No evidence ageing/declining populations compromise socio-economic performance

> "Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies

This does appear to be an admission that labor shortages occur due to lack of workers. The authors propose a solution (immigration) to the problem, but in doing so pretend the problem doesn't exist.

It is a major flaw. Birth rate is falling basically everywhere and below replacement (~2.1) even in places people think of as booming in recent history -- India is at 1.98, South America somewhere around 1.8. It's really just portions of Africa that still have TFR above 2.1 and the rates there are declining over time, too. Immigranting your way of a demographic collapse only works if there are lots of births happening somewhere else.

It also means some places on earth have to be kept in poverty or even wars. That's the biggest driver moving people out from their homeland. People who live good, peaceful lives are mostly staying where their are.

It might be a valid strategy and a very likely future, but I hope all the "we will just let immigrants in so don't worry about birth rates" people think about the implications here.

So the assumption is that some populations will always reproduce in sufficient numbers and immigrate, and this just goes on forever and everything’s fine? Those other populations never age and decline?

Even if global population continued to increase forever, that doesn't mean a particular nation would be able to get those immigrants to come fix their demographic woes. It doesn't matter how easy Moldova makes it for people to immigrate, who is choosing to go there over other destinations just as in need of fresh blood? Countries like the US and western Europe maybe can solve their demographic problems with immigration for the next few decades, that doesn't mean that its a generally viable strategy or that it will keep working in a future world when these nations are well past their prime.

Below is the entire paragraph. The first part of the paragraph summarized their research that declining populations do not decline in wealth or productivity; instead their Figure 8 shows increases in Wealth, Research & Development, Human Capital etc. The second part of the paragraph is obtuse and ambiguous wording where they advocate for increased immigration and as far as I could tell had no basis on their actual research.

      Our results provide a strong evidence-based counter to the politically motivated claim that declining/slow-growing and ageing populations in any way compromise national economic performance, income distribution, productivity, political stability, well-being, or health of its citizens. In fact, such populations generally have the highest socio-economic performance indicators in the world. This result supports the mounting evidence that smaller populations are in fact beneficial to most of society37, in sharp contrast to the unsubstantiated political rhetoric of ‘baby busts’ and an ensuing economic Armageddon1-5. This is because investing in the health, training, and education of workers — especially older, more experienced workers — increases human capital, making the workforce more productive29. Neither is there a basis for an expected penury of working-age people for countries experiencing low population growth or even decline. Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies that limit or deny the movement of capable, working-age people from elsewhere to fill local demand70. Indeed, none of the existing credible population projections predicts a decline in the global population30,37,71-73.

Indeed, this specific sentence seems a bit odd.

However, if there is one thing we're not lacking, it's crisis zones, where people are desperate to move away from if given half a chance. Given both the current rate of climate change and the current political climate, this is bound to increase, even after the global population peak.

So I suspect that a lack of migrants willing to resettle to unaffected/less affected regions will not be a problem for the next few decades.

> they occur instead because of inadequate immigration

How did they make that assertion?

In the body of the paper immigration policies were not included as a variable in the data, nor were they a part of the statistical analyses. I couldn't find anything regarding labor movement at all. It feels weird that it was just thrown there in the end.

It's not directly related to your post, but Japan has a very significant Brazilian population that live in very specific parts of Japan. Toyota[1], and its prefecture Aichi, are known for having a Portuguese-speaking population and they are, of course, working as cheap labor in automobile industries. In fact, some signs on the road are written in Portuguese, too.

[1] Name of a city

Unlimited? Do you think Sub-Saharan Africa would have a higher or lower quality of life if they had accepted unlimited Japanese immigration?

Of course literally unlimited amounts of people is a bad thing. Did you mean unregulated?

> This is the great part about science: whether or not you agree with the authors' conclusions, they just asked the question "is our preconceived 'obviously correct' conclusion actually correct". Then, they dove in to the data and tried to prove or disprove the hypothesis

Unfortunately it also shows the difficult part of modern scientific publishing: The authors try to downplay the existence of problems (labor shortages) by arguing that it's really a problem of immigration policies not allowing enough new labor in.

That's a tacit admission that labor shortages are a problem. Proposing a solution to the labor shortage doesn't mean that it's not a problem.

You have to read scientific papers carefully. It's increasingly common to find editorialization or wishful thinking mixed into the logic of papers. More so in some fields than others.

Actually, in social science you really can't test a hypothesis with data. What's true under one set of conditions won't be true under another and conditions change all the time. Famously, there's the Lucas critique - the idea that a relationship (or the lack thereof) between variables may break, if a policy that exploits the relationship is implemented.

Or take the matter of immigration and international conditions that many others noted in this thread. If every rich country depends on immigration and every poor country strives to become rich, at some point you are going to start running out of places to source immigrants from and there will be a relationship between birth rates and economic performance.

Isn't every country a country of Theseus? Not one American was part of America 125 years ago.

You are entirely right; but the conclusion they intend to argue for is that immigration supplements the declining population, still this is obviously just an attempt at giving authority to preconceived political beliefs.

Your argument is extremely relevant to some of the current AI Hype:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelashley/2025/02/17/the-fu...

Yeah, in the limit, this is obviously false.

My hypothesis: Prosperity induces the population decline. That means there will be some momentum behind prosperity in the initial stages of the population decline. The population decline eventually induces a prosperity decline.

>Population of Seoul metro is 26 million people. It's suppose to drop by 2/3rds by 2060 (or worse)

This doesn't make any sense at all. The median age of Seoul is 42, slightly younger than the national average. 2060 is in 35 years. If Seoul had zero births, zero immigration, most people in Seoul today will still be alive by 2060.

I feel like every time someone comes up with one of these predictions the numbers get more nonsensical.

I'm guessing you didn't click through to read the paper.

Their take is that immigration policies rather than an aging population make the difference.

> Population of Seoul metro is 26 million people. It's suppose to drop by 2/3rds by 2060 (or worse). That's 1/3 less taxes, a 1/3 less transportation riders, 1/3rd less customers, etc....

If there are only 2/3rds as many people, why would the same infrastructure be required?

It is a bad thing for the people being left worse off by their parents looting the country on their way out.

Inclined to agree. If per-capita well-being and productivity continues to rise, is a GDP decline in proportion to population decline such a bad thing? The only bad thing I can think of is that we will see fewer children around than we're used to.

Yes. It's time we rejected the cancer economic growth model.