I understand that if you decline like Japan, life gets hard economically. But I find that growing like we do in Canada also puts a lot of strain on us.
Is there any reason why we can't aim for 0 growth each year? Just import enough people that we don't grow / decline more than like 5000 people each year. I get 100% accurate forecast is impossible, but can't we try to get close? What am I missing, since I realized no country has attempted this.
ITT: People totally ignoring OPs question. Yes, we all understand how those still in the workforce pay into social programs that the elderly use today.
OP poses a situation where the growth is zero. Not negative, but zero.
Negative growth means fewer people in the workforce.
Zero growth means zero change. For every elderly person who dies, another young person enters the workforce.
Very few of the top answers even bother to address this, and instead parrot the same old points about what happens when there aren't enough young people to sustain the social programs.
You're right.
The problem mainly comes from transitioning from a growth population model to a stagnant one.
Here's some math for you.
Let's assume a very simple population model. People are born at age 0, and age by 1 year every year. At age 100, everybody dies. There's no other sources of death.
If you use an exponential growth model with a growth of 1% each year (i.e. each year there's 1% more babies than the year prior), then about 12% of the population is over 65 years old and about 55% of the population is of working age (age 18-65).
That's about 4.5 working people per elderly.
Now in a similar scenario except there's no population growth (i.e. each year the same amount of babies are born, which because nobody dies except from old age exactly equals the number of deaths).
Then 35% of the population is over 65, and 47% of the population is of working age.
That's only 1.3 workers per elderly.
You can imagine that a system (social security, taxes, etc) which works well at 4.5 workers per elderly might not work well at 1.3 workers per elderly.
For fun, here's the numbers for a 1% shrinking population (each year 1% fewer babies).
39% working population. 59% elderly. 0.66 worker per elderly.
While I realize tweaking the number won't completely solve the issue, you took a life expectancy of 100 Vs a more realistic one that could be 80
Edit : yeah I get his point, what I'm criticizing is the order of magnitude that is a complete guess instead of an accurate estimation. The longer people live without working, the larger the gap would be in worker per elderly (w/e) for a shrinking population vs a growing one. Furthermore, I have absolutly no idea how much w/e is a satisfying number. While I realize it's probably not 0.66 w/e, if the correct answer was 0.1 w/e, his model wouldn't prove anything since a shrinking population would not be an issue.
Feel free to repeat the math for 80.
In that case we have 3.2 workers for every elder with zero population growth and 4.45 with a one percent increase every year. Seems much more sustainable and kinda proves that, while a decreasing population would put a strain on the social system that is too high, a stable population is manageable
I did the math for 80. Then, because it was an easy tweak in my Excel spreadsheet, and because my numbers for 1% growth with life expectancy 80 were suspiciously close to yours with life expectancy 100, I did it again for 100. My numbers for 100 are significantly different from yours, so one of us must have done something wrong.
With 1% growth: % over 65: 13.29% % 18-65: 56.89% % under 18: 29.88% Ratio working age to senior: 4.30
With 0% growth: % over 65: 18.75% % 18-65: 58.75% % under 18: 22.50% Ratio working age to senior: 3.13
With 1% decline: % over 65: 25.33% % 18-65: 58.60% % under 18: 16.06% Ratio working age to senior: 2.31
With 1% growth: % over 65: 24.43% % 18-65: 49.55% % under 18: 26.01% Ratio working age to senior: 2.03
With 0% growth: % over 65: 35.00% % 18-65: 47.00% % under 18: 18.00% Ratio working age to senior: 1.34
With 1% decline: % over 65: 46.78% % 18-65: 41.77% % under 18: 11.45% Ratio working age to senior: 0.89
The trends are of course the same, leading to the same conclusions on how eliminating or reversing population growth affects systems where working class people must contribute to care for seniors. So the point stands. But the differences aren't coming out quite as severe with my numbers.
Methodology: Excel spreadsheet with ages 0-79 or 0-99 respectively, each with its own row. Because 99 really represents ages 99 years to 99 and 364 days, we go from 0-99, not 1-100 or 0-100. The oldest age has population 1 in that year (arbitrary, but simple, and for ratios it doesn't matter). For population growth, each row beyond that is 1.01 times the row above it. For stagnation, they're just all 1. For decline, each row is 0.99 times the row above it. Copy down the formula.
I use Excel to add up those numbers for age rows 65-79 or 65-99 depending on the life expectancy, for 18-64, and for 0-17 (remember, it's effectively going to 17 years and 364 days). For percentages, I divide that resulting age group number by the total for all ages (cutting off as appropriate at our life expectancy). For number of working age folks to seniors, I divide the working age number by the senior number (underage gets ignored here). Is anything wrong/missing here, or different from how you calculated it?
You're probably right. I'm sick right now, so didn't properly check the math.
No worries. Errors or not, I appreciate people who actually do the math!
Um well I uh… didn’t want to actually do anything myself. Much easier to just criticize your model while ignoring the main point
That's what I thought.
Anyhow, the idea of this exercise isn't to generate accurate numbers, because there's a glaring number of inaccuracies in the model.
The idea is just to see how the numbers change between relatively minor population growth figures (0% vs 1%). The rest is simply so I can math more easily.
People who study aren't necessarily working jobs too, so the average working age probably won't start at 18, but closer to 20/21 years. And the fact that some people retire earlier than 65 (not necessarily living of government funds, but not working to add to those funds either), you have a smaller working age range and it will again be closer to the original math.
Even if for every elderly person you add a new young person to the workforce, we're paying more for each elderly person than what the one young one adds. Layer on top of that everything the government does at all levels is based on kicking the can down the road.
Yup I'm quite confused by a lot of answers here who completely ignore what op wrote.
Zero growth means zero change. For every elderly person who dies, another young person enters the workforce.
You're assuming that social programs are set up in a way that expects a balance of young and old people. Most of them are set up with the expectation that there are a lot more young people than old people. The population needs to be pyramid-shaped to make the retirement math work out.
I agree.
I appreciate your critique.
Do you have an answer?
The answer is that each young person contributes less than an old person takes from the system, generally speaking. The economics are set up assuming that we will have many more young people entering the workforce than old people leaving. Op is incorrect that the reason Canada is struggling is population growth. Canada with all it's land area has a population only around 3x that of the city of London. There's enough space and resources for everybody. The problem is inequality. Labour efficiency has skyrocketed year on year with all the technology we are creating, but all that value is immediately siphoned off to go to the shareholders
I think it's just ripple effects of past growth spurts and declines that make things wobble, like wars, famines etc.
If you had a stable birth rate for a century it could work but that doesn't happen realistically
Social programs, funded by tax dollars, require a constant inflow of new income earners to keep the coffers full, as people retire and start drawing on those funds themselves.
Many people are under the false impression that the money they pay into CPP is what funds their retirement payouts. In truth, the money I currently send to Ottawa is being sent out to people already retired, like my older sisters and brother. And, when my wife and I put our feet up, you and your kids will be paying for it.
