There’s widespread agreement that a declining population is equivalent to declining fortunes, be it for cities, for countries or for the whole world.
That fertility rates are too low to maintain current population levels is indisputable. Europe, East Asia and the Americas (North and South) are all affected. If the causes are cultural or economical, they must be very fundamental indeed, yet the explanations that are given for the cause are implausibly specific. If cultural choices and specific policies would explain declining birth rates, they would only have explanatory power in a narrow subset of the affected places, yet the phenomenon is near-universal. We don’t even understand the causes of population decline well enough to know if the decline is temporary or if it would persist without radical changes.
I disagree with those who believe that urgent action is needed. The state shouldn’t nudge people into having more kids, and I’m saying that as someone who has had three of them so far. That’s because it’s not obvious enough that population decline is actually a net negative. The case for China’s one child policy in the 20th century was at least as strong as the case for boosting births now, and that turned out to be the wrong decision. China’s policy also caused a lot of unnecessary suffering.
To be fair, there are plausible reasons why declining birth rates are going to lead to problems. Low birth rates lead to fewer people working in the long run, which means less tax revenue, less economic growth and less retirement funding for more retirees. A country with fewer young people may lead to less dynamism. These are all valid concerns. There are also positives such as less pressure on natural resources and more space for nature reserves.
A lot of those disadvantages from depopulation seem to be accruing at the level of the state, not the individual. For example, if the low birth rates in South Korea persist for decades, the Republic of Korea would disappear. That’s a problem from the perspective of the state, but is it so obvious that this is a problem for the Koreans who live through this process? Maybe maintaining high living standards while the population declines isn’t so hard after all. GDP per capita matters, but does the GDP of countries matter?
Another argument, which I’ve seen economist and blogger Tyler Cowen make repeatedly, is that more people equals more brains, which in turn means more innovation. This sounds obvious, but is it true? Athens in the 5th century BC (Plato, Socrates) and Florence in the 15th century (da Vinci, Michaelangelo) had a population of around a hundred thousand, comparable to many third-tier American cities. The population of Medford, OR is more or less the same as that of 15th Florence. It’d be easier to get any type of project started in Medford than it was in Florence, yet we don’t see the same level of innovation. Innovation is of course still happening, but it doesn’t scale with population that well.
Nehaveigur 