19 wnt. Demographic decline is ignored, but no less lethal than the atomic bomb.

The nation gets smaller and older. There will not even be enough people to take care of the elderly, much less to pay their pension. And limited or no workers.

Hello Dear Readers:  I am searching for subject matter of interest to this group of subscribers.  Just lately I have talked about a level of declining optimism.  How do we deal with that?  Can we explain and digest it, or is it just suppressed and denied?  That didn't get too much interest.

Then I spoke of world peace and how in the past, people (like Jennette Rankin), struggled for peace for her whole life.  You don't find that in many leaders these days.  There were limited views.

Then I shared an article about worker co-ops, "employee owned enterprises".  They are the ultimate in fairness, more than capitalism, socialism or communism, and it doesn't take a revolution nor the destruction of the status quo.  They are limited in size to function with true economic democracy, but nowadays small and medium enterprises are a vital part of supply chains.  If ever I would go back to Europe, I would go to the Spanish Basque country and visit the Mondragon University.

Still not much interest here.

Our site has less subscribers that Argomend, but more views on these posts.  That proves that different groups have different interests.  Today I am searching for your interest with an innovative essay on demographics taken from Asian Times.  I had never heard of such a proposal. (Wish me luck.)

Posted by URGE2EVOLVE

SEP 26, 2024

Nearly all countries outside sub-Saharan Africa cannot maintain their population-replacing levels.   Some people want to reduce the world population anyway, but they don’t have a feasible plan of how to do it.  Other people blithely think that immigration will solve everything. NO IT WON’T, see below about immigration in Germany.  In measured amounts immigration could be a temporary fix.  But overall, it will be a terrible disaster. (2,100 words)

TO CONVINCE EVERY WOMAN TO HAVE 2.1 CHILDREN, WILL NEVER HAPPEN. No matter what the offered incentives.

In order for any occupation to be sustainable through time, it must take advantages of modernization and economies of scale.  Raising a child has no such advantages.  It’s a low technology and relatively more and more work for only this one benefit, when you also have to work elsewhere. Because it is now the only non-specialized work of which any of us ever does much of, child-raising seems anomalously hard – as growing one’s own food and making one’s own clothing would feel if one had to revert to it.  Couples who learn how hard child-raising is by their first, relative to more specialized and mechanized kinds of work, increasingly choose not to raise a second child. 

That is this proposal: To make a child-raising family a paid occupation.

Who would pay?  Of course, it has to be State employment.  If one couple raised 10 – 11 children, they would do the replacement work of 5 non-bearing couples, and hence be one sixth of the population.  But other couples will have one or two children, so maybe 8 % of the population could take this occupation and keep populations at replacement level.  LESS, because for the first 3 children the father could still do other work.

There are substantial economies of scale and other benefits of labor specialization in child-raising – benefits that no state pro-natalist policy has ever attempted to capture. Two parents can raise ten to 12 children at a much lower average cost than they can raise one or two children for diverse reasons. 

Preparing food for ten children and cleaning up after ten children requires far less time and effort per child than does preparing food for just two children and cleaning up after them. 

Moreover, in child-raising as in much else, practice makes perfect. The more children one raises, the better one becomes at child-raising, both by doing it and by learning from others who do it. Furthermore, people who enjoy raising children and would like to do so full-time, as a specialized career, will tend to be better at it and require less compensation to do it than other people would.

You could say orphanages are specialized, but they have been stigmatized for centuries as not the best.

Although many countries have pursued diverse pro-natalist policies during the past half-century, none have succeeded in raising birth rates much.  Monetary inducements for families to have children must, in order to meet normal efficiency criteria in spending public funds, promote child-raising in a way that captures the benefits of labor specialization, including economies of scale, that now facilitate nearly all work EXCEPT child-raising.  Those benefits are not captured by families that raise only one or two children and in which both parents work outside the home most of their adult lives. 

To be cost-effective, pro-natalist policy must stop trying to induce all households to raise two children rather than only one child. It must produce the desired number of additional children by funding a smaller number of specialized child-raising households that raise many children. 