Throw in increasing longevity and the skyrocketing costs for end of life care, and Canada needs more and more people annually just to keep the math working.
Lots of people are pointing out the money aspect.
The actual physical labor aspect is important too. Yes we need working people paying taxes.
But you also need people to physically do the labor necessary. Someone is growing and harvesting food, someone is building the things you buy, not to mention the actual physical labor of healthcare.
Productivity per worker has skyrocketed with no sign of decline. Labor isn't the issue (nor is total money available due to production). And hasn't been for the lifetime of anyone here unless you're pushing 3 digits. It's just the boogeyman that the rich point to mask the real issue being wealth distribution.
Until we hit a bottleneck where productivity per worker stagnates, labor will never be the determining factor. Probably not in the top 5.
EDIT: In other words and using the US, if worker pay was kept at a fixed proportion of their productivity as it was in say the '50s, the amount they pay into things like SS, Medicare/medicaid/etc would scale faster than the elderly population. Alternatively if we taxed the rich appropriately a similar level of care would be available to the elderly though the current workers would have a shittier deal. We only have the issue we have now because we both don't pay workers enough and don't tax the rich enough. The productivity of labor scales faster enough to keep up with needs caused by demographics, and the money would scale even faster than the elderly population.
Bingo. The way the governments of Canada and the US have moved taxation off the wealthy and corporations means that they are playing with loaded dice and the people are paying the price.
The math isn't hard.
Yes we'll need more funds and productivity per worker. We're already getting those increases in rates more than sufficient to keep up. They're just going into the pockets of the very rich instead.
It doesn't matter how much you tax people (and I agree it needs to be higher) if you aren't going to have the people to do the jobs.
Productivity is not uniform across all economic fields. If you need one nurse to watch over four hospitalized old people and the number of old people is growing - the number of nurses will have to grow too, absent a medical breakthrough that will reverse aging.
No productivity explosion in making widgets, cars, corn or solar panels will reduce the number of nurses required. Not everything is a commodity that can be bought with increasing revenue elsewhere
Didn't say it was. Changing economics absolutely will shift the proportions just like they did with farmers. These shifts are more than enough to allow for some fields to grow even as the proportional workforce to elderly decreases.
To go back to my earlier example, those 100+ million farmers we don't have? They're doing something else. They don't just vanish.
EDIT: further productivity on that side or healthcares is increasing, and paying/treating them better would be more than enough to make up the numbers (to draw workers away from areas where productivity is increasing even faster) for any reasonable future demographic
So it’s a pyramid scheme.
It’s not just government, every model or future prediction takes population growth as a given so we collectively agreed, planned, and strategized our lives accordingly.
No growth = our slow demise
It kind of has to be. You're always going to end up with the 20-60 year group supporting both 0-19 and 61-100. That's just the physical reality of the situation given when humans are most productive.
Not really. Pyramid schemes involve a transfer up several levels, the welfare state is a transfer mostly in two directions - a big chunk of money to old people, and a smaller chunk of money to adolescents. And unlike a pyramid scheme, people are constantly moving through the system. Young people eventually become adults and pay into the system, adults eventually become seniors, and seniors eventually die and leave the system
It's not a pyramid scheme. Nobody takes "population growth" as a given. Markets want constant labour supply. Population decline instead gives you a shrinking labour force and an increasing dependent (elderly) population. There is no fix for this unless you just want the abolishment of social security.
It's Not entirely your money paying for now. The cpp is more than 20 percent funded
Which means the overwhelming majority is funded by current taxation, which is the point. I also expect that number to decline as more and more boomers retire. As I was born in 64, I am technically the last year of the boomer generation, so the wave is already starting.
What happens in 60 years when nearly everyone in your country has reached retirement age, and the life expectancy has risen to 100? It's not that we need an ever increasing population, but we need an at least constant workforce.
Also, maybe even more Eli5:
If you aim for growth and miss, you can still get by.
If you aim for stagnation and miss, you're in for a bad time.
It's an axiom that holds true much of the time, better to over-produce than under-produce.
And the underlying thing people need to remember- we got used to a trend for hundreds or thousands of years that population continuously grew. Here's a logarithmic chart (it makes it easier to see doubling- like a jump from 100 to 200 is doubling, and a jump from 1 million to 2 million is also doubling, but if you showed this chart linearly in millions, you wouldn't even see the small jumps)
Stagnating population isn't bad inherently, but going to stagnation or loss really fast, when we've designed our social and political and economic systems with the assumption that growth would continue, could be bad.
It's often the case that when things change really fast, stuff breaks or stops working right.
But if on average you aim for growth more than you aim for stagnation or decline, you're going to grow infinitely. And since we live on a finite world with finite resources, you're going to be in for a very bad time.
With technological advances you can do more with less resources, and combine that with more efficient recycling and renewable energy you could theoretically grow nearly infinitely with finite resources.
But humanity doesn't seem very interested in doing a lot of those things...
This is also why all countries are not just stopping immigration like some people want
We literally need that influx of workers and taxes to support the boomers and not collapse the economy
Why a lot of people are parroting immigration like the only option, people there can’t have children or what? That was usually the solution for centuries before.
People don’t want to have children anymore because how expensive things are, a boomer could afford a whole house and three kids on one salary while right now two working people can barely buy a tiny cardboard box.
Why a lot of people are parroting immigration like the only option, people there can’t have children or what? That was usually the solution for centuries before.
why invest 20 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars making kids when you can just import ready-to-work adults from the third world and start collecting taxes today?
Because it can abused and fuck the youth adults of that country
Women by and large don’t /want/ to have three+ children. The only reason they popped out babies at the rate they did in previous generations is because they literally didn’t have any other choice - your job was to be a housewife and make babies.
A lot of women DO want to have three+ children (the average desired fertility in the US is 2.5). However many of them have financial constraints, or don't meet the right partner, or have infertility, or other such factors. So the actual fertility is much lower.
Or, hear me out, we could have fewer boomers
We do have fewer boomers, every year their population goes down.
Finally something positive about the future.
But other people grow into that age range as the oldest people die..
Though boomers were born during the baby boom. Here's a graph of birth rates. Birth rate drops significantly after the baby boom. So there's just fewer 60-year-olds than there are 65-year-olds, and fewer still 55-year-olds.
That's why GenX was called "the Baby Bust generation" before the rebranding.
Oh no
Like, intentionally killing them?
god forbid. just privatize healthcare, close rural hospitals, and cut back on social services and pensions. problem solves itself, really
We will.
The only way to decrease the older population is to remove access to medical aid and financial securities. At some point (if not already), governments will start making policies to do this, but they’ll need to do it undercover because it would be very unpopular.
Having a country where people on average can live to 75-100 but has a declining child birth rate just isn’t sustainable, where your only solution is to rely on immigration to fill the gap.
