This Needs to be Said

When people talk about the dire consequences of demographic collapse, what they really mean is that they have real estate investments, or that they want excess workers so that they can underpay or otherwise mistreat workers, or that they need cannon fodder for wars.

When one looks at historical examples of population declines, the Black Death is a classic example, it turns out that the aftermaths are a time of increased well being for the bulk of the population.

I've been saying this for a while, and now so has Ian Welsh.

There is a genre of population decline doomerism. An example:

Three terrifying charts about Japan’s demographics.

1) Japan’s population is shrinking. It decreased by 850,000 last year. pic.twitter.com/HOKijFWRdx

— S.L. Kanthan (@Kanthan2030) December 21, 2024

Here’s the thing, Japan imports about sixty percent of its food. Japan is, by any reasonable measure, over-populated.

If you can’t feed your population and if there is no reasonable prospect that you could feed your population, perhaps you have too many people?

Another country for which this is true is Britain, which imports about 80% of its food. Yet the British have also been importing over a million people a year.

One might suggest, as well, that any country which has a large number of homeless people is also overpopulated: clearly it has more people than it is capable of taking care of. (Though we all know that’s usually a choice, not a constraint.)

The world is overpopulated by humans and our domesticated animals. We are in classic population overshoot.

………

Population doomers never ask the simple question: Under what circumstances is population growth good and under what circumstances is population decline good?

And for whom?

There was no better time to live in Medieval Europe than after the Black Death.

Decline now, while it’s gentle. If you insist on not doing so, you will do it the hard way.

(Much of this is driven by prioritization of GDP, a desire for low wages, and a deep misunderstanding of what makes an economy strong. More on that in the future.)

I'm not sure how much this all means, but someone is agreeing with me, and that is a rare thing.