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.

My thoughts exactly.

True but only in eighty years time. In forty years time we will reach Peak Pensioner, and it will be very challenging.

There’s also a cost of living crisis and kids living in poverty. I have a professional job and still childcare for my two is half of my salary.

It's the great dichotomy though. Older generations don't want more immigration and will vote Brexit and Conservative and anyone else who pledge to stop it. However, because older people live longer - and the average age in the UK is so high - we need more working age people to look after the older generations.

Yes, a very difficult square to circle. I do think it's a really interesting conversation.

The council in a city in the South West I work for has just asked a developer not to build a new school that was planned, the birth rate is falling so fast that they can’t fill the current schools. There would be no demand for another.

Surely it's more like 10-20 years away?

Japan is quite a racist country. They don’t welcome any type of immigration so it is what it is. You’ll probably see an uptick of emigration by young Japanese who refuse to pay 90% tax to support an elderly majority.

Robots will be able to do a lot of the public sector work, cleaning the streets, mending the road, a lot of the caring for the elderly etc. We will probably end up with robots doing a lot of the emergency services work as well.

@BadLad I remember a teacher using it as a case study of "good management" in a geography module I did at uni or 6th form. If you google older articles there is definitely more positivity towards how they were managing the shift. The tide has turned though.

Exactly. And isn’t child benefit only paid for two kids anyway? Not sure how that translates into “encouraging to breed”.

@BadLad there was probably an element of people praising their model because they didn't go down the usual route of immigration.

And isn’t child benefit only paid for two kids anyway?

It's reductive nonsense, who has a dc for child benefit? I think it should be universal personally as the equivalent was for my parents.

Oh yes, you're right, there look to be slightly more people in the mid-50s bulge than the bulge below it because the children of the baby boom were more tightly packed in agw than the grandchildren.

True but only in eighty years time.

I think economically we are feeling it now. Look at the nhs currently, it won't exist in 80 years if things continue!

I don't think people should have more children just because the school funding model sucks, or because successive governments have not planned for the much known about sharp uptick in the elderly population.

This will be an unpopular view but I agree with a PP that a good start are serious discussions are around the decisions in healthcare which are invariably to just prolong life no matter what the person wants, what harm and pain the treatment causes, what quality of life someone has and other factors. It's actually very cruel sometimes and makes me ashamed to work in healthcare.

The workplace will look leagues different in a few decades anyway, the real issue will be how to entice anyone into working manual jobs we need doing.

I wouldn't underestimate the power of women rightly having more autonomy over their decisions and society now not demanding that the right thing to do is have children. Its very liberating.

I think the world will become more fluid, some parts are going to become even more inhospitable and uninhabitable and they will need somewhere to go, it makes sense to give them safe passage rather than promote people having more children just because we might not have enough of our own paying taxes.

I love Japan, been many times and its beautiful but also very regressive towards women and people of other races. Its not surprising not many people move there, perhaps if they addressed those embedded societal issues they'd have more luck than trying to persuade women they want more children?

The Nazis had some good ideas about how to do that.
Also, "embargoes"? What do you actually mean? What form would these "embargoes" take? 🤔

DH and I moved somewhere very rural 4 years ago. We got married here and are prime child bearing age. Yay for the village!

So let me tell you how it has gone. There is a minibus that comes once a day, three days a week for £9 return. You get around 2.5 hrs in the local town if you catch it. So I finally learned to drive and we are now a two car family, at significantly more expense than when we lived in a city.

I’ve had zero luck making friends - everyone with the time to be friendly is retired and invites me to nice (if slightly bland) activities that take place mid-morning or mid-afternoon, when I am clearly working. The few people our age are farmers and don’t really have the time or inclination to meet new people.

Going to the supermarket is an hour’s round trip. In winter the weather is miserable and we often get cut off from snow or floods. I get most things delivered which just means I rattle round the house even more. But don’t worry, I have Netflix when the internet isn’t too unstable.

We persevered and tried to buy a house for three years. Anything affordable gets snapped up for a holiday let. Anything nice doesn’t go in the market at all - it gets sold within extended families or handed down.

Meanwhile, everyone looks at me as a walking womb and makes unsubtle comments about how good it will be for the local school to have more children in it.

We have given up and made an offer on a house in a large town 45 minutes away. We expect to move in August and the relief is immense.

So yes, it’s easy to see why rural schools are closing. And even if it is a wider trend, I can’t get wound up about it. We don’t need to exponentially grow as a global population, it’s unsustainable. The human population on earth has historically been a tiny fraction of what it is now, and it was fine. They positives would be at least equal to the negatives in my view.

@pennypingletonpenny it's really weird that people don't believe it.

There's a school near me that had a 200 metre catchment for years. They have a poster up advertising spaces.

What we do need is that preventative medical care is finally taken seriously and not some pitiful afterthought.

I think it's a good thing for population size to shrink in general but we are currently too unhealthy to do it gracefully.

The problem is that these small rural communities are too expensive for young families to buy in

We are short of teachers right? Maybe focus can be on repairing and maintaining existing school buildings and paying staff a fairer wage. I don't think schools closing or not being needed to be built in itself is bad.

Rather than child benefit being reformed or whatever else the single biggest thing that would help is nurseries and other settings being properly funded by the government so that it can be actually affordable for people. People are then more likely to return to work and within my group of friends the majority have based their decisions with cost of childcare a huge one. Doesn't necessarily stop when they start school if they need wrap around either.

I wouldn't underestimate the power of women rightly having more autonomy over their decisions and society now not demanding that the right thing to do is have children. Its very liberating.

I'm not sure if I'm overthinking but I worry it will go the other way. Like the overturning of Roe v Wade is a glimpse of the future.

I wonder if the thinning out in between 40 and 50 on that chart (1970 and 1980) is due to the high inflation of the 1970s?

If everyone could stop moving to Surrey and spread out a bit we will be fine.

So we ride out those forty years instead of continuing to breed exponentially. Thank goodness that’s finally slowing down.