America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population | Hacker News Reader

America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population

economist.com

37 pointshvo72 comments

This is only loosely related to the article -

I always hear people talking about how disastrous a falling population is. But I visited Japan last year which has had a falling population for a while and was in a long term recession for decades, since the 80s.

I gotta ask, is that what “bad” looks like?

Because I thought it was a pretty amazing experience and society did not seem like it was crumbling.

I understand they have their problems as a country (so do we all), but if Japan is a future indicator, I’d say we don’t really have to worry about falling pop too much?

"Death spirals tend to be worse in America because of the remarkable level to which the government is decentralised." Difference between USA and Japan. Japan is far more centralized than USA. Not saying that is a better system, but it may be advantageous to handle declining population.

In Japan, they are in fact closing down public services, including schools, because many towns are depopulating. Even if taxation and administration are centralized, when the population of an area decreases, it is hard to spend the same amount of money on services there, since the other areas have relatively more people and more costs.

The article actually doesn't make much of a case for its claim about America being ill-suited to handling a declining population and it doesn't actually examine other countries and how they've coped.

One obvious advantage of centralization, though, is that the government is much better equipped to enact programs to keep towns afloat (whatever that entails). Red tape and obstructionism on the local level is minimal and is unlikely to cause issues.

In the US, if the federal government wants to put similar programs in place, in many ways they’re at the mercy of the states. Certainly out of 50 states some will be cooperative, but even that is subject to rotations of state politicians. This means that any measures to counter depopulation are going to be spotty in the short term and unstable in the long term, greatly limiting efficacy.

I guess I would question the value of that, if the fundamentals are such that any such programs and choices have so little effect.

Japan is highly centralized and yet what is so different about the depopulation situation there? It has been widely reported and actually there have been many links posted on HN about it.

The article seems to be making a big deal out of a minor factor, in order to sell a narrative about state centralization saving countries that have adopted it (the Economist is a UK periodical, and the UK was one of the latecomers to centralization). The USA, which is more like the UK used to be, serves as a kind of foil or cautionary example. Note the final sentence, warning us that decentralization leads to Trumpism.

I think the situation in Japan is a bit different, with how the overwhelming majority of its population is concentrated into just a few cities, with that concentration intensifying as the few remaining young people in rural areas move to the cities in search of opportunity. The effects of population decline aren’t that visible in Tokyo, Osaka, Sapporo, etc, but become evident as one travels further away from major metros.

The population of the US, while still weighted toward cities, is for now still considerably more diffused. Even so, I’ve already seen some of the effects in my tiny rural hometown which has seen its population cut in half in the past decade and change since I moved out. The only reason it’s hanging on at all is because of the major highway running through it and because it’s one of the only places to get essentials (grocery stores etc) in the larger area which pulls in residents of surrounding towns, which are even more depopulated.

Japan has outsourced their manufacturing to other countries and take the profits back home. Seems to be working for them.

What you saw had little to do with decline.

Population in Japan has barely fallen (yet). So far it's only a ~2% decline from peak population, but there will be a 20% decline in the next 20 years.

There is a long lag between below-replacement fertility and actual population decline. Because of how compounding growth works and the length of human lifespans, sub-replacement fertility won't result in population decline (for a previously fast-growing country) until 40+ years after the fact. Japan is only just now seeing the effects of lowish fertility from the 70s and 80s.

Note that one of the other consequences of population math is that if a country has been previously declining in population for a while, it'll continue to decline for decades even if the current fertility rate is at or slightly above replacement rate. This means that population decline is essentially an inevitability for most East Asian and European countries for the next several generations.

None of us knows what will happen when populations are falling by 5%+ per decade which is now the inevitable future of many countries the next few decades..it's totally unprecedented in human history (excluding cases like war/disaster).

Did you visit the countryside, or the smaller cities?

A lot of Japan is getting abandoned, Akiya (abandoned buildings) are becoming more prevalent, small communities are dying out as the younger generations are forced to move to the larger cities like Tokyo to get a good living, which leads to death spirals.

And then there's the age groups skewing, as less people are born and more people reach the point where they're dying but not fast enough, who's left to take care of the older generations, or who pays taxes to maintain their quality of living?

In 2022 the population across 47 prefectures fell over 800k [1].

Sure, immigration can help combat the issue somewhat, but Japan is a homogeneous society, and at some point you'll end up having more "foreigners" than natives if you don't properly combat the internal decline in numbers.

