The real population timebomb - and why we need a more family-friendly society

Depopulating trends are global, across the developed world. After decades of worrying when Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” would go off, we are seeing a rapid decline in child-rearing, so much so that, for the first time, there are more grandparents than grandchildren on the planet. The lower birthrates are leading some demographers to suggest that global populations, instead of growing into the next century, will start to decline as early as 2070.

There is a profound and growing population crisis in the developed, urban world and it isn't what most of you think it is - we are no longer, indeed haven't been for a long while, replacing ourselves. It's not just headlines like the one about there being more grandparents than grandchildren but an accelerating decline in communities outside big cities and, without immigration, the growing inability to provide the care and support those grandparents will require.

Here's what it means:

According to a 2016 Italian environmental association report, there are nearly 2,500 rural Italian villages that are perilously depopulated, some semi-abandoned and others virtual ghost towns.

From the 1850s through to 2004 the population of the village always hovered around the 80 to 100 mark, but since 2004 the population has dropped to 50 and only 20 of those are under the age of 60.

Those living in the village are losing hope that the village – and indeed all of rural Ireland – can be saved.

In Hara-izumi, there's no worry about an influx of foreigners. There are no immigrants here, nor the prospect of any. A bigger issue now is wildlife: The village's population has become so sparse that wild bears, boars and deer are roaming the streets with increasing frequency.

The Alpine hamlet of Albinen is so desperate for new residents that it has voted to offer $70,000 for a family of four to settle in the southern Swiss community.

In the first referendum of its kind, 100 of Albinen's 248 residents showed up to vote Thursday, and 71 approved a proposal to pay $25,000 to each adult and $10,000 per child to live in their picturesque village.

"Only the elderly stayed behind, the parents of those who left, and over time they grew older and died," he said as he stumbled across rubble to reach his dilapidated former office. He said Kalna's population had shrunk from 4,000 to 1,000.

Just take the figures: 85 out of the town's 820 houses are empty. The town had 3,000 inhabitants not too long ago, but now there are only 1,900. When elderly citizens have passed away, there has been no one there to replace them.

"Nobody lives there anymore either," Daum says, pointing to a mint-green single-family house. The industrial bakery moved to the east, he explains, and the area in front of the former garden furniture factory is full of dandelions. The Edeka grocery store closed its doors for good last year, and no trains have passed through the town since 1994.

I could continue - these examples from Italy, Ireland, Japan, Switzerland, Serbia and Germany could be joined by others from Poland, from Canada and from the USA. Our cities are, where they've sustained their economies, thriving but the people making that thriving possible are the ones who've left these small towns and rural villages. All this sits against a background of concern about immigration and integration for the people who - because there's far fewer young people in these rich nations - are filling the gaps left by those empty villages.

Eighty percent of US counties, notes a study by Economic Innovation Group, with roughly 150 million people, have seen their labor force decline in the past decade. The demography of the United States will become more difficult in the next quarter century, with an increase in the working population (15-64) of 18 million projected to be swamped by 28 million new senior citizens, according to the United Nations.

For Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, whose article the quote above comes from, the problem isn't how you square the need for labour with local resentment of immigration but rather how we create a society and economy that allows population replacement. Not the explosive population growth of the past 200 years but a recognition that, if we're to continue the betterment of humanity, we need to achieve a steady state. Kotkin & Cox point to housing policies as a key component but we should also ask questions about policy and attitudes towards families, to childcare and to a more dynamic work environment allowing people to move in and out of paid employment. Above all we need to recognise the value of family and that it cannot really be measured in purely economic terms.

We need to place community and family policy right there alongside climate change, the impact of technology and long term healthcare as one of the 21st century's biggest challenges. If we don't we will see more and more of these shattered, even abandoned, communities, places filled with old people trying their best to look after very old people.

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More on rural decline - Japanese style

Pop-up City report on the efforts of Japanese governments to respond to the challenge of rural depopulation (Japan has a declining population made worse my accelerating migration to the big cities - Tokyo is still getting bigger):

It’s nothing new that Japan’s rural areas are experiencing steady population decline. But the Japanese government’s new measure to fight this trend is as innovative as it is rigorous: giving away houses for ¥0.00.

