The age distribution is most of the problem. It doesn't help to have a lot of people who need somebody else to be working at the hospital for them. If you skip straight past looking at the period if imbalance the situation looks a lot better.

The same number of people, but on the way up and growing, compared to on the way down and shrinking, is very different.

Because current economic policies and capitalism rely on a continuously expanding economy. If the population grows, the economy will continue to expand, if the population doesn't grow then much of the capital class starts to lose money on investments that never materialize.

It is not really a problem for the regular working class citizen, and historically population drops have improved wages and labor rights. See things like the black plague or wars with large casualties, which resulted in significant population drops which gives more power and leverage to the labor class.

stupid question: if by some magic 80% of the population of the planet disappeared tomorrow, what ll happen to the economy and stock market

If nothing is done they will go extinct.

Because the economy is un ponzi scheme and without young people to pay for old people and old debts, it fails.

Why do you think that this is true? Look at the countries by hours worked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a... and there is basically no correlation between birth rates and hours worked. Countries with higher hours worked actually have higher birth rates!

[South Korea has a high birth rate for religious groups than non-religious](https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol44/23/44-23....) no religion, 1.13; Buddhist, 1.33; Catholic, 1.16; Protestant, 1.28; and “other religion,” 1.20. This is the same country with the same problems for all groups.

So far, no amount of pro-natal policies will get you replacement TFR, see wealthy MENA countries where people have make work jobs, extravagant support (nannies etc), and TFR still dropping below replacement 2.1. The reality >2.1 TFR is product of uneducated women without opportunities. As long as women are educated, have agency, body autonomy, in aggregate family formation stays below replacement, even when not resource constrained i.e. women in workforce with opportunity to assume fulltime homemaker rolls (rich family, ample social support) still stops short at replacement TFR. Unless policies regress, the only thing left untried is mixture of extremely pro-natal policies and punitive anti-natal policies, i.e. taxes, opportunities, travel bans to control brain drain, wealth transfers that heavily penalize people with <2 kids.

Or accept (mass) immigration, which LBH only black and brown countries have excess bodies. Countries will have to decide whether they hate slow decline more than they hate getting darker or hate their women's rights. Or maybe on long timeline, some scifi shenanigans like test tube babies, shifting sex ratio, i.e. 2:1 female to male ratio brings replacement TFR to 1.5 and all the family structure changes that entails (more single moms, institutional polygamy, functional state orphanages etc), i.e. state will have to be much more active in demographic management.

Ultimately, it seems cannot carrot to replacement TFR, maybe able to stick, but no politician in any system really wants to touch that stick.

That’s not it at all. The uncomfortable reality is if women work professional jobs you will have a low birth rate. That’s entirely what the data points at. Having kids is almost entirely cultural.

Had this assertion been true India wouldn't have been the most populous country on earth.

> Make life affordable and give time outside work

> Keep insisting on Draconian hours for unlivable pay

Average hours worked in Japan are comparable to the UK and significantly lower than the US, Canada, Czechia, and Israel [0], yet they all have significantly higher birth rates than Japan.

The issue in Japan and Asia in general is cultural. Women are still expected to both hold a career and do all household chores and have 2 kids. In a lot of cases, jobs will de facto fire women if they have kids because of the cultural expectation that they will leave to have kids and become a housewife.

Unsurprisingly, plenty of Japanese women have decided they don't want that life and have decided against marriage. On the other side of the coin, plenty of Japanese women hold off on marriage until they find a partner who can afford to be a primary earner. Unsurprisingly, this means higher educated households in Japan tend to have a higher birth rate than less educated ones [1] as they tend to be more economically stable.

The only developed country which has an above replacement TFR is Israel (even non-religious secular Israelis have a replacement TFR), and it's culturally one of the most pro-children societies I've ever been and much more gender egalitarian than other countries.

All conversations about TFR and birth rates on HN are from a male point of view and never actually as why women don't want kids or maybe don't want to date a number of HNers/Redditors. It's very incel-like in nature.

[0] - https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html

[1] - https://weekly-economist.mainichi.jp/articles/20250916/se1/0...

Except there is the awkward fact that it is the third world which has higher population growth rates and the nordics have are leaders in low birth rates.

Americans do that too.

I think europe seems to be pretty balanced. Friends take 5 week vacation in the summer.

It's a crisis in the sense that most Westerners don't know how Japan began building defensive mechanisms to alleviate some of the worst aspects of an aging society (eg. Building SWFs, creating strict guestworker programs, automating jobs where possible, disinvesting in lower population regions) years ago.

A lot of the policy conversation and worries about an aging Japan began all the way back in the 1960s and 1970s, and helped inform the Flying Geese paradigm Japan has leveraged.

Personally, I've noticed American newspapers using Japan the same way they would use the Nordics a decade ago - as an idealized image that was leveraged for domestic ideological battles.