You ask, is that what bad looks like? I gotta ask, what would constitute bad enough if not the death of all those communities that make the country. Tokyo isn't Japan, all the prefectures and the smaller towns are what make Japan Japan, and as they slowly die out, so does a big part of their culture that so many people love and brings in so much tourism and millions to consume their media, food, fashion and more.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/26/japan-populati...

I mean people, culture, societies, ecosystems have all come and gone. Some may feel sad about but thats just the nature of things.

> A lot of Japan is getting abandoned

That sounds like a good thing, from an ecological perspective.

Adding to the other comments, one thing I have heard about projected population decline is that it tends to happen very _rapidly_. That is, even if birth rates are below replacement level, it takes a while for that number to get reflected in the bottom line population statistics, and by the time a crash in population has serious consequences, it's too late to stop it.

In Japan, infrastructure is centrally funded. So roads, water, sewers, schools, and police services continue even if the local population can't pay for them.

Does the central government just keep empty schools open and staffed ?

No, but they keep them open and staffed as long as the number of students is nonzero. Here's a junior high school with two students.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMcn2DSva2M

There has been a lot of consolidation of village and town services as rural populations have declined. This started decades ago, when the national government announced plans to shrink from 3200 municipalities to 1000 by 2005:

Small towns can choose to go it alone, but a system of carrots and sticks crafted by the central government makes it a costly proposition. “This utter despotism will only kill off towns and villages,” groused one group of local officials.

Exactly how the decision to merge is made can be a bit murky. Some municipalities hold public referendums, but local officials are free to ignore the results. Other municipalities don’t even bother with a vote.

Among the factors towns use in choosing a mate are proximity, shared history, and whether the prospect’s job base, hospitals and shopping are desirable.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-aug-07-fg-merge...

Visiting Japan and making your life work as a resident in Japan are two wholly different things. It's wonderful to visit Iran as well.

Japan's economy has stagnated and declined, so too have real wages. Many Japanese people can't afford to enjoy or even spend time seeing the things you saw on your vacation in their own country.

Well then, aren't we lucky that there are so many people who want to come to America? It might be a good idea to, y'know, let them in and allow them to work.

This is such an easy to solve problem. If only we would decide to solve it.

There is a maximum rate that people can incorporate before the system struggles and populism inevitably rises.

It isn't the immigrants. The wealthy business owners outsourcing the jobs overseas are doing more to fuel populism than any immigrant is.

There is no current problem just another media attempt to push the narrative.

>”It might be a good idea to, y'know, let them in and allow them to work.”

There is no need to be glib. The United States already has the world’s most generous immigration policy. And, what is likely the most lenient stance towards illegal immigration and foreign labor of any developed nation.

Then why are we discussing population decline?

I'm just saying, if we need more people, we know where to get them.

The projections are that population decline will hit the whole world, it's just hitting developed nations first. So immigration is only a temporary solution that'll last a few decades.

If we really want to address population decline, we have to reverse the reasons people are choosing to have fewer children. Which starts with policies aimed to give child-bearing aged adults better financial stability, affordable housing, and support -i.e. easily available, non bank breaking childcare (perhaps even free childcare), improved income / decreased expenses to make it easy to have financial security while also having extra bedroom(s) for kids, and longer, paid parental leave.

Whereas the existing housing crunch, continued downward pressure on median and lower incomes, bare minimum parental leaves, and high cost of childcare in the US discourages and delays a lot of people from having children.

> So immigration is only a temporary solution that'll last a few decades.

If there is a global population decline then all other societies would start declining- in that scenario the US can keep siphoning citizens

> The projections are that population decline will hit the whole world, it's just hitting developed nations first.

And that's a serious problem for the rest of the world! It's not a problem for the US, or any other country rich enough that people are clamoring to immigrate.

Sure, the world will eventually run out of people I guess. But there are so many people who want to come here, that time is exceedingly far away. And population decline is okay if it happens very slowly.

Edit: I'm not against the other policies you listed, I just don't think we need them because of "population decline" specifically. I'm not convinced they would even help with population decline, because families with higher incomes--ie more access to childcare, housing, and so on--are having fewer kids just like everyone else. Immigration, by contrast, really will quite transparently address the need for more people.

The trouble is by the time we decide whether we need to solve the problem, we may be 20 years or more too late to implement a solution. I.e. if we need a larger labor force to keep social security solvent, we need those children born 18-25 years beforehand so they grow up and start paying in.

