No evidence ageing/declining populations compromise socio-economic performance
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
This seems to weaken the entire paper. The only regions poised for continuing population growth into the second half of this century are in sub-Saharan Africa and maybe Afghanistan [1].
Is the premise here that unlimited immigration into other regions from sub-Saharan Africa will sustain their economies (and other ways of life?) as the local populations decline? I'm extremely skeptical of that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_projections
This does appear to be an admission that labor shortages occur due to lack of workers. The authors propose a solution (immigration) to the problem, but in doing so pretend the problem doesn't exist.
For a real example, South Korea has a fertility rate of ~0.7 while Japan has a fertility rate of ~1.4. Yet South Korea seems to be doing okayish, while Japan has clearly entered into decline. The reason is because South Korea had a 3+ fertility rate all the way up to 1976, whereas Japan hasn't had a 3+ fertility rate since 1952. Give South Korea a couple of decades and it'll make the Japan of today look like a utopia. For that matter give Japan a couple of decades and it'll make the Japan of today look like a utopia - their decline is still just beginning, as they only hit the current lows in the 90s.
There's even a name for this: the demographic dividend. It's the demographic capital gains tax that comes afterwards that bites hard.
It’s quite remarkable. They assert the problem doesn’t exist by essentially treating a highly debated policy change as inexorable.
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
(slide 39, net migration to Earth is zero)
Well, maybe if there was more equal income distribution, less overall penalization to those who do not have as many assets, and so on, then it would be more distributed?
I mean, that is basically what is happening anyway, but you have a nation distributing that wealth through social programs, instead of capitalists sharing their take willingly with those who helped them earn it.
This issue radically distorts the concept of who is contributing to society and who is living off the contributions of others.
The point I was making is that tax receipts don't really tell you much of anything about who's contributing to society. For instance farmers tend to be living close to broke and are typical recipients of various assistance programs. By contrast the Waltons have paid more in tax than most people will earn in their lifetime, many times over. Nonetheless, the world wouldn't even notice if the Waltons, and all like them, suddenly disappeared - whereas there'd be a catastrophic effect were the same to happen to even a tiny fraction of farmers.
In a way the current system is sort of like a privatized deflationary system. Your money becomes worth more over time, but only if you're wealthy enough to buy this privilege. For everybody else, inflation makes their money, and frequently their earnings, only decrease over time. And I think this is highly undesirable, even for somebody 100% okay with inequality.
I 100% guarantee you that if we implemented a full UBI today—one that would pay something close to the median individual income, and even if it were only for adults (and thus you got no "bonus" for having extra kids)—once the initial chaos settled down, you'd see those birth rates go up quite a bit. So many people are waiting to have kids until they're financially stable enough...and then they never become so.
I know that one of the big reasons my wife and I didn't have kids in our 20s was because we were concerned about our financial stability (and frankly, we were better off than most of the people that age today—by quite a ways, since we were homeowners).
They have actually turned their low birth rates around after a period of low rates. They are a sign that this trend of declining birth rates is not eternal and can be reversed.
Is this a good solution? No. But its a foreseeable feasible one that does not involve slavery. Which, lets not kid ourselves, the migration approach is also. Just outsourced slavery.
Of course, societal status and contract-control functions that were allocating resources and value to woman would have to be reevaluated - as what remains is a faction of the population unwilling to contribute anything but terrorist movements trying to take over because that urge for societal control and fear of non-power is to strong.
I think this is exactly what we're seeing. This is evolution as a punctuated equilibrium. Nature's last trick "sex feels good (but also leads to babies)" is breaking down in effectiveness on people. Instead, it will be some innate desire to have children that will carry some subpopulation forward. Given the extremely strong selection pressure on (it affects the one life event most determinative of "evolutionary success") this could happen really quickly.
It might be a valid strategy and a very likely future, but I hope all the "we will just let immigrants in so don't worry about birth rates" people think about the implications here.
We're essentially legitimizing a pyramid scheme here. Economics and policy are all centered around extraction and share holder value. I've never seen any attention paid to making an industry stable or resilient.
Nearly every issue we face day-to-day is either due to companies holding massive control over our society, or companies degrading services we rely on because profit is no longer increasing.
We're not allowed a stable, peaceful life in a stable climate because someone else needs to get one over on someone else.
We could provide for everyone but we have decided making immaterial numbers go up is #1 priority.
When I ask why can't we have companies that exist in a steady state, the answer is another company will take advantage if the first company doesn't first. Why do we live like this? Is this system truly responsible for our technology and comfort? or is the comfort a side-product that can be produced by a number of other systems?
We're being played for fools. We all know it, but we can't imagine an alternative because they've got us all by the balls controlling our health care and housing.
How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245229292... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2024.100612
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465127 - March 2025 (26 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42529256 - December 2024 (10 comments)
(You're right, it is a suboptimal socioeconomic system)
we're fucked.
