This morning I read a BBC article about South Korea’s declining population.
Korean women are said to be producing children at a rate of 0.72 per woman, the lowest rate in the world. Since it takes 2.1 births per woman to maintain a population (if you ignore immigration, which many wealthy countries receive), South Korea’s population is on track to drop to half of what it is now by the year 2100.
Considering that the world population was 2 billion when I was born in 1946, and is now 8 billion and still climbing despite South Korea, Japan, China, Germany, etc, and since this rocket of an increase in less than a century is the foundation of environmental problems, poverty, increasing extinction of other species, increasing war, and likely the chief cause of climate changes, this should be seen as hope for the future of the world. South Korea should be praised for leading the way.
Instead, the BBC say “projections are grim.” There will not be enough working-age people, not be enough to support current military numbers, and, apparently worst of all, there will soon be too many seniors like me.
The problem here is that we are looking at population decline solely through economic lenses. With social/economic gurus like Peter Zeihan (who I do follow and like) trumpeting the disaster of de-population every day it seems, we’re forgetting the benefits of reduced population – room to restore forests, better able protect endangered species, reduce carbon emissions, reduce our enormous output of polluting trash and toxic chemicals.
Zeihan constantly refers to China’s deliberate reduction in population via the one-child policy, now abandoned as China seems to have re-joined the money first nations, as a catastrophe. Yes, population reduction causes problems for our economic model founded on expansion, but you can’t convince me that China, South Korea, etc – the whole world in fact, have not benefited from their drop in population.
What is required now is a new economic paradigm, one that can operate under the new conditions that appear to be inevitable. Where are the economic researchers and innovators? Where are the political leaders capable of facing the real future? That’s the question now.
Alan Conrad 