Post: #26

[quote='Athlone McGinnis' pid='362277' dateline='1359945320']
Sub-replacement fertility causes problems in the longterm. I'll be explaining this to Lemmo in a bit.[quote]

Pure hypothesis. Severely low replacement levels are likely to cause problems in the future. But no country has experienced birth rates at these levels before so I think you state your case too definitively. I was arguing that while there are reasons to be concerned about low birth rates, the harms experienced as a result of mass immigration and (to a lesser extent) overpopulation are known, severe and likely would be worse than the economic pain required to adjust to a declining population. Japan has 120 million people in an area the size of California, is wealthy and has a stable, healthy society. They should by all means seek to increase their birth rate. But I'm not convinced that the hypothetical problems you outline, which you admit may not be experienced for decades, are so severe as to require (or would in any case be ameliorated by) cramming millions of the poorest and least educated Asians into Japan. By this logic, Europe should be clamoring for America to empty its slums and trailer parks into it.


[quote] I don't agree, Japan is in a much more precarious position than the majority of Western nations, the USA included. Those few western nations that manage to keep their fertility at or above replacement level are going to be in a much stronger position later this century than those who fail to do so. [quote]

A bald assertion based on a prediction of the distant future. You are assuming that these immigrants, who have been shown to currently be a net economic cost, to discourage innovation, to promote low productivity, to increase economic inequality and to be less educated than the natives are somehow going to be willing and able to pay for these entitlements. More realistically, these countries will simply become poorer and entitlement reforms will still be required. And this completely ignores non-economic costs of large scale immigration. I think my prediction that countries like Japan can better cope through a combination of pro-child policies, money printing and entitlement reforms is at least as realistic.

[quote] Hate them or love them, they're not wrong to point out the importance of growth and immigration to the sustainability to our societies.

There is a reason why so many low-fertility western nations are courting immigrants and allowing hundreds of thousands of them through the door annually.

They aren't doing it because they love diversity and want to build glorious rainbow nations. They're doing it because they understand the fact that sub-replacement fertility will bite them very badly, and they want to mitigate its consequences as best they can.[quote]

This doesn't pass the laugh test. Yes, I'm sure all these wise politicians are favoring immigration because they are planning for economic conditions decades in the future. It couldn't be a desire for cheap labor and easy votes...

And I'm not sure what definition of sustainability you are using that would argue in favor of mass immigration. Certainly not one including environmental, cultural or political sustainability.

Bottom line - every country will be poorer as it ages in the absence of some new productivity revolution so entitlement reform will be required. This is unavoidable as larger percentages of populations cease to produce. Countries that try to address this through mass immigration are just replacing unproductive seniors with low productivity unskilled workers and their unproductive dependents and adding ethnic/generational/economic conflict and most likely political paralysis to their other problems.

Post: #27

(02-03-2013 11:26 PM)Lemmo Wrote:  Or you could reform entitlements and then your chain of causation falls apart. Entitlements based on a pyramid scheme where there is an ever increasing population are undesirable and unsustainable (I would argue) and are in any case unrealistic (as the birth rates in your link point out). Govt attempts to increase the birth rate have not had significant success in any country. Immigrants won't be available in the long run (assuming the birth rates from the WSJ) and the type of large scale immigration required to have a significant effect on national birth rates is not politically feasible in most countries and has so far without exception been shown to primarily attract immigrants who are a net burden to the economy. So you are left with the option of entitlement reform.

Entitlement reform will happen either with a soft inconvenience or through force (a la Greece).

If everyone really is living longer I don't see huge impediments on raising the retirement age and lifting the income cap.

Post: #28

(02-03-2013 06:49 PM)Lemmo Wrote:  Japan is an extreme case and even it hasn't yet felt significant economic effects as a result of population aging and decline.

I'm going to assume you left a "yet" out of this sentence.

Kyle Bass makes a pretty good case that Japan is a ticking time bomb. Hell, three years ago Greece wasn't feeling the negative effects of reckless spending and six years ago everyone knew that sky-high housing prices and corporate profits were "the new normal."

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100391704/Japanrs..._Kyle_Bass

Post: #29

I agree with Scorpion that women given lots of options might opt out of motherhood.

But I don't think that's all of what's going on here.

The media openly mocks fertile women (Sarah Palin) or women who choose to stay home and raise their kids. This, in turn, creates a peer-pressure situation where women feel compelled to have a career even though they might prefer motherhood. The Baby Boomer parents of these woman also pressured them into school instead of creating families -- I've seen this first hand.

