are living longer but the retirement age is staying roughly the same. So as time goes on you have a higher percentage of the people who aren't working but yet consuming public resources.
In the short term it is bad. In the long term it is devastating. Which is why every developed country is aggressively increasing the immigration rate to compensate. Well except for Japan.
The problem is generally overstated, because of (a) efficiency gains and (b) unemployment.
Some people were alarmist about the ageing population in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Their doomsday predictions turned out to be wrong because of technological advances that meant fewer working people could provide the real goods and services for more non-working people.
And what cannot be buffered by technology simply leads to lower unemployment, which is a good thing as well.
Be wary of extrapolation. As more of the economy gets concentrated in knowledge industries, it's likely that more and more people will just keep working until they die.
My mom's been "retired" for almost a decade now. She's had 2 part-time jobs and usually a volunteer gig too for nearly the entire time.
The worst thing is that in places like Japan especially housing availability is a real problem. Which means you will have young people being forced to live with their parents well into their 20s.
And what happens when you have young people living with their parents ? Far less opportunities for sex.
I don't have the numbers, but anecdotally from looking for an apartment with my SO, there doesn't seem to be a big housing availability problem in Japan. Available apartments are plentiful, and outside of central Tokyo, Osaka etc, are priced reasonably. It's a far cry from the situation where I'm from in Sweden, where you have to be on a waiting list for 3 years to get your turn at a rental contract since there are just no apartments to be had.
Young people in Japan live with their parents due to lack of jobs. The Japanese employment market has recently had a massive shift towards part time labour instead of full time labor, leaving young people with jobs that can't support them.
Also, Japan has had a solution for the "opportunities for sex" issue for decades - the massive amount of hourly Love Hotels that are scattered all around the country (and people aren't shy to use - I've had to queue for one).
At my girlfriend's former job, a normal day went like this: the employees were expected to work from 9 in the morning to 8 in the evening (time on contract: 9-6) then attend staff meetings in another city, with one 30min break for the entire day (meant to be an hour, but who's counting?)
Remember that this is for a full-time employee - the main reason companies only want part-time staff now is so they can avoid paying their 50% of your health insurance and for vacations.
Working way too long isn't a new thing in Japan. The company not keeping up their end of the bargain (good benefits, job for life) is. If the govt grew some balls and actually enforced existing labor laws instead of letting companies abuse their employees, maybe people would have time and energy to have more kids earlier.
I totally agree with what you write - It's long been my pet theory as well that the soul-crushing long hours are a big part of the problem. My SO has a similar job - a normal day is 8 AM-8 PM, but she works a lot "on site" so she'll lose half to all the weekend days in a month to work. Sometimes he has to travel across Kyushyu and so has to get up at 5 AM. It's no wonder people get depressed, and when you're depressed, the sex drive disappears.
The fact that you can now not rely on your company supporting your family for life is just the final nail in the coffin.
My gf is actually looking at marriage as an honorable out with her company - if she just quit flat out, she'd be "abandoning" the company and placing a higher burden on her coworkers (company isn't doing too well...), and if she wanted to get a new job, it would be a huge black mark on her resume. Getting married? Well then OBVIOUSLY she needs to quit, it's not her fault.
It's bad because Japan has an extremely low net migration rate. For comparison Australia has 16x that of Japan. So whilst globally yes we should be aiming to reduce the total population Japan specifically has serious problems.
> I agree that society and technology could evolve us through a much more desirable path. But the more time we can buy for that to happen, the better.
I would inflect this differently. An open and free society is much more likely to figure out a desirable path for the future than one steered by central authority.
(In fact, it is the accumulation of thousands or millions of small improvements that will, in retrospect, be seen as a desirable path.)
Desiring "extra" conservation of the resources that today seem most limited, might not necessarily be incompatible with an open and unplanned society. But it usually is.
I agree with all your points, but, regarding the last sentence, I'd like to point out that this is definitely one of the (perhaps rare) cases in which a desire for radical conservation is compatible with openness and freedom.
I'm talking about letting people choose not to reproduce (textbook freedom), instead of having a government policy to influence them to revert their choices for the perceived greater good (central planning).
Except that people will only evolve once the resources are completely gone.
The underlying problem is that sustainable products almost always have a price premium attached to them. And because the benefits of sustainability are indirect it's hard to convince people to pay more.
What if it evolves in the wrong way? Plenty of emerging middle classes in developing countries are now looking to join the American-style unsustainable lifestyle movement.
Is there convincing evidence that resource depletion is among the highest risks to civilization? Much of what I've seen shows the opposite: for example, China is a rising superpower largely because of their huge population. Having more people means more potential productivity, and that could lead to more prosperity.
On the other hand, small countries with few people are usually able to accomplish little. Places with few inhabitants are considered rural and have a lower standard of living than places with high extremely high population density, like cities.
I'm counting war over the increasingly scarce resources as part of the risk, so the current influence of mildly scarce resources over politics is evidence.
I agree with your point that, from a nationalist perspective, population size is basically nation size.
I think this fact will become much more apparent as drones and droids become more common. The desire to control resources will become stronger when people can project that control "more cleanly". Battle robots and drones will be treated like a barbed wired fence used to keep people out.
Wars aren't overtly fought over resources these days, but the US has spent a lot of money in Iraq and 'stabilizing' the middle east (lot of good it's done). There happens to be oil in that area.
Which we could have simply purchased at a tiny fraction of the cost of going to war for it.
I'm still waiting for all of that free oil we "won" to start making its way over here. It's almost as if the war wasn't fought for oil, but for oil companies. Gee.
The system only works when there's growth... a huge decline in population (hence births, hence sexual activity ...) is the biggest fear of all governments, as it deflates the foundations current countries/systems/power balances/... are built on. It's also the reason why worldwide "family values" and "the traditional family (unit) as cornerstone of the society" are main political points, independent of culture, religion, ...
Well, the fundamental problem is a demographic one. In the end, the elderly are always cared for by the young so if you have a lot of elderly and not very many young, this becomes a real problem.
Ideally, the birthrate would be close to the replacement rate. Much lower and you run into very significant problems. If you want to draw down the population, a birth rate of say, 90-95% of the replacement rate would not be so bad.
> In the end, the elderly are always cared for by the young so if you have a lot of elderly and not very many young, this becomes a real problem.
Fun fact: an evolutionary explanation for "witch hunts" is that when the tribe is low on food, they're an excuse to get rid of less useful / influential elderly people. Which is why they happen more in resource constrained developing countries than rich developed ones.
But it goes to show that if young people feel that the elderly are more burdensome than useful, they may find a way to get rid of them.
The problem is that not everyone is making less progeny. Japanese and European populations may be in decline, but African, Asian, Arabic, and Hispanic ones are growing at a brisk pace.
So yes, it's pretty bad for some people to limit births. You are essentially diminishing your influence and putting yourself at risk of being swallowed up by other cultures.
Population growth rate is declining all over the world, but the effect is more pronounced in developed countries. As standard of living increases people tend to have less children.
Resource depletion is among the highest risks to civilization. Seems straightforward that severe population decline should be desired, and voluntary refraining from reproduction should be welcome.
(Please don't just extrapolate the trend till extinction. See http://xkcd.com/605/. )