Killing off the elderly is not a popular policy
Especially since they voted most often then any other age group
wealth concentration. i'll use housing as an example but there's more than one situation like this:
buy property, age, sell up to the next generation was the plan, but...
house prices went up fast and wages didn't, pricing out the next generation. now when boomers age they sell up to pay for care costs, which they have to pay because the younger generations pay didn't rise at the same rate, so they all work, so there's no homemaker to shift from raising kids to caring for the elderly - the social capital of communities has been absorbed into labour. so who's buying boomer houses? in cities it's buy-to-let landlords using borrowed money from banks. further out it's hedge funds - massive private corporations, who get thier cash from... boomer investments. so boomer pensions were the borrowed money used to transfer housing stock out of the hands of the public and into corporate control
so even as the numbers of boomers decline, nothing trickles down to us, it just trickles into billionaires pockets where they use that wealth to leverage ever more value out of us
something something luigi, you get the picture
how do you propose we get rid of them? start culling people above x age? I'm sure that'll go down great
Historically, large population clusters of the old and vulnerable were solved naturally by waves of disease. Lots of people in proximity with weak immune systems = rapid spread of nasty bug = rebalancing of population to the young, mobile, and healthy.
We have advanced to the point where science can counter the worst of that with vaccines and treatments, halting the historic pattern.
But much like life, death finds, er, a way.
More old people, more votes for the right wing, less social care for the elderly and education systems, and a rise in the anti-vax population ripe for the next wave of natural disease. We just don't see the overall timeframes for the pattern to play out.
Your elderly were so preoccupied with whether they could live, they didn’t stop to think if they should live.
That's called 'death panels.' A really large talking point in elections past.
But it's what I think to myself when I see patients barely hanging onto life in their 80s-90s at the hospital and their families refuse to accept their poor prognosis. The medical and caregiving needs for the last year of life is extremely expensive for families and our society.
Yes, there is a good case for withholding a lot of the expensive care in the last year or so of life which delivers minimal lifespan extension with a pretty bad quality of life.
The problem is that almost nobody wants to withhold care for THEIR parents.
Guess we'll start with your grandparents
If you're advocating for what people think you're advocating for, you're no different from the mindset you're supposedly trying to prevent.
We don't need it, capitalism does. Capitalism treats humans like cattle that need to breed and work to keep their system running. It's an inhumane system that detaches us from the moral fabric of humanity.
that’s just the stupidest statement in the entire world.
which economic system doesn’t need this? feudalism? communism? mercantilism??
every single economic system ever designed by humans needs it.
OK, it's capitalism's fault. That doesn't change the fact that as people age they become less or non-productive. It requires working age people to provide for them. How do you do that without what you're talking about?
Hopefully if life expectancy has risen to 100, the level of health and wellness in the 60s-80s would also markedly better, and some people would still want to work (hopefully for better benefits) beyond the normal retirement age and thus keep feeding the system a bit more.
Your body still ages. In no world outside serious genetic engineering will today’s 55 be tomorrow’s 80.
It'll even out over 60 years as more companies embrace automation. And I'm not even talking "chatgpt is vibe coding my job!" I'm talking old tech that you would be surprised isn't it factories yet. Rotating work benches, robotic arms, conveyor belts, a central air system for tools at work benches, COUGH AC in factories maybe? COUGH a lot of factories or shops I've worked at might have 1 or two of these things, I've worked at some shops where the closest thing to automation was a human assembly line with power tools, as more shops and businesses update, the need for labor will decrease.
... And then you have neural networks able to do data jobs :P (okay I snuck in some AI talk) and there ya go. Production will keep up with demand, which just leaves the problem of "I have too many humans and not enough jobs to go around and no one is working and no one has enough money to put into the economy but UBI? Over my dead body" and that's pretty much what I predict in the next 60 years.
For much of Europe, the population growth is close to zero, with declining native birth rates leading to an aging native population being offset by mostly younger immigrants moving in.
Theres a number of things. For one the current status quo may not be sustainable (ie, the worker to retiree ratio is *already* a problem), in other cases the immigration / emigration has a lot of variables. Sure you could limit the residence permits granted to a certain set amount but people leave your country, people stay temporarily, people come and go to study, refugees etc... it's non trivial to plan around population growth even at municipal level. After all it's not like you can force people to stay or keep people waiting for years until it's convenient to you for them to move in
In an objective sense, nothing says we can't have countries and social systems designed around 0 growth/shrinkage. However, the problem is that every government and economic system in use today presupposes growth over time.
To operate on a system designed for functionally 0 growth, we'd first have to transition away from our current systems over to it. And this would take a lot of power from people who benefit from the current systems. They have no incentive to enable/allow such a move, and plenty of incentive to prevent it.
Strictly speaking, with economics and productivity, nothing says we couldn't turn hard into the automation wave and get ourselves in a position where nobody HAS to work, all are provided for. However, a lot of growth systems are at odds with this. Leaving people the option to not-work, means you have to entice people TO work, thus lessening your growth curves. Why pay someone $30/hr if you can get someone "good enough" to do it for half that? If people HAVE to work to live, and you put the market in a position where jobs are scarce, you'll get people agreeing to wages that, strictly speaking, are not self sufficient simply because they'd rather starve to death over three years than in three months. That's a lot of power for pro-growth systems.
Now, you can also obtain a bit of a hybrid in a way. You can go static on population and tune yourself to expect growth in the form of automation/scientific boons. Getting more out of less, and so on. But again, you'd have to globally transition to that system and there's no incentive for the people at the helm to do that.
(more of an ELI15...)
The current economic structure doesn't support it. It's why we have to keep fighting (even if we're currently losing) to stop from shoving old people onto the streets and to keep teen pregnancy low. Both of those things happening are desired by the current system. More workers, and less of what the Germans called "useless eaters".
We're plenty productive enough for it to not be this way, have been for nigh on a century, however the current system forces the wealth to slow down by concentrating into the hands of the very few. With such a low velocity the money just stagnates, doesn't get used for anything, generating more material wealth or taking care of those who produced the wealth the current system was built upon.
tldr: it can in a different economic ruleset, the current economic ruleset doesn't want it to because those who maintain the current ruleset are benefiting greatly.
Population decline isn't bad for regular people, it's only bad for money. If there's less people, they have to pay better or compete for workers with other goodies.
Housing prices go down because there's less people needing houses.
It's not bad for you and me at all.
That would require exactly 2 kids per family. You can’t legislate how many kids people have, like logistically it would be a nightmare.
I don't think OP is suggesting we put laws in place to force stagnation, just asking why so many people treat growth as the only correct path.
No it doesn't. It requires the birth rate to match the death rate.
Number of kids per family is irrelevant, average fertility rate is more useful here.
When you look at averages, the result is the same whether four couples have 2 kids each, or whether 2 couples have 0 kids, 1 couple has 2 kids and 1 couple have 6 kids.
Hard for locals to have kids when they're broke.
The actual trend is the opposite of that, though. Poorer countries have more kids, and the birthrate tends to go down as countries get more developed and wealthy.
