does demographic collapse matter?

My previous post asked whether demographic collapse can be avoided. Perhaps an even more vital question is whether it actually matters. Is demographic collapse necessarily a bad thing?

There are several arguments for demographic collapse being disastrous. To summarise:

Firstly there’s the capitalist argument. Capitalism must have ever-increasing markets and wages must be kept as low as possible.

Secondly, demographic collapse leads to a rapidly ageing population in which there won’t be enough young productive people to support the ever-increasing numbers of old people.

Thirdly, the argument that there’s something inherently unhealthy about a society with very few children and lots of old people. A related argument is that low birth rates mean many women not having any children at all which may not be good for their long-term psychological health.

There are however counter-arguments. The counter-argument to the first point is that there seems to be no logical reason why capitalism can’t sell more and better stuff to the existing market rather than selling lots of junk to ever-increasing markets.

As for point two, automation is likely to make a large workforce of young productive people both unnecessary and irrelevant.

As for the third point, it may be motivated mostly by a dislike for old people. A society with virtually no children would clearly be unhealthy, but maybe a society with fewer children isn’t necessarily a catastrophe.

There are other arguments in favour declining population sizes. Problems of urban overcrowding, suburban sprawl, traffic congestion, environmental degradation would be eased. In theory, wages would rise (bad for capitalists but good for everyone else). Housing prices should fall. Back in the 70s people used to be concerned about “quality of life” but nobody talks about it any more because it has anti-immigration overtones.

We should perhaps return to the third point, the supposed unhealthiness of a society with fewer children. We have to be somewhat realistic. We are not going to go back to being a society in which large families are the norm. For a variety of reasons (alluded to in my previous post) married couples no longer desire three or four, or more, children. Most want children, but most are content with one child or at the most two. It would require a radical change in the nature of our society to reverse this trend.

We also perhaps need to accept that there has been a fundamental change in people’s attitude towards marriage (and towards long-term relationships). Marriage is no longer seen as being essentially a framework for the raising of children. It is now seen as an arrangement by which a man and a woman seek emotional and sexual fulfilment, with the raising of one or two children being merely a part of the deal rather than being absolutely central. We may deplore this but I don’t think we can change it. We also need to accept that we are never going to return to a society in which sex is seen as being solely for the purpose of procreation. There are Puritan factions within the dissident right who particularly deplore this change but it is irreversible. And perhaps we need to ask if it’s really so terrible that people should want to put personal happiness ahead of some vague duty to a society that seems to have little regard for them.

Of course when it comes to population decline we do have a real life example in front of us, that example being Japan. They have already reached the point of actual population decline, and they have so far resisted the temptation to boost their population artificially through immigration. Thus far there is no sign that Japanese society is on the point of eminent collapse. As to whether Japanese women, and Japanese men, are less happy than they were in the past I must confess I have no idea since I don’t live there. It would certainly be interesting to see some relevant statistics. If the Japanese can survive population decline then presumably other nations can as well.

A great deal obviously depends on whether, without immigration, populations will eventually stabilise. A Japan with 60 million people might be a very pleasant country. But what about a Japan with 20 million people? Could they sustain a modern industrialised economy? Is there any reason to think that populations would stabilise, and at what level?

I don’t have any strong opinion on this matter because I honestly don’t know if demographic collapse is really an inevitable disaster or not but there does seem to be at least a possibility that it is survivable. And it may even be a net positive. In any case it seems likely that we’re stuck with it so perhaps we will simply have to learn to deal with it.