- China’s population shrinkage is having a big effect on its economy.
- Marriage rates have halved over the last decade, with only 3.4 million couples marrying in the first half.
- Economists warn that an aging population could lead to sluggish growth and lower productivity.
I think China, which is very overpopulated, would really need some population shrinkage. It’s getting tiresome seeing articles whining about being “bad” for the “economy”.
The whole world probably has too many people, it’s just that the decline should be at a bearable rate (not too slow, not to fast) and occur at appropriate rates per area (some areas may be more overpopulated than others). And I ~dont give a care about the economy, we have means of aleviating the issues of decreased workforce by using robots, reducing unecessary jobs to save resources (like the whole ad industry?), but we live in such a capitalistic society that you ~have to step on others to survive and waste resources just to make money… Maybe this “economy” should be scrapped eventually.
PS. Lol, “oh no, the diamond sells are dropping, pump up more humans!” Pathetic…
It’s not the shrinkage that’s bad per se. It’s the rate it’s happening at. Any drastic change in either direction will lead to unpleasant consequences- economic or other.
Yeah, as someone who lives in Japan, I agree. Since the opportunities are basically all in the big metros and remote work is far from popular, kids chasing a better future go to trade school and/or uni in the big cities and don’t come back. I do have remote work so I moved to the country to farm and live a more relaxed life. My wife’s company graciously, though for a pretty big pay cut, let her work remotely. Her job was not able to be done remotely (physical education), but some of her duties involved media and web stuff so now she does only that. We love it.
However, budgets in my municipality are tight. The population dropped severely after the tsunami came and wiped out a lot of the areas up to 2.5-3km inland. As such, this place is somewhat unique globally, but is still a depopulating area. With the money after the disaster, a lot of new infra was built. I got paid some to move us here.
However, even with the infra and programs, the opportunities and even raw numbers of people aren’t here which strains maintaining all the roads and nature trying to encroach. We have crumbling buildings from businesses that went under. Fire, emergency services, elder care, child care and more struggle. Except for forestry, farming, a paper mill, construction, and fishery, there’s not a lot of opportunity here.
Japan, and many other places, are going to need quite the cultural shift to redistribute the population to keep things from collapsing outside of the metros and to solve the increasing problems in those metros (transport, infra, etc.).
I imaging china and other countries will have the same issues, though I understand a lot of rural china is far more rough in terms of poverty and services than here which may leave them even more cut off.