Anyhow yeah I don't think policy is the only reason we're in this bind, but let's be honest that we do not make it easy to be parents of young children. Various trends exacerbate this, like the fact that it's now more common to live in different cities than most of your family - which means less free childcare from families. But also many people get their idea of family sizes from what they grew up with and what their friends and family are doing, so the decline in children per woman is going to be rather sticky.

No countries have experienced a faster fertility drop than the poor countries in the "global south". Chile's TFR numbers just came out last month and it dropped 24% YOY.

I do not think they're being glib. Do you have examples of the generosity? My SO is American (I'm a European with nearing ten years of IT work experience and counting) and we are going through the immigration system, to call it a hell hole is an insult to hell.

A generous policy would be to make the process simple for individuals that are able to work and contribute on their own. That is not the case.

Generosity doesn’t mean rubber stamping everyone who wants to emigrate. “Simple” seems to imply that becoming a citizen should just involve filling out a few forms.

I don’t think people truly appreciate the sheer number of people who are trying to emigrate. If I may, which European country do you belong to? I invite you to compare your own nation’s legal emigration numbers and procedures to that of the US. I suspect you’ll find that the barrier to entry is even higher.

As for generosity, here is some information from Wikipedia: “In absolute numbers, the United States has by far the highest number of immigrants in the world, with 50,661,149 people as of 2019.[1][2] This represents 19.1% of the 244 million international migrants worldwide, and 14.4% of the United States' population.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...

Divide by population, absolute numbers doesn't give a fair picture.

Look. I'm not even necessarily trying to argue that we should have more immigration. But, only one of the below statements can be true:

• The US has too few people.

• The US has too many people.

If the former, we should increase immigration beyond whatever the current levels are.

If the latter, population decline obviously isn't a concern.

Which of these universes do we live in? It can't be both.

People are not fungible. There is potentially such a thing as a wrong/right person to fill a slot.

The world’s most generous immigration policy? How do you figure? It’s super hard to immigrate to the US

There are two problems with this take:

* The people who immigrate have declining TFR after a couple of generations, if not in the first generation.

* The rest of the world has declining TFR.

So hey, you might gain a couple of generations, but maybe not even that much. Populations all over the world are rapidly gaining in education and, with it, undergoing the "demographic transition" -- later entry into the work force and much lower TFR.

But society can handle population decline if it happens slowly (ie over a couple of generations). It's a problem if it happens quickly.

(And, personally, I think it would give us much more than a couple generations.)

Education isn't the cause of fertility decline because North Korea is experiencing the same drop.

There are two concerns I have with your reply:

* Everything I'm reading about education in North Korea indicates it is actually fairly intensive.

* A trend or tendency admits of exceptions, so finding one or two exceptions doesn't answer the trend.

Its easy in same sense that one can convert extra room in home into homeless shelter considering so many people in cities are facing homelessness.

Further even when you let people in they most likely live and work which are already crowded because thats where opportunity will be. They are not going to live in ghost towns of America that article refers.

The US and Canada can better handle a falling population because we are better at handling immigration compared to the rest of the world. Sure, there’s been recent pushback but no one is better at assimilation than the US and Canada. Maybe Australia and NZ are also close to us given their history?

I didn’t see any good argument how we’re worse than the rest of the world, especially compared Germany, Japan, South Korea, and China. Ghost cities will not be unique to the US.

Look at the map: not ghost cities, ghost hinterlands.

https://archive.is/jP4Ru

The article doesn't actually walk us through a comparison with other countries to show us how, exactly, the USA is worse off than other countries when it comes to handling a falling population. In Japan -- a country that is much more centralized than the USA -- closures of local services and funding cuts due to declining populations have been widely reported on for many years. In fact, there are small localities in Japan that are doing things like offering new residents free houses to get them to move there, which is not so dissimilar to small cities in the USA offering people incentives to move.

The U.S. is actually one of the best in terms of demographics in the western world. We make up for it with immigration. Most of the western world is declining much faster than the U.S.

The US will import people from other countries. We are doing it now.

There’s a limit to that because almost every other country save a few exceptions is seeing the same demographic decline.

But the US for all its faults is very good at assimilating its immigrant population. Everyone in the end becomes mostly American. No other country manages to do that nearly as well. Not countries in Europe and definitely not China or Japan.