If all countries and cultures were reducing their populations at the same rate, if that rate appeared slow enough not to entail grave adverse economic consequences, and if no country sought to increase its population relative to other countries, then no country would need a pro-natalist policy until the global population had declined to its optimal level, whatever that might be.

Here are some notes on population decline:

The population-replacing level is 2.1 live births per woman per lifetime. Meanwhile, Europe’s (1.5), the Americas’ (1.8) and Asia’s (1.9) TFR’s, (total fertility rate), are now below replacement, while Oceania’s (2.1) is at replacement. The regions of our world with the highest TFR’s are its poorest and least educated regions: central Africa (5.6), western Africa (4.9) and eastern Africa (4.2). Those with the lowest TFR’s are well-educated and far richer: eastern Asia (1.2), southern Europe (1.3) and eastern Europe (1.4). 

A TFR of 1.8 reduces the birth cohort by 15% per generation and by about 40% in a century.  a TFR of 1.05 – roughly what China’s TFR is now widely thought to be – reduces the birth cohort by half every generation and by about 90% in a century, and, with a lag of no more than one lifetime.  South Korea’s 2023 TFR of 0.7, if sustained, would reduce the birth cohort by two-thirds every generation and by about 97% in a century.  In South Korea, the old-age dependency ratio – the ratio of population over 65 years old to population aged 20–65 years – is expected to rise from about 24% now to about 90% in 2060. Prospects for China are only slightly less grim.

Furthermore, fertility in most of East Asia is so far below replacement that, if sustained, its economic consequences, including population aging, may be disastrous.  We are also decreasingly religious, – at least in the West – and fertility now correlates strongly with religiosity.  It correlates most strongly with the most demanding religiosities, orthodox Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Amish and Mennonites.  With a sustained salary, other people could also choose to raise a large family.

Of the many governments of countries with below-replacement fertility, none have ever publicly set a national fertility rate target and committed itself to raise the number of live births to achieve that target rate within a specific time and by whatever economic incentives may prove least costly and are consistent with providing the additional children with upbringings not inferior on average to those of other children.  Even to advocate doing that – to state publicly the glaringly obvious truth that a 21^st-century state needs an effective population policy – has been beyond the capacity of politicians in countries with formally democratic governments.

To promote and fund a limited number of large families in which children are raised by their biological parents would encounter no such resistance rooted in traditional culture; the large biological family is a time-tested institutional arrangement for raising children.  The largest number of children that a woman can bear, consistent with the childbirth-risk-minimizing constraints of bearing a child every 27 to 33 months, starting no earlier than age 18 and continuing no later than age 45, is about 12 children.  If a woman gives birth once every 30 months from age 20 to age 44 – i.e., every 2.5. years for 25 years – then she will bear ten children. That seems the best target for a pro-natalist policy that seeks to recapture the benefits of specialization in child-raising by reviving the large biological family.

In the middle of that couple’s child-raising career, when they are raising five, six or seven children at once, the assistance of a maid/nanny or two might also be required. One or both members of a professional child-raising couple aged 62 or older, no longer raising children of their own, might provide such assistance.

This program would entail advertising the existence of this career path to secondary school students, and helping secondary school students interested in such a child-raising career to meet and date with other such students of the opposite gender and to marry soon after graduating from secondary school and receiving a marriage-contingent offer of employment as specialized child-raisers from age 20 to age 65, with an old-age pension thereafter. With the first few children, these parents could still continue their education.

Additional economies of scale external to particular specialized child-raising families might be achieved by cooperation among such families in bulk purchasing diverse goods and services, and perhaps even by a judicious modicum of co-location. A society in which specialized and generalized child-raising households are segregated from one another, or from society at large, is to be avoided. 

The children of one-child families and the children of ten-child families should not first encounter one another as adults; they should attend school together, play together, befriend one another, and visit one another’s homes.

To test such novel institutions would take at least two decades, until the quality of the young adults produced is observable.  East Asia cannot afford to wait that long before starting to reverse its fertility decline. 

