Low Births Will Mean Economic Ruin

The number of babies born in Japan last year also fell for the seventh consecutive year, dropping below 800,000 for the first time since records began in 1899 to 770,747, down 40,875 from the previous year, according to the data released by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. The number of deaths in Japan in 2022 rose to a record high 1.57 million, with the population naturally shrinking for the 16th consecutive year.

The total fertility rate — the average number of children a woman is estimated to bear in her lifetime — fell to 1.26, on par with the record low in 2005.

The pace of decline in the number of births has also been accelerating in recent years, falling by 24,404 in 2020 from the previous year, and by 29,213 in 2021.

770,747 means about 380,000 female babies.

The population pyramid projection for 2027 for Japan was projecting 4.082 million Japanese babies for 2023-2027. This would mean averaging 816,000 babies annually. Japan is coming in 45,000 babies annually short of that projection and if the drops continue Japan could be at 600k-700k babies annually in 2027. The population pyramids and projections were assuming that Japan could hold at 810,000 per year. The shortage of Japanese babies means that population trends are even worse than 103.7 million in 2050. Instead of 9 million fertile women between 18-38 there would be 8 million.

The Japanese women who are aging out of fertility now are 35-39 years old. There were 660,000 women per year in those years. Japan will be losing 70% of its fertile age women. Each 5 year group is about 100k per year less women.

The fertility data comes a day after Prime Minister Fumio Kishida released a draft plan to boost “unparalleled” child-rearing support, although the announcement has raised questions about its effectiveness in turning around the falling birthrate.

The fertility rate in Japan had recovered to 1.45 in 2015, but has been on a downward trend since 2016. Getting fertility temporarily up to 1.45 from 1.3 earlier cost about $200 billion. Having a working age population that is 10% less is costing but also averaging 48 years of age instead of 35-40 is costing Japan 20-30% of GDP or about $1 to 1.5 trillion each year.

This is before Japan loses 20-30% of its population over the next 30 years. Japan has lost about 5% of its people over the last 15 years. The population birth spiral does not stop in 30 years, it keeps spiraling downward with fewer fertile women. Until birthrates get back over 2.1 replacement and stay there then there is no population stabilization.

Well, so what, some might say. This will mean all pension systems will collapse. There will be no state support for retirement. If there is less than one working age person to each old person, the math of taking some taxes and giving it to the old person to live becomes scraps. The old person will have to keep working until they drop. If 40-50% of the population is old people then they do not spend money. The economy shrinks massively.

* Economic recession
* stock market crashes
* no pensions

If it persisted then how would we keep the systems of civilization running?

The Black Death causes 30-50% population loss in seven years. If Japan loses 20% of its population in the 30 years and most of them are old (65+, 75+) and the average age is 55, then we will see if economic systems break.

If China loses the entire population of the USA by 2050 going from 1.41 billion to 1.1 billion with TFR of 1.1, then will this end up with some quiet and peaceful scenario? Russia had population loss and started a war with Ukraine.

What happens with national debts of countries that start collapsing? Will the world banking system hold up?

It is just those countries, it is not like Japan or China have globally important banks or the aging Europeans.

At the start of the COVID pandemic, people thought it was just a China problem. China was locking down whole provinces the size of European countries. Populations that are already shrinking : China, Japan, Italy, Spain, Russia, South Korea. (20% of the world’s population).

You don’t have to worry about a population crisis in Japan…or China etc… People ignored the pandemic for the 6 months and that worked out great.

Also, only rich countries can afford to develop and pay for technology to fix things like climate change. Africa has to get loans and technology to transition off fossil fuels. Poor countries just burn coal.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has made arresting the country’s sliding birth rate a top priority and his government, despite high levels of debt, plans to earmark the spending of 3.5 trillion yen ($25bn) a year on child care and other measures to support parents.

“The youth population will start decreasing drastically in the 2030s. The period of time until then is our last chance to reverse the trend of dwindling births,” he said this week while visiting a daycare facility.

Over 70% of the world is below replacement level. This includes poor countries like India, Vietnam, Bangladesh. Indonesia and Cambodia are close at 2.2 to 2.3.

China will be losing 10 million people per year from its working age population from 2027-2050. Japan will be losing 1 million people per year from its working age population from 2023-2050. The working age populations for China, Japan, Italy and Spain will be about 20-30% smaller in 2050 than today.

