• edinbruh@feddit.it
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    26 minutes ago

    I highly doubt that the birthrate in Italy is 1.14

    The government and the media doesn’t stop yapping about how it’s declining and we are going extinct.

    This happens of course for economical reasons, and the government comes up with the most half assed “solutions” to ever cross human mind. Like “reduce VAT taxes on diapers and powder milk” like that is gonna make any difference.

  • treesquid@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    .8 birth rate is going to be a huge problem for South Korea in a few years. The rest are just “oh no, capitalism’s infinite growth will be finite after all”

    • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 minutes ago

      Lower birthrates are less an issue that people think.

      For any living being self replication can explode incredibly fast, and it’s usually the case when numbers dwindle, due more resources available per person.

      Big birth numbers are more worrying and limited resources lead to fast “too little resources for everyone” situation.

      I remember reading that part of what took Europe our of the dark ages after the black plague was that survivors thrived in an post plague environment. Also remember reading that dutch population growth actually taller because after so many people died survivors got more meat and food in general available to them, so their children grew a lot.

      So in general I’m always more worry about high birthrates than low birthrates.

      • the_strange@feddit.org
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        57 minutes ago

        The growth (or in this case decline) is exponential. 1.08 is bad, 0.80 is terrifying. 1.08 is roughly half of the fertility needed for a stable population (about 2.1 children per woman). This means that per generation your population shrinks by half its size. 0.8 is another 25% lower. At an exponential rate these differences add up fast. The first one gives you (roughly) one child per 8 great grandparents. The other one needs 18. So over 3 generations the population shrinks by another factor of more than a half.

        • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net
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          30 minutes ago

          But the birthrates are still falling everywhere. Countries that are at 1.08 today will be at 0.8 soon. I think they are just hitting the problem sooner, not that they are facing a different issue.

      • stenAanden@feddit.dk
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        2 hours ago

        Westerners just REALLY want wealthy, peaceful Asian countries to be uniquely awful.

  • Bricked@feddit.org
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    8 hours ago

    Most of the former nations can at least offset this with immigration, while the latter ones don’t

    • stenAanden@feddit.dk
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      2 hours ago

      Korea actually has a lot of migration of Koreans from China and Western Asia. It is actually a pretty unique situation. The Chinese Koreans already speak Korean and their culture align perfectly with Korea.

      It’s in all ways a better situation than western countries. But no, let’s pretend that Asia is collapsing. Better than fixing issues in the west.

        • idiomaddict@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          In humanity. Some people exclude others because of the order in which they apply spreads to scones, some because they disagree about whether the bread they’re eating is literally or metaphorically a man’s body, and some because they like a different sports team.

  • daannii@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    We need less humans.

    Otherwise we will outgrow this planet and kill it and ourselves.

  • PugJesus@piefed.social
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    8 hours ago

    I mean, South Korea and Japan’s birth rate is a serious problem.

    The issue is less that they’re going ‘extinct’, and more that the population pyramid is gonna look real fucky going forward, and that comes with… economic issues. And potentially cultural issues.

    • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net
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      2 hours ago

      Those look very similar to me. I would say Japan is now where Poland will be in 10 years. Why it’s a problem for Japan but not Poland?

      • PugJesus@piefed.social
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        1 hour ago

        Those look very similar to me. I would say Japan is now where Poland will be in 10 years. Why it’s a problem for Japan but not Poland?

        That’s the thing about population pyramids - they don’t just move up evenly. They’re adjusted by the ongoing mortality of each age group and the size of the next age group down. Poland and Japan are on the same trajectory, but Japan is, effectively, much further along. More ~30-40 years than ~10. The emphasis is less on the largest ‘boom’ generation, and much more on the general trend of the ‘youngest’ generations shrinking, growing, or being stable. In Poland, it’s uneven - closer to shrinking than stable, but more stable than Japan, which is only shrinking.

        Even relatively small differences can have an outsized effect in making the older generations an ever-larger proportion of the population despite their lifetime mortality going up with each age bracket. Compare the percentages here. “Boom” generation aside, Japan’s retiree cohort is roughly 150% the youth cohort. That’s not a good sign. For Poland to end up with those numbers in a decade, it would have to have effectively no mortality in the elder cohorts - extremely unlikely.

        That being said, it is a problem for Poland going forward - as well as many other developed countries.

        • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net
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          35 minutes ago

          That being said, it is a problem for Poland going forward - as well as many other developed countries.

          Exactly, Japan is hitting it sooner but most countries will have the same issue eventually. The main difference I think is that Japan is still refusing to address this issue by allowing more immigration while some European countries are trying to do it already. So I think this is going to be a scary but interesting experiment. Poland will go the way of Japan, Spain will try to support the population growth with immigrants. It will be interesting to see where each will be in 30 years. We can use Japan as a canary in the meantime.

      • PugJesus@piefed.social
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        1 hour ago

        It is, but not as bad. The EU’s birth rate is higher than Japan’s, and the EU is much more immigrant-friendly - and if that makes you suck in air through your teeth, let me clarify - that’s a relative estimation. SK and Japan are… infamously hostile towards immigration.