China’s population is declining faster than any country in human history, and the nation is now on track to lose half of its population by the year 2050. This is what we call depopulation, and it’s a concerning trend that will completely upend the world as we know it. Depopulation is a phenomenon that is going to be causing severe problems for most of the world’s wealthy nations, such as Japan, Italy, and Spain, to name a few. But no one is going to have bigger population demographic problems than China, which, thanks to its authoritarian one-child policy, has decimated the number of young people living in the country.
Why is depopulation a problem?
First, let’s start with the obvious… depopulation means you have a dying society. As a country’s population decreases, so too does its culture, its identity, and its influence. As nations become less relevant, they lose the ability or desire to impact the world positively. Second, depopulation has some serious financial consequences, as we’re now seeing in Japan and will continue to see in China.
A country that’s not producing children will suffer significant economic decline ..and a decrease in everyone’s standard of living… since there won’t be enough young people to work in companies, start new businesses, take risks, and come up with fresh new ideas to solve humanity’s biggest problems.
Population replacement
There’s also another glaring problem with depopulation. A population that is not producing young people will be unable to take care of its elderly and society’s most vulnerable. Young people are the ones who generate the economic activity and wealth to pay for all of the social services that provide for the elderly and those in need.
Here, in the United States, social security was set up during an era in which there were 42 workers for every one retiree. And retirees had a life expectancy of only 65, the age at which they qualified for social security benefits.
Today, there are just three workers for every retiree, and the average life expectancy for Americans will soon hit about 80 years. Still, the US has it way better than other countries, like China or Japan, where they’re going to have a retiree population that dwarfs their working-age population.
Much like the childless middle-aged neurotic cat lady you run into at your local Whole Foods, a society that is not producing children is an unhappy, pessimistic, nihilistic, hellish place that offers no hope for the future.
So, the picture is pretty straightforward; if we want a better world, we should learn from China’s terrible example and promote policies that actually incentivize families to have more children, because there literally is no future without them.