There is a phrase that was going around some of the religious manosphere blogs: "maternity as pathology." We need view motherhood as a condition to be treated.

So "options" are not exclusively the problem. The sociological direction society has taken is. Each society "shames" and ostracizes one group for something or other. In the 1950s, you'd get shamed if you were gay. Today it's stay at home moms. Wonder who it will be tomorrow?

Post: #30

About resource, the resource problem fixes itself fairly quickly - People simply die (to put it bluntly). Ramifications, negative feedbacks are felt more-so in developed nations then in non-developed nations though. Your Banana man in Belize will be fine but the Lawyers Assistant in London maybe not so much.

Don't believe the narrative that a farmer in rural Latin America gets the worst blunt of it, he barley has nothing and is battle and game tested, and his simple lifestyle is non dependent on a over abundance of needed resources like us in the West. Your nouveau riche yuppie in Atlanta or Arizona World would end if simple things like power were gone for more then a few days.

Post: #31

(02-04-2013 12:41 AM)kosko Wrote:  About resource, the resource problem fixes itself fairly quickly - People simply die (to put it bluntly). Ramifications, negative feedbacks are felt more-so in developed nations then in non-developed nations though. Your Banana man in Belize will be fine but the Lawyers Assistant in London maybe not so much.

Don't believe the narrative that a farmer in rural Latin America gets the worst blunt of it, he barley has nothing and is battle and game tested, and his simple lifestyle is non dependent on a over abundance of needed resources like us in the West. Your nouveau riche yuppie in Atlanta or Arizona World would end if simple things like power were gone for more then a few days.

Yes and no; banana man in Belize may not feel the impact of day-to-day resource struggles (rising gas prices and other commodities) but he isn't equipped to deal with the long term effects of global warming or other huge resource constraints like a drought wiping out his crop for that year.

If anything I believe the non-developed countries will be crushed first; they're the ones no one will care about when shit really hits the fan in developed countries. Half of these countries depend massively on aid from the West for basic operations.

Post: #32

(02-03-2013 05:41 PM)Soma Wrote:  Three options for the West, all currently unpalatable:
1) Incentivize people to have more children.

I disagree that option 1 is unpalatable.

Paul R. Ehrlich's very flawed and now disproven The Population Bomb was published by the Sierra Club in 1971 as political ammo to purposely push an anti-birth agenda in western society. Its publication, among other public policy changes, was used to reduce the value of the income tax write-off per dependent, especially when adjusted for inflation. In 2012, each dependent is worth a $3,800 deduction.

Compare this to 1950, where pretty much the ONLY deduction was for dependents, with each dependent worth $600 --equivalent to $5,716.03 in 2012. While shaving this down by a third may not seem a big deal to the rich, being able to write off $28,580 for a family with 3 children instead of today's current $19,000 would make a solid, tangible difference in the finances of working class families with household incomes of $20,000-$40,000 --ie young families starting out.

If your goal is to incentivize people to marry younger and for working families to have more children earlier in life, increase the exemption per dependent to $6,000 or higher and make it affordable to do so. The beauty of this is it only incentivizes working families with income. (Those not working and without income have little use for income tax write-offs).

Post: #33

(02-04-2013 12:00 AM)Lemmo Wrote:  Pure hypothesis. Severely low replacement levels are likely to cause problems in the future. But no country has experienced birth rates at these levels before so I think you state your case too definitively.

I suppose things could work out. Europe has faced population collapses in the past and recovered quite nicely, so there's no guarantee that the declines we see now will lead to permanent destruction/destitution.

I'm just saying it doesn't look so good.

Quote:I was arguing that while there are reasons to be concerned about low birth rates, the harms experienced as a result of mass immigration and (to a lesser extent) overpopulation are known, severe and likely would be worse than the economic pain required to adjust to a declining population.

I don't think you can qualify this last statement any more than I could the earlier statement you claimed was too definitive.
The economic pain of population decline could very well surpass that of mass immigration.

Quote:Japan has 120 million people in an area the size of California, is wealthy and has a stable, healthy society. They should by all means seek to increase their birth rate. But I'm not convinced that the hypothetical problems you outline, which you admit may not be experienced for decades, are so severe as to require (or would in any case be ameliorated by) cramming millions of the poorest and least educated Asians into Japan.

Japan will be experiencing these problems very soon, if it isn't already. Demographic Dividends can be lived on for 50 years or so, and Japan has already used up that time. It is all downhill from here unless something is done, and they're well aware.

Immigration or no immigration, they'll need to do something.