I don't think they really expect that to happen (and we can observe that it hasn't); it's just a sales pitch.
i don't mean to sound pithy, but some "open borders folks" just fundamentally disagree with the concept of borders (and usually, by extension, the monopoly of violence employed at those borders), regardless of economics.
Just like the US once destablized its southern neighbors to keep them exporting cheap fruits, if the only thing that keeps the US's pension system from exploding is cheap workers from the neighbors, it'd want them to keep exporting cheap labor.
Of course one might argue rich countries will do that anyway so it's not a concern. It's just icing on a poisoned cake.
The Great Demographic Reversal Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6 | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6
https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbe...
https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/dependency-and-dep...
https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/spring/summer-2018/demogra...
https://www.bis.org/events/conf160624/goodhart_presentation....
Lots of non-Ukranian Europeans still want to move to the US for example, because there's an idea that in skilled jobs you can make more money in the US.
Likewise, India isn't "kept" in poverty nor is the country at war, but the opportunity for economic prosperity elsewhere is a strong driver for migration. And when India surpasses the US or Europe in economic prospects, the trend will reverse and enterprising people will flock to e.g. Hyderabad and New Delhi.
Economic prosperity, until we do away with capitalism, probably won't ever be homogeneous. Where there's a potential across a circuit the electrons will flow.
Another is that immigrants into these countries can and will just plug right into the local economy and be adequate substitutes for the economic effects of the local population decline.
There's everything about a country unrelated to economics that isn't even addressed too that will likely have ... big implications for these countries receiving the mass immigration too. These will likely also affect the economy.
Obviously that can't be true "forever" assuming that trends never reverse, but their scope is just the "long-term."
Our results provide a strong evidence-based counter to the politically motivated claim that declining/slow-growing and ageing populations in any way compromise national economic performance, income distribution, productivity, political stability, well-being, or health of its citizens. In fact, such populations generally have the highest socio-economic performance indicators in the world. This result supports the mounting evidence that smaller populations are in fact beneficial to most of society37, in sharp contrast to the unsubstantiated political rhetoric of ‘baby busts’ and an ensuing economic Armageddon1-5. This is because investing in the health, training, and education of workers — especially older, more experienced workers — increases human capital, making the workforce more productive29. Neither is there a basis for an expected penury of working-age people for countries experiencing low population growth or even decline. Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies that limit or deny the movement of capable, working-age people from elsewhere to fill local demand70. Indeed, none of the existing credible population projections predicts a decline in the global population30,37,71-73.How did they make that assertion?
In the body of the paper immigration policies were not included as a variable in the data, nor were they a part of the statistical analyses. I couldn't find anything regarding labor movement at all. It feels weird that it was just thrown there in the end.
It is relative, no? If a nation's population decline isn't as high as another, maybe because of immigration, then they have more human resources? Also, humans tend to migrate?
The quote suggests that there won't be labor shortages in markets that have adequate and adaptive immigration policies, because migration into a country with an aging population is how countries today maintain their labor pools.
That the global population will continue to grow into 2100 supports their assertion that all countries should be more immigration friendly so as to reap the bi-directional benefit of available labor moving into geographies that need workers.
However, if there is one thing we're not lacking, it's crisis zones, where people are desperate to move away from if given half a chance. Given both the current rate of climate change and the current political climate, this is bound to increase, even after the global population peak.
So I suspect that a lack of migrants willing to resettle to unaffected/less affected regions will not be a problem for the next few decades.
>This metric ignores the youth cohort
That's very very significant. They are not looking at population pyramids holistically at all. They are just focusing on part of the pyramid. Are there lots of people >65 compared to those between 16 and 65?
Now here's something to consider. If a population has very few children but many elderly they may actually have a great ratio of working/not-working. This study won't see this at all. Merely, look lots of elderly and they're doing great!!
I suspect the reality may well be that the most successful economies have offset the extra costs of more elderly with far far fewer children. So the elderly are indeed a burden as you'd expect but we're offsetting it with fewer children.
I'd also point out that I'm not convinced the arbitrary cutoff of >65 is correct since western governments are all pushing for retirement ages well above that. As in the worst of the bubble in the population pyramids is yet to fully hit, many in that bubble are still working and the effects of below population sustainment birth rates is also yet to fully hit (we don't yet fully have the narrowest parts of the population pyramids sustaining the widest parts). When it does all hit though it could well be devastating and this really superficial study doesn't reassure me at all.
A razor for people who think like this:
Do you think Japan and Japanese people would have a higher or lower quality of life if they had accepted unlimited sub-Saharan Africa immigration?
This should separate serious people from the not so serious people pretty rapidly.
[1] Name of a city
Of course literally unlimited amounts of people is a bad thing. Did you mean unregulated?
Regarding your question, it's for you to answer bi-directionally, the result being interrogating hidden information.