That is because in poorer countries, people often directly rely on their kids for aid when old, and mortality rates are also usually higher.
Richer countires usually install the "proxy" of governmental social security, so that you don't necessarily need kids of your own to provide later. But the society as a whole still does - it's now just one step removed.
We’ve gone from relying on our own kids to relying on other people’s kids. I see the problem.
Everyone wants to grow their wealth. It's harder to grow your wealth when your population is stagnant.
There are two problems with this:
A welfare state with a pension system requires a sustainable ratio of young, working people paying for all the old, retired people. This system could be scaled back (reduce the standard of living for old people) but it is politically unfeasible because old people as a group tend to vote more than young people as a group, so it is political suicide to turn your back on them.
State economic policy is made with future economic growth as an assumption. When the tax revenue isn't enough then states take on debt so they can keep operating, this debt (and the interest payment on it) tends to grow larger over time which isn't an issue if you also assume that the population (tax base) will also grow with it and become more productive. If population growth stagnates then generation C will not only have to pay their debt, they will have to pay the debt of generation B and A as well.
What am I missing, since I realized no country has attempted this.
There are countries, like the US, that have level or low population growth entirely due to immigration while birth rates are far below replacement.
At some point, you have to look at the global scale. Does it make sense for there to be excess population producing countries that have their local population/resource constraints/limits removed because they migrate the growth to other places?
It would make more sense to let the populations level out locally on their own, let the economies re-adjust and find their new balance at steady state.
Economies do not "readjust" painlessly. A shrinking workforce and aging population will ultimately lead to domestic industry collapse and a social security crisis.
Who will grow and harvest our food when the citizens are old and the immigrants are kept out?
It can and it will. The same people writing doomer articles about population decline were writing nearly identical articles about overpopulation a decade ago.
Don’t take them seriously they are looking at trend lines slapping a linear fit on it and pretending they are doing deep analysis.
Zero growth is perfectly fine (capitalists desiring infinite growth might not like it of course but that's another matter entirely). One in, one out, resources and services sitting in a steady state. All good and probably the best case scenario (even a very slight decline is safe).
The problem you are seeing across the West right now is Japanese style decline. The numbers are masked because people are living longer so you end up with not just less people going in but less people going out too. Eventually you hit a tipping point though and those older folk start dying and then you see the collapse a few decades after the damage is done.
A larger and larger portion of the population is used to care for a group that require more and more resources. That's fine if you are in a steady state and can adjust, but birth rates are collapsing due to economic problems (and unlike other parts of the world people still having access to education and birth control).
You bring up Canada, the current fertility rate is 1.33. That means every adult woman has on average 1.33 children. To have a steady state that needs to be 2 (normally adjusted to 2.1 to accommodate for child mortality).
Immigration is being used by many countries as a stopgap to try and overcome this, the problem is those immigrants are subject to the same economic issues and after a generation or two you're in the same situation, not to mention growing right wing anti-immigrant pressure that's growing across the West.
TLDR: a stagnant population is fine, but a declining population can be easily mistaken for a stagnant population for decades before its too late.
Too late? The ability of policy to change birth rates is limited. The population demographic change is already happening. The patterns have already been observed in every country this has already happened in.
This is an interesting read: https://ourworldindata.org/demographic-transition
Why would a country want its power, influence and economy not to grow?
what is the downside of increasing these things?
The criticisms usually are increased housing costs and, depending on the type of immigration, hurting either low-skill or high-skill native born workers’ job prospects.
Housing and employment opportunities should organically grow alongside population increases.
indeed, they should grow comparably faster, as economic efficiencies increase with greater available manpower and brainpower.
The age of cheap, abundant human labor as an advantage is starting to go away, though. One could argue that with a smaller population, you could spend more on each one to create a more valuable workforce.
Spend how? If you are decreasing your tax base, how are you spending more?
Capitalism relies on continuous growth.
Eventually things will have to change as infinite growth isn’t a sustainable model but everyone’s hoping they’re not going to be the one holding the hot potato when it explodes.
In short, because systems where working class folks help support retired folks rely on a relatively constant ratio of working class folks to retired folks.
You already know that such systems are strained when population declines, relative to population growth. Essentially the same thing happens (relatively speaking) with population stagnation, just with a lower severity of change. If you have fewer working class folks for each retired person, those workers each have to contribute more (on average), or retired folks have to get less support (on average).
To really understand what's going on, though, look at the math. Statistics are simplified to assume that we all die of old age, at age 80. We join the workforce at 18, and retire at age 65, then collect some form of support (like social security) until we die. I also re-ran the numbers for life expectancy 100, which I think is less realistic, but is also generally a trend the world is following, as healthcare gets better.
Hat tip to u/drugbird for getting started on the math.
With 1% growth: % over 65: 13.29% % 18-65: 56.89% % under 18: 29.88% Ratio working age to senior: 4.30
With 0% growth: % over 65: 18.75% % 18-65: 58.75% % under 18: 22.50% Ratio working age to senior: 3.13
With 1% decline: % over 65: 25.33% % 18-65: 58.60% % under 18: 16.06% Ratio working age to senior: 2.31
With 1% growth: % over 65: 24.43% % 18-65: 49.55% % under 18: 26.01% Ratio working age to senior: 2.03
With 0% growth: % over 65: 35.00% % 18-65: 47.00% % under 18: 18.00% Ratio working age to senior: 1.34
With 1% decline: % over 65: 46.78% % 18-65: 41.77% % under 18: 11.45% Ratio working age to senior: 0.89
Methodology: Excel spreadsheet with ages 0-79 or 0-99 respectively, each with its own row. Because 99 really represents ages 99 years to 99 and 364 days, we go from 0-99, not 1-100 or 0-100. The oldest age has population 1 in that year (arbitrary, but simple, and for ratios it doesn't matter). For population growth, each row beyond that is 1.01 times the row above it. For stagnation, they're just all 1. For decline, each row is 0.99 times the row above it. Copy down the formula.
I use Excel to add up those numbers for age rows 65-79 or 65-99 depending on the life expectancy, for 18-64, and for 0-17 (remember, it's effectively going to 17 years and 364 days). For percentages, I divide that resulting age group number by the total for all ages (cutting off as appropriate at our life expectancy). For number of working age folks to seniors, I divide the working age number by the senior number (underage gets ignored here).
Please let me know if you think I got something wrong, or follow this guide if you want to adjust some assumptions to see how the answer changes.
Note: Most of this was buried further in comment threads, as a response to someone else who did the math, but I thought it deserved a top-level place, with some minor tweaks.
Because industry needs labor. The more people, the bigger pool to choose from and the more workers have to compete against each other, lowering the overall cost of labor. That's good for profits.
Theoretically that gap should be able to be closed by automation, but instead it's just used to drive profits ever higher and funnel money into the pockets of the owner class.
