World population boom over?

Politics and religion
1

http://www.policyreview.org/feb04/eberstadt.html

Interesting. The Indian and Chinese male/female ratio imbalances are way high, Japan is going to get old like no one’s business, and most interestingly, the US is projected to grow like no other country in the world - lots.

2

Damn, that’s a long article. Could you sum it up in a bit more detail? Are you saying Asian countries aren’t growing as fast as we are? China seems like an odd example, since they have population control measures. I wish we did…

3

Why? Doesn’t our (USA) growth come from immigration?
In the case of the USA, the immigration growth may not be a bad thing, someone has to pay for the boomers social security.

4

But, who would pay for theirs? Aren’t Ponzi schemes fundamentally flawed in terms of fairness to its members? Is our social security system a Ponzi scheme? If so, why hasn’t the social security system been re-architected to a model that can sustain payouts to its members?

5

Summary:

  1. All of Asia is going through the demographic transition at a rapid pace. Asian population boom? Old news, not going to happen. China shifting the world balance of power strictly through population? Probably not going to happen.
  2. Russia is totally fucked beyond belief. There’s some serious possibilies for horrible things to happen there; they’ll have half the population of Pakistan in 20 years. Their male life expectancy has dropped in five years.
  3. Japan is going to get so old so fast it’s unbelievable. You think the US has a short-run Social Security demographic problem - Japan will have as many over-80s in a few years as under-18s.
  4. US population growth over the next two decades will quite possibly be the highest in the world, thanks a) our uniquely high birthrate, for all groups and b) our uniquely high rates of immigration.
  5. China and India have throughly ludicrous gender imbalances, with up to 25% more men than women in some areas. This isn’t going to be pretty.

Amazing conventional-wisdom destroying stuff on 1) & 3).

6

Ponzi schemes crash when they run out of new members to bring into the fold. Unless people stop having kids, I don’t think this can happen to a retirement program.

7

This isn’t exactly news.

India and China are going to have massive amounts of social unrest in about 15-20 years. Thanks to ultrasound technology, couples know the gender of their child while it’s still in the womb. If it’s a girl, she gets aborted. There’s a huge imbalance growing in terms of male/female ratio, which I’ve noted before. In about 15-20 years, China and India will have millions more young men than there are young women, and when those boys want girlfriends, well…

European birthrates have almost collapsed. Immigration would normally pick up the slack, but European countries are having a huge issue with immigration right now, even worse that the US.

Japan is an old nation, and it’s not getting any younger.

The U.S. birthrate is doing very well. That and immigration means that the US is projected to have a population of at least 500 million by the second half of the century. Europe, in the meantime, is projected to shrink. Europe’s efforts to become a major player on the world stage will take a hit.

I’ve noted this all before in earlier threads.

8

I think third-world Asian birth rates leveling off is news.