Would it take 10% of the population to accomplish this, if the 90% did not bare any children?  Well, it would be less, because many couples have one child.

Nevertheless, for a country with TFR of 1.05 – which is roughly what China’s TFR is now thought to be – to double its TFR to the population-replacing TFR of 2.1 by specialized child-raising; the proportion of the 20-to-64-year-old workforce that would have to work as full-time child-raisers might be roughly 5%, i.e., half the roughly 10% needed to supply a stable population if only by such means. 

For such a country to raise its TFR by two-thirds, to 1.75, by means of specialized child-raising, might require something like 3.5% of its 20-to-64-year-old workforce to work as full-time child-raisers.  These crude guesstimates provide a rough sense of the magnitude of the labor resources needed.  For such a pro-natalist program to attain a target TFR would take 25 years, assuming no unforeseen changes in relevant variables, and if only 1/25 of the eventually-desired number of specialized child-raising couples were hired every year. 

East Asia, which for millennia has been the source of diverse innovations that the West has found useful, seems far more likely than the West to innovate effective pro-natalist policy.  To reverse fertility-decline enough to avoid future economic disaster and demographic oblivion, even by the cost-minimizing means suggested by this essay, it would entail substantial sacrifice in the present. Therefore it may prove impossible for countries with formally democratic governments.

Most East Asian countries, being more ethnically and culturally homogeneous than most Western countries are currently, they’re less paralyzed by cultural, ideological and ethnic divisions that make it virtually impossible for many Western countries to innovate a state-funded program to reverse fertility decline by reviving specialized child-raising.

To administer, legislate or even advocate such a program in the United States would be a nightmare.  Some Americans would demand that any such program perpetuate existing cultural and ethnic divisions; others would demand that it ignore such divisions; still others would demand that it seek to alter such divisions in a particular way, e.g., toward less traditional Western culture and fewer white people.  Compromise would be impossible; the culture wars among groups that loathe one another preclude it.

The US central government may be too paralyzed by cultural and ethnic divisions even to copy another country’s successful pro-natalist policy.  However, the US also has 50 state governments, any of which could copy such a policy. The governments of states that are culturally less diverse than the US as a whole, might copy a successful East Asian pro-natalist policy, if the US central government does not prevent them from doing so.  Although the US is now too crippled by diversity to lead the non-African world in the survival-critical matter of reversing fertility decline, parts of the US may not yet be too diverse to follow leadership offered by East Asian countries more homogeneous than the US.

Let’s have a word about immigration:

The euro zone's trade balance went from a positive value of 116 billion in 2021 to a negative value of 400 billion in 2022.  Germany is not nationalist, it has no power project, which is proven by its very low fertility rate of 1.5 children per woman at most, over the long period.  (Russia is the same, and they are gaining from Ukraine.) So, they are compensating for demographic sluggishness with a mass of immigrants.  Acceptance of immigrants by Angela Merkel during the refugee crisis of 2015 was a continuation of the call for labor.

Low fertility should condemn the German population to decline, like that of Japan. But, on the contrary, it increased from 80.327 million inhabitants in 2011 to 84.358 million in 2022.  There were 73.985 million inhabitants of German nationality in 2011, falling to 72.034 million in 2022, a decline which includes naturalized citizens. There were 6.342 million foreigners in 2011, but 12.324 million in 2022, almost a doubling to 14%.

In 2022, Turks, Ukrainians, Romanians, Poles, Croats and Bulgarians occupied a prominent place. The fall of the Iron Curtain effectively placed at the disposal of the German industrial economy the active populations of the former popular Soviet democracies, employed most often on site, in their own country, but sometimes also absorbed directly by the active population of the Germany.  The ex-Soviet population generally has a higher education level than the European common worker.

What do we know of this mix of immigrants in Germany?  I think some problems are already apparent.

[This came from two articles on Asia Times: The author goes by the name Ichabod.]

https://asiatimes.com/2024/09/the-economic-way-to-reverse-demographic-decline/

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