The Population Collapse

Are we running out of people? Maybe. It turns out countries with postindustrial economies (i.e., just about the whole West) are surprisingly infertile. People just stop having children. Why is not clear. But the fact that people work 24/7, and have no time (and maybe not the money) to have children are probably among the more important factors.

Business Insider recently ran an article by Chris Weller, 7 countries at risk of becoming 'demographic time bombs’, which notes that already Hong Kong, Singapore, China, South Korea, Spain, Italy, and our own United States face potentially serious problems with replacing their aging populations. In the US, the situation has been made worse in recent years by our ever more stringent restrictions on immigration. We used to be able to import workers and residents. Now, that’s less true.

Thus there is a certain irony. We either need to raise salaries and provide subsidized child care so that young people can have families, or we need more immigrants. But politics prevents the latter. And corporations, always eager to extract more work from employees who are already over-stressed, will frustrate the former.

Yet, we cannot continue as we are now, or else the day will come when there is no one left to feed us when we cannot any longer lift a spoon...

Or even to empty the bedpans afterwards.

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Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



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