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Comment by ta1312135 | Hacker News Reader

How unhinged is it to call the lack of exponential population growth a crisis?

That is not what is being called a crisis.

Fertility rate being *far* below replacement (1.3 vs 2.1) is being called a crisis.

If the population falls to quickly the ratio of young to old gets unbalanced and there are not enough people young enough to do the work needed to support the population too old to work. All the products and services like food and healthcare that the old consume still need to be physically produced regardless of nominal price, so simply saying "save more money for retirement" is not a solution.

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So the crisis is that there are not enough products and services for an aging population. That's a different crisis than low birth rates, that should be solved differently.

By whom? Sustained how?

Well first, this is a problem that's gone regardless in fifty years. After the fat ripple has left our demography, there will be many vacant homes, lots of wide open highways, plenty of arable land, all to be attained for little by this shrinking population.

Second, this "crisis" is entirely brought upon themselves by the generation that will have want for people to "support them". Cut out elderly healthcare and the majority of your shortage is gone.

Third, there are plenty of people available for this support, as many of the jobs these youngsters do today are only done because they are very attractive in the current economic system. If the population as a whole agrees that this "crisis" is indeed a crisis, there is enough labor to step up.

Well until we have robots which can fully replace many/most jobs people do, the only way solve that is by increasing the proportion of working age people to those who are retired.

There are no other options. You can do that by either increasing immigration or birth rates. That’s it.

One other (bad) option is raising the retirement age or lowering the start-work age.

Maybe the solution is simply to end retirement. As in end the social security for old people.

It’s already set high enough that the years past that point aren’t productive. Social security and Medicare/Medicaid were a response to advanced age meaning destitution, poverty, and horrific suffering.

It’s essentially UBI and universal healthcare that winds up making a lot of demand for younger workers. Keeps the grandparents able to help raise kids, if wanted/suitable.

Maybe we could also recycle old people into fertilizer to decrease reliance on fossil fuels.

Once we have robots doing most jobs, heck why even have babies?

> until we have robots which can fully replace many/most jobs people do

Most people's jobs aren't necessary for a functioning society. If you look at say, agriculture, transportation, energy, sanitation, infrastructure, etc, what percent of the total population is employed in those fields, 5-10% maybe?

Society will be fine for a long time with drastically dwindling population, we'll just see a contraction of the "bullshit jobs" which have become the mainstay of post-industrial societies, with a higher percent of people employed in fields which are actually producing something of value for society.

What we need is a Agricultural Revolution in the Health sector. As it stands, it is way too people intensive.

According to projections based on this fertility rate, Japan will have more than 60 million working-age people at any time through 2100 who will need to support an aged population no larger than 3/5 that size.

What percentage works in agriculture and related industries? A single-digit % last time I checked. It does not make sense that there could be a fundamental problem with the production of essentials (or non-essentials for that matter), especially with decades to adapt.

You seem to lack some nuance. As demands for those goods on services increases while supply remains stagnant if not decreasing they’ll cost will grow. Making it hard for most Japanese people to sustain the QoL they are used to/expect without increasing the burden on the working age population.

The Japanese economy has already been close to stagnant for the last 20 years or so.

But we also seriously increased our paid labor pool with women in the 20th century (and there are also certainly people who don't work who probably could work given the right stimulus).

I think we'd need some research/math to see at what working population to non-working population ratio this is actually a problem (and what fertility rate is safe to avoid this if it is indeed a problem).

True but some of the jobs women who were not technically in the labor force did are now provided by others .e.g cooking, childcare, washing (well automatic washing machines, which is obviously a magnitude or more efficient than washing by hand and a bunch of other housework which used to require way more labor.

> working population to non-working population ratio this is actually a problem

True. Overall I find it a bit (well huge understatement...) disappointing that while productive has increased tremendously that has not been reflected so well in compensation (for most people for a privileged minority it's the complete opposite) or working hours.

>not enough people young enough to do the work needed to support the population too old to work

I don't see the problem though. We have a gerontocracy where most of the power has been concentrated by an unusually old generation. If there was a problem they could have done a lot to solve this problem. I mean, why expect the powerless young to solve the problems of the powerful old?

Fertility rate in Japan is far below replacement. Fertility rate globally is above replacement rate. They could just allow people in.

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