Total Fertility Rates of Top GDP Countries All Below 2.1 Replacement

USA       1.66
China     1.18
Japan     1.26
Germany   1.6
India     1.99
UK        1.75
France    1.84
Italy     1.29
Canada    1.47
Brazil    1.67
Russia    1.5
S Korea   0.78
Australia 1.60
Mexico    1.79
Spain     1.29

34 thoughts on “Low Births Will Mean Economic Ruin”

  1. I am not sure how you link population decline with economic decline. In the past economic advancement was tied to productivity advancement. Productivity was tied to increased human work force. That is not the case now Your whole site is dedicated to future advancements with robotics and AI leading the charge. We do not need more people now. Even young people will become a burden on the system until we settle on a method to distribute wealth based on something other than individual productivity because soon that will be a memory of the past. Even this site will be done through AI without any input from human authors. So what will boosting biirth rates do for us then. For the doubters, remember early Amazon and how many believed people would not shop online. Grow it out 20 yrs and now who goes to a store to shop. As robotics and AI become more closely merged, who will need people. We should never forget that we can be evolved to irrelevance or extinction. Making more mouths to feed will only create larger problems down the road.

  2. Seems to me, the countries with lower birth rates share a common trait. Namely the government soaking up ever greater percentages of the income of the average citizen while inflicting ever greater control (regulations) which in turn directly increases the cost of goods and services. Net impact is that the average citizen is poorer, making having a family increasingly more difficult. Inevitable economic result is a lower birth rate because having children becomes too expensive.

    Strikes me the solution to lower birth rates is to massively reduce the number of government bureaucrats and their excessive regulations. Serendipitous benefit is the average citizen has more money in their pocket to spend on what they want, as opposed to enriching the bureaucrats and their elitist supporters.

    • Total support.
      The Great inflation of the 70s was the effect of profligate spending from the government and money printing.
      With time, continuous prices increases become normality, people adapted saving less and indebting themselves more and more. And economic growth went consistently down compared with the past.
      No economic growth just means the government is spending too much and leaving not enough in the pocket of people.

      Today, the only “economic growth” is just nominal prices growing because the currency is devaluing .

  3. FEW PEOPLE SEEM TO RECOGNIZE EVOLUTION IN ACTION.
    HOMO SAPIENS IS THOUGHT TO HAVE GONE THROUGH A BOTTLENECK OF PERHAPS 60,000 INDIVIDUALS OR PERHAPS FAR FEWER BEFORE RISING TO THE CURRENT 8 BILLION OR SO.
    THE RESULTANT HAS BEEN THE LARGEST POPULATION OF OUTSTANDING GENOMES EVER KNOWN.THESE ARE RECOGNIZED AND EVEN POST MORTEM ARE POTENTIALLY ABLE TO BE RESURRECTED.
    RED CHINA HAS ALREADY RESTORED SELECTION OF AT LEAST THE FITTEST ACADEMICALLY BY ALLOWING ONLY THE TOP GRADUATES TO BE PARTY MEMBERS.

  4. I agree that is is all countries. My prediction is that all countries will under go the same boom/bust cycle; just not all at the same time. Nigeria will be the last large country to go through this cycle. These transitions occur when the country is ready for them so they are staggered out over 200 years. The US is almost finished with the farm to city transition, Nigeria hasn’t even started yet.

    But the pattern should always be the same. Run up in the farm population, followed by migration to the cities, that causes birth rates to go negative, population falls until the standard of living greatly rises, then kids become affordable again and the population trend reverses.

    Every population in nature goes through these boom/bust cycles. Why should humans be different?

    • The inability to replace the population is just a symptom of poverty and inability to form families.

  5. To me this is a perfectly natural occurrence. No population in nature grows without bounds, they all go through boom and bust cycles. I believe the coming population collapse was always destined to happen. Kids on farms have a positive economic value to the farming family so farm families had lots of them. When people moved to the cities, kids became liabilities instead of assets so we had many few of them. The population is going to fall, and it is going to keep falling until the standard of living rises enough that having kids is no longer an economic burden. As that point the trend will reverse.

    As for the USA, I would rather see a halt to unskilled immigration and a boost to skilled immigration. Then focus the national resources on raising everyone’s standard of living. The US can easily do that if it would just stop importing millions of people at the bottom of the economic scale. In other words, embrace the falling population and try to transition to a standard of living which supports a positive birthrate as quickly as possible. The AI trend will help a lot with this transition.

    Of course the government has to change. In this scenario the population falls first before recovering later. You simply can’t run the government like the Ponzi scheme we currently have. Government fiances will have to shift to a model which assumes a falling population achieving large productivity gains.

    I don’t think masses of bodies are the solution here. In my opinion the solution is to raise the US standard of living 5-10X over the current level. Achieving that is possible by focusing on the education of the shrinking population and the gains in technology they will produce. Sooner or later they will become rich enough to start having kids again.

