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.
America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population
71–79 of 79 posts
Re: America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 forc…
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.
Re: America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 coo…
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.
Re: America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population
#74This 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 the…
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.
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...
Re: America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 housi…
> 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.…
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.
Re: America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
“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.
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.
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.
Re: America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Re: America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population
#78This 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 the…
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…
> A lot of Japan is getting abandoned
That sounds like a good thing, from an ecological perspective.
Re: America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population
#79This 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 the…
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.