Japan's problem is mostly how old the population is. Modern countries are setup with social systems to provide for the elderly. In the US this is social security and medicare. The working population pays into this to provide for the elderly population who are not working anymore.
When population growth slows down, it means fewer babies. Fewer babies grows up into fewer workers. Then you run into a situation where there are a lot of elderly people relying on care and not enough working people to pay for it.
this is actually the same issue that canada is having. an aging population where less and less people are having children.
the canadian government tried to 'fix' this by importing international students, which not only keeps domestic tuition costs down (international students pay WAY more), but also filled in a lot of jobs *at the time* that needed to be filled.
every business from small (like your local bar) to big (like tim hortons) wanted this. there was also an incentive for businesses to get subsidized wages if they hired international workers.
so solution-wise, it made sense. the problem is as the pandemic lockdowns and residual effects of it trickled away, it became much harder for canadians (especially canadian youths) to find entry-level jobs, since all of the businesses would rather have subsidized-wage international workers rather than hire canadians.
now theres rampant racism in canada, especially against south asians, as that is predominately where the international students are from. its to the level of hate that east asians got during covid and frankly, its embarrassing.
You also have a lot of housing affordability issues where Canadian born citizens are feeling left out and would rather not have increased demand for housing from immigrants
TBF, a lot of that came from NIMBY and a previous conservative government gutting housing programs, as the government previously would build a lot of dense housing and starter homes for economic reasons.
Then they went all "the free market provides" and we ended up with every builder loving the profit margins on luxury-end homes and not the thinner margins of starter homes. It's how we've ended up with new homes being double the cost of existing homes in even cheap CoL areas.
Well that and we've got a lovely system of trades where existing trades train the new generation, but that brings competition (you're literally training future competition) so many trades don't take apprentices now.
Funny enough, immigrants probably aren't much demand, as those taken advantage of for minimum wage subsidized work, can't afford things either, so they're living 4+ to a room in some cases. One place got shutdown recently, as a basement 1BR unit had 9 people living in it, all workers for the building owner's franchise. It's literal slavery.
What a load of bull. I know plenty of people that wants to build but can't because it takes years to get a permit, the list of requirements is longer than an arm, and land availability is artificially limited. Houses can't be cheap when simply acquiring the land costs 250-500k right? Then have a list of requirements longer than an arm to match, then wait years for the permit.
Land is being artificially limited for ideological reasons, namely that urban sprawl must be combated. I can't even build on land I own, despite having someone built next to it, because some politician drew an artificial urban perimeter
Governments don't build houses, they only slow down those that want to. The less they'll get involved the more will get built. Our ancestors had no housing issues because they'd just split land and start building. They could finish a house before you get approval nowdays
Often this is due to nimby. Rich people don’t want more housing around them.
If you want to look at how government policy can create plentiful, cheap housing, there is a very obvious model in Toronto. It's called 'public parking', or 'cheap housing for cars'.
The city is dedicated to making sure that you can park your car, cheaply, pretty much where ever you want in the city. It's done so with a three pronged approach:
A) Massive public subsidies: The green P lots sprinkled all over the downtown core sit on incredibly valuable land, and charge comparatively cheap parking. Every road, no matter how arterial, permits a sizeable chunk of it's roadway to be given over to parking, for the cost of ~$60 a month. I live on Lappin, a downtown avenue that used to be on a streetcar line. We ripped up that streetcar line, and now we use the extra wide avenue for parking.
This massive, government owned supply sets a price floor for parking. A private operator doesn't want to try to sell parking for $50 bucks a day if there is a green P nearby that is competing with him for $10 a day. The only places where $50 a day parking exists is in the extremely dense business district, and even then, there are hundreds of subsidized spaces, but demand overwhelms supply.
B) Mandated supply from private builders: Parking minimums: Wanna build a mall in Toronto? Cool, you must build several hundred homes (for cars) on site, based on your square footage. Building a factory? You better believe there is a minimum number of homes (for cars) that you must build, based on the number of employees you have. Until a few years ago, if you wanted to build a home for humans, you had to also build a home for cars. Cheap housing for cars is so important to the government that it mandates that virtually every public facing business have some provision of housing for cars.
C) A humane understanding of market failures.
Despite all the planning, there are some events that routinely cause demand to outstrip supply. Every year, the CNE is a classic example. Almost every parking space for miles is taken, with a few lots nearby offering some at $80 a day or more. So in parkdale, enterprising locals allow you to park on their front lawns, or drive around to their backyards, for $20-50 for the day. This is dangerous, creates environmental and fire risks, and damages property, and happens every year like clockwork because the market just can't meet the demand for a few days. Technically the city would be justified in issuing fines and shutting down all these residents, but the city declines to, because they understand the basic human principal. People /have/ to park /somewhere/, and criminalizing parking when the market is failing to meet the demand is just counterproductive.
The city's three pronged approach works. It takes a massive amount of public and private spending to work, but politicians will argue that it's a worthwhile investment, because providing plentiful, affordable housing (for cars) is what makes the city work. If people('s cars) couldn't exist in the city, business would grind to a halt, so it's in everyone's interest to make sure that housing (for cars) is cheap and plentiful.
You just decsribed NIMBYism lol
Yeah because that is part of the problem. Look at all the large single family homes in the suburbs of Toronto where the only other thing to do there is get in your car and drive to a strip mall. Think of how much more housing could be built on that land instead of large single family homes
No, the root issue is that 99% of Canada is empty land that your government doesn't zone for development.
When land is cheap you put a cheap house on it.
When a plot of land costs half a million dollars, you build a proportionately expensive house.
My home if I were to list it today is worth about $550,000. $450,000 of that is land, the depreciated structure on it is worth <$100k.
Oh, more than 99%. But open Google Maps, and scroll out to the middle of rural Manitoba. Put the little streetview man on the highway and stare out over that untouched wilderness.
Would you want to live in a cheap house on that land? If not you, then who?
The problem isn't the amount of land that isn't zoned for development—it's the amount of land people actually want to live on.
see i'd love to live out there, but i definitely dont wanna drive 4 hours down to the city for anything reliable, you cant even drink unboiled water if you're too far from a city
we need density
An alternative is subsidizing the cost of the infrastructure and seeding investment money for local business. It costs the tax payers up front but long term eases a ton of longer term costs like housing costs and ends up actually generating more money for the government and locals long term as well. Politicians think in election cycles though and you can’t do much long term good when you only have 4ish years to not only get something done but then see the tangible rewards from it.
Viewing infrastructure as an investment rather than a cost???
Impossible!
The cost of building has ballooned, both materials and labour so that there are no cheap houses anymore.
Average building cost is easily $300/sq ft on a low end home, plus site prep and more, for a 1000 sq foot home you could be looking at a total cost of $400,000+ even if the lot was only $25,000.
The depreciated value is mostly useful as a taxable value and pseudo market value for the house on it's own.
Canadian Shield. Head on over to r/geography. This comes up frequently.