    • It is all countries. It will be Africa as well. They are just delayed a few decades. India. Bangladesh. Vietnam. South America. Almost everywhere below replacement

      • Stop worrying about Africa, my Chinese friend, Africans are doing well, as they have always been for over 200,000,000 years, despite all the Caucasians’ wickedness against them.

        • Tunisia is below replacement rate. South Africa is at just above replacement at 2.3. Africa fertility rate is falling from 6 to 4 with several countries at 3 or below. It is happening in Africa as well.

  6. You repeat yourself Brian without addressing the Elephant in the room. So I’ll repeat myself. Immigration and the dramatic advances in AI and robotics occurring right now.

    • With 70% of the world below replacement, and the remainder on the way to joining them, immigration isn’t a solution. It’s barely a delaying tactic.

    • I think this is a critical risk to the future existence of humanity. You can bet that I will continue to repeat and expand upon these articles.
      The risk also threatens the world economy. As Brett said, if almost all countries will soon have shrink population, then immigration is re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Immigration will have some interesting results like Canada getting to 50 million people by 2030 and maybe 100 million by 2100.

      I believe in future technological miracles but timing is not certain. Things have to happen and it is not OK to say. I am not worried about the fire in my house now because I am in line to be given a new house once the new house is built.

      • This is actually something we have to solve as soon as possible, because there are social positive feedbacks involved.

        The fewer people who are having children, the more having children stops being viewed as a normal part of life, and begins being viewed as a kind of expensive hobby. And in a democracy, the government does not typically subsidize expensive hobbies. The lower the birthrate, then, the harder it becomes to actually DO something about the problem. The easier it becomes to adopt policies hostile to fertility, maybe not even intentionally, just because fertility isn’t really something being considered by people who don’t want to have children.

        Immigration isn’t a solution, and that’s not just because this problem is eventually going to set in everywhere.

        If you look around the world at the places that still have above replacement fertility, none of them are really functional societies, except possibly Israel, and there you’ll find that the people reproducing aren’t terribly productive citizens.

        Immigration-wise, you are what you eat, assimilation runs both ways. If the West is reliant on immigration from dysfunctional societies to keep its population up, in time the West will become dysfunctional, too. We’re not importing these people as babies, and raising ourselves in our own culture, with our own cultural values, after all!

        And, even if it could be made to work, any solution dependent on keeping part of the world impoverished would be profoundly immoral.

        One of the reasons this has to be solve ASAP, is because it WILL be solved eventually, and some of the potential solutions are horrific, and would warp our societies in ways that we might never recover from. Brave New World style baby factories. Handmaid’s Tale style deprivation of women’s rights.

        We need to fix things NOW, while we still have the lingering cultural memory of how a free society above replacement can function. Rebuilding that culture will be practically impossible, because the alternatives to it will empower people who won’t want it rebuilt.

        And I think that starts with identifying what the common cause is across advanced societies. Somehow everybody in the West is making the same mistake, what is it?

        • What is it, really? I guess you’re not a woman… having kids is uncomfortable, extremely painful (pregnancy, birth), consumes all your time and resources and is extremely hard work, with 99% of all that falling on the woman. I’ts a very long term commitment and in the end you get nothing for all that hard work and waste of your life, as anybody in an old people’s home can tell you, 99% of them having had kids. And you wonder why women aren’t up to it?? They had to in the past, when there wasn´t any other option than marriage and kids, but now??!!

          • “I’ts a very long term commitment and in the end you get nothing for all that hard work and waste of your life, as anybody in an old people’s home can tell you, 99% of them having had kids.”

            What a load of crap. Most people will tell you, including my wife and I, that having kids was the best thing we’ve ever done.

            I think most women want to have at least two kids but somehow many fail. Why? There is a lot of research on that and it’s not simple.

            • right! and you and your wife speak for all people, of course. my point is: why have kids, spend all your money, time and resources on them if, in the end, you’re left to die in some shoddy place like a useless old rag? most women don’t want to have at least two kids, I never wanted any and, by the state of affairs, I’m not the only one.

              • if you don’t want children, no one wants to force you to bear or raise them.

                So, please, stop cringing.

            • right! and I guess you and your wife speak for all people, of course. My point is: why have kids, spend all your money, time and resources on them if, in the end, you’re left to die in some shoddy place like an old useless rag? and most women don’t want to have at least two children, I never wanted any and, for the state of affairs right now, I’m not the only one.

