No Evidence Ageing/declining Populations Compromise Socio-Economic Performance

Or take the matter of immigration and international conditions that many others noted in this thread. If every rich country depends on immigration and every poor country strives to become rich, at some point you are going to start running out of places to source immigrants from and there will be a relationship between birth rates and economic performance.

Unfortunately it also shows the difficult part of modern scientific publishing: The authors try to downplay the existence of problems (labor shortages) by arguing that it's really a problem of immigration policies not allowing enough new labor in.

That's a tacit admission that labor shortages are a problem. Proposing a solution to the labor shortage doesn't mean that it's not a problem.

You have to read scientific papers carefully. It's increasingly common to find editorialization or wishful thinking mixed into the logic of papers. More so in some fields than others.

It might be a valid strategy and a very likely future, but I hope all the "we will just let immigrants in so don't worry about birth rates" people think about the implications here.

It is relative, no? If a nation's population decline isn't as high as another, maybe because of immigration, then they have more human resources? Also, humans tend to migrate?

This does appear to be an admission that labor shortages occur due to lack of workers. The authors propose a solution (immigration) to the problem, but in doing so pretend the problem doesn't exist.

However, if there is one thing we're not lacking, it's crisis zones, where people are desperate to move away from if given half a chance. Given both the current rate of climate change and the current political climate, this is bound to increase, even after the global population peak.

So I suspect that a lack of migrants willing to resettle to unaffected/less affected regions will not be a problem for the next few decades.

How did they make that assertion?

In the body of the paper immigration policies were not included as a variable in the data, nor were they a part of the statistical analyses. I couldn't find anything regarding labor movement at all. It feels weird that it was just thrown there in the end.

      Our results provide a strong evidence-based counter to the politically motivated claim that declining/slow-growing and ageing populations in any way compromise national economic performance, income distribution, productivity, political stability, well-being, or health of its citizens. In fact, such populations generally have the highest socio-economic performance indicators in the world. This result supports the mounting evidence that smaller populations are in fact beneficial to most of society37, in sharp contrast to the unsubstantiated political rhetoric of ‘baby busts’ and an ensuing economic Armageddon1-5. This is because investing in the health, training, and education of workers — especially older, more experienced workers — increases human capital, making the workforce more productive29. Neither is there a basis for an expected penury of working-age people for countries experiencing low population growth or even decline. Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies that limit or deny the movement of capable, working-age people from elsewhere to fill local demand70. Indeed, none of the existing credible population projections predicts a decline in the global population30,37,71-73.

The quote suggests that there won't be labor shortages in markets that have adequate and adaptive immigration policies, because migration into a country with an aging population is how countries today maintain their labor pools.

That the global population will continue to grow into 2100 supports their assertion that all countries should be more immigration friendly so as to reap the bi-directional benefit of available labor moving into geographies that need workers.

If there are only 2/3rds as many people, why would the same infrastructure be required?

This doesn't make any sense at all. The median age of Seoul is 42, slightly younger than the national average. 2060 is in 35 years. If Seoul had zero births, zero immigration, most people in Seoul today will still be alive by 2060.

I feel like every time someone comes up with one of these predictions the numbers get more nonsensical.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelashley/2025/02/17/the-fu...

Their take is that immigration policies rather than an aging population make the difference.

My hypothesis: Prosperity induces the population decline. That means there will be some momentum behind prosperity in the initial stages of the population decline. The population decline eventually induces a prosperity decline.

Of course literally unlimited amounts of people is a bad thing. Did you mean unregulated?

[1] Name of a city

Comparing what life was like then to life now and thinking about what I'd miss if I had to go back to say a 1976 lifestyle everything I'm coming up with is just that we've now got better technology, more advanced medicine, cleaner energy sources, and we passed laws and regulations to take better care of the environment.

Did we need 4 billion more people to get those things? I don't think so. In an alternate universe where the world decided in 1976 to voluntarily lower the fertility rate to just keep the population at 4 billion I think that 2025 in that world would be a lot like 2025 in our world as far as tech, medicine, energy, and the environment go.

By not having children, parents save costs and can instead accumulate more wealth per capita. This doesn't actually increase aggregate wealth though. It's the same wealth distributed over fewer people, making it look like you can population crash your way to wealth.

It is a somewhat perverse way to look at society, but par for the course for economists.