If only there were some way to build multiple homes on a single plot of land, dividing the cost of the land across, say, 50 different homes!
Everyone would be living on the same land, but they’d be…apart.
Yes, but at the same time the population growth hasn’t been that high compared to historically, so the housing issue seems to be more about not building enough rather than the population growing too fast
As a Canadian I would love to have already started my family by now but I've had to delay because of the cost of living and job security.
I had kids a while back in the same situation and in retrospect, it seems there is never a perfect time and job security can change in a flash.
Yeah, the cost of of housing, healthcare, and education/job training has been rising around the world and have been squeezing living standards, but since we want our economies to be able to handle a growing population I’m just unconvinced that immigration has been the driving force behind those rises - to me it looks more like a lack of investment in house building, an aging population meaning more demand for healthcare, and the wrong incentives in education
It really always boils down to NIMBYISM, doesn't it. That + people hoarding houses as "investment properties" and the fact that even when people do build anything it's always luxury apartments because that's the most profitable thing to build.
I was working in an architecture firm in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina wrecked a significant portion of the city, and for about a year or so afterwards, there were a bunch of big out-of-town developers coming down to the city and planning these big luxury condo towers that they thought would be necessary to replace all of the destroyed housing.
Our architecture firm was happy to take on those projects, because they threw big chunks of money at us, and we'd just spend a few months making drawings/renderings of big fancy skyscrapers, knowing full well that they didn't have to be realistic because they were never going to get built.
The majority of the housing that got destroyed in the storm was in the newer parts of the city and where the lower income people tended to live, because the elevation was lower and the flood risks were so much higher. And in the wealthier neighborhoods where there was flooding, the people living there weren't going to let developers come in and build giant towers around their houses.
After about a year those big developers started to realize that their fancy luxury towers didn't make any sense, and those projects started going away. But it was fun while it lasted.
Right now, we simply have too few units. Luxury, basic, condos, rentals, houses, townhouses, doesn't matter, there isn't enough inventory. There are legal solutions (banning airBNB, increasing costs for secondary/vacant residences, etc), and there are physical solutions (build more fuckin' housing).
The latter is more expensive, but also where you run into NIMBYism. Everyone wants more housing, but no one wants "the character of their neighbourhood" or whatever changed.
Yea I'm kinda over it here. Gentrified out of the community I grew up in
That's mostly a zoning issue in most areas but it's also not as big an issue as some make it seem. If you move out of Toronto or Vancouver, there are tons of medium sized and even some bigger cities with perfectly affordable housing.
I was looking at houses in my home city, $150k-200k for a house. Not an amazing house but perfectly livable.
I don’t know about Canada but it’s similar to the US. You can find affordable housing in medium to small sized cities. The issue though is there may be a lack of job opportunities and things to do. So there just is a push to move to the top 20-30 metros. There is also a push for people to leave colder climates up north and moving to where it’s warmer throughout the year.
Also schools tend to get funded by property taxes, so your more pricier neighborhoods are in bigger demand. If you take my city as an example, it’s mainly 2 suburbs and 1 small area within the city limits that has schools zoned to the suburbs that middle class people and above tend to look at when buying houses. There also tends to be economic investment only in these areas as well.
So although there may be tons of affordable houses in my city, a bulk of it is in areas where people will claim it’s undesirable. Then you have retirees and corporations seeing these nicer areas as good investments, and they are offering cash and outbidding people looking for homes to raise a family.
Here in the Maritimes/Nova Scotia it's gone a bit differently, rather than students we incentivized a lot of immigration mostly from Central Asia. But the government didn't provide enough affordable housing for the flood of new immigrants, many of them growing young families.
There are still a lot of entry level jobs here, at least at the terrible places like fast food chains and Walmart. But there isn't enough housing which has only caused the already insane housing prices to get even worse.
Huh? I'm in Halifax and most immigrants are Indian here.
I didn’t know that. Like from the ‘stans?
One of the issues here in Australia in holiday towns is that the service industry is struggling to fill positions because they don't pay enough for the workers to afford the very few available rentals in the towns - the shortage plus the excessive cost is driven by short term rentals like AirBnB and similar programs.
In the cities there are also issues with land banking (developers buying land and then holding onto it instead of developing so they can make more money down the line) and foreign investors buying housing - more than a few of these foreign owned places are kept empty because it is too much of a hassle to worry about tenants.
The problem wasn't that they were bringing in foreign students to expand the tax payer base, the problem is that they're using foreign workers to replace Canadian workers as a means of artificially keeping wages down.
There's a difference between bringing in engineering students for a degree, who then settle down and have a family and immigrate long term - and bringing in unskilled labour to replace workers at Tim Hortons for less than the prevailing labour wage. One contributes to your long-term economy, while the other stops business from hiring the people already here
The US tech industry does the exact same thing.
There's a particular class of visa that allows companies to hire foreigners if they can't find qualified citizens. So they write a job description with impossible-to-meet requirements, claim there aren't any qualified Americans, and hire a (usually) Indian for 50% of the standard wage.
The immigrant can't look for a better-paying job once here because the company is sponsoring their visa. If they leave the company, they'll lose their visa and the ability to (legally) stay in the US.
Every year the tech companies lobby to increase the number of these visas, saying that the fact they "have to" hire so many Indians is proof that there aren't enough qualified Americans.
The jobs didn’t need to be filled, businesses weren’t willing to pay higher wages. The TFW and international student worker programs have always been about keeping wages low for businesses.
I agree Indians don’t deserve the hate for using the system as intended, but Canadians (especially young Canadians) have every right to be angry for their government attacking them.
Specifically the federal government allowing international students to work full-time to address a “labour shortage” was one of the biggest attacks on young Canadians in recent history.
I don’t think this explanation holds water. Workers were finally going to be in a position of relative power where they could make some gains and increase wages and benefits.
This is unacceptable to corporations, so the government did their bidding and brought in huge numbers of workers. Nothing else mattered.
100% corporations took advantage of this.
but it wasn't just corporations who wanted more immigration. it was also mom and pop shops. local bars and restaurants.
i think people seem to have a very selective memory of what was going on right before the pandemic when there was already a huge labour shortage, followed by the period of covid where mass layoffs in the service industry resulted in people attempting to level up their skills to join other work sectors.
but you're right that there was a period of time where workers did hold position of power. didn't last very long.
Yep. This is what happens to the US every few decades too. See: The blacks, the irish, the chinese, the polish, the mexicans... they were all intentionally brought in as subsidized labor during periods of massive growth, then ended up being hated for taking jobs away once the market stabilized. You'd think people would have figured out a different solution by now, but history and repetition and all that.
Why figure out a different playbook when the current one works? Yeah there's been bloodshed during each of these cycles, but it's never been the blood of these oligarchs being spilled. We spill our blood and it inconveniences their operations enough to settle down for a few decades until a new group is imported to be exploited. The only thing that's new is the current class of exploited labor has a contingent of the poor defending its existence without being paid.