Quote:By this logic, Europe should be clamoring for America to empty its slums and trailer parks into it.

Europe is looking to Africa, South Asia and the Middle East instead.

Quote:A bald assertion based on a prediction of the distant future.

Distant? Japan's a ticking time bomb. That isn't 50 years from now, we're going to see consequences soon and some would argue that we already are witnessing them.

Quote:You are assuming that these immigrants, who have been shown to currently be a net economic cost, to discourage innovation, to promote low productivity, to increase economic inequality and to be less educated than the natives are somehow going to be willing and able to pay for these entitlements. More realistically, these countries will simply become poorer and entitlement reforms will still be required. And this completely ignores non-economic costs of large scale immigration. I think my prediction that countries like Japan can better cope through a combination of pro-child policies, money printing and entitlement reforms is at least as realistic.

I think you've got a bit too much focus on the immigrant aspect. Immigration is just one solution, albeit the most popular one. My point is that the dependency ratio needs to be managed-how nations choose to do that is up to them, but failure will carry serious consequences.

Quote:This doesn't pass the laugh test. Yes, I'm sure all these wise politicians are favoring immigration because they are planning for economic conditions decades in the future. It couldn't be a desire for cheap labor and easy votes...

No, that's precisely it. You assumed that concern for future economic conditions and the desire for the maintenance of low labour costs are mutually exclusive, and that's not necessarily the case.

The politicians do want to prevent skyrocketing labour costs because that is crucial to the maintenance of the societies they live in as they are. And yes, obviously they want votes.

And they're not necessarily planning for conditions decades into the future. The problems they're trying to fend off are already having an impact in many places, and will not take 50 years to show up. Most of these nations have already used up their demographic dividends.

Quote:And I'm not sure what definition of sustainability you are using that would argue in favor of mass immigration. Certainly not one including environmental, cultural or political sustainability.

When I mentioned sustainable growth, I was speaking with regards to fertility rates and where they should be to encourage steady but manageable population growth. The focus on immigration is your conjecture, not my argument-I wasn't considering immigration rates when I made that statement about sustainable growth, only local fertility rates.

The mass immigration thing really seems to be a sore spot for you, though.

Post: #34

(02-03-2013 09:41 PM)Roosh Wrote:  Decreasing fertility = aging population.

Aging population = unsustainable entitlements to take care of elderly

Unsustainable entitlements = high taxes on youth, capital flight, then eventual economic collapse of many nations

Once your have a flight of youth, you learn your lesson.

Entitlement for the elderly are a social construct, it is not a natural law like gravity.

Raise the retirement age, and the right hand side of the dependency ratio alters... if you think it doesn't matter, recalibrate it leftward and make the retirement age 35 and see what happens.

Bismarckian Germany first introduced the retirement age at 60, when men lived to 59 and women to 62.

It was to aid the few men who hadn't dropped off, and see women not slip into destitution for their last few years.

Now it is viewed as 15+ years of long service leave for 'years of tax I've paid to gum'mint!'

Income support in retirement needs to be recalibrated in line with life expectancy.

Cenusus figures are obtained frequently enough, something like the eldest 4% can easy be estimated with an acceptable margin of error between census frequencies.

Post: #35

(02-04-2013 02:04 AM)T and A Man Wrote:  

(02-03-2013 09:41 PM)Roosh Wrote:  Decreasing fertility = aging population.

Aging population = unsustainable entitlements to take care of elderly

Unsustainable entitlements = high taxes on youth, capital flight, then eventual economic collapse of many nations

Once your have a flight of youth, you learn your lesson.

Entitlement for the elderly are a social construct, it is not a natural law like gravity.

Raise the retirement age, and the right hand side of the dependency ratio alters... if you think it doesn't matter, recalibrate it leftward and make the retirement age 35 and see what happens.

Bismarckian Germany first introduced the retirement age at 60, when men lived to 59 and women to 62.

It was to aid the few men who hadn't dropped off, and see women not slip into destitution for their last few years.

Now it is viewed as 15+ years of long service leave for 'years of tax I've paid to gum'mint!'

Income support in retirement needs to be recalibrated in line with life expectancy.

Cenusus figures are obtained frequently enough, something like the eldest 4% can easy be estimated with an acceptable margin of error between census frequencies.

I already made this argument a few replies back. Raise the retirement age to about 10 years before average death (or to +/- a few years before the vast majority of retirees can no longer provide reliable labor) and a part of the problem corrects itself.

That was what retirement was always about. Not 15+ years of living like you are a teenager again.