So that means the US will have a softer landing in the transition to a post-growth economy.

Will that fix the issue in the article? New immigrants presumably are some of the people that are the most free to pick anywhere in the country to move to, so they will be even more prone to going to big cities that are already growing.

Thus demonstrating more common sense than the indigenous who don't budge from contracting areas?

I think that's too dismissive of the their reasons. Migrants just have more flexibility and for good reasons.

Cairo, Illinois (mentioned in the piece) is an interesting town to visit, recommend driving through during daylight hours if your travels take you near there.

That change in population map is cool...

...or a Civil War...

...or a Great Depression...

This Tower of debt-Babel has been a century in building. The resources[1] and ideals are present. The rot at the top is the challenge. If America is "exceptional", then another exception will be thrown, and we'll struggle onward.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Superpower-Ten-Years/dp/15...

I strongly believe this is very wrong. Just a $3500 tax deduction for children brought an increase in levels of 5-10% more children if im not wrong and it didn’t cost the states anything. Imagine if it was a $10000 reduction and so many people will have kids. Prove me wrong “shrugs”

I don't believe that effect size. What's the case you're thinking of?

I... can't bring myself to trust doomerism from economists at the moment. It would further help if America wasn't doing particularly better than... most everywhere else right now?

I'm not confident enough to say this is obviously wrong. I am fairly confident in saying it is almost certainly oversold. "Uniquely ill-suited," per the headline, reeks of bullshit.

If the strength of population growth, hard work attitude and morals ever come back from the 50s we'll be ok. Since the internet seems to want the opposite, I guess we're just going to burn.

pretty meaningless. the past doesn't repeat and you never bothered to prove the implication anyway

More that in the 1950s other countries were recovering from bombing each other into rubble for the second time that century...

"bombing each other into rubble" can happen this century.

“We” will be fine no matter what. The future will still have Mormons and Muslims and evangelical Christians. Whether it has secular humanists or not isn’t our problem.

> The future will still have Mormons and Muslims and evangelical Christians.

Do you want Idiocracy[0]? Because that's how you get Idiocracy

[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

how does religious folks result in Idiocracy scenario?

Quite the opposite it seems looking at history.

It’s also how we got America.

Did you leave out Catholics (20% of the US population) on purpose?

Catholic fertility is very low compared to the other groups listed. Whatever secret sauce for resisting modernity is built into evangelicalism, mormonism, etc, appears to be absent from high church denominations. Except for the hardcore traditionalists. We can expect to see more of them, as the others are bred out of existence.

> Except for the hardcore traditionalists. We can expect to see more of them, as the others are bred out of existence.

I would say conservative Catholics rather than just traditionalists.

Both SSPX and Opus Dei have larger families, and both have a strong conservative streak. But SSPX is traditionalist, whereas Opus Dei is more "modern conservative". Opus Dei is officially enthusiastic about Vatican II (provided it is "interpreted correctly"), SSPX refuses to accept it. While both celebrate Mass in Latin, SSPX insists on using the old (pre-1970) Tridentine Mass in Latin, whereas Opus Dei's Latin Masses are the contemporary Mass in Latin. Opus Dei emphasises obedience to the Pope (although Francis makes that painful in a way that his predecessors never did), SSPX insists on a duty to disobey papal decisions it believes to be erroneous

You say that like those groups aren't great at producing non-religious people.

Like a third of Mormons leave the church. Ditto for Catholics. Probably similar for the rest, but I haven't looked up all the statistics.

I'd go so far as to wager that in America today most non-believers come from religious households, with second-generation-non-believers in the minority.

But even with that phenomenon, the world’s population of non-religious people is shrinking: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/27/religion-why-is....

Some religious groups are much better at retention than others.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews (Hasidic/Haredi) and Old Order Amish have very high retention rates, by some measures >90%.

Mainstream Catholicism has very poor retention rates – there is a quip that ex-Catholic is one of America's largest religions. However, if we look at highly conservative/traditionalist groups like Opus Dei or SSPX, the retention is much better (although I don't have exact figures).

Mormons are definitely showing signs of transitioning from growth to decline, at least in the US. However, given other religious groups I mentioned appear to be avoiding that, it may be more a story of mistakes of the Mormon leadership than anything else.

Twice the people are working now than then, unless you count children

This reads like a boomer shitpost. Like something you see in the comments section of clickbait tabloid news sites like the guardian or dailymail, not necessarily here.

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