Aren't a lot of the jobs these people are doing, jobs most people don't want to do anyway?
Not just don't want to, often they're vastly underpaid.
It's why the farms in the US are basically entirely fueled by subsidy and illegals, as you don't have to give good pay to illegals, it cuts costs down.
No, they are jobs that can't afford to pay people enough to do them. If I could own a house and raise a family and have a car and take the occasional vacation or go to a nice resturant on $4.50 an hour, I'd have no problem harvesting tomatoes in the hot sun all day. If working overnights as a janitor covered the cost of a NYC apartment I'd take that job in a heartbeat. If the seasonal construction job that only lasts 3 months paid enough for me to make it through the other 9, I'd sign right up. You get the picture. The majority of people who take these kinds of jobs are doing it temporarily and sending the bulk of the money out of the country to places where the wages do afford a better quality of living for their families. 6 months of sharing a room with 4 or 5 other guys so my wife and kids can have good food and a roof over their heads for an entire year back home isn't a bad deal. The problem is, as a full-time resident with a legal apartment in a safe-ish neighborhood, student loan debt, and a car payment so I can get to work every day, those jobs don't cut it. I have to pass them up for something more lucrative because the money doesn't stretch as far here. There is no such thing as a job people don't want to do, only jobs that don't pay enough to offset the downsides of working it. High risk, low pay jobs go unfilled by US citizens because the reward isn't worth the risk. The reward is much higher for temporary laborers who can spend the money elsewhere.
I agree, it's embarassing Canada would forgo its own populations interests and expect them to be emotionally ok with it.
It didn’t help that Trudeau made a grand speech about how immigration was important to Canadas “diversity” then imported 92% from India , mostly from one specific province of India. That’s not how you get a mixing pot of cultures to assimilate to Canadian culture. Also ignoring the housing crisis while doing this is just icing on the dumb cake.
It wasn’t even a majority from India. You’re just lying. In 2024 India was 26.34%, 2023 was 29.63%, 2022 was 27.02%, 2021 was 31.51%, 2020 was 23.23%, etc. After the 2021 census Indians only made up less than 11% of Canada’s immigrant population, or as a whole <2.5% of the country’s population. The Philippines and China were both 2%, the UK 1.28%, etc
India is also a huge country that has more diversity than you’d think at face value, imagine if the EU was one country and suddenly people complained “all the immigrants are coming from one country”.
Plus, housing prices rose more under Harper than they did under Trudeau, so blaming it on immigration doesn’t make sense.
Your not wrong about the immigration statistics but ignoring the fact that Harper was in power for 2008 skews the numbers massively.
Obviously large amounts of immigration when there is already a housing crisis greatly inflames the issue.
And yet, rents are starting to fall now that immigration has dropped and the government is tightening up on work and study permits. Funny, that.
Cart, meet horse.
Interest rates have spiked to levels not seen in decades, and even now they rest at a level that hasn't been around for 15 years. Racist Facebook posts don't really mention that detail.
Spiked? Those sub 3% rates were the exception not the norm. They are going back to levels they were at historically.
TBF, that exception has been around for a pretty long time.
I didn’t say there was no effect. There’s also the issue of temporary foreign workers that get exploited from their employers to the point the UN called it a form of modern slavery.
I was just pointing out immigration is definitively not the reason housing is unaffordable. A stronger connection is when the government stopped building houses through CMHC over 40 years ago - if they hadn’t, we wouldn’t have a housing shortage at all right now.
Another problem Canada has is their housing market is complete garbage. I thought the NIMBYs were bad in Southern California, our Canadian brothers to the north have it 1000x worse.
When I read "rampant racism" I can't help but assume you're prematurely judging some valid emotional reactions to the issue that you've just pointed out
This wasn't due to lockdown, this was a growing problem that anyone with eyes could see happening well into the 2010's, and started before. Covid is an excuse and sure MAYBE exacerbated it but it would more or less be where it is now. The cities where it was a problem was just waiting to reach a boiling point, immigration just got put into overdrive and that's why it felt like it was a sudden issue, because we were already struggling to keep up with that population growth. It was simply unsustainable growth and honestly the idea we have to keep growing imo a flawed one, all it does is support making the rich richer while they sprinkle those with less wealth with a bit of it to make them feel like it's the only way they can survive.
Don't worry same thing is happening in the U.S., the entire tech industry hates Indians with a fiery passion, and when the countries citizens can't find work in their fields because of it, it's really no surprise they're reacting like that.
Also bringing in nepotistic behaviour in regards to hiring policies.
I am not racist for pointing that out; it is fact.
Incredibly nepotistic, it's not racist anymore, it's just pointing out dickhead behaviors that are gate keeping other qualified professionals from moving up the ladder. I'm a brown mfker and all of my promotions and opportunities came from managers and coworkers who weren't part of that background.
The racism predates this effort
it not (just) a problem of paying for it, it is a problem of not having enough working age people to do the actual work
Additionally, the increased elderly population will require elder care without a larger workforce providing that care. This leads to overtaxed systems, provider burnout, and elder abuse/neglect.
Not just an issue with modern societies. Every human society in history would collapse when there are more old people to support than young people able to support them.
There's nothing requiring us to follow the same dynamics as animal populations, which are subject predominantly to nature with limited human interference, except for house pets.
We are a tool using species, and we've already enacted massive transformations to this planet to the point of heating it up. Therefore there is no earthly reason why we can't organize our societies and economies to provide for a stable population in which the elderly are many and the young, few.
That's basically what we're doing isn't it? Over the last ~50 years most of the social and economic systems in developed countries have been redesigned to funnel wealth to older generations, by those generations, who saw this coming.
I thought it was common knowledge that young people are relatively much poorer now than they were in previous generations.
So then what I don’t understand is if the older generation has most of the wealth, can’t they pay the younger generation to care for them?
We don’t need one young worker to every elderly person.
I can understand if the government’s social systems were always paying things forward, but can we shift to a system where we are each saving for our own retirement, not counting on the generated wealth of the younger generation?
Really good question! The wealth is not distributed evenly among the older generation, many can't afford to pay for their own care. You would have to tax the rich boomers to pay for the poor boomer's care, and they won't allow that.
That does makes sense to me, though it’s odd that the combination of most millennials and poor boomers can’t vote in policy to have this happen.
People usually only vote for politicians to make the policies...or in some countries directly on policies who are still made by politicians. And those politicians usually are the ones who benefit from the status quo and don't want stuff to change, so they won't redesign the whole system to hurt themselves.
So why are people still voting for these? Because there's usually many issues going on at the same time and politicians use that to "outweigh" other stuff.
Not to mention a lot of elderly people spite the young anyway and don't want to give them an easier time.
But if Japan just maintained a steady population instead of dropping, what would be the problem?
A steady population with an improving life expectancy means that your population gets older and older over time, leading to a Japanese-style demographic issue.
but even so? isn't that just a one time issue. Sure Japan is reeling from it now, but in 20 years time all those old people will be dead and the population can shrink without issue.
