Summary: Every day brings new doomster stories designed to influence you. The politics of fear rules America. We were not so weak and gullible in the past, and need not be so in the future.
Today’s Doomster News!
“The demographic time bomb
that could hit America“
By Catherine Rampell, opinion columnist at the WaPo.
“In 2017, the United States saw the fewest babies born in 30 years, a stat that produced a lot of hand-wringing {WaPo: “As U.S. fertility rates collapse, finger-pointing and blame follow“}. But it turns out things could be worse – a lot worse. We could be Japan, whose unfolding demographic crisis provides some lessons for where America might be headed. …
“Despite government campaigns and policy changes, gender roles remain relatively traditional in Japan. …
“In a sense, then, Japan has learned the opposite lesson of the United States: If you want more babies, find ways to make it easier for working people to have kids – through both more family-friendly workplace policies and a more liberal immigration system. (Immigrants, by the way, tend to have more babies than do native-born Americans.)
“And preferably, do all this before the demographic time bomb explodes.”
As I wrote a decade ago, Only our amnesia makes reading the newspapers bearable. For decades we were told that the The population bomb
(1) About those “traditional gender roles in Japan.”
Unknown to Princeton-educated Ms. Rampell, societies with traditional gender roles usually have higher fertility rates than those with more modern systems. Japan’s plunging birthrate must have different causes.
(2) About the horror that is Japan’s economy.
As a good WaPo columnist, Rampell shares the perspective of our corporate owners. GDP is god. Fewer people means fewer sales, smaller profits, and perhaps even higher wages. (open those borders to fix both of those problems!) Real people care about per capita real GDP (and similar measures). How has Japan done during the past ten years (through 2017), during which its population fell by 0.9% and America’s rose by 8.1%. Japan did slightly better: up 6.6% vs. up 6.3% in the USA. Click to enlarge.
(3) Japan: the model of a successful nation in the 21st century.
The big flaw in Rampell’s doomster screed: we are entering a new industrial revolution. This next wave of automation will destroy a large, but known, fraction of jobs. Kiosks and automatic check-outs replace cashiers. Paperless and cashless economists need fewer people to move paper. Human judgement in many fields, from credit officers to radiologists, replace by superior and cheaper algorithms. Droids replacing security guards. Software replacing journalists. See scores of posts about this here.
The perennial tech-debunkers have moved to their last-ditch defense: new systems will not replace all jobs. Duh. The people remaining in these jobs (cashiers to radiologists) will be far more efficient than today. There will just be fewer of them. Perhaps new jobs will be created to replace them. But there is little evidence of that today. Most analysis suggests that one-third to two-thirds of occupations will have large job losses.
Rampell is correct. We can learn from Japan. They have the formula for success in this age of history.
- A highly educated and hard-working people with a high-savings rate – the foundation for economic success).
- A homogeneous population with strong social cohesion – minimizing the domestic turbulence common in multi-ethnic societies when under stress.
- A shrinking labor force – able to more easily absorb the job destruction from automation.
These advantages are mutually reinforcing. A highly educated population suits the available jobs. A shrinking population more easily accommodates job losses from automation, which reduces the social stress of this transition (more about this here). Less social stress might facilitate adoption of new technology and methods. The obvious contrast is with America, and its growing population of increasingly poorly-educated people, in a society fracturing by ethnicity, race, religion, and ideology.
(4) Fewer people will help solve our environmental problems
Advocating more people for Japan is nuts. Japan’s leaders have worried about its overpopulation since the Meiji Restoration when they had about 30 million people (1868). They encouraged emigration to Korea, to no effect. They had 50 million in 1910, 100 million in 1967, and a peak in 2008 at 128 million — all crowded into a narrow urban belt along the coast. At their current level of fertility, by 2100 their population might be half of today’s, back to the level of 1930. Eventually their population might fall to 60 million (1925) or even 50 million (1910).
The effect on Japan’s environment would be wonderful. Japan could become a garden with fewer people and the cleaner technology of the future (when common question in grade-school history class will be “Teacher, what is ‘pollution’?”).
An industrialized world in the mid-21st century of ten or twelve billion people would be an ecological catastrophe. Falling fertility will help reduce the damage, and allow easier and faster repairs in the second half of the century.
On one hand, the WaPo advocates drastic Leftist measures to boost population growth in America. On the other hand, it advocates drastic Leftist measures to protect the environment – to which population growth is the greatest threat. There is a common element to these two campaigns: they assume that their readers are too foolish to notice the contradiction. Are they wrong?
For More Information
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about Japan, about doomsters, about the new industrial revolution, and especially these…
- Must our population always grow to ensure prosperity? (2013) – Spoiler: no.
- A rocky road lies ahead to a far smaller world population.
- Why Japan can become an economic star of the 21st century.
- The facts behind the scary new UN population forecast & those doomster headlines.
- Doomsters warned of End Times from overpopulation. Now *fewer* people are disastrous.
- Diversity is a grand experiment. We’re the lab rats.
Books about the coming industrial revolution
The Second Machine Age:
Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
By Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (both at MIT).
From the publisher …
“In The Second Machine Age MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee – two thinkers at the forefront of their field – reveal the forces driving the reinvention of our lives and our economy. As the full impact of digital technologies is felt, we will realize immense bounty in the form of dazzling personal technology, advanced infrastructure, and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our lives.
“Amid this bounty will also be wrenching change. Professions of all kinds – from lawyers to truck drivers – will be forever upended. Companies will be forced to transform or die. Recent economic indicators reflect this shift: fewer people are working, and wages are falling even as productivity and profits soar.
“Drawing on years of research and up-to-the-minute trends, Brynjolfsson and McAfee identify the best strategies for survival and offer a new path to prosperity. These include revamping education so that it prepares people for the next economy instead of the last one, designing new collaborations that pair brute processing power with human ingenuity, and embracing policies that make sense in a radically transformed landscape.
“A fundamentally optimistic book, The Second Machine Age alters how we think about issues of technological, societal, and economic progress.”
For more about this see Chapter One and a review from the London Review of Books.