Whether this will work rather depends on whether the people taking up this offer (and picking up the cost of renovation) are able to sustain their life away from the job (and culture) magnet of the city.

The article also reports on this, very Japanese and decidedly spooky, initiative:

Nagoro is a slowly shrinking village located in the valleys of Shikoku, Japan. Populated by creepy dolls, it might make you question the reality. Its inhabitants left the village in a search of employment or died. Eleven years ago, Tsukimi Ayano returned home to Nagoro. Faced with loneliness, she has populated the village with dolls, each representing a former resident. About 350 life-size dolls currently reside in the village.

More on trying to rescue rural places from depopulation - Japanese craft beer

I've written a few times about how rural places in the developed world are depopulating, leaving behind the old, ill and poor, as people move to the city. And the local governments of these depopulating places - in Ireland, Switzerland, Devon, Sardinia and Calabria - are trying new ways to get folk back living in remote towns and village. Most of this is about straightforward bribery - we'll pay you to come and live here, we'll give a free house, we'll provide a variety of financial incentives.

This one from Japan is a little different and involves art, beer and broadband:

It’s not just craft beer that has attracted young urbanites to Kamiyama. However, the Kamiyama Beer Project is symbolic for chiho sosei (creating life in the countryside), a set of government measures to attract a younger population to Japan’s rapidly shrinking rural population. Kamiyama’s population has decreased from 21,000 in 1955 to around 6,000 today. But, a slow increase is on its way as the town recently introduced high-speed broadband Internet, satellite office spaces for city-based companies, an artist in residence program, a local farming project, and a craft beer brewery.

I wish them well - technology ought to make living in cities less necessary but it still seems that the lure of the bright lights pulls the young away from fields, farms and tranquillity.

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Why stopping immigration is good politics but lousy policy

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We need immigration. This shouldn't be a matter of argument or dispute, it should be a matter of fact. Without immigration our society - the civilisation too many claim is threatened by migration - withers and dies.

Though demographers have long anticipated the transformation Japan is now facing, the country only now seems to be sobering up to the epic metamorphosis at hand.

Police and firefighters are grappling with the safety hazards of a growing number of vacant buildings. Transportation authorities are discussing which roads and bus lines are worth maintaining and cutting those they can no longer justify. Aging small-business owners and farmers are having trouble finding successors to take over their enterprises. Each year, the nation is shuttering 500 schools.

One of the world's oldest and greatest civilisations, Japan is slipping slowly away. Whole abandoned villages, towns populated almost exclusively by the old, shuttered businesses closed from lack of a workforce. Without new blood Japan will die - not a sudden violent shock but a gradual decline to the point where the assets and value of the nation are devoured by the old. Yet Japan still keeps one of the world's strictest immigration systems:

Abe, however, ruled out any significant change to Japan’s closed-door approach to immigration at the UN general assembly in New York in September.

“It is an issue of demography,” he said. “I would say that before accepting immigrants or refugees, we need to have more activities by women, elderly people and we must raise our birth rate. There are many things that we should do before accepting immigrants.”

This is the demographic equivalent of tilting at windmills or commanding the tide not to come in - yet it is actively promoted as a policy by politicians eager to exploit people's distrust of migrants, a distrust built on race, religion, culture and language:

“Look at nurses, they believe their income will be cut if we let in Filipinos and Indonesians,” said Katsuyuki Yakushiji, a sociologist at Toyo University in Tokyo. “They also say that these people can’t speak Japanese well and that could be risky. Yet, at the same time, they complain about severe overwork and say we need to add nurses.”

Familiar rhetoric to Europeans and now, tragically for an immigrant culture, in the the USA - short-term fears and self-interest are placed above the fact that there aren't enough people to do the jobs we want done. And that it's not just high skills we need but also old-fashioned labour from people willing to kill chickens, clean lavatories and help old people get in and out of bed.

It's great politics - easy pickings - to wind people up about immigration, to claim that it's damaging our culture or society. But it's lousy policy - we need those immigrants for, as Japan shows us, without them the basis of society, the social compact that forms our civilisation, slowly washes away.

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The case for immigration...