        • What is it, really? I guess you’re not a woman… having kids is uncomfortable, extremely painful (pregnancy, birth), consumes all your time and resources and is extremely hard work, with 99% of all that falling on the woman. I’ts a very long term commitment and in the end you get nothing for all that hard work and waste of your life, as anybody in an old people’s home can tell you, 99% of them having had kids. And you wonder why women aren’t up to it?? They had to in the past, when there wasn´t any other option than marriage and kids, but now??!!

          • Women [globally] not being up for it means eventual extinction. It will be all countries. If the average does not get back over 2.1 then it is eventual extinction. It is math. 1.9 means 0.95 females replaces 1.0 females. It keeps dropping.

      • Well there is a lot of research as to why people aren’t having kids. Why not post some of it?

        An obvious hypothesis from much of the data is that 1) societies are increasingly giving women more options in terms of education and accepting them as single and 2) Nevertheless, the parenting roles with a partner remain largely traditional and overburden the woman.

        • “An obvious hypothesis from much of the data is that 1) societies are increasingly giving women more options in terms of education and accepting them as single and 2) Nevertheless, the parenting roles with a partner remain largely traditional and overburden the woman.”

          The evidence really doesn’t seem to support that. If it did, then countries with lower female labor force participation relative to male, like Japan (74%, TFR 1.34) or Italy (69% TFR 1.24), would have more children than countries with high female labor force participation, like Norway (93% TFR 1.48) or France (85% TFR 1.83).

    • Mass immigration is the fastest way to destroy cultures, not save them. The Japanese will make it through just fine regardless of the doom and gloom predictions. It would be nice if whites could understand the destruction they’re importing, but some people refuse to see the obvious.

      • The people controlling the immigration know what they’re doing. They’re “electing a new people”; They think they can create a sort of modern feudalism, with a small segment of aristocrats empowered by automation and AI, and subservient masses keep poor and easily manipulated.

        The existing population aren’t really up for that, so they need to be replaced.

        • Nobody has talked about chemistry. Where is GoatGuy when we need him?
          We have been ingesting endocrine disruptors for decades, phthalate’s in our packaging, glyphosate in our foods, inhaling lead from engine exhaust, contaminated fish (eg mercury), and herbicides in our yards. I remember using 2,4-D on the lawn to suppress dandelions.
          If you look for non-government approved data, you will find that heavily Covid-injected populations are showing up to 10% reductions in fertility.
          I fully agree that the “people” controlling society are aware of the desired outcomes of reducing western populations, replacing us with manipulable immigrants, and arranging elections to suit those ends.

  7. I don’t know how real this is, but supposedly, a new social idea struggles to gain traction until it’s held by about 25% of the population, then it becomes respectable and has a much easier time climbing.

    So does it work in reverse? An old, established idea, or way of life, can trundle along at 50% for near forever, but once it falls to 25%, it’s no longer respectable and on the way out fast?

    South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.78. This probably does not mean that 78% of South Korean women have 1 child. There’s a distribution, and it probably isn’t even. But you could get the right number of children if 51% of women had 0 children, 33% of women had 1 child, 15% had 2 children, and 5% had 3 children. Even if we lump the 2 and 3 child families together, having more than 1 child would be in the “non-respectable” zone.

  8. My view

    AGI and/or 10 000’s of ultra advanced narrow AI’s will save us.

    Tech and scientific progress is faster than labor force decline. Even without AGI. With AGI it will accelerate probably like 1000 times or more.

    Countries like Japan, South Korea, China may have shrinking workforces, but their per capita is growing rapidly. Compare 2021 to 2023.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita

    If you want older data and projections for late 2020’s, you will find it here – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_past_and_projected_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita

    So even though, we may have less people, we will still have larger output (thanks to more advanced tech in the future) and therefore countries budgets will be growing, so we will have money for pensions etc.

    Tech progress is accelerating. Per capita in most OECD countries, at least in PPP will be above $100 000 soon. US is already at 80k, will be above 100 000 in a few years.

    It will be interesting to go back and analyse those early 2020’s predictions around 2030, when our tech will be like 100-1 000 000x more advanced, we will probably have ASI and robots as capable as humans by then, we will be able to construct gigafactories in a few weeks/days and world will be almost unimaginably richer.

    PS. Brian, it would be interesting if you would write an article where you try calculate how mass manufacturing humanoid robots(with human capabilities – advanced AI brains) from late 2020’s would increase our GDP, GDP per capita, general output/tech capabilities(ability to mass creation of ambitious/world changing megaprojects). Example – building huge orbital solar power stations, mass manufacturing giga/hyperfactories).

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