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yeah but productivity already has gone up a lot in the past few decades. So … does that mean we could have a smaller working population?

There’s the quantatitve thing of currency, but also simply the reality that people actually have to work to provide the things the retired people need. In this case the money issue is modeling a more intrinsic issue.

It’s good that people consider the reality behind the fiction that money is. Money is literally paper, it’s made-up literature. Reality, however, is real.

There’s indeed not much data for the medieval age, at least not in Europe, but we know data from the roman empire and the modern age, and we can interpolate what happened in the thousand years between.

seriously: split the country up into two.

something like that. doesn’t have to be exactly like that.

the reason is simply because i believe that there are irreconciliable differences between the rural population and the coastlines. you can’t have one government with one set of policies if the people clearly want two very different policies. what is the point in that? the government should help the people as much as possible, not continuously piss off half of the population.

maybe something like the EU can be done, where you have individual states, but they have some laws in common …

edit: also i should mention that i believe that it is easier to hold your politicians accountable if they live closer-by to you. like, in medieval times, if the landlord made some laws that pissed the people off too much, they would walk to his home with pitchforks and torches and demand change. You can’t have that if your representative politicians live more than 30 miles away, really.

What you’re forgetting is that the demand for human labor is going to decrease due to automation. You may or may not believe this, but i certainly do.

okay then i guess you should think about what rate of population decline is acceptable? like, you’re saying the current rate is unacceptable; where do you draw the limit and why?

I understand your position and i think that you say a respectable thought. I like the way you think but i think you’re still wrong. Let me explain:

The labor market is the mechanism through which wages are determined. Human labor is bought and sold on the labor market; that means there is supply and demand. Supply comes from workers who are willing to work, while demand comes from companies who seek to employ people.

Now, as is always the case on any market that is regulated by supply and demand, if there’s a higher supply, prices go down; while if there’s higher demand, prices go up. Prices in the context of the labor market are the price that is paid for an hour of human labor, i.e. the hourly wage.

Now, companies don’t have a constant demand for human labor at all. In fact, how much demand companies have for human labor depends largely on how much the company intends to grow. Imagine it like a house: Building a single house might take thousands of days of human labor (i.e. 8 employees for 120 days) for a single-family brick-built home, but maintaining that house takes significantly less labor (it was traditionally done by a single house-wife, and nowadays it’s done in the spare after-work hours). So, growth requires intense labor input, while maintenance does NOT.

The same is true for the economy. As long as the economy grows, it requires a lot of human labor input. You have to remember that the Great Fire of London happened in 1666, and that is the starting point for large, stone-built cities in the modern age (before that most houses were built out of wood). Also since roughly that time (1800) we have the industrial revolution which has created steam engines, cars, and basically every commodity that we have today. Building all of that up from scratch required a lot of human labor input, and that is why there was such a large demand for human labor. But today, we have all these commodities and companies already built up, and maintaining them requires rather little work, which is why the demand for human labor is declining. That is a natural development and not a human-chosen development. Growth comes to an end (see also the 1970s study The Limits to Growth that discusses that) because planetary boundaries are reached, and either we find new planets to settle or we won’t have growth; but without growth we will have less demand for human labor, and that means lower wages. And that’s what we’re already observing for the last 25 years: wages have continuously declined.

I don’t think that wages could go up again; unless you move to mars and start developing the planet all over again. That’s why UBI is necessary; because people still need resources to live.

there is a difference between natural scarcity and artificial scarcity.

Natural scarcity is one that is simply there for natural circumstances. Such as, your population grows, and now suddenly you have 7 kids to feed, so you have to work harder to farm enough food. That’s natural scarcity and everybody understands that you have to work to live through it. Another example would be natural disasters, or maybe if you develop a new technology and now you want to build a factory to produce a new type of product. You have to invest a lot of hard work to build that new factory, and everybody understands that. People are generally fine with that, and pull through with it.

Artificial scarcity is one that is purely man-made, for no underlying natural reason. Examples are when the rich siphon all the wealth away from society and people don’t have enough resources to live anymore. We live in a time with enormous productive capabilities, but those don’t reach the people because somebody mindlessly steals them. People are told to work 60+ hours/week, and that’s not because of some natural circumstances but because rent is made so expensive by nonsensical policies and greedy landlords that your wage doesn’t pay for it anymore. That’s artificial scarcity and people are not ok with it; in fact it makes them very angry.

That is why you have to distinguish between natural scarcity and artificial scarcity. People are largely ok with natural scarcity but NOT with artificial scarcity; and in fact artificial scarcity should be held small at all times; i believe.