Post: #36

(02-03-2013 07:16 PM)tmason Wrote:  

(02-03-2013 07:11 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  Fewer people to compete with for oil, food, water, arable land, clean air and jobs.

Thank you. Too many people.

More people, yes. But also more minds and more labor. Every extra person brings one mouth, but two hands. Granted, there are large multipliers for effectiveness of that labor. Whole books have been written about why the west has made economic advances that the larger population empires of India and China couldn't.

But the famous Simon-Ehrlich wager got right to the heart of it. At a global level, will a larger population increase or decrease prices on known limited resources?

Ehrlich lost, Simon won. The net added benefits of population increases, on average, outweigh the costs.

Also granted, suddenly adding a million retarded invalid people, or a million feminist study majors, or a million IRTs, would probably be a net loss. But in western society, at least, there are societal values and structures that allow increases in population to be a net positive, providing on the average net more labor than what the population increase itself consumes.

Post: #37

(02-04-2013 02:19 AM)tmason Wrote:  

(02-04-2013 02:04 AM)T and A Man Wrote:  

(02-03-2013 09:41 PM)Roosh Wrote:  Decreasing fertility = aging population.

Aging population = unsustainable entitlements to take care of elderly

Unsustainable entitlements = high taxes on youth, capital flight, then eventual economic collapse of many nations

Once your have a flight of youth, you learn your lesson.

Entitlement for the elderly are a social construct, it is not a natural law like gravity.

Raise the retirement age, and the right hand side of the dependency ratio alters... if you think it doesn't matter, recalibrate it leftward and make the retirement age 35 and see what happens.

Bismarckian Germany first introduced the retirement age at 60, when men lived to 59 and women to 62.

It was to aid the few men who hadn't dropped off, and see women not slip into destitution for their last few years.

Now it is viewed as 15+ years of long service leave for 'years of tax I've paid to gum'mint!'

Income support in retirement needs to be recalibrated in line with life expectancy.

Cenusus figures are obtained frequently enough, something like the eldest 4% can easy be estimated with an acceptable margin of error between census frequencies.

I already made this argument a few replies back. Raise the retirement age to about 10 years before death (or to +/- a few years before the vast majority of retirees can no longer provide reliable labor) and a part of the problem corrects itself.

That was what retirement was always about. Not 15+ years of living like you are a teenager again.

That'll help in the short term in a population decline scenario. Long term, however, you'll still need to get to replacement level fertility to achieve a more reasonable dependency ratio. That, or find more working age folks somewhere else and import them. Continued population decline will only see increasing dependency ratios, even with a raised retirement age.

Barring that, you'll only be delaying the economic consequences for a little longer.

Post: #38

(02-04-2013 02:25 AM)Blackhawk Wrote:  

(02-03-2013 07:16 PM)tmason Wrote:  

(02-03-2013 07:11 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  Fewer people to compete with for oil, food, water, arable land, clean air and jobs.

Thank you. Too many people.

More people, yes. But also more minds and more labor. Every extra person brings one mouth, but two hands. Granted, there are large multipliers for effectiveness of that labor. Whole books have been written about why the west has made economic advances that the larger population empires of India and China couldn't.

But the famous Simon-Ehrlich wager got right to the heart of it. At a global level, will a larger population increase or decrease prices on known limited resources?

Ehrlich lost, Simon won. The net added benefits of population increases, on average, outweigh the costs.

Also granted, suddenly adding a million retarded invalid people, or a million feminist study majors, or a million IRTs, would probably be a net loss. But in western society, at least, there are societal values and structures that allow increases in population to be a net positive, providing on the average net more labor than what the population increase itself consumes.

Bingo.

Too many folks are entirely too willing to totally underestimate the value of human capital. People are a resource too, and not one without value.

Post: #39

It is the flawed economic model that requires inflation that also requires an ever growing population.

Neither are sustainable.

The former because of the latter.

Pretty simple actually.

Post: #40

How the hell is entitlement reform going to occur? If old people are becoming the majority why would they vote to reduce their benefits?

Post: #41

Samseau is right. The baby boomers are going to use their voting power to live off of the younger generation who will more than likely pay in more and receive less when it is their turn. This is already playing out in Germany where retirement age and contributions have been raised for everyone 60 and under while boomers receive more generous benefits.

Post: #42

Not to sound too libertarian, but the government needs to get out of the retirement game all together. Same with financing medicine. Forget all this changing the social security age from this to that. Hell the SSA wasn't founded till the 30s, life went on before then. Essentially, people just need to be responsible for themselves and save for their own retirement.