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Here's a projection on Japan's population:

Japan's agency responsible for projecting population, the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research forecasts a stunning reduction of population to only 42.9 million residents in 2110. For every three Japanese residents today, there will be one in 2110 according to the National Institute of Population. If this projection is realized, Japan's population would drop to a level not seen since the middle 1890s.

The National Institute of Population projects a population loss to 97.0 million residents by 2050, for an annual population loss rate of 0.7 percent from 2015. By 2100, the population would fall to 49.6 million, for an annual loss rate of 1.3 percent. Over the 95 years from 2015, the annual population loss rate would accelerate from 0.4 percent annually to nearly 1.5 percent.

Now I know there's some folk who rather want humanity to die out (Jeremy Corbyn, for example) but Japan really does face a crisis because for much of the time between now and 2110 that country will be sustaining an ever bigger population of very old people with a smaller and smaller population of active working age people. This is essentially unsustainable. Unless, of course, you're like the UK and the USA and think immigration is rather a good idea.

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We know what happens when a developed nation has no immigration

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We know the answer to this because of Japan - here's a report in New Geography:

Japan’s working-age population (15-64) peaked in 1995, while the United States’ has grown 21% since then. The projections for Japan are alarming: its working-age population will drop from 79 million today to less than 52 million in 2050, according to the Stanford Institute on Longevity.

Since hitting a peak of 128 million in 2010, Japan’s overall population has dropped three years in a row. These trends all but guarantee the long-term decline of the Japanese economy and its society.

Bear in mind that Japan's population is 127 million today - it will fall but the precise figures are hard to predict because of longevity. The New Geography article sets out some of the consequences:

...by 2020, adult diapers are projected to outsell the infant kind. By 2040, the country will have more people over 80 than under 15, according to U.N. projections. By 2060, the number of Japanese is expected to fall from 127 million today to about 87 million, of whom almost 40% will be 65 or older.

Put simply Japan can't afford to do this. It can barely afford the cost of health and care today. And this is the reason why Japan's economy is struggling. Moreover, it points to the reason why the UK, Germany and the USA stand an outside chance of affording health and social care costs at least for the time being. We have had relatively open borders allowing us to maintain the size of our working age populations - without this immigration we would be facing the same time bomb as Japan faces.

It's not just a fiscal time bomb it's a social one too:

Japan’s grim demography is also leading to tragic ends for some elderly. With fewer children to take care of elderly parents, there has been a rising incidence of what the Japanese call kodokushi, or “lonely deaths” among the aged, unmarried, and childless. Given the current trends, this can only become more commonplace over time.

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The next time somebody moans about the snow...

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...show them this little film.

The section of the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route linking the Tateyama station and Ogizawa only open from mid April to November, the reason for this hiatus is wintry snow, snow on this section reaches a thickness of 20 meters the most amazed of all is that in mid-April, much of the snow still lingers, so you have to make real corridors of ice to get through that stretch.

Amazing!

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Friday Fungus: Snow Mushrooms

Seemed appropriate given the current weather to talk about enoki - Japanese Snow Mushrooms (Flammulina velutipes). If you've an interest in Chinese or Japanese cookery you will have encountered these delicate mushrooms but I bet you didn't know they grow wild in the UK where we call them velvet shank. In the wild they do not look like the picture above but are yellowish brown and rather larger - the cultivated version is produced in huge quantities in the far east (over 100,000 tonnes annually).

The snow or winter mushroom description comes about because these fungi fruit very late and can survive a temperatures close to freezing. Golden Gourmet Mushrooms * describe them as follows:

"...enoki are found in the mountains often right at the snow-line growing in clusters on deciduous logs. Under outdoor conditions, wild specimens of this mushroom are short-stemmed with caps as wide as the stems are long. The lower portions of the stem have a darkened, velvety fuzz, hence the common name "The Velvet Stem" or "The Velvet Foot". Under artificial cultivation conditions first developed by Japanese growers, cultivated varieties of this mushrooms look entirely different. Manipulation of light, carbon dioxide and temperature conditions creates a beautiful bouquet of delicate, white, long-stemmed (4-5 inches), small-capped (1/3-1/2 inch) mushrooms."

*There's a recipe for smoked oysters, fried spinach and enoki on the Golden Gourmet web-site that looks good although I haven't tried it so can't vouch for it!

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