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Japan's 18-year-olds at record-low 1.06 million on falling births
(www.japantimes.co.jp)
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this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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Need citation for this. War is a net negative every time. War destroys resources and kills people. This leads to a labor shortage. It also destroys property so it leads to housing crisis and famine.
That is a death spiral. You can consider the labor involved with caring for the elderly a sort of tax on labor. It's a net drain but required and is directly related to previous generations of labor. The labor involved with raising children is similar but is closer to an investment. The more labor done for raising children, the more labor there will be next generation. Even though the labor for children is higher than the labor for the elderly, it results in a net positive.
If you have vastly fewer children in the following generation, you end up with a higher percentage of elderly labor compared to the labor pool. If the labor for children goes down enough to more than make up for it, you don't have a per capita labor deficit. BUT you do have less total labor.
Now we get into the real issue: maintaining society. It isn't just about the labor to care for each other. But technology, infrastructure, food, etc all need a certain amount of labor. And most of these tasks are scalable so it requires less labor per capita as population increases. If you shrink your labor pool too quickly, you won't be able to sustain your infrastructure causing a collapse.
Napoleonic Wars, WW1, WW2. Not even including the US, Russia, China and Japan all had explosive growth after WW2.
If a sudden drop in working age labor causes a death spiral, then Russia would have had a death spiral after WW2. Instead they had a boom and put a man in space before the US.
It's not an investment because at the end of a child's growth, you now have a consumer who requires more resources. When an elderly dies, that frees up resources for everyone.
The Black Plague is a accepted factor for the Renaissance. Labor became more valuable. The death of so many workers allowed the surviving workers wages to increase and they got more independence. It wasn't a death spiral.
Total less labor isn't a problem when you don't need more labor.
WW2 was a far quicker and far more severe labor pool shrinkage for many countries in the world. There was no collapse.
You realize working people produce more resources than they consume, right? If they didn't, there would be no economy at all.
Dude, where do you think our food, housing, and consumer goods come from? Your cynicism has overshot so far you're just denying the existence of the world around you.
People make products to sell to other people. When we build more homes than we have people to buy, prices go down.
When there is more capital in the market than things to buy, people put it into investments which raises prices on those investments.
1946 US wasn't a post-apocalyptic hellscape because we only had a population of 140 million and 1 million of the most able bodied workers were killed/wounded.
I'm not the one claiming a population decline is a death spiral.
Japan is still so overcrowded that there are train conductors who jobs is to physically smash the riders into the train because there isn't enough room.
https://imgur.com/gallery/cq7aBfT
It is my opinion that like natural predator-prey-food cycles, when population declines enough that regular people can again afford to have children like they did after WW2 because wages were high and real estate was cheap, population will go up again.