I'm still not sure that the local trend of population decline is a long-term indicator; but, there's a bunch of economies along the curve, and things seem fine, for now?
My worry is that this is a railroad fallacy: you can see the train coming, but it's not hitting you now, so everything must be fine in the long-term?
Unfortunately it also shows the difficult part of modern scientific publishing: The authors try to downplay the existence of problems (labor shortages) by arguing that it's really a problem of immigration policies not allowing enough new labor in.
That's a tacit admission that labor shortages are a problem. Proposing a solution to the labor shortage doesn't mean that it's not a problem.
You have to read scientific papers carefully. It's increasingly common to find editorialization or wishful thinking mixed into the logic of papers. More so in some fields than others.
Or take the matter of immigration and international conditions that many others noted in this thread. If every rich country depends on immigration and every poor country strives to become rich, at some point you are going to start running out of places to source immigrants from and there will be a relationship between birth rates and economic performance.
---
1 new born ->
2 20-40 year olds ->
4 40-60 year olds ->
8 60-80 year olds ->
16? 80-100 year olds
---
Just ignoring the 80-100 year olds, we end up in a scenario where you have 6 people in the working age for every 8 people of retirement age. And if life expectancy inches up, then it may be closer to 6 working age people for every 16+ retirees.
As for an aging population slowing the economy, Japan is the classic example of the dynamic: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succ... Looking within-country during a retirement boom seems more informative than trying to compare apples to oranges.
Country of Theseus.
Canada has been so badly managed that it gives the Soviets et al a run for their money in stupidity, short-sightedness and greed.
Also, Canada is not as big a country as it appears on a map. A good deal of it is uninhabitable.
The log10 per-capita domestic comprehensive wealth index is related positively to the logit of the dependency ratio (Fig. 4a), but with countries in the Middle East departing from the expected relationship (Appendix II, Fig. S3). The boosted regression tree analyses showed that the dependency ratio had the highest relative influence on wealth (43.5–82.5%) compared to rmean and population size (Appendix II, Fig. S4), and a clear threshold effect where wealth increased rapidly from a dependency ratio of ~ 0.09 (-2.3 on the logit scale) to ~ 0.16 (-1.65 on the logit scale) (Fig. 4a). In other words, most countries with relatively older populations are those with the highest national per-capita wealth on average.
All they did was... show that countries with lower birth rates correlate to countries that are richer. No kidding! Everyone knows that wealthy countries have had declining birth rates for decades. Presenting this correlation as causation — that is, implying that the declining birth rates have a positive impact on wealth (!!!) (rather than wealth having a negative impact on birth rates) — is basically nonsensical. This paper is just degrowth propaganda designed to trick numeracy-poor journalists into writing articles about how declining birth rates are fine, actually.
(And huh... Middle Eastern countries are an exception? Wow! Almost like it's not low birth rates that cause wealth... And there's something different about Middle Eastern countries. I wonder what that could be?)
By not having children, parents save costs and can instead accumulate more wealth per capita. This doesn't actually increase aggregate wealth though. It's the same wealth distributed over fewer people, making it look like you can population crash your way to wealth.
It is a somewhat perverse way to look at society, but par for the course for economists.
I feel like the ideal is to have a population with a near perfect 2 - 2.1 replacement rate with a socio-economic performance that allows for the fewest people in poverty and then for that to continue forever.
Perhaps this is the first time in history that most of the world has reached its population limits and since we overshot it, it is now attempting to correct and will come to an equilibrium eventually.
Comparing what life was like then to life now and thinking about what I'd miss if I had to go back to say a 1976 lifestyle everything I'm coming up with is just that we've now got better technology, more advanced medicine, cleaner energy sources, and we passed laws and regulations to take better care of the environment.
Did we need 4 billion more people to get those things? I don't think so. In an alternate universe where the world decided in 1976 to voluntarily lower the fertility rate to just keep the population at 4 billion I think that 2025 in that world would be a lot like 2025 in our world as far as tech, medicine, energy, and the environment go.
Population of Seoul metro is 26 million people. It's suppose to drop by 2/3rds by 2060 (or worse). That's 1/3 less taxes, a 1/3 less transportation riders, 1/3rd less customers, etc....
This doesn't make any sense at all. The median age of Seoul is 42, slightly younger than the national average. 2060 is in 35 years. If Seoul had zero births, zero immigration, most people in Seoul today will still be alive by 2060.
I feel like every time someone comes up with one of these predictions the numbers get more nonsensical.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelashley/2025/02/17/the-fu...
If there are only 2/3rds as many people, why would the same infrastructure be required?
There is nothing special about any population number, it's how quickly and in which direction your population is changing that matters.
My hypothesis: Prosperity induces the population decline. That means there will be some momentum behind prosperity in the initial stages of the population decline. The population decline eventually induces a prosperity decline.
Their take is that immigration policies rather than an aging population make the difference.