20 years is an entire generation. Would you be content if someone said to you "sorry, but for 20 years you're going to deal with crippling taxes, sky high cost of living, and live a much worse life than your parents did so you can afford to take care of their generation while they enjoy retirement" or would you rather just leave the country or protest for changes that hurt the older generation instead of hurting you?
I think that's what's happening now in the US
It's happening at a very tiny level in the US right now. Productivity has been ever so slightly outpacing wages as more resources are diverted to supporting aging/retiring population, which results in a slightly slower increase in standard of living, and everyone is losing their mind because they're not also getting to enjoy the single greatest increase in standards of living that the US had ever seen like their parents and grandparents did.
If you truly wanted to see the kind of economic hardship that would be required to allow a large country like the US to transition to a stable population economy, it would probably be an order of magnitude or more worse.
20 years is a whole generation.
i doubt any young person atm would like ot hear from their governements:
"Tough luck kid, you are stuck working for the rest of your years, being taxed t ohell and we will not ensure you can be cared for when you retire."
this could legitimately cause a massive chunk of young people to just go "screw this" and leavethe country for fairer opportunities, intensifying the problem.
It’s a permanent issue. Your young people leave the country to escape the stagnation and you keep having an inverted demographic triangle.
If a population hit the optimal mix of old and young, then yes, it could work if everything remained in stasis. In reality, that’s not how it works. The population is aging due to advancements in medicine, changing lifestyles, and economic security. Therefore if the total population remains the same, the population is likely aging. A potential fix to this is to allow more immigrants, but we’re seeing how well that’s working out socially worldwide.
I think the developed world would need to start pushing for multigenerational households.
Immigration only works as a “solution” if you assume a couple things. 1) The areas you are getting your immigrants from will continue to have an excess population to send abroad, which is doubtful as there is a shrinking number of countries above replacement (India falling below replacement last year) and 2) Everyone in the world are basically just interchangeable widgets that you can drop into any country without any issues, also doubtful since the immigrants will bring their culture with them and at best you end up with a new blend of the various cultures moving in and at worst you get ghettoized chunks forming with ethnic and cultural tensions.
Yep, another potential fix to this is throwing a bone to the middle class to make children make more sense, but no we can’t do that how will Jeff Bezos upgrade his mega yacht next year?
But that policy is not working in generous Finland or Norway countries. Also in USA every economic rung up has less children then those below them.
Well just look at the cited answer
“This delay is linked to prioritizing education and career advancement before starting a family, and the challenges of finding a partner. ”
Stands to reason imo if that level of education or career advancement wasn’t as necessary more people would have kids.
As for why wealthy have less kids than poor, that’s very culturally dependent.
“In Sweden, among recent cohorts, it is higher-income, better-educated men and women who are more likely to have children, while lower-income, less-educated men and women are least likely to have children”
https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-babies-for-the-rich-the-relationship-between-status-and-children-is-changing
This is an inevitable consequence of the demographic transition, and the true answer is automation and UBI, not trying to perpetually pull in more people from elsewhere with less desirable population pyramids, because eventually those countries too will gain wealth and undergo their own demographic transitions.
I agree. UBI is the only solution that makes sense here, make work optional and standard of living high through automation and people may have kids.
That has been tried.
The problem is that the primary reason people aren't having children is not their inability to afford them.
People are getting into long term relationships later, waiting longer until marriage, and then carefully planning out kids.
They just don't have time to have lots of kids doing it like that.
People also have higher standards for child raising. Each kid needs their own bedroom, lots of toys, full sets of clothes etc.
My grandparents got married at like 21, started having kids at 22. Made them wear shorts because it was cheaper than full trousers, and only sorted them out a bedroom each once they got a fair bit older. They had kids before a car.
I'm doing better than my grandparents at equivalent age, but i have zero kids to their three. If I wanted three kids I'd need an extra 2 bedrooms first.
Maybe you can throw enough money at me that I buy the extra bedrooms, but you can't buy me starting to have kids at 22
“A bone to the middle class” doesn’t just mean money, it means time, it means making career growth less essential. And you know money it what buys houses with those rooms you mentioned. It all comes down to standard of living.
I think it's more accurate to say it "comes down to the standard of living you feel is the bare minimum". People have higher standards that previous generations. Many people have priced themselves out of having kids because they aren't willing to make the lifestyle sacrifices to have them. People are more or less choosing to consume their earnings now, rather than invest them in the next generation.
This is fine, but our social safety net programs should probably take into account whether a recipient had and raised the next generation of workers funding the program.
Japan actually has quite a few of those things. They've got national health insurance, no medical bills for kids up to a certain age, and they give parents a small monthly stipend.
It helps but the crazy work life balance makes having children difficult when one of the parents is never home.
Something like a 4 day work week or laws against working over 8 hours per day would certainly qualify as a “bone to the middle class”
Poor people have more kids almost universally - it’s not an economic issue.
So essentially because the population was growing before stagnation, the population of elderly is growing, increasing the stress on social systems and requiring more labor to be focused into elder care. If you have a continually growing population this is hopefully accounted for by the growth. If you are stagnant then this pressures will increase their economic effect on a smaller group of young people. Eventually enough elderly would pass away that it balances out in the long term, but that is a process of decades. In the short term younger generations will be economically disadvantaged due to those pressures, and likely would have further incentive to have less children. So you would reach an equilibrium, but as the cost of the economic wellbeing of a few generations. This may be a slight affect or could spiral out of control, but either way it’s an undesirable effect in the short term for many people.
You do not just aim at the same number of heads. You want young persons to replace the older so the working population stays similar. Meantime, you don't want to import people of low quality yet the nation may need basic labours. And your people may not want these new people to compete better paid jobs with them. This is when the idea starts to get complicated.
In order to maintain a steady population you need like 2.2 offspring or something like that
If everything were to remain exactly the same, there would be no problem. The problem is that people want more comfortable and luxurious lives. You can't have a life like that without exploiting someone below you. Because if everyone's rich, no one's rich.
So if you want a life of luxury and ease, you must get someone else to do all the dirty jobs. You either need immigrants or a growing population that will take those jobs because they have no choice.
When a population shrinks, without immigrants, there are loads of job openings and nobody to do them. The system collapses from below and the standard of living for the average person goes down drastically because either they accept those lower wages or they pay way more for those services.
Okay but then what happens when they get over that hump .
Although the problem is self resolving. We need less and less of the population working every year. Manufacturing is more and more automated, so is agriculture, more and more white collar jobs are redundant with AI, etc... every day is another headline about how there will be no jobs in the future. A shrinking population is helping the problems we created with technology. If we kept a replacement birth rate, we wouldn't have enough jobs for everyone. The future might be that 20% of working age adults are directly helping take care of the elderly, and that's probably just where it'll go.
I remember being 17 and thinking like this, good times.
This doesn't work without reconfiguring capitalism