We need to start talking about population decline

[user4567890754]

The first signs of it are starting to show in the UK, with primary school closures. Secondary school closures will follow.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/11158f12-0133-11ee-a364-04e704863f75?shareToken=5ef47b2b4776be376153089146c8bacf

Italy is a few years ahead of us.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/01/plunging-birthrate-threatens-italian-schools

Japan shows where every country is headed - towards a crisis where they are on the brink of being unable to maintain social functions.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/13/asia/japan-population-decline-record-drop-intl-hnk/index.html

And yet there are still people who think that we have a problem with overpopulation. It’s the opposite.

There won't be any "social functions" when life as we know it stops because we have no food and water and the weather is over 40 degrees.
Why would we want more people to suffer?

Mother Nature will sort us all out eventually! The world will be here long after we've been exterminated.

It's really a case of procreate like our lives depend on it.

I don't know what the answer is as house prices must be having a huge impact on couples not being able to afford to expand their families.

We need to see more couples having babies. I have multiple children myself and wouldn't have it any other way.

I need someone to wipe my bum when I am old and decrepit🤣

There's a Japanese film about state assisted dying for the over 75s, Plan 75.

I assume we will see more of that in the future. Jersey are looking at this but have a few more votes to go before it becomes law.

Yes - it's fiction though, not a documentary 😂

obviously, but I do think assisted dying will become more common. You can disagree of course.

The director made the film because she's concerned about the increasing intolerance to older people in Japan & doesn't want it to become a reality.

What rubbish…yes birth rate is low but migration is totally off the scale at an unsustainable rate and therefore services are collapsing. The issue is migrants don’t want to leave in leafy North Yorks, but inner cities.

The latest route is doing a one year “Masters” course, then getting a two year post grad visa. Nearly all get low grade jobs and it isn’t hard to meet the income threshold to stay permanently. I don’t know why the Conservative party wring their hands about immigration as they all know full well what is happening and the various scams underpinning it

They said this before they closed schools then we had the millennium baby boom and the schools were insufficient education suffered

We will have a boom again its only a matter of time

I don’t know why the Conservative party wring their hands about immigration as they all know full well what is happening and the various scams underpinning it

Well their electorate hate it but the Tories also believe in capitalism. I don't actually know how things like the nhs would function without immigration.

Yes that's true, I agree and I understand that. It's more that it didn't change from 65 to 85 suddenly. I feel the mess is more to do with poor planning tbh. Look at climate change, its been happening for decades, no one wants to do anything because they don't want it to affect them. One day it will affect everyone and it will be too late.

And how many of those houses are occupied by 1 or 2 old people, who 100 years would have been long dead?

I feel the mess is more to do with poor planning tbh

The gov could do more but you're right people don't want to hear. Look at how many people on this thread think the UKs issue it's down to too many babies...

Or you get comments like people have paid all their lives for their care later on. Or a&e is full because of drunks on the weekend or sprained ankles. And of course everyone thinks someone else should pay.

Planning forward is the best idea. People are in part having less children because it is unaffordable for most families to have more than one or two. Increase the tax burden on working people and you'll reduce the birth rate further. We need to stop funding pensions and care out of general taxation and have a separate fund into which people make increasing payments as they get older. We desperately need to tax wealth as well rather than focusing on income. This would be a much more sensible system in any case than the present one (forced selling/charging of homes if the asset threshold is exceeded, subject to various exceptions, and then the state meets the costs).

Jesus christ this was some grim reading on a Saturday morning. I'm probably guilty of just not letting myself think about all these things given I have two very young kids and actually reading them all makes me feel both myself and them have scarily bleak futures and that I shouldn't have inflicted this on them. It's like there is point after point of why life is going to be horrible and difficult and no positives or ways out of it.

Not the point of the thread but I'm in bed with my baby tearing up at the thought.

What have Japan done to plan for it?

We desperately need to tax wealth as well rather than focusing on income.

Absolutely. I don't think there is any other option tbh as where will the funds come from.

Exactly. If they've paid all their life, where is their money now?

It doesn't matter what people have paid, there's no magic pot of money sat waiting for them. Their entitlement to anything at all from the government in their retirement depends on the policies in place at the time, and whether the government can fund these by extracting sufficient taxes from working age people.

If the workers can't pay because there are not enough of them, then you can whistle for your entitlement. And it doesn't matter what you paid.

Agree op but as another posted out (very amusing post) upthread, the bandwagon is climate change currently so all focus has to be on that from celebs politicians and companies.

it’s all a bit of a moot point though. In the end this planet will do what it has to do. We are delusional if we think we are more powerful than the planet is.

@BadLad about 20 yrs ago they implemented a care insurance plan for people (they didn't used to have one). They have invested in emerging tech eg robots. They have tried to make the country more "age ready" eg changing infrastructure & making more things physically accessible. They have also tried to boost birth rates eg higher benefits, cheaper childcare etc.
And of course there is a strong message within the culture to be personally responsible which includes staying healthy particularly as you age.

Having said that it's not been enough and the PM recently said “Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society,” & wants to heavily boost investment in children.

Meanwhile the UK hasn't done anything except increase state pension age. I actually thought the blanket h&s levy was a good policy but they scrapped that. We don't even have enough suitable housing.

Ridiculous, we won't always have the gov er have now and if there are huge huge issues I'm sure someone will say ah okay let's look at how we fund this. The issue now is that schools aren't paid enough per child, not that they pay per child.

Not sure what the second part even means, I'm saying if humans are no longer sustainable the planet and every other creature on earth will be much better off, so happy days when that happens (just not for us).

www.ft.com/content/342d059e-7252-4212-8bfc-1f508b063f17

this is a good article on global population trends. The UN already thinks u15s peaked in 2021. And the growth to 9bn that's forecast is largely due to a surge in older people.

That's why the "just grab some migrants" becomes an interesting conversation as lots of countries in the West will be competing for them as well as some of their own countries which will become far more prosperous.

Hasn't there recently been an increase in the number of people of working age who are not working? That might be fuelling the problem. The government needs to incentivise people into the workplace, which they could do by increasing minimum wage and placing caps on the salaries/bonuses paid to executives (to cover this cost).

The best thing we could do here is have some grown up discussions about whether keeping people alive as long as possible despite the quality of life, amount of medication and whatever else.

The staying healthy is making things worse, seeing as people live longer and therefore the ratio of old to young is getting worse.

I haven’t seen much of this changing infrastructure as a government policy to improve the birth rate. I thought it was getting worse. More and more people cramming into the mega cities while small villages in the countryside have fewer and fewer young people and end up with just old people, hence the large number of deserted houses.

The robots aren’t going to address the real issue, which is that there is going to be a horrendous tax burden on future generations when young people are such a minority compared to the elderly.