Hi Grim,

"Japan currently anticipates a 50% reduction in population by the end of the century."

Isn't it fun to play Supreme Leader ? To decide the fate of billions ?

So how has Japan gone so far, with its slightly decreasing population ? What impact has declining population - combined with a growing population of retired people - had on the economy there, and on the tax-base paid for by a relatively declining number of working people ? What methods might be required to cut the population in half in the next 85 years ?

After all, you can't somehow cut the number of older people - they live out their lives without any fear of Solent green.

And you can't cut back on the number of working people (they're already born), since they provide the tax revenue to support government services, support for those older generations, infrastructure and mechanisms to keep boosting the economy.

So you can't really cut back to hard on the birth-rate, since those babies will need to grow up to support ever-more older people.

BUT the obvious way around your dilemma is to intensify, to boost technology, to improve productivity. How to do that ? Better education, more efficient use of resources. Peace in the North Pacific and North Asia would allow funds to be put into education, innovation and infrastructure rather than into military spending, after all.

And if those silly issues between China and other Asian countries could be resolved equitably and peacefully, then that would also enable China to handle its population-reduction scenario a bit better, because I suspect the current scenario of one-child families will produce catastrophic results from, say, 2025-2030: relatively suddenly, very few younger people to go into either the work-force or the armed forces, while older populations grow rapidly, at least for another generation or two.

No easy ways, Grim :) No cutting of a Gordian knot, no Solent Green solutions, no culling of babies. No grand utopian plans of Supreme Leaders.

Joe

Thanks, Don, that's a brilliant article on future demography !

But sometimes, in my more cynical moments, I suspect the over-pops know very well that populations in developed countries are not rising, and are usually declining: even in the US and Australia, if immigration (so often of young people just starting their families) is taken out of the picture.

So what are the over-pops really worried about ? Putting on my Arjay-paranoid hat, I suspect that what they don't like is not just a decline in white populations, but any expansion of those non-white populations. Simple as that. They worry about too many black people.

Get stuck in, Greens :)

Another factor in population reduction is the 'turnover time' between generations. Look at it this sway: if every woman had her kids at 20 to 25, then there would be three to four generations alive at any one time, with one just departing and another just arriving. But if women delay their child-bearing, as educated women are more likely to do, until they are, say, 33-40, then there may be only 2+ to 3 generations alive at any one time. Merely in this way, population could slowly decline.

In fact, how to maintain an optimal population may become the issue: I'm sure it's been tried before but once that time comes, governments may have to contemplate very high social funding for second and third children. Watch Singapore to see what might be done.

Joe
www.firstsources.info

What a remarkably polite post Loudmouth.
Now perhaps you might like to explain why I'm acting as a “Supreme Leader” for quoting the same statistics as provided by Don's “brilliant article on future demography”?

Yes, sorry, Grim, I read too much into what seemed a too-ready declaration of massive population reduction in Japan. In future, I'll read your posts more thoroughly.

Just one observation about population: my wife was Indigenous, the eldest of six girls and four boys. They all started having their own kids from the late sixties, and between them, they had twenty children: a birth-rate of 2.0. i.e. an average of two children per family.

My wife ran a pre-school in an Aboriginal community across the mid-seventies and it seemed that, even there, family size had declined remarkably since the decade before. I'd hazard a guess and suggest that this was common across Indigenous Australia - a decline in family size around 1966-1970, from families of six and eight and ten and twelve, quite common in the forties and fifties, down to two and three.

Why ? Urbanisation may be one factor. Access to contraception, especially the Pill and the loop, would certainly be another. Far better education across those years from 1950 to 1980-1990, especially for women, has become the most important factor since the sixties. In short, population reduction factors impact on women far more than on men.

Of the 36,0000 or so Indigenous university graduates, two-thirds are women - 24,000. Anecdotally, those women don't seem to have fewer kids than their sisters, but they do seem to have them later. As well, they tend to inter-marry at a higher rate (as do Indigenous male graduates) and inter-marriage is one major factor in increasing the Indigenous birth-rate, two for the price of one, as it were.

Joe

Perhaps you should consider a cuppa and a little lie down, Grim; you seem to be foaming at the mouth there

That's the standard of argument constantly coming from you, reflected back to you.

Do you find it persuasive?

Answer? Yes? No?

You accuse me of irrationality. Do you have the gall to claim that as some kind of rationally valid contribution? Yes? No?

"Oh thank the Lord, Peter Wing Ah Jardine Lo Fat has raised his gaze from under the bed to rescue us.

Now with your new-found understanding that ad hominem is fallacious, can you see that there is nothing of substance in what you opened your discussion to me with, is there? According to what you now acknowledge as the valid standard, it's abuse, isn't it?

Yes? No?

"How lucky we are to have the Global Financial Military Industrial Complex, to save us from the Evil that is Democratically elected Government."

Who was suggesting we have the GFMIC to save us from the ETISEG? If you're implying it was me, how can that be anything but the kind of misrepresentation you're complaining about when I reflect it back to you? Show me where I have ever argued how lucky with are to have the GFMIC? And what has that to do with the arguments for liberty?

"your ideological support for the corporatisation of the planet"

You ask me to justify my accusing you of that.

Excuse me? That's the misrepresentation you threw in my face, remember? You're asking me to correct your misrepresentations. You justify it.

And what's that supposed to mean anyway? You don't want to buy goods or services from corporations? What are you talking about?

"and profound hatred of freely elected governments is irrational"

What's that supposed to mean? Prove it.

“Government ought to protect the individuals within the country against the violent and fraudulent attacks of gangsters, and it should defend the country against foreign enemies.”

How is that inconsistent with classic liberalism or libertarianism, or consistent with any other government control of production or consumption? Why are you not contradicting yourself.

Can you see that supporting that is inconsistent with what you falsely called "FREE" education? It's inconsistent with any governmental services but those to protect liberty and property.

"JKJ (or whatever your name is this week) I have answered your questions."

Still confusing the merit of an argument with the name of the person putting it forward?

And yet you've already acknowledged the invalidity of ad hominem in this thread. So in other words, you know that what you're doing is irrational, and you just keep on doing it.

"Where have I ever suggested that elected governments are "presumptively better than your freedom to make the decision in question, or not?"

In accusing me of irrational hatred of elected government, when all I have ever done is put forward the arguments for freedom from aggressive violence by government.

"Surely with your intellectual integrity, answering these questions without misrepresentation shouldn't be too challenging."

You need to cure yourself of your vice of prefacing every post with snide ad hominem, and snide misrepresentations, and then I'll answer any question you want.

"And one last question:
Care to do a word count on who has been most verbally abusive on this thread?"

You seem to expect that you will just constantly abuse me every single post, and I'll politely ignore it and try to answer the substance of your argument, while you just continue with your personal argument and misrepresentation every time.

No. You learn to respond to ideas like a civilised human being and you will find you're not having to cop any of your own abuse reflected back to you, which is all you're complaining about from me.