Basically, a shrinking population is good for the people, because there’s fewer people among which to divide the resources that the land can provide, so on average that should mean more resources for people, in other words a lower cost of living (since cost of living depends on resource availability). And it also means that there’s less supply of human labor on the labor market, and by the rule of Supply and demand that means that the prices for human labor (wages) are gonna go up, i.e. people are gonna get paid better for what they do.

That intuitively makes sense, because if your country has 10 million people instead of 100 million, then your CEOs and companies are better gonna treat your workers better or they’re gonna strike, and since there’s fewer other people to replace those workers, their strike would have greater impact and therefore more power.

on top of that, you can’t just assume that there will be a high demand of human labor in the future. You have to assume that automation is going to reduce jobs, so if you don’t also reduce the number of workers, you’re gonna face an unemployment crisis, and that can be very bad for the workers.

you’re wrongly assuming that pensions have to be paid by labor taxes. there is no natural law of the universe that forces that. introduce taxes on the rich and pensions will be easily paid for.

but you are basically advocating for entire countries to disappear

In biology, a species is considered threatened if there’s fewer than 200 individuals of that species around.

Here’s your short reminder that south korea has 52 million people, so even if people almost stop having children for a generation or two and the population stabilizes at 5 million people, which is 1/10 of what it currently is, it’s still very far away from extinction.

It might be possible to have a society that could survive less-than-replacement birth rates, but I don’t see how.

I want to add that historically, in the US from 1680 to 1880, the population has grown by approximately 3% annually. Source

(In the table, since the growth rate given is per 10-year interval, you have to divide it by 10, roughly, to get 3% annual growth)

This suggests that it should be possible (at least in theory) that the population can shrink at the same speed, i.e. 3% annually. This would mean an average fertility rate around 0.66 children/woman. Currently, in most western nations, it’s around 1.4, while 2.1 would be “replacement levels”, i.e where the population numbers stagnate.

The reason why i think you can have a 3% annual population decline is because it’s kinda symmetric: instead of a surplus in children (which eat and consume resources but don’t contribute through their labor power), you have a surplus of old people (which, mostly, also consume resources but don’t work). So, the situation is kinda symmetric, and that’s why i suggest that it should be possible.

I’m not sure how many people Earth will hold in the future, but we can look at historical data. Source

We know that worldwide human population was around 300 million for most of the medieval age (500 AD to 1500 AD). That was sustainable, i.e. people lived like that for a thousand years without incurring some ecological catastrophe. I’m not sure whether it’s needed to return to these numbers, but it’s certainly possible.

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The populist surge comes as Japan, a traditionally insular nation that values conformity and uniformity, sees a record surge of foreigners needed to bolster its shrinking workforce.

Here’s your short reminder that there is no such thing as a “too small workforce”.

Anti-immigrant policies, which allow populists to vent their dissatisfaction on easy targets, are appealing to more Japanese as they struggle with dwindling salaries, rising prices and bleak future outlooks.

A smaller supply of labor on the labor market means that higher prices will be paid for said labor, which means higher salaries. The decline of japanese population is a good thing for the people. Trying to “fill up” that population with foreigners is the most wrong thing anybody could do in that situation.

I fully, 100% support the japanese people with trying to uphold their own culture, their own way of life, and deal with their problems themselves. If you rely on foreigners to solve your problems, then you have already lost. In fact, you never even tried. If you have dwindling salaries and you try to fix the problem by giving away more jobs to other people, then you’re stupid and shouldn’t hold a ruling position. That’s economics 101, not a conspiracy theory.

I mean, America has traditionally been an immigration country. 97% of people in the US today are the descendants from immigrants, so at least there i can understand that immigration seems like a historically continuous process. But japan always had little migration, both in and out. It’s pissing me off that newspapers say we need to “fix” our declining birthrates. We don’t need to “fix” it because it’s not a problem. It’s just people giving the planet a break and creating some more space for themselves. Fewer people in a country means more resources per person. That increases the resource supply and decreases the Cost of Living; which probably increases the Quality of Life.

Besides, red states rely on federal funding from taxes in blue states and would collapse without them.

I’d say that’s a reason to split apart. (slight /s)

I think the violence will continue (and probably escalate) until the United States of America are split apart. There cannot be one central federal government. Political power must be shifted to the states. Unfortunately, due to historical reasons, not enough people are understanding this yet, because a federal system has worked so well in the past, that it first needs to be proven by Trump that the potential for abuse at the federal level is huge, and only then will the States get their Rights.