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rkajdi posted:It's now pretty apparent that outside of some zealot outliers, when women get to choose how many kids they want, they choose a sub-replacement number. You can't really "fix" this without destroying women's agency, so we might as well start planning for a world with less people instead of more. In Europe, at least, people actually want more kids than they are having, and women tend to desire more kids than men do. Only a handful of countries show desired fertility below replacement, and a handful are quite a bit above that - Denmark, Sweden, Finland, France, and Ireland are all around 2.5 desired kids. In Sweden, paragon of gender equality, single digit percent of young women want less than 2 kids, while close to half of want 3+. Hell, even in the low fertility countries, Austria is the only one where more than 25% want 0 or 1 kid. Sub-replacement fertility is more a factor of modern life making it harder to provide for the size family you want than a function of women not wanting to reproduce.
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Dec 6, 2014 23:12
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A Buttery Pastry posted:For retired dependents to represent a continuously greater part of the population, doesn't that mean the fertility rate would have to keep falling too? There is the possibility that it levels out at a sub-replacement level, which would create a new steady-state population structure that's sort of the inverse of the one humanity has lived with for thousands of years, if not as skewed toward the elderly as it was for the very young. There is of course the possibility of medical technology keeping old people alive longer and longer, which would exacerbate the issue, though the cost issue could be solved by not struggling to keep people whose bodies are obviously failing alive just because we can't accept that death will catch up with us eventually. IIRC, end-of-life care is hugely expensive in terms of added longevity compared to pretty much anything else doctors can do. Add to that the quality of life in that extended life, and you wonder if those resources might not be better spend at the start of life, not the end. The biggest problem with this is that the elderly are WAY more expensive than the young. It's not a big deal if you have a 1:1 ratio of workers to dependents if most of those dependents are kids, who don't usually need expensive medical care or have expectations of defined benefits. To make this population structure work, you'd have to severely cut health spending for old people and let nature take its course, to put it crudely, in a lot more cases, if you want this to work. Government old age pensions would also either have to but cut and/or the contribution rates would have to be raised and/or you'd have to make it so that people were forced to save more privately some how. Both of those are basically political non starters. You'd also have to have a continually increasing rate of productivity growth as well. If the population is declining, then the economy can't grow without increases in productivity.
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Dec 7, 2014 18:44
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tsa posted:Even 10 years ago taxi drivers would have laughed at the idea of being replaced by driverless cars but it's probably going to happen within the next couple decades. I think you are greatly underestimating the number of low wage jobs that can be eliminated. Sure janitors sound hard but fast food chains? Warehouse operations (see amazon)? Self-check out lines have gone from basically 0 in 2005 to 400,000 in a decade, and that trend will only increase. There was basically no such thing as retirement even as recently as 100 years ago, and health care was not as big of a deal. If you were old and frail, your family took care of you, hopefully, and when you succumbed to a disease, you left this mortal coil. There was no expensive nursing homes, or surgeries, or drawn out end of life care. All of those kinds cost money, and require a young workforce to support them. If we don't worry about that, then, yeah, a declining population for awhile isn't a big deal.
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Dec 8, 2014 03:57
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